Author Sarah Stonich has written repeatedly about the cabin experience in northern Minnesota. Her latest book, "Vacationland," continues the tradition.
And with the weather putting a damper on the cabin experience this year, reading about it may be as close as many of us get.
"I don't think it's specifically a Midwestern experience," Stonich said Monday on The Daily Circuit. "There's a Vacationland everywhere you go. Here, we just happen to have this cabin culture that's so engrained. It would be odd to meet a child, when I was in grade school, that did not have a family cabin. So you didn't see your friends too much in the summer, that was for sure."
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In the nineteenth century, poetry and science were “kindred thrones” which possess the “power to lift the mind above the stir of earth and win it from low-thoughted care,” in the words of William Hamilton spoken during a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin in 1832. Poetry can certainly be considered art, but by the late 19th century art and science had gone their separate ways. Science adopted the language of mathematics, not art, to explain living things and the universe itself.
A late spring has made the spring harvest late, so we’re taking a second look at rhubarb with Beth Dooley, author of Minnesota’s Bounty: The Farmers Market Cookbook.
Why were the earliest commercial beers brewed in Minnesota lagers instead of ales?
The only Frank L. Packard book I’ve ever found at a Montreal bookstore was in the “FREE” box at Cheap Thrills.
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Do you have trouble sleeping? Everyone has a sleepless night from time to time, but for sufferers of chronic insomnia, bedtime can turn into a nightmare. But what if you didn't need so much sleep? Research is looking into ways to make sleep more effective 
Once declaring that an individual is a “montage of loosely assembled parts,” and furthermore that when “you are on the phone or on the air you have no body” (p. xxix), Marshall McLuhan (1962) dismembered the body. Our media might be extensions of ourselves, but they’re also prosthetics, amputating parts as they extend them, turning us into cyborgs. If we are and always have been cyborgs (Clark, 2003), then where does the body end and the media begin?
Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby suggests this story is as much a tale for our own times as it was for readers who first encountered the book in 1925. Fitzgerald packed a surprising amount into his short novel, capturing the ugly excesses of the rich, female oppression, and moral decay in 1920s America. A timeless parable of the American Dream and its often devastating consequences? Narrated by Nick Carraway, the novel takes us into the lives of the extravagantly wealthy Long Island couple Daisy and Tom, and that of Jay Gatsby, enigmatic host of legendary parties and Daisy’s former flame.
A visit to the local natural-history museum used to be a rite of passage for elementary-school students. (Holden Caulfield sought his lost childhood there in “Catcher in the Rye,” remember?) But rocks, taxidermy, and subdued lighting don't fire up generations raised on technology, and in recent decades, a lot of those field trips have been redirected to big, flashy science museums.
“The humans are dead.”
One of the general areas of interest I have is the intersection of religion and science. It is one of the reasons I have focused so much on the American religious traditions emerging in the mid-nineteenth century and leading in the early twentieth. During this time period, the boundaries were porous and claims fantastic. This is also one of the reasons why I study Theosophy, because from its beginning it has had an ambiguous relationship with both religion and science. Frequently members of the society would suggest that particular scientific discoveries would prove this or that esoteric claim made by members. Yet, should science not support their claims, they are quick to dismiss science as limited in its scope or abilities. For instance, in reading about Theosophical ideas about the human body, one author was quick to invoke scientific discoveries to validate part of his claims, but when science did not validate the other part, he is quick to add, “Nor does it much more concern us that the Scientists deny the existence of such an arrangement, because their instruments are inadequate to make their senses perceive it. We will simply reply—‘get better instruments and keener senses, and eventually you will.’”
Every probing into the past is illuminating to the present. Applying our intuitions to understand past practices is rewarding but exploring history to make better sense of our present concerns is even more fulfilling. History is not merely a vacuum, a reality in its own shell, a lived away period - it is more a piece of the jigsaw of human life, an essential abstract of the human continuum. The perspective of historical knowledge is always illuminating, virtually in any dimension, including ... sex.