By Brett Yates I began writing for this newspaper in early 2008, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I enjoy this column so much that I could do it forever if the editor would let me. I […]
Category: Generation Y
Is Minnesota going to be OK?
By Brett Yates If you had asked me in 2015 to name three people from Minnesota, I probably would have thought for a moment and then come up with iconic pop star Prince, Senator Al Franken, and the public radio […]
Improper nouns
In late 2017, we all still have days where we wake up and the realization hits us afresh that the only thing separating millions of innocents from nuclear devastation is the dementia-addled, TV-addicted brain of a 71-year-old narcissist. We may […]
Perfect lines: an anniversary of sorts
By Brett Yates I was hired in 2008 as a youth culture columnist for the Mountain Times, just a few months after my 20th birthday, and one of the earliest articles I wrote was an impassioned denunciation of emo music, […]
Product review: Tropical Sour Patch Kids
By Brett Yates Sour Patch Kids, the iconic child-shaped treat invented in the 1970s by a Long Island man named Frank Galatolie, are, in my opinion, perhaps the greatest mass-produced American candy. To me, their astringent artificiality best captures the […]
Repeal and replace
By Brett Yates I’m aware that nearly everyone is probably tired of hearing about Confederate statues by now. But before I finally move on from the Unite the Right fallout and restore this column to its regularly scheduled programming, I […]
Empathy, part two
By Brett Yates Last week, I wrote a column whose conclusion I myself found, at the very least, debatable. Fortunately, my conception of my job here has never included a requirement to be correct—every week, I try my best only […]
Good things for bad people
By Brett Yates This month, following social media pressure upon their employers, two workers in the San Francisco Bay Area were fired for holding opinions widely deemed abhorrent. The first was a Google engineer who circulated a memo criticizing certain […]
Spill your guts
By Bret Yates In July, the Boston Globe published an article about the painter Helen Frankenthaler that contained the following sentence: “Frankenthaler’s effects are more visceral, more buzzy and demanding, than pastoral evocations of space.” Every time I encounter the […]
Save it forever
By Bret Yates Some weeks ago I mentioned here, offhand, that I expected to hate the new “Spider-Man: Homecoming” movie, which was turned out to be totally wrong; I saw it, and I enjoyed it more than any other comic […]