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 […]
Tag: brett yates
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 […]
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 […]
Great article with a small problem
Dear Editor, There’s a bit of a misrepresentation in the third sentence of Brett Yates’ otherwise excellent piece “Good things for bad people” published in the Aug.23-29 edition of the Mountain Times, in regards to the infamous Google memo. It […]
Rebels without a cause
By Brett Yates When I read about the fiasco that ensued when the South Burlington School Board decided to change the nickname of the local high school’s sports teams, I had a moment of déja vu that took a few […]
My top five superheroes
By Brett Yates I’ve gotten to the point where my hatred of superhero movies is so intense that I get angry just seeing that a new one has been released. In the case of last weekend, it was “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” […]
The world is a sandwich
By Brett Yates One of the important duties I’ve set for this column has been the task of settling, once and for all, in the inviolable space of print, some of the common internet debates in which pedantic males between […]