The best thing I did in 2023 was beat cancer, though I should note that by “beat cancer” I mean “lay in bed feeling awful while a cocktail of carefully curated toxins brewed by physicians at the Mayo Clinic coursed through my veins killing malignant cells.” I can’t say I enjoyed any of it but I’m glad things turned out the way they did.
When I wasn’t suffering the debilitating side effects of chemotherapy I managed to write some stories for the Reformer. Here are a few of my favorites:
Crime in Minnesota continued to recede from the high-water mark set in 2021, a fact that many people were upset by because it undermined certain political narratives they had spent a long time putting in motion.
The writing on this was already on the wall in July, when Minneapolis’ mid-year crime stats showed a hearty, across-the-board decline (with the massive exception of carjacking, naturally). National survey data, on the other hand, was showing that Americans were of the opinion that the city was becoming more dangerous, not less, a false impression driven primarily by Republicans.
In September I covered the release of the final statewide crime stats for 2022, as well as the teapot tempest surrounding the role of cops in schools. I also wrote about the use of civil asset forfeiture to seize cash and property from Minnesotans who hadn’t been convicted of any crimes.
I also wrote about new data showing shoplifting complaints in the Twin Cities were down. A lot of people yelled at me about this online.
This wasn’t planned at all but I ended up writing a ton of stories about deer this year. I don’t particularly care for the animals, but they ended up being at the center of a lot of conversations about the environment, conservation and the proper management of Minnesota’s natural resources.
Did you know, for instance, the state spends about $33 million dollars every biennium on deer management? That’s more than we spend on film production tax credits, electric vehicle rebates, or the entire state auditor’s office.
How about the fact that deer are responsible for killing off much of the state’s moose population thanks to a specific type of brainworm they carry? Or that they cause about $1 billion in property damage across the country every year, primarily by jumping out in front of cars?
Then there’s the question of Minnesota conservatives organizing around the uproariously false belief that wolves are devouring all of the state’s deer. They’re not. I wrote several stories about it. A lot of people yelled at me about this online.
Another perennial hobbyhorse of mine is air quality. Air pollution is something we tend to ignore even though it exerts a horrific toll on our health. But it became much harder to ignore this summer, when smoke from Canadian wildfires caused record-breaking spikes in air pollution here.
And it wasn’t just smoke, either: High temperatures combined with increased particles in the air provided fertile conditions for the creation of other types of lung-scouring irritants.
Our ever-warming climate means these events may become more commonplace in the years ahead, so I also spent a good deal of time covering climate data and what ramifications global warming will have for the state. One of the main Midwestern conclusions from the big federal climate report this year, for instance, was that ice seasons would get shorter.
Shortly after that report came out, a group of anglers got stranded on an ice floe on an unseasonably warm Upper Red Lake, and then less than a week later a guy tried to land a plane on the unseasonably thin ice and then broke through. Ope.
This year I also started writing The Topline, a weekly digest of Minnesota data nuggets to surprise and delight. I enjoyed highlighting some of the phenomenal data work of other publications, like MPR’s exploration of county property forfeitures, Axios’ air pollution retrospective, and the Star Tribune’s meticulous calculation of how much flour it would take to turn Lake Superior into bread.
But I also stumbled across some interesting little factoids that didn’t really fit in anywhere else, like this USGS map of earthquake hazard risk, this federal dataset of large-scale solar installations, and the weird little corner of North Dakota where the rivers never reach the sea.
