March 10, 2009 - Penumbra's artistic director Lou Bellamy and actors join Midmorning to talk about Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun.
March 12, 2009 - MPR’s Lorna Benson reports on Minnesota's sudden infant deaths, and how investigators are now learning that unsafe sleeping arrangements are fairly common with these deaths.
March 17, 2009 - Two senior statesmen reflect on public life and civic engagement. Former Vice President Walter Mondale and former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger discuss their experiences in public life and the need for civic engagement.
March 17, 2009 - Well... the economic turmoil that's making financial products like payday loans more prevalent offers a lesson. Economists haven't refined it yet, but commentator Peter Smith can sum it up in one word- Simplicity.
March 24, 2009 - David Plotz, editor of the online magazine Slate, read every word of the Old Testament. He chronicles the experience in "Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible." Plotz is an award-winning journalist and the head editor of Slate, the world's largest online magazine. He's been writing for Slate since the popular site launched in 1996. He's also a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post. He spoke recently at the Minneapolis Central Library as part of the library's "Talk of the Stacks" series.
March 26, 2009 - MPR’s Tim Post interviews various students, college administrators, and politicians on how they feel about attendees of private for-profit institutions being restricted from the State Grant Program. such institutions include business schools, truck driving schools, and barber colleges.
March 27, 2009 - MPR’s Tim Nelson spent some time at the weather service's River Forecast Center in Chanhassen today, to follow the floods upstream in the Red River Valley. The story of the floods that threaten southeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota started long ago, according to the National Weather Service.
April 2, 2009 - As the Minnesota Twins study who will be on the roster when the regular season begins, one hoping to make the club is relief pitcher R.A. Dickey, who was acquired in the off-season. The Twins believe that Dickey's signature pitch, the knuckleball, will be particularly effective inside the Metrodome.
April 3, 2009 - Four years ago Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden burst onto the literary scene with "Three Day Road," a tale of two Canadian Cree Indians who volunteer as snipers during World War One. Boyden is all about dichotomies. He is part Ojibwe and part Scots-Irish. He splits his time between New Orleans where he teaches and James Bay in Northern Ontario where he fishes and hunts on the reservation. His new novel "Through Black Spruce" has two narrators. The first is Will Bird, a hard drinking former bush pilot who is in a coma on a Cree reservation. The second is his niece Annie. She also lives on the reservation, but leaves to work as a model, while trying to find her sister who has disappeared. The book just won Canada's top literary award, the Giller prize. Boyden told Minnesota Public Radio's Euan Kerr he chose the characters because he wanted to write about the extremes of modern native life.
April 3, 2009 - Excerpt of Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak commenting on 2006 police shooting death. Rybak says city officials believe allegations of misconduct in the 2006 police shooting death of a 19-year-old man are false. Earlier this week, a lawyer representing the family of Fong Lee, filed affidavits which contradict police claims that Lee had a gun when Officer Jason Andersen shot and killed him. The documents also raise the possibility that the gun found next to Lee's body was planted by another police officer. Rybak urges people to be patient and let the legal process take its course.