Today in the NYR Online, Ian Frazier—a son of Ohio and the author of Great Plains (1989), a best-selling account of his travels across the prairie regions of North America—writes about Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, a Nebraska native and the current governor of Minnesota. “Not enough Democrats know enough about the part of the US that’s not the coasts,” notes Frazier, but Walz, who was born forty minutes away from Johnny Carson’s hometown in Norfolk, Nebraska, “seem[s] to know and care about the places as well as the history” of the Upper Midwest.

Below, alongside Frazier’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about Minnesota.

Ian Frazier
Heeeere’s Tim!

Governor and Mrs. Walz break the Democrats’ pattern of seeming to prefer the coasts.

Aida Alami
Somali and American: Portrait of a Minnesota Community

“Distinct and notable about St. Cloud’s Somali-American community is that its leaders, elders, and activists have a battle-hardened quality that makes them very effective representatives. So many of them are, in fact, survivors of civil war and brutal dictatorship, that they have become adept at organizing and mobilizing—both in strengthening their own community and in reaching out to other people beyond it.”

—July 2, 2019

David Treuer
The Power Brokers

“Growing up, as I did, as an Ojibwe on the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota, we viewed the Lakota to our west as a tribe of legend. We were taught that they were fierce and uncompromising and would rather die than be diminished. They ate dogs. They had the coolest ceremonies. They walked or rode on picturesque buttes. They hunted bison.”

—December 6, 2012

Betty McCollum
A Letter to AIPAC

“You and your colleagues at AIPAC have the right to disagree with my position on any piece of legislation, but for an AIPAC representative to say that I would ever vote to support Middle East terrorists over the interests of my country will never be tolerated by me or the families I serve. This incident rises to a level in which a formal, written apology is required.”

—from a letter sent by Representative Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, to the executive director of AIPAC, April 10, 2006

Garry Wills
The People’s Choice

“When [Governor Jesse Ventura’s] book revealed that he does not wear underwear, Fruit of the Loom sent him twelve thousand pairs of undershorts. He donated them to two charities, which thanked him profusely, since that is just what their beneficiaries need—others leave them old coats and dresses, but who donates their cast-off underwear? Even boorishness, in the alchemy of this moment, became a benefaction. The citizens of Minnesota treat Ventura as a sly practical joke they are playing on themselves.”

—August 12, 1999

Alison Lurie
The Frog Prince

“One of Garrison Keillor’s greatest gifts is his ability to modulate like this from realism to fantasy, or from low farce to high comedy. The range of Keillor’s sympathy is wider than Twain’s, however. It includes not only children and outsiders, but also the most conventional citizens of Lake Wobegon: people like the local Lutheran pastor, David Ingqvist, and his wife.”

—November 28, 1988

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