RacketCast

For many Minnesotans, it wasn’t just another building on the North Shore—it was the beating heart of the North Shore. Over its 144-year history, Lutsen Resort had hosted countless weddings, family reunions, and friendly ski trips along the the intersection of Lake Superior and the Poplar River. So when the historic lodge burned down in early 2024, many folks were understandably heartbroken. Then,...

The ghost of Jeffery Epstein, sex-trafficking buddy to the elites, continues to haunt Trump World. Just this week the Wall Street Journal  reported  that the Justice Department warned Trump in May that his name is included in the Epstein files. (The White House called this  "fake news." ) Meanwhile, the drip, drip, drip of previously unknown Trump-Epstein entanglements keeps acceler...

After Racket's Keith Harris was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2022, he noticed how much the actual experience of having cancer differed from how we typically talk about it. He's joined on the pod today by independent journalist Taylor Dahlin (Wedge LIVE!, Twitter), who was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. Now that both are cancer-free, the two "survivors" (who feel weird about calling them...

War: There's nothing worse. Yet the U.S. can't seem to stop waging it, with our latest target, Iran, being subjected to around dozen 30,000-pound GBU-57 "bunker buster" bombs on June 21. The illegal preemptive attack may have set Iran's nuclear program back by only a few months, according to one preliminary classified report. One day later, President Trump floated the following via Truth Social: "...

Punter. Activist. Rocker. Writer. Gamer. And, now, politician. Ex-Viking Chris Kluwe endeared himself to (most) Minnesotans for eight seasons as he booted the ball while fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. From July 3-6, Kluwe will make his triumphant return to this state as a guest at sci-fi convention  CONVergence  in downtown Minneapolis. Before that, we caught up with him to talk about getti...

Two veteran reporters from The Hill—Sharon Udasin and Rachel Frazin—drop by the pod to discuss their new book,  Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America , which dropped this past April via Island Press. You'll learn about the accidental origins of PFAS chemicals, their consumer-facing ubiquity, and the massive health risk they pose to all Americans, including the ones&nb...

It's a Very Special Episode of  RacketCast ! No guests this week. Instead, three of Racket's four co-owner/editors—Jay Boller, Em Cassel, and Keith Harris—will share the origin story of our local news, arts, and culture publication, which'll turn four this summer. All it takes? Four laid-off schmucks with a combined $4,000, plenty of Covid-era unemployment insurance, a dash of good luck, thou...

The horror Davis Moturi and his wife, Caroline, experienced after moving into a cute white house on Grand Avenue in south Minneapolis has been well-documented . Moturi, a 34-year-old Black man, quickly realized his neighbor, 54-year-old white man John Sawchak, was determined to make his life hell. Beginning in 2023, Sawchak's seemingly endless assault of racist remarks, violent threats, and disgus...

Last fall  Racket surveyed 44 Minnesota brewing pros  and found that 63.6% believe the industry is in a positive place—not bad! Last month  Racket highlighted Axios reporting  that showed a 10.8% boost in Minnesota craft brewery production last year—nice! But David Berg, the longtime brewmaster at  August Schell Brewing Co. , isn't convinced by those types of cheery report...

A fresh RacketCast ep, out one day early due to Wolves Fever gripping the state. Is it unwise to keep calling our listeners "dummies"? Perhaps, but that's what we did with our Twins preview pod , and we're doing it again for this Timberwolves explainer featuring the great podcaster Dane Moore. Dane joined us Wednesday afternoon from L.A., where hours later your T-Wolves trounced the Los Angeles La...

We're still figuring out what types of conversations y'all wanna hear on  RacketCast , and our first experiment with a newsier, shorter installment was  a certified hit . So here's another bonus ep along those lines: our chat with veteran state Sen. John Marty (DFL-Roseville) about whether Minnesota should ban billboards. Marty's  eye-catching new bill  would establish a morato...

Twin Cities burger freaks: This is the episode for you. The proprietors of two elite food trucks— Angry Line Cook  (Jesse Hedman and Mona Negasi) and  Burger Daddies  (Nikki and Brian Podgorski)—dropped by our studio for a long conversation about cheeseburgers, building your business from scratch, and life in the trenches of the food industry. (FYI: Whenever "the burger group" gets...

What's going on up there in Duluth? Plenty of stuff worth trying out ahead of your demise, that's for sure. Duluth News Tribune reporter Jay Gabler chronicled the exact number in his new book,  100 Things to Do In Duluth Before You Die . Jay, who you might remember from his time at 89.3 the Current, hopped on the pod to discuss the Zenith City's must-do activities, and he also gave us a nice...

Late Tuesday , Gov. Tim Walz surprised around 40,000 state workers by announcing a mandatory 50% return-to-office policy for employees who live within 75 miles of their main work location. “This policy change supports the economic vitality of office districts like downtown St. Paul, bringing foot traffic back to businesses and public spaces,” the governor's office says of the directive, which is s...

In the early '00s Aaron Gleeman's U of M journalism professors suspected he was chronically hungover. In reality, the young blogger was chronically exhausted from writing about baseball literally all night long. That set Gleeman on a path that includes Aaron's Baseball Blog (cute!), NBC Sports, Baseball Prospectus, and, since 2019, the Athletic, which is now the de facto sports desk of the New Yor...

Voters elected Mary Moriarty as Hennepin County's top prosecutor in 2022, which, given the sweeping sociopolitical changes since, feels like 1,000 years ago. Just over two full years into the job, how has Moriarty's progressive vision of restorative justice unfolded while Minneapolis remains under a national microscope? We asked the first openly LGBTQ+ Hennepin County attorney about her successes,...

A terrestrial radio DJ... on a podcast?! Believe it: We've got Dave Ryan , the 101.3 KDWB morning show host since 1993, on the pod to talk pranks, legacy, the evolving nature of Top 40 radio, and the ill-fated Booty Cruises. (Our conversation cold-opens with him dealing with a Colorado exterminator—how can you cut tape that good?) Be sure read Rachel Hutton's longform 2018 Star Tribune profile of...

We've got a double-header for ya, folks. In the leadoff spot: Keith and Jay discuss Poised to Pop , Racket's annual predictions for the year's most exciting new local music acts. (It is very different from Picked to Click , thank you very much!) Hear Keith's scouting reports, then dive into some of the best rock, jazz, techno, rap, etc. sounds currently coming from the Twin Cities music scene. On...

Did you know the Star Tribune recently launched its very first episodic, narratively driven podcast series, Ghost of a Chance ? Over six episodes, reporter Eric Roper and producer Melissa Townsend explore the lives Harry and Clementine Robinson, a Black Minneapolis family who owned Roper's south Minneapolis home in the early 20th century. "The Robinsons' lives are a window into the ambition, discr...

Mitch Hedberg conceived his jokes with a deliberate eye toward timelessness.  The Minnesota-launched comedy great’s widow, Lynn Shawcroft, confirmed as much during a 2013 episode of  WTF with Marc Maron . And for about 15 years, the timeless comedy of Hedberg—surreal one-liners, musings, and wordplay delivered in his unmistakable stoner drawl—attracted a massive following. Jokes like, “I...

It's the first RacketCast episode of 2025! Before '24 ended, we reviewed the year in music , bozos , politics , and movies , though we didn't have time to bite off a biggie: food 'n' drink. So, for this ep, we recruited two great dining writer/reporters—James Norton ( Heavy Table ) and Justine Jones (formerly of Eater Twin Cities)—to hashbrown out the year that was, assess the state of the local r...

Did you that co-owner/editor Keith Harris is the only regularly published movie critic in all of Minnesota? Sounds wild, but we believe it to be true! As such, movies are a big part of the equation over here, though we've never addressed them via the podcast medium. To remedy that, we enlisted a silver-screen freak you know and love: Racket super-commenter Taco Mike! Enjoy over an hour of Keith, E...

A special bonus episode of our biweekly  RacketCast ? Believe it. Happy Lizz Winstead Day ! Minnesota comedy great Lizz Winstead is a legend of lefty media, having co-created Comedy Central's Daily Show as well as Air America Radio. Every holiday season, Winstead returns home for a show that recaps the year that was. And folks? Good god... what a year we've had in 2024. "Lizz Winstead’s Proje...

What were the biggest, strangest, buzziest, most important, least important, and/or riffiest Minneapolis politics stories of 2024? Glad you asked! Because that's more or less what we posed to John Edwards, Taylor Dahlin, and Jason Garcia of Wedge Live!, a collection of folks who pay as close attention to such matters as anyone in town. They teed up eight topics, and we knocked 'em all down togethe...

A sincere and gratitude-stuffed "gobble, gobble" to all our RacketCast listeners ahead of this, the final episode before Thanksgiving. As such, we're talkin' turkey—local folks deserving of our unenviable "Biggest MN Turkeys of 2024" designation, that is. (How did we possibly come up with this idea ?) Em, Keith, and Jay go around the horn, picking the biggest fools, phonies, and/or foes of '24 and...