Gifts for People You Hate 2025: Boycott Friendly Edition

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Once again, I started working on this before Thanksgiving and once again it’s now well into December and I still haven’t gotten this up. Look, it’s been a busy couple of weeks that included, among other things, proofs for Obstetrix that I had to review. A special election got called. I needed to go see Wicked.

But also, the gift guide this year was a little bit extra challenging. Because most years, it is made up heavily of stuff on Amazon for a couple of reasons:

  1. Amazon’s URLs are mostly pretty reliable. I just went and looked at my 2019 gift guide and while lots of the items I linked to are “currently unavailable,” the link still pulls up the item and the photo so you can see what it looked like. Since most people come just to gawk at the hilariously weird stuff, it’s good to know that the links won’t break.
  2. (This is actually pretty key) I don’t have to worry that I will hurt the feelings of some human artist by saying “give THIS to someone you dislike!” and I worry about that a lot when linking to things on, say, Etsy.
  3. I have an Amazon Affiliate store which means I can set the links such that if people buy the stuff I link to, I get a little bit of money.

But I know quite a lot of people this year who are boycotting Amazon (and Target and a bunch of other big stores). This created sort of a quandary. After a bunch of waffling I decided that the Amazon links were unavoidable, but I also made an effort to find a bunch of non-Amazon options. To the Etsy sellers who find their way back here: I swear I’m not insulting your creations. I’m just saying that the sort of jerks who would deserve passive-aggressive gifts from my readers would almost certainly not appreciate your work properly.

To be clear: I am always in favor of just not buying presents for awful people. But I am also in favor of self-care, and sometimes self-care means making the gesture that will let you avoid the drama. The thing about gifts is that most of the bad gifts that are given are not bought out of passive-aggressive malice but out of clueless good will, and this provides a lot of camouflage for anyone who gifts their brother-in-law a short sleeved button-down shirt with a picture of a raccoon carrying a chain saw and riding an alligator.

The usual caveats apply:

  • If I have ever given you a terrible gift, I am very sorry and I promise it wasn’t because I hate you. (I don’t give gifts to anyone I don’t sincerely like and care about.)
  • If you have ever given me a gift, I did not scrutinize it for signs that you hated me. I assume the best about people who give me presents. Actually I generally assume the best about anyone I’m on regular interaction terms with and I sail through life these days assuming that people like me and think I’m cool (this was not always true, but hey, being over 50 comes with certain benefits). If you hate me, I probably don’t even know it.

On to the horrors!

Condiments and/or Ingredients

CNN this year ran a hilariously off-base guide to Hanukkah gifts. Among the fuckups: an ornament (yes, some families do a Hanukkah Bush but you should never assume people do) and also extra-virgin olive oil with the description, “they can even use it to fry latkes during the holiday” (no one deep fries latkes in EVOO, you weirdos). There’s also a “latkes and lights” scented candle but it turns out it’s not actually latke-scented. (A latke-scented candle would make you mad that you didn’t have any latkes, which would be kind of perfect, but alas.)

Anyway, they also had a hot sauce set and I thought, “oh, this would be an outstanding bad gift to anyone who thinks ketchup is too spicy, i.e. an awful lot of Minnesotans, but I bet I can find something cheaper,” and voila, $10 and it comes in a cute gifting box. I was pondering extra virgin olive oil as a gift and trying to find some that would telegraph “this is too fancy to ever actually use; better leave it on the shelf forever until you cook something worthy of this olive oil” and found this specialty website with an “olive oil tasting kit.” (This is definitely a good gift for some people, a bad gift for others — use your judgement.)

Penzey’s is an assertively left-wing company that sells very nice, high quality spices. Most of their spices would actually be a good gift, but they carry a sufficiently complete array that you can definitely assemble a bad gift from their lineup. Get one of the DIY gift boxes and then fill it with the following: whole caraway seeds (useful mainly to people who bake their own rye bread), whole celery seeds (I use a little sprinkling of celery seeds in my refrigerator pickles in the summer but I do not go through them fast), cilantro (cilantro is better fresh, sorry Penzey’s!), whole coriander (they’ll have to figure out how to grind it), cream of tartar (gets used in tiny quantities to make meringue, they’ll have it forever), corned beef spices (almost no one corns their own beef), anise seeds (another rarely-used spice for most people), and then maybe throw in a cinnamon because your recipient will use that, will think “oh wow, this is really good,” and feel like they have to hold onto to the other spices because they’re probably just as good.

Horrifying Home Decor

I forget who initially linked to this object on Bluesky, but made the rounds pretty thoroughly over there:

A pillow that appears to have embroidery (it's not embroidery, it's printed) depicting a screaming goat with bulging round eyes. The goat's mouth is wide open and you can see its tongue.

Honest to god this is probably my favorite item this year. For reasons that truly baffle me, it is available on Shein, and it’s available on Temu, but it doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon or any other domestic retailer. Before you order, you should know a couple of important things: (1) It looks like an embroidered pillow, but it is not. That is a 100% 2-dimensional screen printed object. (2) Also it’s just a pillowcase, you have to supply your own throw pillow. On the plus side it’s also extremely cheap. If that link takes you to an unavailable version, just search “screaming goat pillow” on Shein or Temu and another one will probably pop right up.

Back in November when I started working on this, I had been reading about some godawful White House redecorating project and I started looking up ugly gold stuff on Amazon. I found this thing that looks like a metallic Koosh ball, a gold statue of a balloon dog, the lower half of someone’s face that is also a vase, and the head of a grumpy rabbit with a walrus moustache and a monocle.

But honestly, this is where Etsy really shines. A lot of Etsy sellers have 3D printed stuff on offer, and quite a bit of it is in the category “great for the right person; horrifying for your least-favorite aunt.”

First up, the 2025-appropriate Zen Gardens. You’re familiar with “Zen Garden” desk accessories, right? Here’s an example. The theory is that you keep it on your desk and you move stuff around and rake out the sand and it’s soothing and meditative and looks better on your desk than the pile of papers you currently have there.

The 2025 version looks like this:

Here is a Dumpster Fire Zen Garden that features both possums and raccoons (and a flaming dumpster.) Here is a Dumpster Fire Zen Garden with just raccoons, but it also includes a pen organizer.

This Etsy seller sells portrait suncatchers. They’re custom items, which means you can send over whatever image you’d like immortalized. Obviously in theory you’d send over a lovely photo of the grandkids but you could send your Trumpy brother-in-law an unflattering photo of his hero (this link will take you to an entire Getty gallery of unflattering photos of that fucking guy) or for that matter, a photo of the recipient and their family where everyone looks good except for the recipient. The same seller does a “pet portrait” suncatcher and I’m guessing she’s not fussy if you send an animal picture that’s not your personal pet, like you could do the raccoon that got drunk in the liquor store, or a naked mole rat. (Disclaimer: I have not actually tried to buy a naked mole rat suncatcher; results not guaranteed.)

I specifically looked up vases, because the thing about vases is, so many bouquets arrive in vases that most people wind up with a surplus. Also, there are a lot of vases for sale that are not very practical — test-tube vases, for example. Here’s a test-tube vase mounted in a disembodied hand that looks like Thing from the Addams Family. (The same artist also sells the hand without the vase.) Continuing the “disembodied hands” theme, there’s also this object, which is described as both a planter and a vase, made from a circle of hands. (The thing about a planter is that it needs to have a hole in the bottom. The thing about a vase is that it needs to not have a hole in the bottom. You can’t see the bottom in the photos and my guess is that it’s a vase, but not a vase that would work very well to hold your typical bouquet of flowers.)

There’s also this vase, which looks a little like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, but what’s really great is the striking neon green color.

People either like neon green, or they do not like neon green, and a neon green object in a room will immediately attract everyone’s eye. If you like the idea of a very brightly colored vase but want more options than just the neon green, there’s a different vase that comes in a very bright orange but also pink, purple, and multiple shades of green and blue.

“Okay, okay,” I hear you saying, “but what I really want is something shinier, that also looks like the torso of a naked man, but would somehow be appropriate as a gift to that cousin who likes to post ‘THIS IS WHAT THEY TOOK FROM YOU’ memes.” I have good news:

A 3D printed rendering of the torso of Michaelangelo's David, done in a shiny reddish orange.

That is a surprisingly affordable 3D printed torso of Michelangelo’s David, as a planter, in pretty nearly any color you could imagine.

Please don’t hate me, Etsy sellers!

Frightful Fashion

One of the delightful things about doing this piece as a regular thing is that friends of mine send me links to hilariously awful stuff. I frequently say “oh wow this is amazing” and then lose track of the link, but my friend Rachael sent me a link to these boots last week.

Shaggy (furry) red thigh high boots that look like someone murdered Elmo and took his legs

They come in a whole range of colors, not just Elmo Red. There’s also Cookie Monster blue. (They’re kind of expensive, alas.) Every time I look at them I think, “is this fetishware for people who are really into Muppets,” because I kind of can’t imagine any other reason to wear them. Especially the red ones.

At a more reasonable price point, how about a button-down shirt with a patriotic T-Rex, or a sloth riding a llama standing on a pizza surrounded by burritos, or pirate cats? Or maybe you’d like a sloth riding a dinosaur that’s shooting lasers out its eyes!

(I am noticing a trend of sloths riding other animals, which makes a certain amount of logical sense, actually.)

You Make Coffee Wrong

Most people who drink coffee have a preferred way to make it. I use a coffee maker; I have friends with espresso makers; I have friends who make concentrated cold brew and then dilute it. But if someone is over, oh, 25 or so, and they’re a coffee drinker, they probably have come up with something that works for them.

But also if someone is a coffee drinker you can say “oh, I understand you’re a coffee drinker; I have heard that there is One True Best Way to make coffee” and give them one of the following:

Just make sure it’s whatever they don’t currently use and tell them you know they like coffee, and you’ve heard this (whatever it is) is the best way to make coffee. Instantly annoying gift.

You can also set them up with a milk frother, which is a bulky, one-purpose appliance that will take up space and they’ll probably never use.

And For the Tea Drinkers

A little insulated carafe is a great gift for a tea drinker but not this one, which according to many of the reviews, leaks like crazy. (It looks really cool, though.)

When I was in China in October, I went to a tea house where the tea was served in this little contraption where you poured water in the top, and then it dispensed it out through a little tube if you used the magnet handle to open the spout — it’s hard to explain but you could definitely get one like it for your annoying family member who drinks tea. It’s absolutely in the category of “intrinsically cool, so they won’t want to get rid of it, but actually a lot more complicated to use than a teabag and a kettle, which is what they probably use now.” (There are some great sets that look like dragons and come with eight little tea cups.)

If they do in fact use teabags, you could do the “you’re brewing your tea the wrong way” thing and give them a basket-style tea infuser. However, if they try it, they’ll probably like it.

Hot beverage drinkers of any variety can be given a mug with a little pad that keeps the beverage warm. Or you could give them this one, which will keep it lukewarm.

You Need a Hobby

One of my Bluesky friends is an artist who posts every year the advice not to give children in your life one of those “art kits” that’s got markers, watercolors, brushes, pastels, etc. all in one box, because the quality of the materials tends to be absolute dogshit. This year they specifically suggested St. Louis Art Supply as a good place to buy art supplies (both quality-wise and ethically). One of their visible mending starter kits would be a terrific passive-aggressive gift to someone who buys a lot of fast fashion.

Alternately, this loom kit will allow people to weave long strips of very narrow fabric. Here’s a fun fact about weaving: setting up the loom is by far the most annoying part of the process, and even with good instructions, most people need hands-on help the first time they do it. SLAS also has a Japanese-style indigo tye-dye kit, a spool knitting kit, and a very affordable set of wood-carving knives. (All of these would be perfectly lovely gifts to someone who’s ever expressed interest in fiber arts or wood carving. Use your own best judgment.)

Elsewhere, there’s also this, the “Buddha Board” which I think is basically a high-end Etch-a-Sketch for adults. (You paint with water and the image disappears a few minutes later and you’re supposed to relax and meditate on impermanence.)

The Gift of Experiences

Airbnb now has “Experiences,” activities in your area that you can pay someone to help you do. These experiences are highly variable by location. Minneapolis has an Axe Throwing Experience, a Nordic Spoon Carving class, and a Coffee Tasting. Other cities have Goat Yoga, Llama Yoga (Llamaste!), Beekeeping, Olive Oil Tasting, Giant Sand Castle Building, and of course many, many, many walking tours of various kinds.

Do I know someone who would 100000% enjoy Llama Yoga? YES (and I’m sorry, it’s in Atlanta, unfortunately). Do I also know people who would 1000000% not enjoy Llama Yoga? ALSO YES. Check out your local area and see what’s available.

Books That Send a Covert Message

Books are a terrific gift, but some books function on multiple levels. They can be both a really great read and a really great opportunity for passive-aggression.

Drop Dead Sisters by Amelia Diane Coomes (“It’s apparently sort of a comic thriller”) (that’s about how some men absolutely deserve killing to the point that everyone in the story will help cover it up.)

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (OK, I’m cheating here. This is, in fact, a really terrific gift for the person in your life who just cannot let go of Harry Potter no matter how toxic JK Rowling gets. This is a magical school novel from the POV of one of the teachers, and it’s terrific and interrogates magic, social class, and the experience of adolescence. It’s just so good.) The Grimoire Grammar School Parent-Teacher Association is about the mundane parents of a magical child and is also a book about parenting a child with special needs, and is also a genuinely terrific gift for people who love (or once loved) that series.

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of the Golden Age by Ada Palmer. Ada is a science fiction writer and an academic historian. This is a great read for anyone interested in history, and also a great passive-aggressive gift for anyone who’s ever posted a “this is what they took from you” Tweet about Renaissance art.

You can’t give your friends and loved ones and annoying relatives my forthcoming book Obstetrix yet, because it does not come out until next June, but you can pre-order it for yourself (or, hey, any of those people! “Happy holidays! I bought you a book that’ll arrive in six months.” Who wouldn’t love that?) Pre-orders are particularly powerful for the author in a whole lot of ways: if you order it through your own local independent bookstore, they’re more likely to get it in stock. Lots of pre-orders encourage publishers to print more copies and promote books more heavily.

Passive-Aggressive Charitable Gifts

The Minnesota Zoo still lets you sponsor any animal they have at the zoo. They still don’t list their cockroaches on the big list of all the animals they have, but they do list guinea pigs (for your favorite antivaxxer) as well as Red River Hogs (known for fluffing out their facial hair to look bigger when threatened) and West African Dwarf Crocodiles (survived from the time of the dinosaurs). ETA: My dad pointed out that at our other zoo (St. Paul’s Como Zoo) you can do a symbolic animal adoption of their sloth.

Also, Habitat for Humanity continues to have a gift catalog. You can symbolically gift someone with a doorbell set if you wish to symbolically call them a ding dong; a box of hammers if you’d like to symbolic compare their understanding of the world to that possessed by such a box; and if you’d like to give them symbolic coal, I actually think furnace filters come pretty close. (Oh, and hard hats! I feel like the “hard headed” symbology there is pretty clear. But still subtle enough to get away with it.)

You can also give people tribute gifts to Doctors Without Borders.

Happy holidays!

Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:

2010: Beyond Fruitcake: Gifts for People You Hate
2011: Gifts that say, “I had to get you a gift. So look, a gift!”
2012: Holiday shopping for people you hate
2013: Gift Shopping for People You Hate: the Passive-Aggressive Shopping Guide
Gifts for People You Hate 2014: The Almost-Generic Edition
Whimsical Gifts (for People You Hate) 2015
Gifts for People You Hate 2016 (the fuck everything edition)
Gifts for People You Hate, 2017
Gifts for People You Hate, 2018
Gifts for People You Hate, 2019
Gifts for People You Hate, 2020: Pandemic Procrastination Edition
Gifts for People You Hate 2021: Supply Chain Mayhem
Gifts for People You Hate 2022
Gifts for People You Hate 2023
Gifts for People You Hate 2024

Special Election 2025, State House 64A

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“Where’s your gift guide?” It’s coming, I promise, but first and somewhat more urgently there is one more election this year. Saint Paul Mayor-Elect Kaohly Her was a State Rep, and resigned her seat when she won the mayoral race, and the primary for the special election to fill her seat is happening December 16th. This is a deeply blue district, and while a Republican is running (Dan Walsh, who also ran against Kaohly Her in 2024), the primary is the real contest. So if you live in District 64A (that link leads to a map but you can also look up your address here) you should figure out who you’re voting for, and go vote. (“What about the Special Election in 47A, are you going to write about that one?” No, because 47A is an entirely suburban district. No part of 47A is in St. Paul or Minneapolis. I only write about races that appear on the ballots of voters in St. Paul or Minneapolis.)

There are six people running in the DFL primary. The local DFL held an endorsing convention on December 7th, which I attended with the goal of watching the speeches and the Q&A. Everyone said they would continue to run regardless, which is honestly reasonable given that it’s too late to pull your name off the ballot, and also, this was a convention of 75 delegates re-called from the pool that volunteered to be delegates to the uncontested convention in 2024. I’m glad they ran the convention, because it gave me an opportunity to see most of the people running and get a sense of what they’re like. But I think it’s fine that no one’s dropping out.

There’s no instant runoff in this race; everyone needs to pick one.

In the race:

John Zwier
Matt Hill
Lois Quam
Meg Luger-Nikolai (DFL-endorsed)
Beth Fraser
Dan McGrath

A note on this writeup. Ordinarily, I would send e-mails to all the candidates asking them a question or two. But this election is in one week. So I’m going to leave some stuff a little handwavy and if candidates see this and urgently want to explain whatever it was I threw up my hands over, they can e-mail me and/or leave a comment.

ETA: There was a LWV candidate forum last night. I haven’t watched it (yet) (and I may not, because I’ve got a bunch of other stuff I need to do.) Here’s the video. It looks like all six candidates were there.

John Zwier

John didn’t seek DFL endorsement, which means I didn’t see him speak. He works in the Attorney General’s office but his boss has endorsed in this race and he was not the pick (Keith Ellison endorsed Lois Quam.) He lists no endorsements on his site. His primary issue is gun control, and you can read his Star Tribune editorial for more information on his proposal (his main proposal is mandatory visible trigger locks on any gun carried in a public space; he has more proposals at https://www.mnfirearmlegislation.com/.)

Poking around social media I discovered that he does have an endorsement from Wes Burdine (owner of the Black Hart LGBTQ+ soccer bar) who knows him personally.

I would not vote for John; most of the other candidates seem to be making a better case for themselves. (Also, he doesn’t seem to have much momentum, and this is not a race with instant runoff. I think this is a race between Lois, Meg, Beth, and Dan.)

Matt Hill

Matt has worked as an advisor and aide to several Ramsey County Commissioners, but again, does not have any endorsements. He did seek DFL endorsement so I heard him speak and respond to Q&A today, and I was not impressed. He kept saying that he was uniquely qualified but was not successful at conveying what his unique qualifications were, in this field of incredibly qualified and accomplished people. He said “that’s my commitment to you!” at the end of most of his answers, after not actually giving us any specific commitments.

During Q&A, there were two responses that stood out to me, both bad. First, there was a question about AI (this really took all the candidates by surprise; none of them had an answer prepared, which was interesting in itself). Everyone else talked about the ways in which they would want to regulate AI and Matt’s response included the line “We need to get with it, if that is the will of what we decide to do.” (I assume he meant the will of the people.) Terrible response. At the very end, they got asked whether they would support higher taxes on the very rich. Everyone else said yes. He did not. He didn’t say no, either, but he used his minute to talk about living within our means and “as a small business owner” blah blah etc. He seemed out of his depth, and I would not vote for him.

Lois Quam

Lois honestly impressed me more than I’d expected her to when I saw that (a) she was the President and CEO of Blue Shield of California from January through April of this year and an executive at UnitedHealth from 1989-2007 (source) and (b) she’s endorsed by Hillary Clinton. Her endorsements also include Attorney General Keith Ellison, Ward 4 City Council Rep Molly Coleman, and Ward 3 City Council Rep Saura Jost. In addition to working for health insurers, she helped write the legislation that created MinnesotaCare, she was an advisor to then-first-lady Hillary when she was writing the health care plan that didn’t pass (hence the endorsement from Hillary), and spent a number of years as the CEO of a global health nonprofit.

Her four-month tenure at Blue Shield of California is sort of weird. I assumed that she got hired in an interim capacity, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case and it’s not clear why she left (and I can’t even read the article talking about how it’s mysterious as it’s behind a paywall I can’t get around with archive.is.)

Asked about single payer, she said she’s a supporter, but that it’s very hard to do it as a state on our own. She talked a ton about coalition building. She said that health care was an easier issue to work across the aisle on than you might expect because there’s not a single Republican representative that doesn’t have his or her own horror story about prior authorization fuckery. (Can I just say I find it wild to hear this from someone who has been a high-level executive at UnitedHealth and a CEO at another insurer. Yes, yes, we all contain multitudes, but, you know. Wild.)

She’s from Marshall, Minnesota originally, and she talked a lot about how she would do outreach to the southern part of the state to recruit people who would run as Democrats for the state legislature. Asked about what she’d hope to accomplish in her first year she talked about being a loyal team player and serving wherever caucus leadership thought she was needed. Finally, if you’re a fan of the Twin Cities Boulevard proposal, she was the one candidate who said she favored it when this got brought up during Q&A. (Everyone else talked about a land bridge.)

I’m going to talk about her answer to the AI question, too. (I found the responses to this really interesting because it was a topic no one had prepared for, and it meant we got a look at how they thought through something they don’t get asked about much.) She started out with the cheerful statement, “I like regulations.” She then acknowledged that it’s an uphill fight because the companies are powerful and it’s a hard problem to tackle as one state, but she supports Keith Ellison’s work in that area, and she suggested that one place to start would be within health care — there are good places to use it, but also really bad places. (She didn’t specify what she meant by this but I would cite “AI supported radiography” as an example of an appropriate use and “AIs used to deny coverage” as an example of a wildly inappropriate use and hopefully that’s more or less what she meant.)

Anyway. There are aspects of Lois’s platform I appreciate but I’m sorry, I can’t get past the fact that she spent almost 20 years as a UnitedHealth executive. It is possibly she has managed to buy back her soul in her years of working for nonprofits, and if so, that’s a good thing, but it doesn’t mean I trust her. I would not vote for her in the primary.

Meg Luger-Nikolai (DFL-endorsed)

Meg is a labor lawyer who works for Education Minnesota. She’s endorsed by SPPS school board chair Halla Henderson and 62A House Rep Aisha Gomez, and also by several unions. (ETA: post-convention, she was also endorsed by mayor-elect Kaohly Her, SD 64 Senator Erin Murphy, and 64B Rep Dave Pinto.)

In her speech, she highlighted fighting back against school boards that adopt homophobic and racist book censorship policies. She talked about the unprecedented corruption in the Republican party.

During Q&A she mentioned organizing in the suburbs; it’s nice to hear people talking about party building generally, like Lois’s comment about working in southern Minnesota. She stood out a little as being unsupportive of ranked choice. (They got asked about that during the Q&A.) On the AI question, she started out with, “I’m a luddite” and went on to say that she doesn’t really care about stuff like fake pictures of alien invasions but she is very concerned about deepfake videos of real people, and would support required identification when AI was being used. (Same! I don’t know how we enforce this but same.)

ETA: I got a note from Meg. She says she’s not against RCV, just not sold, and is going to be chatting with someone from FairVote ASAP (but probably not in the next week). Re AIs, she had this to add: “I am very concerned about the intellectual property aspect of AI and LLMs specifically. In my line of work, most of my writing is a work for hire and I can’t feel that protective of it. The notion that working authors are having their works fed into a digital Cuisinart and get neither compensation nor a right of refusal is a huge problem that we need a fix for, and I am all in for a state level solution if it’s workable.”

I poked around social media to see what other people were saying about various candidates and ran across a post from a local labor guy (with a book coming out) that said “Labor organizer’s greatest ire is reserved for timid labor lawyers who are too scared to support action. Meg Luger-Nikolai is THE exception to that rule, the best labor lawyer I know.”

She is one of my top three.

Beth Fraser

Beth is a former Deputy Secretary of State and founded the Voting Rights Alliance twenty years ago. She has a long career in policy, working both directly with the legislature (as a researcher) and with various nonprofits (the Main Street Alliance, OutFront Minnesota, and others). She is endorsed by former Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (Steve Simon’s predecessor), a bunch of State Senators, Ward 5 City Council Rep Hwa Jeong Kim, and Ward 1 City Council Rep Anika Bowie. And the owners of Moon Palace Books, one of my favorite local bookstores.

She helped to both pass and implement the Safe at Home act (which allows people whose safety is at risk, such as victims of stalking and domestic violence, to maintain a confidential address and still vote). She worked to end prison gerrymandering and to ensure that Tribal IDs were acceptable ID for voter registration. One of the things that impresses me about her history is that she had the foresight to write protections in the law before the GOP started trying to use certain specific loopholes to attack voting rights.

She started her speech by talking about a vicious homophobic note she received as a 14-year-old high school kid, and she ended it by talking about standing up to bullies (i.e., Trump). Two things from her speech particularly stood out to me. First, when she introduced herself, she gave her pronouns, which I don’t think anyone else did. Second, as she was talking about protecting all the people being targeted by the Republicans, she said that everyone had the right to respect and protection “regardless of how or if you worship.” Both of these things were brief and subtle and yet stood out to me as evidence that she’s someone who is not going to brush aside any of her constituents.

Policywise, some things that jumped out at me: she talked about empowering local governments to raise money in progressive ways (rather than property taxes.) She also talked about banning tear gas for crowd control.

On the AI question, she said she’s been working with experts in this area, trying to figure out what is and isn’t possible, in terms of regulatory approaches. She said she worked on Minnesota’s law against political deepfakes. She added that we also need strong environmental regulations on data centers.

She is one of my top three.

Dan McGrath

Dan McGrath was the founding executive director of Take Action MN, which is an organization I like a lot. (When I doorknock in election season I often head over to their office to pick up materials and a route.) He is endorsed by two County Commissioners and by State Senator Scott Dibble, who also endorsed Beth Fraser. Since leaving Take Action MN in 2018, he has worked as a consultant, and as a policy strategist for the Grassroots Power Project.

In talking about his history, he noted that in 2012, there was a statewide referendum on mandatory photo ID when voting, and that there was initially 80% support for it in polls, it was so popular that a whole lot of Democrats and progressive organizations said we couldn’t win and shouldn’t even try. As the Executive Director of Take Action, he decided they’d fight anyway, and we beat it. (We beat it along with the proposed constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, and we beat both so thoroughly we got a trifecta for the first time in a long time and passed marriage equality.)

Everyone (I think) said they were at least theoretically in favor of single-payer. Dan also brought up passing the Patient-Centered Health Care Act, which would change Minnesota Care so that payments were made directly from the government to the providers. (Currently, If you are enrolled in Minnesota Care, you get your services through one of the insurers.)

On the issue of property taxes, he mentioned wanting to be able to raise revenue from all the properties currently not on the tax rolls but was not specific about exactly which of the various nontaxable entities in St. Paul he wants to tax. (A bunch are owned by the government itself.)

A couple of things I particularly liked: there was a question about how people would work across the aisle while not compromising their values and he said that where the inherent worth and dignity of all people were at stake, there could be no exceptions; “I cannot yield on any question about the basic dignity of other people.” But also, he wouldn’t want to go to the legislature if he didn’t want to talk to people in the other party. The question you want to ask is, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve, and are we actually coming at it from different directions? (“No one likes insurance companies,” he added, which was echoed a minute later by Lois — I talked about her response above.) Also, on the question about climate change, he was the only person to talk about transit, which kind of blew my mind; he also talked about working with farmers to help them cut fertilizer usage, and bonding housing downtown that requires builders to minimize use of plastics. (This was a lot more specific plans than most of the other candidates offered in response to that question.)

On the AI question, I transcribed while he was talking and I’m actually just going to quote: “I, too, feel strongly about regulating AI. But I want to say why. It is important that in public life that we emphasize and prioritize having a conscience. Having ethics. AI has none of what I’ve just said. It doesn’t have a moral compass. I think first – how do we try to lift up the idea that we are people, that we have values, that we yearn for connection to each other? We also have to look at infrastructure side so that our rural communities are not depleted of their resources for Google’s next behemoth.”

He is one of my top three.

So — okay, I have narrowed it down to Dan McGrath, Beth Fraser, and Meg Luger-Nikolai. And I’m not sure how to decide. All three seem fighty, in a way I think we need right now. Dan is a particularly good speaker, someone who can really eloquently defend our values. Beth is someone whose past work shows a lot of insight into shoring up the exact walls that Republicans are preparing to attack. Meg Luger-Nikolai is kind of the embodiment of the line “there is power in the union.” I think Dan would be the strongest on environmental issues, because he’d clearly spent more time thinking about them than the other candidates; he’s also someone who will stand and fight when no one thinks the ground is defensible. I think Meg Luger-Nikolai would be the strongest on education issues, because she’s spent 16 years working for the teacher’s union. Beth seems particularly well-prepared to defend democracy, both because of her decades of work on voting rights and because of things like, she’s been posting to her Facebook about banning the use of tear gas and requiring ICE agents to unmask.

I think I would vote for Beth. I think she’d be my pick. But honestly I’ve been swinging back and forth (mostly between Beth and Dan) since the convention, and I’m not sure. I am going to go ahead and post this because if you’re in 64A, you have one week to figure out how to vote, and hopefully this at least helps you narrow it down and gives you a starting place?

If you’d like to express your appreciation for my election blogging work in a monetary way, you can still donate to my fundraiser for YouthLink. You can also pre-order a copy of Obstetrix, my near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult. (It comes out in June!)

Election 2025: Sample Ballot/Index of Posts

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Greetings to everyone pulling up my site on their phones from a voting booth. For your convenience I’ve put links to (hopefully) all of this year’s races. If you scroll and don’t find what you’re looking for, try searching a candidate name, but remember, I only write about races that appear on the ballot in Minneapolis or Saint Paul.

Saint Paul (we’re doing Saint Paul first because it’s a very short ballot)

Saint Paul Mayor: Melvin Carter

City Question 1: Yes

School District Question 1: Yes

Minneapolis

Minneapolis Mayor: (1) DeWayne Davis; (2) Omar Fateh; (3) Jazz Hampton. DON’T RANK FREY.

Board of Estimate and Taxation: (1) Eric Harris Bernstein; (2) Steve Brandt. THERE ARE TWO OPEN SEATS; RANK BOTH OF THESE PEOPLE.

Minneapolis Park Board At-Large: (1) Tom Olsen; (2) Michael Wilson; (3) Amber Frederick. THERE ARE THREE OPEN SEATS. RANK THREE PEOPLE.

Minneapolis Park Board District 1: Dan Engelhart. (Both candidates are named Dan. Pay attention to the last names.)

Minneapolis Park Board District 2: Charles Rucker is running unopposed.

Minneapolis Park Board District 3: Kedar Deshpande is running unopposed.

Minneapolis Park Board District 4: (1) Jason Garcia; (2) Andrew Gebo.

Minneapolis Park Board District 5: (1) Kay Carvajal Moran; (2) Colton Baldus; (3) Steffanie Musich.

Minneapolis Park Board District 6: Ira Jourdain

City Council Ward 1: Elliott Payne

City Council Ward 2: Robin Wonsley

City Council Ward 3: Marcus Mills

City Council Ward 4: Marvina Haynes

City Council Ward 5: (1) Ethrophic Burnett; (2) Anndrea Young

City Council Ward 6: Jamal Osman

City Council Ward 7: Katie Cashman

City Council Ward 8: Soren Stevenson

City Council Ward 9: Jason Chavez

City Council Ward 10: Aisha Chughtai

City Council Ward 11: Jamison Whiting

City Council Ward 12: Aurin Chowdhury

City Council Ward 13: Ugh, why can’t we have some better choices? Linea Palmisano I GUESS but it’s not like BobAgain is going to win so maybe write in your favorite neighbor.

And that’s it! If you’d like to express your appreciation for my work in a monetary way, you can donate to my fundraiser for YouthLink. Also, please consider supporting one or more of the many excellent journalists I rely on when doing my writeups.

Election 2025: Some of My Many Sources

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If you would like to learn more about any of the races, or any of the groups involved, or politics in Minneapolis more broadly, or if you’d like to support the people whose work I turn to when I’m writing my election guide, there are in fact a LOT of people whose original reporting and data-gathering I rely on heavily, and I’d like to list some of them along with Patreons and fundraisers and so on.

John Edwards of WedgeLive, who provides social media coverage of a whole lot of events on Bluesky, writes a blog about local politics, and does amazing interviews on his podcast, which you can find via a podcast app (it’s called the WedgeLive podcast) or on YouTube. Something distinctive about his interviews is that he likes to interview people while biking or engaged in some other physical activity, which means you often get a much more genuine and authentic look at the candidate or politician than you would normally, because they’re just a little bit distracted. I listened to many, many of his interviews with local candidates, followed his coverage of conventions, and deeply appreciate his work. Support his Patreon here.

Taylor Dahlin has done a ton of research on the PACs that have been throwing money around the Minneapolis city races. You can find her on Bluesky here and her blog (full of useful coverage of those PACs) is here. I don’t think she has a Patreon but she does have an open GoFundMe to support her ongoing fight against breast cancer.

Josh Martin documents meetings and also has this absolutely AMAZING set of spreadsheets (link is to his Google Doc that rounds up all the stuff he does) that give you summaries of (and links to more) campaign finance stuff, endorsements, his “campaign viability matrix” where he tries to calculate the people who might actually win, just a TON of stuff. I could not find a Patreon.

The League of Women Voters Minneapolis hosted a TON of forums this year, all staffed by volunteer moderators and livestreamed. You can donate to the LWV Minneapolis here. LWV St. Paul also hosted a forum. You can donate to LWV St. Paul here. They’re also both always looking for volunteers; volunteers run all those forums but also register voters, answer questions about voting, and educate people about voting. Volunteer with LWV Minneapolis / Volunteer with LWV St. Paul.

Racket is an online arts and politics weekly that is staffed by people who once worked for the City Pages. It’s terrific and you can subscribe to it here.

Sahan Journal does immigrant-focused news coverage and is my go-to source for anything related to the Feeding Our Future scandal (other stuff as well, to be clear). It has no paywall, and you can support it here. MPR News and MinnPost also provide paywall-free coverage of local politics at least some of the time.

I also pretty regularly use coverage from the Star Trib (you can find that on your own) and the Pioneer Press (ditto). The Minnesota Reformer has moved away from local political coverage in an unfortunate way (the decision they made resulted in extremely fine-grained coverage on everything Fateh has ever done wrong, and no coverage of anyone else) although they’ve been a key source for me in the past.

(I’m probably forgetting someone, so I may come back and add stuff.) Anyway, if you value news, please support journalism!

The Future Creation Workshop

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So as I mentioned: I spent the last couple of weeks in China. I went to Chongqing as the guest of the Fishing Fortress Science Fiction College of the Chongqing College of Mobile Communication in Hechuan. (Chongqing is both a city and a province — okay technically I think it’s a “direct-administered municipality” but I feel like “province” communicates what that means reasonably well. Hechuan is a “district” which in this case seems to basically mean “an outlying town.” It’s about an hour from the city of Chongqing.)

That’s a picture of (nearly) the whole workshop — teachers, students, staff, interpreters.

I had never taught at a workshop before, nor have I attended any of the big US workshops (Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, etc.) but I have participated in a writers’ group that does peer critique since 1997. The foreign instructors were all told to prepare two lectures — one two-hour lecture to be delivered just to the students in the workshop program, one 90-minute lecture to be delivered to anyone at the university who wanted to come. The 90-minute lecture was translated by our interpreter (which meant we needed to plan for less than 90 minutes) and the two-hour lecture was translated by speech recognition and machine translation.

For the “workshop” part, we each had two groups of three students. We worked with Group A for three days, and then with Group B for three days. Each student worked with two mentors, one Chinese and one foreign. The other foreign mentors were James Patrick Kelly, Roderick Leeuwenhart from the Netherlands, and Leonardo Epinoza Benavides from Chile. The Chinese mentors were Cheng Jingbo (who was introduced as Bo, at least to the English speakers), Ling Chen, Baoshu, Jiang Bo, and Deng Siyuan. (I think one of those people did lectures and not workshops but I’m not sure which.)

My students in Group A (I know I’m throwing a lot of names out here — this is partly for my own future reference! When I see a familiar looking name show up in Clarkesworld in 2028 I want to be able to come look at this) were Zhang HongRui (“Herry”), Xiong Qiong (“Shu”), and Gong Er (“Kiki”). My students in Group B were Cao Rong (“Ultraman”), Yang Luixi (“Osse”), and Nie Yong (“Andrew”). I had an interpreter all week, Li Min (“Diana”).

The program originally had all of us doing our workshops at tables in one big room, but the second day, Shu made a face and asked if there was anywhere quieter we could go. I sent Diana to find out, and she conferred with the program organizers and we relocated to this nice room with sofas, which was great.

I'm on a couch. Diana is whispering in my ear; Kiki is sitting to my left. Herry and Shu and visible from behind. Everyone has a laptop out.

(In the picture: Diana is the person whispering in my ear. Kiki is sitting to my left. Herry is in the brown t-shirt and Shu is in the black plaid shirt.)

Something I did not know before the first time I did something like this is that conversing through an interpreter is its own separate skill in a couple of ways. First, you need to pay close attention to what your interpreter is saying while filtering out the background noise of the person who’s speaking in the other language but hopefully still paying attention to their body language, tone of voice, etc. Like especially if you’re teaching, you want to notice if they’re getting frustrated or overwhelmed, and that’s especially important in a workshop setting where at least some of the students have not done peer critique before; one of my students did clearly start to feel overwhelmed and I temporarily stopped the critique and told him, this is still your story. We are not assigning you these changes. It is entirely up to you whether to make changes, or not; we are giving you our advice one what we think would make this a stronger story and you can take the advice that seems right to you and ignore everything else!

Two men sitting on a couch, both with laptops out.

(From my first group, a photo of Shu and Herry.)

Second, when you’re speaking, you need to pause a lot more often so that your interpreter can tell people what you’re saying, and you need to do that without losing your train of thought. Third, sometimes interpreters don’t know a word and ideally you should have a relationship with them such that they’ll let you know and you can offer a synonym or rephrase.

All that said, the workshops seemed to work reasonably well. Some of my students spoke some English, which helped.

Here I am with my second group:

Me and my students sitting on a low step in a decorative library. Three of us are holding books and one person is holding up a Nutcracker.

(This was a posed picture on the last day. Left to right: Ultraman, Osse, me, Diana, Andrew.)

We set a trend escaping the crowded room, which meant that as the week went by we kept having to find new spaces because other people would beat us to the couches. We stole some poor guy’s office several times:

The second group of students and me sitting around a desk. There's a giant Star Wars poster behind us.

As noted, I also had to deliver two talks. The first was on the very first day, when I did an evening talk to anyone in the college who wanted to come. I did a talk about good and bad advice I’d gotten on writing.

Me, holding a mic, standing in front of my incredibly ugly basic slide.

If you’re curious, the slide I’m in front of is about the advice to make backups and mentions that when I was in college, I heard author Maxine Hong Kingston give a talk where she read an absolutely harrowing story about trying to get to her house during the Oakland Firestorm of 1991 to rescue her manuscript. In The Fifth Book of Peace she tells this story and relates it in a metaphysical way to the Gulf War. I heard this story and thought, “this is a message from God to not only make backups but to figure out a way to do off site backups” which in the early 1990s was no joke — I used to burn CD-ROMs and then give them to my father to store at his house. These days it’s more critical to remember that you need not only the cloud backup but also the local copy in case you lose access to the cloud, a thing that can very much happen.

Did I mention my slides were basic and ugly? Just literally a bulleted list.

I had a nearly full house (I think this photo was taken that evening, they had me sit down in the audience at the end for a photo, which meant some poor person got booted out of their seat at that point!)

An auditorium full of Chinese students, except for four people in the front row (me, Roderick, Jim, and Leo.)

That talk was translated by Diana, who had looked at my slides in advance and done a ton of preparation. (I saw her notes, which were extensive.)

On the last day, I did my morning talk to the students in the program. Rather than trying to come up with two hours of material on one topic, I basically did two talks, one on the critical lessons I learned as a writer on my way to publication, and one on how I wrote my first novel. This was machine-translated by way of speech recognition. Including a somewhat unflattering photo of me because the image shows the translation in process:

A picture of me, discoursing. In the background you can see one of my ugly slides, overlaid with a projection of speech being transcribed in English and then translated into Chinese, as subtitles.

To be honest I had significant doubts about how well this would work, and I asked my students later if they were able to follow my talk. They said that it was helpful that I’d put an outline of the talk on very simple slides, because they could input the words on the slides into a translator app themselves and get some context for what I was saying. So, ugly slides for the win! Jim made it to more of the Chinese mentors’ talks than I did (this workshop had a heavy schedule and I skipped a bunch of other people’s talks because I needed to work on critiques for my students) and thought it worked pretty well.

Anyway: it was a really good experience, I enjoyed teaching, my students were great, the other mentors were great and I really enjoyed getting to know them, and I hope this workshop continues. I flew home over the weekend and have been slowly getting un-jet-lagged.

Administrative Note

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I believe I have blogged about every race happening in Minneapolis and St. Paul this fall. I was in a hurry to get it done this year because I am going to be teaching at a Science Fiction workshop in Chongqing, China. I am super excited about this, but it also means I’m going to be on a very different schedule for the next couple of weeks, and whether I’m able to even get to my blog to edit it remains to be seen. (Yes, I have a VPN. Will it work? I am not going to know until I get to China!) Also: I’m going to be teaching at a workshop, and want to devote the bulk of my energy and attention to my students.

All this means that if there’s some late-breaking scandal, I may not be able to update my post about the relevant race! I will try to weigh in on anything significant after I get back. I will also assemble my directory of posts after I get back; in the meantime if you’re looking for a particular race, stick the most distinctive candidate’s name in the “search” field in the upper right-hand corner and it should turn up. (I use search here a lot. It’s how I find what I said about candidates in the past.)

Election 2025: Saint Paul Mayoral Race

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The incumbent, Melvin Carter, is running again. On the ballot:

Melvin Carter (incumbent)
Kaohly Her
Yan Chen
Adam Dullinger
Mike Hilborn

This is a ranked-choice election and St. Paul lets you rank five candidates, so you can literally rate these candidates in order of preference, if you want.

I need to get this done ASAP: it’s my last post and I’m about to leave town. I’ve been having trouble getting motivated to do this one for reasons that are summed up well in a conversation I had tonight with my father. He asked me when I was going to do the St. Paul mayoral race and I told him I was working on it. I then told him that the only person with any real shot at beating Melvin was Kaohly Her, and he grabbed a pen to write down the name. Bad news for people who hate Melvin: if, a month out from the election, reasonably politically engaged St. Paul residents are not even aware of the name of Melvin’s main opponent, this is not much of a contest.

I mean, get out there and vote, please, whether you love Melvin or hate him or feel “eh, I mean, he’s okay?” about him, because we need your votes on the two ballot questions (vote yes on both).

tl;dr I’m going to vote for Melvin. If you don’t like Melvin you should rank Kaohly Her and Yan Chen.

Mike Hilborn

Mike Hilborn owns an exterior services business that does stuff like powerwashing. I e-mailed him to ask him if he had any endorsements or any governance experience (like, had he ever served on a city board or committee or a county advisory board or attended city council meetings as an observer)? He does not. “I do not have any endorsements.  I don’t seek them.  Endorsements come with strings to promote their agenda.  My agenda is to lower taxes, crime and homelessness.  I do not have any government experience.  I have spent the last 30 years focused on growing my business.  We are a second chance employer with 45 employees.  I’m at the point in my career where I have time to see if can save our city.  I believe my business experience is what is required to fix Saint Paul.”

I disagree that running a small business is (all by itself) adequate preparation for the job of mayor. (I also don’t know that Melvin Carter would be qualified to take over a 45-employee exterior services business. At the very least I would have a bunch of questions about whether he’s run a small business in the past and how much he knows about power washing; his Wikipedia entry does not lead me to believe that he has any relevant experience in that area.)

He also had Republican vibes and sure enough, Open Secrets showed donations to Tim Pawlenty and the Minnesota GOP. He also gave a rousing defense of ICE at one of the forums. I would not rank Hilborn.

ETA: someone pointed out in the comments he ran for State House last year. This means I sent him the question I sent to all Republicans running: who did he think won the 2020 election? From my post last year: “He gets some credit for responding to my e-mail asking who won the 2020 Presidential election but no credit for his response. (He made it clear that (a) he 100% buys into Trump’s big lie and (b) he wanted to fight with me about it by demanding why Democrats opposed the SAVE act. When I pointed out that the law he and his party wanted to pass would disenfranchise about 30% of married women, and a disproportionately Republican subset at that, he stopped replying.)” Don’t rank Mike!

Adam Dullinger

Adam is an engineer (he makes firefighting equipment, I think for this company) and has no endorsements or political experience. He is very earnest (though he got scolded at a mayoral forum for his lack of civility) and given his genuine interests in city design particularly as it applies to bikes, I think he should consider applying to one of the the city advisory boards. (Among other things, I genuinely think this would be a better fit for the information deep dives he wants to do than the mayor’s job.) I do not think he’s qualified to be mayor, though I’d take him over Mike.

Yan Chen

Yan Chen is a retired science professor who ran for City Council in 2023. Last time she picked up a second-choice endorsement from a labor coalition, and this time she’s co-endorsed with Kaohly by former City Council rep Jane Prince. When I asked her about her governance experience, she said that she had attended City Council meetings multiple times, had visited every district council, was a board member of Summit University District Council until she withdrew to run for office, and is a community board member for a public charter school (Career Pathways). That’s actually pretty solid from a “does this person have any real idea what this sort of job entails” perspective.

She really loves to post videos and I really hate to watch videos but I watched enough to be reassured that she is not secretly a Republican despite her focus on property taxes. I am unconvinced that she’d do a better job than Melvin, but if you’re unhappy and feeling like you want a change (any change) she’s worth ranking.

Kaohly Her

Kaohly Her is a State House Rep for 64A (a section of the middle of the western part of the city). She did an interview with WedgeLive and my primary takeaway from it is that she’d do basically the same stuff Melvin is doing but she’s pretty sure she’d do it better.

Asked about the Summit Trail thing, she said the process was flawed, which … I don’t know, honestly, I feel like there are some real problems with the communication around that project but I don’t think that means that the project is a bad idea. (I wrote about this project in my Ward 4 post a few months ago, here.) The way she talks about this project makes me worry that she will cave to pressure from NIMBYs to the detriment of everyone in St. Paul. She also talked about this bike trail like it’s an amenity for the people who live on Summit. It’s really not; the whole point of a regional trail is to provide a really good, pleasant, well-maintained trail that people can use for both recreational travel and bike commuting and Summit is terrific for this for anyone who needs to get between downtown and the river and a ton of people use Summit (for driving, biking, and walking) as their preferred route just because it’s nice. (This was the thing Adam got scolded over, incidentally; he said her answer was bullshit.)

ETA: Kaohly has totally signalled her alliance with the anti-bike-lane side of that fight. (She’s “refused to pick a side” according to the Strib which is — to quote Adam Dullinger — a bullshit answer. I consider this a really good reason NOT TO VOTE FOR HER.

That said: she would bring good relationships with the legislature and she clearly has the experience to do the job. I like her fine and she’d probably be a reasonably decent mayor. I’m just really not convinced she’d actually do better than Melvin. I’m thoroughly put off by her “oh, I just don’t think the process was sufficient” BS on the Summit Ave bike lane thing. Nope. Also, someone in the comments also raised concerns that her “urban wealth fund” thing would be stealth privatization.

Melvin Carter

Melvin’s WedgeLive interview is also worth watching or listening to. He has one really interesting moment where he talks about how one of the aspects of unidentified, masked ICE officers is that we had a political assassination in this state a few months back committed by a masked guy pretending to be law enforcement.

Melvin has done an outstanding job on one particular thing, which is gun violence in St. Paul — basically he worked with the police department to have them investigate non-fatal shootings with the same energy they bring to murders. This has made a massive difference in the number of shootings. I’m also happy with what he’s done with municipal garbage collection. Homeless encampments in St. Paul are dealt with by an outreach team and while they pop up from time to time this is more or less what I think most Minneapolis advocates would say is the right way to deal with encampments. (I ran searches in the Minneapolis and St. Paul subreddits to see how much people are talking about encampments and in St. Paul they mostly just are not, which is funny given that r/stpaul really hates Melvin and thinks he sucks. Or at least that’s the direction of the threads on the mayoral race.)

St. Paul’s downtown is ailing but it’s dealing with the central problem of downtowns everywhere, a reduced in-office work force. Property taxes are high, and this is a problem that is largely created by the fact that huge sections of St. Paul are owned by the government (because it’s the state capital) or a large nonprofit organization (we’ve got a truly ridiculous number of colleges) and are thus not taxable; the fall in commercial property values in downtown is a major contributing factor and this not a problem that’s going to get solved as quickly as would be nice. It’s annoying to start a business in St. Paul (Minneapolis has this same issue) and they should rethink some of the regulations; I’ll put that on Melvin. Kaohly Her says that Cub says that nobody at City Hall took their calls; Melvin says this is bullshit (except he was more polite about it than Adam) and that they complained a lot about shoplifting but then never called 911 when it was actually happening.

Fundamentally I think Melvin has done a pretty good job of fixing the stuff that he could fix. In the coming four years (because as noted, I think he’s going to win) I hope he’ll bring some of that energy to dealing with the Snelling-University vacant CVS (is that a pet peeve of mine? I mean yeah but I think it pisses off everyone who regularly passes that intersection. Seriously, what the hell) and those vacant buildings on Grand that the Ohio teacher’s retirement fund is basically just sitting on and leaving empty.

A final strategic note: Melvin’s father was a cop, and it’s pretty clear that he has a good relationship with the SPPD, enough that he was able to get them to aggressively investigate non-fatal shootings. In the current political environment, I can think of worse things than a progressive mayor who can successfully tell the cops to do stuff.

Anyway, I am currently planning to rank Melvin #1 (and Kaohly #2, and Yan Chen #3, even though I don’t think those rankings will matter.) If you’re unhappy with Melvin, I think Kaohly would make a fine mayor would probably disappoint you just as much, honestly (unless your ONLY issue with Melvin is that you hate the idea of the Summit bike trail, in which case, I guess she’s your girl.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 5

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Steffanie Musich is the incumbent and is running again. She was not endorsed at the City DFL convention, probably due to the walkout of all the Frey supporters in a failed attempt to break the quorum.

On the ballot:

Steffanie Musich (Incumbent)
Kay Carvajal Moran (Labor-endorsed)
Justin Theodore Cermak
Colton Baldus

tl;dr I would rank Kay Carvajal Moran #1, Colton Baldus #2, Steffanie Musich #3.

Over on the post about the At-Large race I provided a whole lot of backstory on the last four years of the Park Board, and I don’t want to just C&P that whole thing over because there’s a lot. For the people who don’t want to click over, here’s a minimalist “why I’m super annoyed with the current Park Board, and why I want candidates who will do different things” summary:

I think Steffanie was the only candidate seeking endorsement at the City DFL convention, which is why there was no endorsement in District 5 — she was one of the members LiUNA (the park board workers’ union) identified as a union buster, but there was no viable alternative presented at the time. Since then, Kay has entered the race and gotten a ton of union support.

Justin Theodore Cermak

Justin listed his Instagram as his campaign site but I linked to his campaign Facebook because it’s a lot more informative. (For example, the newest post as of today appears to suggest that supporters put his signs up in parks.) Most informative bit is his rant about how the incumbent is “THE driving force behind the plan to ruin Hiawatha Golf Course.” That golf course is not viable in 18-hole form. One of the things I like about Musich is her refusal to prioritize golf over a clean lake and people not losing their homes. I would absolutely not rank Justin.

Steffanie Musich (Incumbent)

Steffanie was on the wrong side of both the Uptown Mall vote and the strike. She was also the driving force behind a program that sells carbon offset credits to companies, theoretically in exchange for planting trees. Her website mentions this in her first-term accomplishments: “Facilitated Public/Private partnership with Green Minneapolis to expand tree planting by 7,000 trees annually.” Except that according to the 2024 Star Tribune article I linked above, “none of the profits has been used to plant a single tree. It may be used to purchase trees in 2025, said Park Board spokeswoman Robin Smothers.”

I have mixed feelings about carbon credits; I mean on one hand they’re weirdly reminiscent to me of medieval-style indulgences and on the other hand they’re maybe better than nothing. However, if someone’s buying indulgences carbon credits on the basis of trees getting planted, and the trees aren’t getting planted, it’s really hard to see this as anything other than greenwashing.

Kay Carvajal Moran (Labor-endorsed)

Kay doesn’t have the DFL endorsement (presumably because she entered late) but does have multiple labor endorsements and endorsements from various high-profile DFLers. She’s held various jobs in human services (her LinkedIn says she’s currently a case management assistant for Hennepin County, and has worked as a youth coordinator).

She’s worked with the Minnesota Immigrant Movement to support street vendors, and supports “micro entrepreneurs” in the parks. She’s also worked on youth programming in the parks (she mentions kickboxing, Bike Alebrijes MN, and academic support.) Her website leads with youth programming and also talks about environmental stewardship and worker rights.

Colton Baldus

Colton Baldus is a tenant organizer. The vision section of their website leads with “stand with organized labor” but also talks about climate justice, reduced fees for those who currently struggle to afford to use park programs, public restrooms in every park, and harm reduction strategies. They don’t t seem to have any endorsements.

I would rank Kay #1, Colton #2. I originally said that I was not worried enough about Justin and his “NO ENDORSEMENTS – NO MASTERS” approach to campaigning to rate Steffanie #3, but a friend made a case for her on the grounds that it’s worth having the golf course ride-or-die lose as decisively as possible, and she deserves some gratitude for sticking with her stance on the golf course. (FWIW I think this is a contest between Kay and Steffanie, in any case.)

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 6

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Cathy Abene is the incumbent and is running again. Her opponent, Ira Jourdain, has the DFL endorsement, probably in large part due to the walkout at the City DFL convention of all the Frey supporters in a failed attempt to break the quorum. (If I were Cathy Abene, I would be absolutely furious at Frey. Apparently they’re campaigning together, though.)

On the ballot:

Cathy Abene (Incumbent)
Ira Jourdain (DFL-endorsed)

Cathy Abene

Cathy Abene was my second choice in 2021 and while I don’t think I regret this (could’ve been worse) I’ve been disappointed with her as she’s largely gone in lockstep with Elizabeth Shaffer. I wrote a longer assessment of all the reasons I don’t like the current Park Board on my At-Large post and I don’t want to recap here, but I will note that Cathy got called out by LiUNA (the union that represents the Park Workers) as a union buster in the wake of the park worker strike. On Cathy’s website, she says, “The number one refrain I hear from constituents is that we should prioritize taking care of what we have, and I couldn’t agree more. When it comes to our physical parks, our world-class system is only as good as the assets that make it up.” The thing she doesn’t acknowledge is that among the assets that make it up are the people who take care of what we have! Taking care of the workers who maintain our parks is part of taking care of what we have. Cathy also joined Shaffer in the vote to cut youth programming positions in order to repave a bike path.

When my kids were little, we lived close to the Hiawatha School Park, and we went there a lot. There was a woman who worked at the park (I would guess she’s now retired) who was the person who would literally haul out the hose to spray down the surface of the ice rink any day when it was cold enough to freeze, to give skaters a fresh surface. One time some asshole dropped bubble bath into the wading pool and she spent the next day scrubbing it out by hand. She worked so hard making sure that park stayed pleasant and usable and nice. The parks system is partly the fields, playgrounds, ice rinks, woods, community centers, etc., and it’s partly the people who mow the grass, fix the play equipment, flood the ice rinks, trim the trees, and staff the community centers.

Ira Jourdain

Ira is an enrolled tribal citizen of the Red Lake band of Ojibwe, works in Human Services, and served on the Minneapolis School Board for two terms. In an article where he reflects on his time on the school board he mentions his proudest achievement is mandating 30 minutes of recess per day for Minneapolis elementary schoolers. (That’s a minimum, to be clear, and many — possibly most — Minneapolis elementary schoolers were not getting it. My kids definitely did not, when they were in a Minneapolis public school.)

Ira got an anti-endorsement from someone who’d had very bad experiences with him back when he was running for the State House seat in 62B (okay, someone let me know you can’t see that link without a Bluesky account. The statement was, “Ira Jourdain is the single worst elected official I have ever interacted with. I had to block him on Facebook because he would constantly harass me in the DMs at like 2AM,” made by a former resident who maintains ties to the area) but I’m very unhappy with Cathy, and Ira actually explicitly acknowledges how much the parks are the result of hard work from the park staff.. I would vote for Ira Jourdain.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)

Election 2025: Minneapolis Park Board, District 4

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This district is currently represented by Elizabeth Shaffer, who is running for the Ward 7 City Council seat. I don’t like Shaffer; she is central to all my current grudges against the current Park Board.

There are three people on the ballot:

Jeanette Colby
Jason Garcia (DFL-endorsed)
Andrew Gebo

tl;dr I would rank Jason Garcia first, Andrew Gebo second.

Over on the post about the At-Large race I provided a whole lot of backstory on the last four years of the Park Board, and I’m not going to fully recap that here because there’s a lot, but here’s one thing: last spring, there was a vote on the Uptown Mall, which is a stretch of park-owned land between Hennepin and Lake of the Isles:

A snip of Google Maps showing "The Mall," just south of the Midtown Greenway, running between Lake of the Isles and Hennepin (which isn't labeled in this snippet but where you see MoZaic, that's Hennepin).

There were five years of community engagement over how best to develop it, which resulted in a detailed plan in 2021: the plan included a play area, a connection to the Greenway, seating, a “shared woonerf” that could be used for stuff like farmer’s markets or small art festivals, and a community garden. When this plan was originally created, it looked like it wouldn’t be implemented for years, because it would require money to be allocated to do it. However, this year, the Met Council announced they were going to do a sewer rebuild, which involved tearing out all the roads anyway, and offered to rebuild it however the Park Board wanted it rebuilt. It was an absolutely amazing opportunity for a free park, basically.

And the current Park Board turned it down, because the rebuild would sacrifice parking. Their claim was that they were acting out of concerns over fire safety. However, their justification was that the Fire Department prefers a 20-foot road width; this is wider than the “shared woonerf/flexible market street” in the plan, but also wider than the 12-foot road that’s there now, unless you include the 8-foot parking lane, which is normally full of parked cars. The board then voted against banning parking there, or even enforcing the on-the-books overnight parking ban. The claim that this was about fire safety rather than parking was profoundly disingenuous. (Also, Minneapolis is full of streets that don’t provide that ideal 20′ road width and the Fire Department is able to cope.) The theory I’ve heard now from two places is that the rich people who live in mansions nearby didn’t want the renters who currently park on the Mall to relocate to the street parking in front of their homes.

One final note on this controversy: the Uptown Mall is in District 4.

One of the other major things that happened was the strike of park workers. Elizabeth Shaffer is one of the park board members called out by the union as a union buster.

Moving on! Jason Garcia was endorsed at the DFL City Convention. On September 29th an e-mail went out advocating for an “apolitical Park Board” and signed by some of the most aggressively centrist, absolutely political people in town. They’re supporting Colby.

Jeanette Colby

Jeanette Colby is campaigning with Elizabeth Shaffer — her lit highlights that endorsement — and I swear I saw her talking somewhere about having been recruited by her to run. That would be reason for suspicion but I also e-mailed her to get her thoughts on the Uptown Mall thing, and here’s her response:

On the question of The Mall, my biggest concern was that if street access were removed, emergency vehicles would not have had adequate access to the apartment homes of dozens of people according to the Minneapolis Fire Chief. In general, I believe a remake of a space like The Mall requires much more substantial community input than it received during the Southwest Area master planning process. When the issue came to a critical juncture in April, the East Isles Neighborhood Association did not support the master plan.

Yeah, no. Even the Star Tribune reporting made it clear the “fire safety concerns” were a smokescreen for a collective freakout over parking spaces.

Colby has volunteered with the Kenwood Neighborhood Organization, the SWLRT Community Advisory Committee, and the Cedar Lake Park Association. She is a an artist (ceramicist, specifically) and a docent at the MIA.

I would not rank her.

Andrew Gebo

Gebo is a tech guy with cats. He spoke in favor of the Uptown Mall plan when interviewed by the Southwest Connector for their coverage of the race. (“This project, part of the Southwest Parks Plan, would have created bike paths and recreational spaces that connected Uptown to Bde Maka Ska, which would have been a transformative enhancement to our park system. With the Metropolitan Council’s sewer project presenting a unique opportunity to implement this plan without cost to the Park Board, the decision not to act reflects a lack of vision and leadership.”)

He has done some volunteering in the parks (in an e-mail response he mentioned Earth Day trash pickups and supporting fundraising efforts with the Friends of Loring Park) but has not served on any commissions or advisory boards. I enjoyed listening to his interview with WedgeLive but there was one bit I found sort of eyebrow-raising — John asked him if he was ready for “nastiness” and Gebo thought he meant in the campaign. John did not mean in the campaign. (The Park Board has historically been one of the most drama-prone, acrimonious elected bodies in the City of Minneapolis.) If he were the only person running on a “park board, not parking board” platform I would endorse him but he is not. I would rank him second.

Jason Garcia (DFL-endorsed)

Jason Garcia is someone I’ve known online for years and I was really excited when they entered the race. They spent most of the month of September in the hospital after emergency surgery — they’re now home, but still recovering. They do expect to be sufficiently recovered to serve, if elected, but they are not able to do as much campaigning as some of their opponents. If you would like to see Jason elected, this would be a good race to volunteer to doorknock in.

Jason’s employment has involved a lot of work in local/indigenous foods. They worked for the American Indian Community Housing Organization and helped AICHO plan an indigenous food market. They were also the founding manager at the Indigenous Food Lab Market in Midtown Global Market.

Their governance experience includes a lot of time in meetings as an observer, and part of why I’m familiar with them is their involvement with WedgeLive coverage of local politics. I have a lot of confidence that they know what they’re getting into, and significant conviction that they’ll make good choices in Park Board work.

I would rank Jason Garcia #1, Andrew Gebo #2.

I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)