Author Archives: naomikritzer

Election 2024: Judge – 2nd District Court 29 (Ramsey County)

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This is one of two contested judicial races in Ramsey County. The two candidates:

Timothy Mulrooney (incumbent)
Winona Yang

Timothy Mulrooney was appointed in 2016 by Mark Dayton, re-elected in 2018, and is finishing up a six-year term. When I looked him up, I found no scandals or anything else of concern. There’s no reason not to vote for his re-election.

Winona Yang graduated from law school in 2021.

There was an editorial in the Star Tribune this week by a guy who used to chair the state committee for judicial selection (which is to say, the committee that recommends people who would make good judges.) He highlights the actual courtroom experience that Judge Mulrooney had even before he was appointed: he worked as a prosecutor for five years, then in private practice for eight years in family law. Then he heard family law cases as a referee for eight years before he was appointed. He notes that he looked up Winona Yang in the Minnesota Court Records online and it indicated that she had never appeared in court.

(I had never noticed you could do this! If you go to https://publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us/CaseSearch one of the options is to search by attorney.)

Anyway. I am absolutely going to vote for Judge Mulrooney. Winona Yang might be qualified for the bench eventually — but she sure is not yet.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)

Election 2024: Judge – 4th District Court 24 (Hennepin County)

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This is a judgeship in Hennepin County. Voters in Hennepin County will see this race on their ballots. On the ballot:

Matthew Frank (Incumbent)
Christopher Leckrone

Judge Matthew Frank was appointed by Governor Walz in 2023. There are basically two really straightforward reasons to vote for Judge Frank and not his opponent.

  1. One of the foundational experiences lawyers should have if they want to become a judge is to spend time in court — you can be a prosecutor, defense attorney, or litigator, but you really do need to be going to court. According to his resume, Christopher Leckrone has worked for many years primarily in compliance, a job done entirely outside of courtrooms. (He does list pro bono work with foster kids that might involve going into the courtroom, but that is very clearly not what he’s spending most of his time doing.) (ETA: his website says he worked as a prosecutor, so I checked his resume again. From 2010-2010 he worked for the DA’s office in Middlesex, MA. I stand by my assessment that this is not someone bringing a wealth of courtroom experiment to the table.)
  2. Matthew Frank was one of the lead prosecutors in the state’s case against Derek Chauvin. And of the 19 judges in Hennepin County up for election this year, that’s the guy Leckrone decided to run against. Leckrone has a completely hidden or sanitized social media presence and I found no indication of his political views except that he opted to run against this particular judge. (It’s not just that Frank is new — a cursory check quickly turned up several judges appointed in 2022 or 2023. There’s some other reason Leckrone decided to run against him, and this seems by far the most likely.)

Anyway — Frank is well-qualified and Leckrone is not. I would vote for Judge Frank. I think all the other 4th District Court judges are running unopposed.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)

Election 2024: MN Court of Appeals 12 (statewide race)

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Once again the tl;dr is to vote for the incumbent. On the ballot:

Diane B. Bratvold (incumbent)
Jonathan R. Woolsey

So first of all, if early voting has started and your website still says “coming soon,” you are not a serious candidate. But I fell down the google rabbit hole here so you’re all going to hear my story of what I found.

When I looked up Jonathan R. Woolsey, what I found were a whole lot of court cases (and appeals going all the way up to the State Supreme Court) involving a divorce with a child custody case. Woolsey divorced his wife in 2014, when his daughter was an infant. There’s no way to directly link to the stuff in the Minnesota Court Records Online system but I dug through the divorce filings and found that by the fall of 2014, his ex had an order for protection against him and exchanges of their daughter happened at the police department. The OFP presumably ended at some point but he appears to have repeatedly over the last decade filed endless requests to modify one thing or another, dragging his ex back into court over and over. The most recent court decision from this year included things like “[Jonathan Woolsey]’s request to have his daughter communicate with him by text is denied, as she does not own a cell phone” and “Halloween to be removed from the holiday schedule.”

I have known quite a few women who shared custody with a dude who dragged them back into court over petty bullshit, bleeding them of time, money, and energy, extending their abuse and control and forcing the woman to give them attention (by way of showing up in court).

Is that what’s going on here? Maybe not, but the fact that his ex not only got an Order for Protection but was able to have it extended at least once sure makes it look like that pattern. Anyway, in 2020 there was a case that made it all the way up to the State Supreme Court. The State Court of Appeals panel ruled against him, and I checked — yep, Diane Bratvold appears to have been one of the lawyers who ruled. So my guess is that’s why he’s running against her.

Vote for Diane Bratvold!

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)

Election 2024: fabulous new statewide resource

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If you live outside of Minneapolis or St. Paul, you may find my posts about statewide races useful but I do not write about your City Council races, school board races, County Board races, etc., and I know it can be extremely hard to find good information on those races.

Good news, though — MPR News now has a fully statewide election guide that includes every race on the ballot. They contacted every candidate with three very basic questions (“Why are you running? What life or professional experiences led you to seek this position? What are the top issues you’re discussing with voters and why?”) When candidates did not respond, they assembled any information available on the candidates’ websites. If you click on candidate names, the guide will provide links to their website and social media links, and for many candidates that did not answer, there’s an “ask this candidate questions directly” link that directs to their campaign e-mail.

This is a tremendous resource and I’m so glad they’re doing this. Local races matter! (That’s why I write this guide!)

I also put together a guide for hunting down information on these races last year, which you can read here.

Election 2024: Associate Justice – Supreme Court 6

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This is a statewide contest (it will be on everyone’s ballot) since it’s for the State Supreme Court. On the ballot:

Karl Procaccini (incumbent)
Matthew R. Hanson

Karl Procaccini was appointed fairly recently (August 2023) by Tim Walz. At the time he was appointed, there was some concern about the fact that his former client included 3M, Polymet, and Flint Hills Resources. At the time he was appointed, he assured everyone that he would recuse from any future cases involving former clients (and I found nothing suggesting that he hasn’t.) He was also Walz’s former general counsel, which meant that he was involved in various executive orders Walz issued during the pandemic.

That seems to be the main reason Matthew Hanson is running. (“[Procaccini] led the legal team that drafted the governor’s executive orders during the COVID-19 lockdowns” is basically the only case he makes on his website to vote either for him, or against the incumbent.)

Hanson ran in 2022 in Scott County, and my father helpfully researched that race for me. He noted two years ago, “The challenger graduated from [Mitchell Hamline] and passed the bar in 2018. Other than as a student, he has had little, if any, courtroom experience (his website says that he worked with a small firm doing commercial litigation). He’s had three jobs since graduating from law school and it’s not clear what he’s currently doing (https://hansonforjudgemn.com/issues/).” That’s a thoroughly underwhelming resume for a potential judge (let alone a potential State Supreme Court justice).

ETA: holy hell Hanson’s Twitter is SURE SOMETHING. Retweets of Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, a lot of failed Minnesota Republican candidates, a whole lot of fearmongering about non-citizens voting, and that’s … five minutes of scrolling down. YIKES.

I will be voting for Procaccini and would encourage everyone else to do likewise.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)

Election 2024: Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court

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Here’s who’s on the ballot:

Natalie Hudson (Incumbent)
Stephen Emery

tl;dr: vote for Natalie Hudson.

Stephen Emery has an interesting history. First, he ran for US Senate in the DFL primary in 2018 (against Amy Klobuchar.) I noticed at the time that he was hair raisingly conservative, absolutely not someone anyone should vote for in the DFL primary even if they disliked Amy Klobuchar. In 2018, he described himself as “Pro-Life, Pro-Traditional Family, Pro-Gun, Pro-Private Enterprise, Responsible Immigration.” His website included gems like, “I will advocate and vote in such a way as to promote the decree of the Creator for mankind to take dominion over the earth and subdue it and to be fruitful and multiply” and “I would advocate and vote to defund the promotion of evolution.” He also wanted to disband the UN because it was too pro-Muslim.

In 2022, he ran for and won a race to be County Attorney in Yellow Medicine County, only to then refuse to accept the position. The guy he’d defeated was appointed instead. Also in 2022 he was promoting election denial propaganda.

So it’s a little surprising that his website for the judicial race starts out with a long anti-corporate rant. (But shows up with the title “Conservative representation for Minnesota” when you google.) Anyway: absolutely do not vote for this guy!

Natalie Hudson is fine. I’m going to vote for her and so should everyone else. (Seriously, even if you’re very conservative and would prefer a Chief Justice not appointed by a DFLer, you don’t want Emery. If you’re very conservative and would prefer a Chief Justice not appointed by a DFLer, I’m going to suggest you move to Iowa, because the MN GOP endorsed Royce White for US Senate this year, that is not the choice of a serious party that wants to win statewide elections at some point in the future.)

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I get a lot of satisfaction by pointing people at fundraisers that I can then see fund. I’m probably going to mix things up later but for now, if you’d like to make a donation to encourage my work, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes (that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in). She is also looking for funds to buy school supplies, learning materials, and classroom storage, rugs, and flexible seating.

Election 2024: Statewide Constitutional Amendment

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I read something a while back that suggested saying “thank you for your patience” instead of “I’m so sorry for the delay.” So: thank you for your patience! I had some computer problems which I resolved by getting a new computer. Suboptimal timing, but here we are, it’s still September, early voting is just about to start, let’s do this!

Everyone in Minnesota this year will see a statewide constitutional amendment on our ballots. Here’s what it says:

Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund Renewal

Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to protect drinking water sources and the water quality of lakes, rivers, and streams; conserve wildlife habitat and natural areas; improve air quality; and expand access to parks and trails by extending the transfer of proceeds from the state-operated lottery to the environment and natural resources trust fund, and to dedicate the proceeds for these purposes?

So. As you probably know, we have a State Lottery. We created it back in the late 1980s, and dedicated 40% of that money to the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, which funds all the stuff mentioned above: water quality, habitat conservation, parks and trails, clean air. That “dedicated percentage” is provided by a law that expires in 2025. We’re voting to extend it to 2050. There’s some more info on this here and an article from MPR here.

The renewal also creates a community grant program that would reserve 1.5% for projects in “underserved communities,” which includes both historically marginalized groups and rural areas.

If it fails, the money will simply go into the general fund like the rest of the lottery money. This is basically a way to guarantee a revenue stream for the natural environment of Minnesota that can’t be turned into tax breaks for the rich if the GOP ever gets back into control.

I can’t find anyone campaigning against this. I couldn’t even find anyone seriously arguing against this in the comments on the editorial supporting it in the Star Tribune. It is broadly agreed to be a good idea. The main risk is that it just slips below the radar and people fail to vote on it because they don’t know much about it. Not voting is counted as a “no” vote.

I am voting yes on this. You should also vote yes! The question here is, “should we continue to spend 40% of lottery proceeds on the environment and natural resources of the state of Minnesota, as we’ve done for the last quarter century” and I think that’s an excellent idea.

I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I get a lot of satisfaction by pointing people at fundraisers that I can then see fund. I’m probably going to mix things up later but for now, if you’d like to make a donation to encourage my work, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes (that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in). She is also looking for funds to buy school supplies, learning materials, and classroom storage, rugs, and flexible seating.

Election 2024: the races I think I’m going to write about

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Welcome back, all the people here hunting for whatever I was able to dig up about the people running in judicial races!

In addition to the races everyone knows are happening (President, US Senate, US House, Minnesota House) there’s some interesting stuff happening downballot this year.

  1. There’s a State Constitutional Amendment that involves renewing the law that puts lottery proceeds towards environmental conservation. (It expires in 2025; we’re voting to renew this to 2050.)
  2. Minneapolis has a contested school-board at-large race and a contested school board race in District 6.
  3. Minneapolis has a school funding levy.
  4. St. Paul has two city constitutional amendments: one would shift city races to presidential years, and the other would impose a property tax levy to provide day care subsidies.
  5. There are a number of contested judicial races.

Josh Martin put together a document with a list of all the Minneapolis races, which I’m happily using to determine which city legislative districts even have a contested race in Minneapolis (if anyone knows of a similar list for St. Paul, please let me know!)

I’m going to prioritize writing about the stuff I’ve listed out here plus State House district 61A, since that’s a race between a DFLer and a Green — for every other legislative seat you can safely assume that if I get around to writing about it, I will tell you to vote for the Democrat and not the Republican. (And ditto US House and US Senate. And the Presidency, obviously, but I’ll definitely write about that one for my own amusement if nothing else.)

What I Did On My Vacation (not write about the election)

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Back in early August, I went to Glasgow, Scotland, to attend WorldCon, where I won two Hugo Awards:

Two Hugo Award trophies (they are shaped like art deco style rocket ships on a wood base).

The Hugo Book Club Blog went looking to see how often this had happened before, and determined that four previous writers had won twice in prose fiction categories in the same year. (Lots more people have won for both a story and a podcast.) The other writers: George R.R. Martin, Gordon Dickson, Connie Willis, and Martha Wells.

I am deeply honored and also feeling a little bit of impostor syndrome. (At this point in my life I rarely feel impostor syndrome but it turns out finding out that I’m on a five-person list with those four people will do it!)

Anyway, if you want to go read the stories I wrote that won, they are Better Living Through Algorithms and The Year Without Sunshine, both free and online.

So yeah: kind of an amazing week. And then I went to Iceland, where I went all the way around the Ring Road with my husband and my dad. I saw puffins! I saw puffins up close! I stood on a glacier! I saw a volcanic eruption! (It started right before we left and we could see it from the road back to the airport.) I may at some point write up a detailed trip report with photos (at least of the puffins) but right now I feel like I should probably write about the judicial elections.

FYI, I have a new story out but it’s out in print — “The Four Women Overlooking the Sea” is in the September/October issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. (Well, OK, it’s also available in digital subscription — including Kindle Unlimited — but it’s not available on a web page you can just go pull up.)

My WorldCon Schedule

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And now for something completely different! I will be attending WorldCon next week and have some programming to share (OK, I’ll be honest, the main reason I’m putting this here is to provide myself with a handy reference, but there are at least a handful of people who read my blog for the SF/F stuff instead of, or as well as, politics.)

Thursday, August 8, 2024

13:00 (1 p.m.) BST – Autographing
Hall 4 (Autographs)

19:30 (7:30 p.m.) BST – Reading
Castle 2, 30 min

Friday, August 9, 2024

16:00 (4 p.m.) BST – Imagining our Great AI Overlords
Hall 1, 60 mins
Panelists: Justin C. Key, Lettie Prell, Mikko Rauhala, Naomi Kritzer, Stew Hotston (moderator)

From Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, readers and writers continue to be fascinated by artificial intelligence, in both utopian and dystopian settings. As scientists and engineers note the implausibility of many science fiction scenarios, what does it take to create a believable fictional AI character? Join our panel as they discuss their favourite, and least favourite, AIs, robots and sentient machines. 

Saturday, August 10, 2024

13:00 (1 p.m.) BST – Table Talk
Hall 4 (Table Talks), 60 mins

Table talks are small events; signup is required. I think you sign up on the online portal (it opens August 6).

Sunday, August 11, 2024

11:30 BST – All the World’s Books Depend on the Beancounter: Economics in SFF
Carron, 60 mins
Panelists: Charles Stross, Eleanor Teasdale (mod), Naomi Kritzer, Scott Lynch, Stew Hotston

Economics is the “dismal science”, but economic speculative fiction is far from dismal; writers have experimented with all kinds of economic models from social credit to gift exchange, in worlds fantastical or space bound. And that’s without thinking about the impact of magic on currency values or space travel on the flow of trade. Our panellists will share their favourite examples of economic systems in SFF, which ideas they think the genre should be doing more with, and even what economics can learn from speculative fiction!

14:30 (2:30 p.m.) BST – Best Cats of SFF
Hall 1, 60 mins
Panelists: Erin Hunter, John Scalzi, Naomi Kritzer (mod), Nnedi Okorafor, Seanan McGuire

As the great, late Sir Terry Pratchett once said, “in ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.” No wonder we can’t imagine our stories without them, no matter where or when they are set. 

From Garth Nix’s Mogget to Terry Pratchett’s Greebo and Maurice, Robert Heinlein’s Pixel to Robin Hobb’s Fennel, come along as our panel celebrates their favourite felines.