The burned and abandoned Third Precinct has served as a visual reminder of the Minneapolis City Council’s dysfunction. Does the City Council think this derelict and destroyed building somehow serves its constituents? Now it seems that vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, who is otherwise abhorrent, has done more in one hour to advance Third Precinct action than the City Council has been capable of over the past four years.
Frederick Law, Minneapolis
The Star Tribune tribute to economics reporter Mike Meyers was richly deserved (“His writing brought light to complex economics,” Oct. 20). He was a lovely person as well as a unique talent, and I think the story conveyed the warmth that people who knew him felt toward him. His talent was evident. There is an old joke that if you ask a question of five economists, you will get five opinions (six, if one went to Harvard). Yet Mike relished sitting down for a two-hour lunch with the Star Tribune Board of Economists four times a year and turning the discussion into intelligible and relatively interesting reportage (and Bill Melton in our group did go to Harvard).
Mike also contributed at least one piece of noneconomic reporting to the Star Tribune’s pages. On 9/11, he called the office of my small consulting firm to ask my opinion of what the economic consequences of the attack on the World Trade Center might be. My business partner, Andre Lubov, later told me that when she told Mike that I was attending an economic conference inside the World Trade Center and that she was hoping to hear from me, she literally heard the wheels going round in his head. He might be connected to breaking news instead of reporting on GDP in the quarter that ended six weeks ago. He asked if I would call him if she heard from me, and he and I talked that afternoon. The Sept. 12, 2001, metro edition included Mike’s story of my “escape” from the south tower and my journey on foot north to the Manhattan office of my wife’s employer, Padilla Speer Beardsley, complete with an inset map. Mike managed to make even that interesting; we shall not see his like again.
