Do you have a Thanksgiving dinner specialty? With my limited cooking skills, I whip up the easiest classic to make from scratch: cranberry sauce. I always get compliments, but maybe my relatives are just taking pity.
Growth and harvest are themes of today’s newsletter. Here’s what we have:
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Farmers’ market tips for the Thanksgiving season.
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A look at a Walker Art Center exhibition that includes both fresh flowers and rammed earth.
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A tally of big wins by local teams.
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Five must-reads and the weekend weather forecast.
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Why a nine-foot bear has taken up residence at Allianz Field.
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This week at the farmer’s market
We’re nearing mid-November, and many of us are planning our Thanksgiving menu. To get some ideas on what’s fresh, I chatted with Lindsay Stauner, the assistant director of the St. Paul Growers’ Association. “I get a lot of questions about cranberries this time of year,” she said, adding that yes, they are in season, and yes, it’s a good time to buy them.
Sam Sifton has a great New York Times Cooking recipe for a simple cranberry sauce. It freezes well if you decide to make it before the holiday.
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Dave Cossetta, whose Italian restaurant and grocery is a beloved staple of the St. Paul food scene, died in Rome yesterday at age 70 of an apparent heart attack. His family’s restaurant, Cossetta Alimentari, recently won two prestigious awards at the Panettone World Cup, and Cossetta was in Italy to deliver some of the holiday breads to the pope. Read the full obituary at The Minnesota Star Tribune.
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Voter turnout spiked during last week’s elections in cities with planned hyperscale data centers, including Farmington, Faribault and Hermantown, highlighting how motivating an issue they were for voters. Check out MinnPost to see which side of the debate prevailed at the polls.
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The Minneapolis City Council rejected Mayor Jacob Frey’s pick for police chief. MPR News has why council members opposed making the interim chief, Bill Peterson, the permanent leader.
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Reporting from Minneapolis and Beirut, Lebanon, our colleagues at The Times found that the Justice Department tried to build a criminal case against Representative Ilhan Omar by pressuring a former bodyguard to provide incriminating evidence on her. Read more about the bodyguard and his case.
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And in sports: Kirk Cousins’s highly anticipated return to the Vikings as quarterback will give coach Kevin O’Connell a “massive opportunity,” The Athletic reports.
Off hours
Standing in “Variations on a Garden,” an exhibition at the Walker Art Center containing works that reference the desecration of cultural treasures in Syria and Iraq, I asked Abbas Akhavan, an Iranian-born artist, what it means to be opening his first major U.S. museum show during a conflict in which President Trump has threatened to obliterate Iran’s “whole civilization.”
“I don’t see much of a difference between the Iraq war versus the Iran war in my relationship to them,” he said. “It’s all part of the same act of violence.”
A team of eight labored for four weeks to construct “curtain call, variations on a folly.” The 16-ton work includes a model of the colonnade that led to Syria’s Palmyra arch, which the Islamic State destroyed in 2015. Comprising rammed earth and other material, the model stands on a green screen like those used for digital background replacement.
The rough pillars, with their monumental physicality, make a striking impression against the pristine screen — the kind of thing that sets the stage for reality to be changed at a keystroke.
The show, which opened yesterday, surveys a two-decade career; his hothouse recently earned buzz at the Venice Biennale.
The relationship between transience and permanence is a recurring theme of the Walker exhibition. One piece, “untitled,” contains a set of refrigerated display cases: something you might see at any florist, but here set into a museum gallery wall.
“This is kind of a mini museum,” Akhavan said. “It’s temperature-controlled, light-controlled, and we’re trying to keep precious goods alive within their own limited life span.”
Akhavan’s work invites viewers to contemplate ephemerality, while drawing a contrast between the integrity of the natural life cycle and the horror of deliberate or careless destruction.
In “curtain call,” Akhavan chose to include a model of the colonnade (which still exists) but not the arch (which was destroyed). In fact, he sought to contest the very idea of rebuilding.
He wanted, he said, “to not make a replacement, but a place holder, so that it’s kind of a flickering memory that comes together and then crumbles literally to dust again.”
Sports
Talya: It’s me again. Don’t worry, I won’t say it too loudly.
The Minnesota Wild are on a winning streak, having won their seventh consecutive road game against the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Minnesota Timberwolves put on a show to defeat the Dallas Mavericks, 133-94, in their fifth consecutive victory.
And the Minnesota Gophers men’s basketball team has started the season with a 4-0 record, highlighted by a buzzer-beater against Cincinnati.
Now it’s time to hold your breath. Tomorrow, the Timberwolves will face the Chicago Bulls, and the Wild will face the Boston Bruins. And after a 6-0 start to the season, followed by two losses, the Minnesota Vikings are looking to reset. They play the Green Bay Packers on Sunday afternoon.
Today will be clear and cold, with temperatures hovering in the low 30s for much of the day. We’ll warm up over the weekend, reaching highs in the 50s by Monday.
Ope! Just one more thing
The latest sculptural installation at Allianz Field, called “The ButterBears,” includes a nine-foot bear imprinted with Minnesota butterflies.
Despite its size, the bear is not quite as conspicuous as the 33-by-88-foot loon erected at the soccer stadium in 2024. The sculptor Andy Scott created both the loon and the bears.
Scott didn’t pick the “ButterBears” name. That honor fell to Bill McGuire, who is both a butterfly maven and the majority owner of Minnesota United.
Thanks for taking a break with us this afternoon!
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Feedback? Questions? We’d love to hear from you: thelocalTC@nytimes.com
Shadi Bushra contributed reporting.
