Tim Gihring / Writer • Editor • Storyteller

“…on par with This American Life.”

“…carving out a place in national conversations…”

“Playful, thoughtful, and elegant.”

News and Features

“Sen. Tina Smith remembers exactly when she knew…”
On Paul Wellstone’s legacy, for MinnPost
“Aaron Brown was a junior at Cherry High School, in a little farming community just outside Hibbing, when the internet rolled into his classroom.”
On broadband access, for MinnPost
“…we both looked at each other and said, ‘Holy sh-t, we’ve got a really good idea here.'”
On the rise and fall of Gopher, the first popular Internet protocol, for MinnPost
“Everyone thinks, Oh, they’re adopted and that’s just how they’re supposed to be…”
On specialty healthcare for adoptees, for Minnesota Monthly
“It wasn’t the dying that bothered Duane Columbus.”
On the struggles of Native American veterans, for Minnesota Monthly
“Sometimes Shelby wants to get away from Shelby.”
On TV anchor Don Shelby and the changing news landscape, for Minnesota Monthly
“‘Several of us suspected who it was. … No one was going to betray that elector.‘”
On the mystery of the last “faithless elector,” for MinnPost
“Can he win by being Al Franken—only a little less so?”
On the comedian’s unlikely run for Senate, for Minnesota Monthly
“He would slip on a pair of thin white gloves and gently lift his prize possession out of the case.”
On the theft of the ruby slippers, for Minnesota Monthly
“He wondered if this was related to the stories he’d been hearing from downriver: weird tales of boats with no drivers, spinning wildly in the water.”
On the threat of invasive carp, for Minnesota Monthly

Columns and Commentary

“North, it’s fair to say, has won out.”
On Minnesota’s identity crisis, for MinnPost
“I never expected to be a father. I certainly didn’t expect it to happen a month early.”
On fatherhood (the Debut Dad column), for the Star Tribune
“He’d ‘bagged’ them, ‘taken’ them, ‘harvested’ them, like potatoes.”
On Cecil the Lion and the language of hunting, for the Star Tribune
“Through his Rumsfeldian, half-frame glasses, he saw sin everywhere.”
On the fall of Archbishop Nienstedt, for MinnPost
“Rituals are a chance to acknowledge loved ones for who they were, not who you wanted them to be.”
On differing family values (in the MN Nice Advice column), for Minnesota Monthly
“I grew up with the Green Bay Packers the way you grow up with gravity,”
On marrying into a football rivalry, for the Star Tribune
“You fall into a midlife crisis as into a manhole. No warning, looking straight ahead.”
On how to have a Minnesota midlife crisis, for Minnesota Monthly
“It was a set-up, a test, but one that Sullivan … had prepared for nearly all his life.”
On Jake Sullivan (in the Minnesota At Large series), for MinnPost
“This was the business, the cat and mouse of media and celebrity.”
On Minnesota media’s treatment of Prince, for MinnPost
“The solitary act of writing for pleasure died in a garret while we were all checking Facebook.”
On the rise of “content strategy,” for MinnPost