Artificial intelligence is here. It’s actually been around for a while, speckling software with capabilities, like predictive text, that we now take for granted.

But it’s in the last few years that AI has advanced along a science-fictional trajectory, with companies releasing dozens of generative AI models. These inventions are capable of generating images and text, and one subset in particular has gained incredible attention and sparked deep wariness.

Language learning models are trained on vast databases of written information and commonly used as chatbots. These models famously include OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool but have also been implemented by Google, Bing and other companies as personal assistants and search engine aids.

The immense power of language learning models has spurred wariness and fear of plagiarism.

In one survey, 48% of students admitted to having used ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz. Of surveyed students, 53% had the model write an essay for them and 22% had it write an outline for a paper.

The rapid rollout of these tools coupled with limited knowledge of their abilities and a boom of online schooling over the pandemic has all contributed to a panic on the part of educational institutions and instructors about the use of AI.

In recent years, law school exams have generally been open-book, said Kali Killmer, a first-year law student at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her exams will be different from those other lawyers in training have sat through, which allowed students to reference textbooks, notes, class materials and even the Internet, in some cases. 

“But because of AI this year … the exam will still be in a virtual format in that it’ll be on my computer, but it’ll be on a lockdown browser completely,” Killmer said. “I won’t be able to do anything else on it, so all the supplemental materials you’re allowed to use on the exam you’ll have to bring in hard copy.”

Killmer cited two prominent AI-related incidents that gained national attention in the legal world.

A judge in New York imposed sanctions on two lawyers in June who submitted a legal brief that was written with the help of ChatGPT. The AI chatbot generated six citations for fake cases throughout the brief.

ChatGPT also passed the bar exam this March. The Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) is designed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners and forms a shared core of the bar exam, which would-be lawyers must take in order to practice law, in more than 40 states across the country. Not only did ChatGPT pass the exam, but it showed great improvements over attempts by previous generations of the model. ChatGPT is learning and advancing.

Killmer describes a response to these events, and others, on how her law school’s approach to plagiarism has changed.

“The general trend has been, like: ‘We don’t know what AI is going to be or how well it’s going to facilitate cheating on law school exams or on the bar exam. So we’re gonna precautionarily move to lockdown, hardcopy things until we have a better assessment,’” Killmer said.

The question is top of mind for many educators.

In January of this year, instructors at the University ran ChatGPT through four law school exams. The bot “performed on average at the level of a C+ student, achieving a low but passing grade in all four courses,” according to the paper.

But for law students, like many other students, the incentive to use ChatGPT or other AI models for plagiarism is outweighed by the risks and difficulties.

Killmer used the example of legal citations, which new law students often struggle to learn. Using an AI-based citation generator as a shortcut to writing citations borders on redundant, since students are aware of AI’s unreliability and tendency to invent entire cases that never existed. On time-restricted law exams, Killmer said, students don’t have time to double-check an AI’s work and make corrections.

For now, there are hard limits to the abilities of ChatGPT and other similar tools.

Everyday Google search results now turn out dozens of AI-generated blogs and articles. Amazon has been flooded with hundreds of AI-written books, often with no disclosure of their authorship. Clarkesworld, one of science fiction’s biggest publications, closed its submissions in February of this year after receiving almost as many AI-generated works as ones by real people.

The common thread of these AI creations? They all sucked.

“It’s difficult for me to believe that there’s a scenario where your average law student could use ChatGPT with any facility to come up with an exam answer that would be better than anything they could come up with on their own, just by the way that the exams are formatted,” Killmer said.

ChatGPT and other AIs are advancing quickly, but for now, the limits of their abilities are clear. Instead of engaging in conversations about the ethics of these tools or their role in the classroom or the professional world, institutions are erring on the side of blanket zero-tolerance policies with little nuance or conversation.

I have my reservations about AI. I worry about how AI’s popularization will affect jobs and the value of different skills. I worry about how it will impact art and creativity. I worry about students using AI as a shortcut instead of learning critical analytical and writing skills they will need for the rest of their lives. I worry about AI’s ability to regurgitate racism or manipulate users. I miss living in a world where I didn’t have to worry about these things.

By relying on fear-mongering and excessive precaution, we risk creating students who are unaware of generative AI’s abilities and potential, and consequently unprepared to deal with it in the professional world. 

By creating classrooms where any mention of AI is taboo, we encourage curious students to view instructors as the enemy and certain subjects as unthinkable. This is the opposite of what an academic environment should cultivate.

Perhaps this is indeed the best way forward for the University Law School. But what about the rest of us? What conversations can be had around AI in our classrooms? 

Even when its use is prohibited, it is our responsibility to create spaces where we can talk about it honestly and analyze its abilities and limitations as they change in the coming years.

Artificial intelligence is here. It’s actually been around for a while, speckling software with capabilities, like predictive text, that we now take for granted.

But it’s in the last few years that AI has advanced along a science-fictional trajectory, with companies releasing dozens of generative AI models. These inventions are capable of generating images and text, and one subset in particular has gained incredible attention and sparked deep wariness.

Language learning models are trained on vast databases of written information and commonly used as chatbots. These models famously include OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool but have also been implemented by Google, Bing and other companies as personal assistants and search engine aids.

The immense power of language learning models has spurred wariness and fear of plagiarism.

In one survey, 48% of students admitted to having used ChatGPT for an at-home test or quiz. Of surveyed students, 53% had the model write an essay for them and 22% had it write an outline for a paper.

The rapid rollout of these tools coupled with limited knowledge of their abilities and a boom of online schooling over the pandemic has all contributed to a panic on the part of educational institutions and instructors about the use of AI.

In recent years, law school exams have generally been open-book, said Kali Killmer, a first-year law student at the University of Minnesota Law School. Her exams will be different from those other lawyers in training have sat through, which allowed students to reference textbooks, notes, class materials and even the Internet, in some cases. 

“But because of AI this year … the exam will still be in a virtual format in that it’ll be on my computer, but it’ll be on a lockdown browser completely,” Killmer said. “I won’t be able to do anything else on it, so all the supplemental materials you’re allowed to use on the exam you’ll have to bring in hard copy.”

Killmer cited two prominent AI-related incidents that gained national attention in the legal world.

A judge in New York imposed sanctions on two lawyers in June who submitted a legal brief that was written with the help of ChatGPT. The AI chatbot generated six citations for fake cases throughout the brief.

ChatGPT also passed the bar exam this March. The Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) is designed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners and forms a shared core of the bar exam, which would-be lawyers must take in order to practice law, in more than 40 states across the country. Not only did ChatGPT pass the exam, but it showed great improvements over attempts by previous generations of the model. ChatGPT is learning and advancing.

Killmer describes a response to these events, and others, on how her law school’s approach to plagiarism has changed.

“The general trend has been, like: ‘We don’t know what AI is going to be or how well it’s going to facilitate cheating on law school exams or on the bar exam. So we’re gonna precautionarily move to lockdown, hardcopy things until we have a better assessment,’” Killmer said.

The question is top of mind for many educators.

In January of this year, instructors at the University ran ChatGPT through four law school exams. The bot “performed on average at the level of a C+ student, achieving a low but passing grade in all four courses,” according to the paper.

But for law students, like many other students, the incentive to use ChatGPT or other AI models for plagiarism is outweighed by the risks and difficulties.

Killmer used the example of legal citations, which new law students often struggle to learn. Using an AI-based citation generator as a shortcut to writing citations borders on redundant, since students are aware of AI’s unreliability and tendency to invent entire cases that never existed. On time-restricted law exams, Killmer said, students don’t have time to double-check an AI’s work and make corrections.

For now, there are hard limits to the abilities of ChatGPT and other similar tools.

Everyday Google search results now turn out dozens of AI-generated blogs and articles. Amazon has been flooded with hundreds of AI-written books, often with no disclosure of their authorship. Clarkesworld, one of science fiction’s biggest publications, closed its submissions in February of this year after receiving almost as many AI-generated works as ones by real people.

The common thread of these AI creations? They all sucked.

“It’s difficult for me to believe that there’s a scenario where your average law student could use ChatGPT with any facility to come up with an exam answer that would be better than anything they could come up with on their own, just by the way that the exams are formatted,” Killmer said.

ChatGPT and other AIs are advancing quickly, but for now, the limits of their abilities are clear. Instead of engaging in conversations about the ethics of these tools or their role in the classroom or the professional world, institutions are erring on the side of blanket zero-tolerance policies with little nuance or conversation.

I have my reservations about AI. I worry about how AI’s popularization will affect jobs and the value of different skills. I worry about how it will impact art and creativity. I worry about students using AI as a shortcut instead of learning critical analytical and writing skills they will need for the rest of their lives. I worry about AI’s ability to regurgitate racism or manipulate users. I miss living in a world where I didn’t have to worry about these things.

By relying on fear-mongering and excessive precaution, we risk creating students who are unaware of generative AI’s abilities and potential, and consequently unprepared to deal with it in the professional world. 

By creating classrooms where any mention of AI is taboo, we encourage curious students to view instructors as the enemy and certain subjects as unthinkable. This is the opposite of what an academic environment should cultivate.

Perhaps this is indeed the best way forward for the University Law School. But what about the rest of us? What conversations can be had around AI in our classrooms? 

Even when its use is prohibited, it is our responsibility to create spaces where we can talk about it honestly and analyze its abilities and limitations as they change in the coming years.

Like many users, I downloaded TikTok in March 2020.

Almost everyone I know spent most of the early pandemic on social media. At first, TikTok was a source of human connection and commiseration during a traumatic experience. It quickly became a cultural must-have, up there with other social media giants.

I was a heavy social media user before the pandemic. After two years of living almost exclusively online, though, TikTok had taken its toll on me.

I couldn’t sit through a movie without my phone, much less pick up a book for more than a few minutes. I would watch 10-second videos for five or six hours straight. TikTok was my main source of news, mostly via doomscrolling that only exacerbated my anxieties. My hands began to ache from the repetitive motion of scrolling. My vision got worse.

“I was really against having any social media because I was scared of being so dragged into it,” said second-year Dante Rocío. “I was scared of losing my time, and … people, from what I saw, were just using social media just to show off stuff like ‘What I ate today, who I talked to, what I was doing,’ and stuff, and I wasn’t interested in that.”

Rocío eventually began downloading messaging apps to keep up with his classmates and teachers who used them to coordinate schoolwork. He also began to connect with activist groups and projects outside of school using apps like Slack or Signal.

“When I came to the U.S., I started having Instagram,” Rocío said. “Before I came to the U.S., almost everything was on Facebook. Some people were even having the opinion that if you don’t have Facebook, you don’t exist. When I came to the U.S. I noticed that I can’t do almost anything with Facebook.”

Even though he has joined more social media platforms, Rocío remains wary of its effect on his life.

“I think there can be a lot of toxic talk on social media. Let’s say you post a post on anything and you can immediately have questions or prying or maybe some hate or toxic stuff for even, sometimes, any reason,” Rocío said. “I think that’s something that is needed to watch out for. I, nowadays, for example, almost never look into comment sections anymore.”

I don’t argue that social media is universally bad. As Rocío noted, individual platforms are essential to the different tasks and communities we participate in. It is down to each of us to assess the impact of social media on our lives and determine for ourselves when that impact has gone too far. But that decision requires intentionality and awareness, skills I felt TikTok was eroding. 

I comforted myself with the knowledge that I could fact-check anything I saw or close TikTok for an afternoon if I wanted to. I rarely did either. TikTok, with its visual elements, endless feed and talented content creators, increasingly felt as important as the real world. Many people treated it as if others on the app were their friends or community members, rather than complete strangers.

I started looking for options. My first instinct was to go nuclear: how could I get as logged off as possible? I googled ways to get rid of my smartphone completely. I could go back to printing MapQuest instructions before traveling anywhere new. I could get a landline and twirl the cord as I called my friends. I could dig up my mother’s old pager from the early 2000s.

There were other, more moderate solutions. One college student went viral on TikTok after posting about leaving her smartphone at home when she and her friends went out. Instead, they each carried flip phones.

“We realized that every single problem we have on a night out — everything that leads to us crying, everything that leads to us having a bad hookup, everything that leads to us having a bad time — stems from us having our phones when we’re out,” the creator, under the handle @skzzolno, said on TikTok in March 2022.

In the end, I kept my iPhone. But I still wanted to make a change.

In January of this year, I deleted all social media apps on my phone and signed out of each one on my computer. TikTok was the last app to go and the hardest one to go through with.

I had put off deleting the app because I was scared of losing my drafts and saved videos. The drafts felt like an archive of my pandemic experience. TikTok drafts are saved locally to the phone they are made on, so they would disappear when I deleted the app. In my saved videos, I had a bounty of recipes, life advice, jokes, workouts and product recommendations. Surely I would need them as I embarked on my post-digital life.

So, I set aside a week to finally delete TikTok. In several different sessions, to give my aging iPhone time to recover, I downloaded every single draft video onto my phone. There were more than 70.

I had hundreds of saved videos, so downloading them was not an option. Instead, I sat down with a notebook and scrolled through each TikTok. Every time there was something I wanted to save, I wrote it down. If I really, truly felt like I needed to, I downloaded the video.

After nearly four hours, I had twelve pages of handwritten information. Months later, I rarely refer to this content. The only video I saved during this time that I still rewatch is a video tutorial on hand exercises to prevent carpal tunnel.

Writing it all down helped me say goodbye to the app and its hold on my life, which had felt essential to surviving the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. I accepted that I would be fine without it.

I’m still not on TikTok. I’m not on any of the major social media sites. I even deleted my GroupMe and switched to WhatsApp. My profiles still exist, but I don’t open or check them. My friends who have fled Twitter keep offering me Bluesky codes. I decline with thanks.

Maybe I will redownload my social media in the future. In the meantime, I encourage readers to reflect on the hold that TikTok and other apps have on us and our society. What would taking a break do to your life, to your relationships?

For Rocío, social media ultimately has its uses.

“There are a few things I want to polish in how I’m using [Instagram] and how much, but I find that if you know how you want to use it, it can be kind of helpful, especially, you know, for news that’s happening on campus,” he said. “Like, I have a friend who doesn’t have Instagram here and almost every major event that I was talking about that wasn’t talked about in the servers on Discord that she was on, she didn’t know about it. So there would be quite a lot of things that I would be missing out on.”

Even so, Rocío does not have a TikTok.

“I never had a situation that asked me, that needed me to have TikTok,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This column was published before news of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s death broke on Sept. 29.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have spent this year fielding media inquiries about their health.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.) was briefly hospitalized in March after being concussed in a fall. Since then, he’s had two public moments, once in July and once in late August, where he froze in front of the press. He was unable to answer questions or respond to statements. Both times he had to be rescued by staffers. McConnell is the Senate minority leader and is 81 years old.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was hospitalized with shingles in February, returning to the Senate in May, only to be hospitalized again after a fall in August. She currently sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Appropriations. She is 90 years old.

As their health issues escalated, news outlets across the country have been publishing opinion and fact-finding articles alike, arguing over the role of these older politicians in ill health. Discussions are being had about whether it is sexist to want Feinstein to retire and whether McConnell should be more forthcoming about his health problems. Even Elon Musk has urged McConnell to step aside.

People come from every perspective on this issue. Some worry for the efficiency or longevity of their party or for how their states are being represented by aging officials. Others see older politicians as distanced from their needs and perspectives as young people.

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) has even advocated for imposing term limits on members of Congress. He told NPR’s Morning Edition he was worried about “a growing lack of generational diversity” in Congress.

This suggestion raises a few red flags among experts.

“In general, political scientists are opposed to term limits,” said Kathryn Pearson, associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. “The effects of term limits are to give more power to lobbyists and interest groups, more power to staff, and more power to governors.”

Pearson pointed out there is already a way to get older politicians, who may be viewed as unable to fulfill their responsibilities to their constituents, out of office.

“Voters have the chance themselves to turn someone away from office by not reelecting them,” Pearson said.

Pearson also stressed these high-profile cases are the exception, not the rule. She criticized Feinstein’s decision to seek reelection in 2018 but spoke highly of Nancy Pelosi, for instance, who announced last year she would step down from her position as Speaker of the House. Despite leaving leadership, she has remained in her role as a representative from California and intends to seek reelection.

“On the one hand, voters who are seeing Diane Feinstein and seeing Mitch McConnell are thinking, ‘Why aren’t they being replaced by a new generation of politicians?’” Pearson said. “On the other hand, there are many politicians who we would think of as being past the 65-year-old retirement age who are making really amazing contributions in both parties.”

As we talked, I mentioned that in fall 2019 I interned for the office of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn). Pearson lit up.

“She is exactly someone who exemplifies the value of having people stick around,” Pearson said. “She is older, but she is super sharp and she knows appropriations policy like the back of her hand. She is amazingly skilled, amazingly knowledgeable.”

DeLauro has represented Connecticut’s 3rd district since being elected in 1991. In 2021, after 30 years in the House, she was selected as chair of the House Appropriations Committee for the 117th Congress. She turned 80 this year. 

“And if she had been the appropriations chair six years after she was elected … she would not have had the expertise she has today,” Pearson said.

The subject of aging politicians causes everything from individual frustration to party infighting to political conflict. Earlier this year, Feinstein’s absence from the Senate Judiciary Committee due to her illness was blamed for slowing the committee’s confirmation of judicial appointees. The issue led to bipartisan clashing, with Republicans blocking attempts to fill Feinstein’s seat with a temporary replacement. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Lindsey Graham and numerous others from both parties offered their opinions.

I must point out: in 2018, Feinstein’s constituents knowingly reelected their 85-year-old incumbent for a six-year term. Feinstein was California’s first female U.S. senator when she was elected in 1992. She is the first woman to have chaired the Senate Rules Committee and the first woman to have chaired the Select Committee on Intelligence. 

These qualifications, in addition to her time as an impressive, widely liked local politician in San Francisco, have made her an immensely popular and qualified figure.

We claim to want politicians who are level-headed and knowledgeable, who have our best interests as their constituents at heart. We want politicians who are experienced and who can cut through their own party’s infighting and petty partisan rivalries.

Perhaps Feinstein ought not to have run for reelection. Perhaps she is too ill to fulfill all of her responsibilities. Perhaps this is increasingly true for McConnell, as well.

But can we concretely assign blame to their age, when there are older politicians who serve with efficiency, grace and great mental acuity well into their supposed twilight years?

“It needs to be more nuanced,” Pearson said. “The value that some politicians bring that reflects their long service and the development of expertise and legislative skill cannot be overlooked.”

This debate also comes as the nation gears up for a presidential showdown between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Biden, age 80, would be the oldest presidential candidate in history. Trump, age 77, would also make history as the second-oldest.

In particular, Democratic-leaning voters are skeptical of Biden’s abilities due to his age. Despite the fact there is only a three-year age gap between the candidates, many tend to speak more favorably of Trump’s abilities, but both candidates’ ages, as well as the ages of many politicians, may conflict with the desires of younger voters.

“Young voters have this image of older politicians being unable to represent their interests, even if it’s not true,” Pearson said. “A lot of the party expertise and political skills are gained from long periods of service or people who may not start a career in politics until after they’ve done something else.”

It is a serious challenge to resist the panicked buzz, on both social media and in the news, regarding aging politicians. When everything from pandemic response to Roe v. Wade to Supreme Court confirmations have been on the table these last few years, it can feel agonizing to watch policymaking be moved along, at a snail’s pace, by senior citizens.

In these moments, though, I take comfort in the long careers of Feinstein, DeLauro and Pelosi. I look to the achievements of progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Ver.) , age 82, and Rep. Maxine Waters (D – Calif.) age 85. 

As new members of Congress join the ranks with each election, it is the experience and wisdom of these party elders that assures the peaceful transfer of power and the stability of our democracy.

A friend’s text in the WhatsApp group chat surprised me. I could, indeed, really use a ride to campus that day. It would save me the cost of an Uber, an hour-long bus trip or a bike ride in the cold. But I had no idea how my friend, who did not own a car, was going to pick me up. This was last year, in October — maybe he would come by broomstick?

When he pulled up in front of my house, it was in a sleek, white hatchback: an electric Chevy Bolt, patterned with teal accents and a logo. The name on the side of the car — Evie — sounded like it should be the name of your millennial cousin’s new baby, short for Evangeline or Genevieve.

“Swanky,” I said to my friend as I climbed into the car. The inside was clean, well-kept and sensible. There were no Tesla-esque touch screens or gadgets.

“It’s electric,” my friend bragged, as if it was his own car.

The Evie Carshare system is new to the Twin Cities. Its operating partner, HourCar, has been around since 2005, but the Evie fleet just hit the streets in 2022.

According to James Vierling, head of growth, marketing and communications for HourCar, it was a movement toward electric vehicles in the car industry that made the Evie Carshare possible, as well as its host project: the EV Spot Network.

“The concept of the entire network is to provide renewably powered access to electric vehicles, whether that be your ability to own one or your ability to drive one without having to own one,” Vierling said.

The EV Spot Network provides curbside charging stations across Minneapolis and St. Paul, with a certain number of spots available at each location for public use and a certain number of spots for Evie Carshare vehicles. The network was developed by the city of St. Paul in partnership with the city of Minneapolis, Xcel Energy and HourCar.

When complete, the EV Spot Network will offer more than 280 charging stations across the Twin Cities.

The birth of the Evie Carshare has been made possible by a popular boom in electric vehicle ownership. Nationally, electric vehicles accounted for 7% of new vehicle registrations in January 2023; in the Twin Cities, they accounted for 4.3%, up from just 1.4% last year.

“We knew electric vehicles were coming. We knew they were going to be more affordable,” Vierling said.

The arrival of electric vehicles on the market gave the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis a chance to address a critical public health concern.

“The worst air quality exists in the most dense and low-income communities in almost every major metropolitan area across the country,” Vierling said. “In Minnesota, the number one greenhouse gas contributor is the personal automobile, and where those emissions and that bad air quality ends up is in under-resourced neighborhoods.”

Across the partnership’s projects, use of the carshares reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 3,256 metric tons. The Evie electric carshare alone accounted for more than 2,000 metric tons.

By using the carshare services, members saved an estimated $11.5 million on transportation costs by shedding or deferring the purchase of their own personal car.

In August, my partner and I were in a minor car crash. We were unharmed, but our car was out of commission. Thankfully, I knew exactly what to do to keep us mobile around the Twin Cities.

On the user side, the partnership is simple: one membership allows you access to both the HourCar and Evie fleets via a single app. There’s a membership plan option for students and one for frequent drivers. The low-income membership plan, Access Plus, costs just $1 a month.

There’s also an option to pay by each ride, with no monthly fee, the way you might pay for a single Lime scooter ride.

I applied for a membership in just a few minutes, and by the end of the day, I received confirmation that my application had been accepted. I was ready to drive.

I live within walking distance of two different HourCar hubs, spots where cars in the fleet need to be borrowed from and returned. But when I was out and about, near campus or downtown, there were Evies in all the spaces in between. Like a Lime, Spin or Veo scooter, Evies follow a free-float model; they’re unattached to hubs.

When their battery is low, you can park at an EV Spot Network charging station.

In 2022, the body that administers the HourCar and Evie carshares served 5,496 members across their projects, an increase of 160% from the year before. They had 79,636 trips, a 300% increase from 2021.

The Evie Carshare plans to scale up to 170 vehicles or more in 2023. When the associated in-progress EV Spot Network is complete, it will offer over 280 on-street charging locations in St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Even now that our household car has been repaired, I remain a carshare devotee. What if my partner took the car to work and I needed to get to Trader Joe’s, to campus or to a friend’s? I can take an Evie or an HourCar.

Even in its most challenging moments, the carshare system impressed. After driving my partner home from surgery, I mistakenly left my wallet in the backseat of the car. When I realized, I raced back to where I had left the car parked. As I watched, the next driver initiated a ride and drove off. I reported my lost wallet to the customer service line, but I was sure my wallet was gone forever.

The next day, I received an email. My wallet had been found and was waiting for me to pick it up in an HourCar building.

Earlier this month, workers at four Half Price Books stores in the Twin Cities went on strike.

The stores, which unionized in 2022, were the first of the national company’s locations to unionize. Since then, four more stores have followed suit and a ninth may soon follow.

Among other needs, workers are fighting for a wage increase at a time when inflation is making the cost of living in the Twin Cities soar. In response, the company offered them a measly 1% wage increase.

“Half Price Books management has repeatedly failed to approach negotiations with the respect and seriousness workers deserve,” Hanna Anderson, a Half Price Books worker at the St. Paul location, said in a statement. “Instead of living up to Half Price Books’ purported family-owned values, management offered workers an offensive 1% wage increase while violating federal labor law in the process.”

“If Half Price Books wants its values to be anything more than a shallow punch line,” Anderson continued. “Then management should stop their hypocrisy and treat workers like family by providing us with real raises and the security a union contract provides.” 

While the strike marks just one move in the long-term strategy of Half Price Books organizers, it follows a vibrant pandemic-induced explosion of worker power in the Twin Cities.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Minnesota has seen unionizing efforts in museums, local distilleries and coffee shops, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s locations –– and even Planned Parenthood North Central States. Earlier this year, graduate student workers at the University of Minnesota successfully voted to unionize.

In 2022, Minneapolis public school teachers went on strike for nearly three weeks, the first such action by Twin Cities educators since 1970. Later in the year, an estimated 15,000 nurses in the Twin Cities and Duluth walked off the job in a three-day strike. The strike was the largest private-sector nurses’ strike in U.S. history. A second strike was narrowly averted after a deal was reached by negotiators.

Across the state, unionized workers have won wage increases, greater COVID-19 protections, improved benefits and more.

“The biggest leverage that a worker has is withholding their labor,” said Alison Marcanti, a registered nurse at United Hospital in St. Paul. Marcanti was a rotating member of the negotiating team during last year’s strike.

“A strike happens when you know there’s no other recourse and we’ve determined that we are not making any more progress at the negotiating table,” she said.

Marcanti said the public was generally supportive of the nurses’ strike, as many people related to the working conditions the nurses were protesting and were empathetic to the COVID exposure the nurses risked as frontline workers. The pandemic, she said, increased support for organizing overall.

The pandemic was also famously characterized by the “great resignation,” in which millions of people quit their jobs. In 2021, 47.7 million workers voluntarily left their jobs. By the end of 2022, so had 50.5 million more. Some left the workforce altogether, but many simply traded one workplace for another one better suited to their needs and lifestyles.

The “great resignation” enabled millions of people to unionize in workplaces where their poorly compensated labor was harder to replace and therefore more valuable. As the national rate of resignation slows down, experts and journalists alike wonder what this moment of worker power will mean in the long term.

Does this signal a change in work culture and how people show up to their jobs? Will staffing shortages in sectors like education continue? How will hard-won wage increases stack up against inflation? As companies’ pandemic-era benefits and protections are rolled back, will workers stay where they are or take off?

As the harshest years of the pandemic recede, a tentative shift in the balance of power could award long-term benefits to workers and unions. But as challenge after challenge comes workers’ way, there is always the chance that advances could be canceled out.

“Time is not necessarily on labor’s side because there was all this momentum with the pandemic and all this public support,” Marcanti said. “Organizing is not sexy. It’s very time involved and people have lives to live. When the economy is good, it’s not at the forefront of their lives. So I do think that leaders within labor organizing need to be very diligent at this time to kind of keep people’s focus.”

My urging to the unionized workers of Half Price Books — and all current and future negotiating efforts in the Twin Cities — is to keep going. You are not alone.

During last year’s nursing strike, representatives from the teachers’ union often called into the nurses’ union virtual meetings, Marcanti said. Building connections with other unionized workers was important emotional and social support as well as a critical information-sharing practice.

From October 2021 to September 2022, the National Labor Relations Board reported a 53% increase in union election petitions. This was the highest single-year increase in unionization since 2016. 

The 2022 net increase in unionization was also entirely among workers of color — the number of unionized workers of color increased by 231,000 while white workers’ numbers decreased by 31,000.

Not only are unionized workers in good company, but many wish they were. Further evidence suggests more than 60 million workers in 2022 wanted to join a union, but couldn’t. 

That’s what makes this moment so special: unionization is in the public consciousness, in the media and on the minds of millions of working people. The ability and willingness of employees to unionize is not a given, and it is not necessarily a renewable resource.

Think of the University’s graduate student workforce, who earlier this year successfully voted to unionize after a failed vote in 2010. If the vote had taken place three or five or ten years after the pandemic, would workers be interested in a union?

Marcanti said “there’s a risk of people getting more complacent again and not remembering or realizing” the effects of an employer cutting their wages “at a whim” without protections.

To negotiating Half Price Books workers, to the graduate workers organizing at the University and to others who might be trying to unionize or in the process of negotiating a contract: don’t stop. This moment is critical, and the victories won this year will reverberate for many to come.

Good luck!

The last several weeks have seen a flurry of Supreme Court cases regarding affirmative action, religious freedom, environmental regulation and student debt relief. Amid the din, one decision altered the future of the Navajo Nation and set a risky precedent for many others.

In this case, the Navajo Nation sought for the U.S. government to conduct a process to clarify the water rights it holds for the Nation, as laid out in an 1868 treaty. It argued the treaty promised water to the Nation, but did not specify a quantity or any process to protect and ensure access to that water.

The Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo Nation in a 5-4 decision that represented something relatively rare in recent news: a decision not unanimously passed by the new conservative majority.

Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative Trump appointee, sided with the Navajo Nation.

“Everyone agrees the Navajo received enforceable water rights by treaty,” wrote Justice Gorsuch in his dissenting opinion. “Everyone agrees the United States holds some of those water rights in trust on the Tribe’s behalf. And everyone agrees the extent of those rights has never been assessed.”

“Adding those pieces together, the Navajo have a simple ask: They want the United States to identify the water rights it holds for them,” he continued. “And if the United States has misappropriated the Navajo’s water rights, the Tribe asks it to formulate a plan to stop doing so prospectively.”

The court determined the United States was under no obligation to ensure the reservation’s access to water. The decision is a break with precedent and a blow to relations between the U.S. government and tribal nations. But it also represents a critical moment as we reckon with the mounting consequences of climate change.

The decision comes after years of ever-intensifying drought in the Colorado River Basin, which supplies water to 40 million people in the American West.

Seven states rely on the Colorado River for water: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. These states have battled for years over how to address the crisis of the drying-up river and how to apportion out the water that remains.

With the Biden administration as the referee, these states continue to debate policy and engineering solutions, assert legal rights and evade federal intervention. No one wants to cut water usage and risk damaging their economy.

The question of the Colorado River is simple: Who should bear the brunt of climate change? Who will go unharmed and unchanged? Who is best poised to protect themselves and those they represent?

There are 30 federally recognized tribes that derive their water from the Colorado River Basin. While 22 of these tribes have recognized water rights to as much as 26% of the Basin’s average annual water supply, actual access to clean water varies. Approximately 30% of the Navajo Nation’s 175,000 residents do not have running water in their homes.

What will the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Navajo Nation mean for these 22 tribes? And what about beyond the United States?

The Colorado River basin supplies water to two Mexican states. Many who historically relied on the river have watched it recede since the 20th century due to American operations. The affected include members of indigenous groups, like the Cucapá tribe.

Does the United States not have an obligation, morally if not legally, to limit how its actions will harm others?

According to the Supreme Court, it does not even have an obligation to ensure the water rights of those within its borders — water rights established by its own legal agreements with those groups.

An amicus brief submitted in support of the Navajo Nation’s case argued established precedent sided with the right of tribal nations to hold the U.S. government to the promises made in treaties and other agreements. The amicus brief was submitted by a group of 37 federally recognized tribal nations and three intertribal organizations.

“Concomitant with the promise to reserve water rights is the corresponding duty to protect and deliver on that promise and avoid rendering those rights meaningless through obstruction, depletion, or diversion to more junior users,” wrote the brief’s authors.

By “more junior users,” the brief refers to groups whose legal water rights were established after those of the Navajo Nation. The Nation’s water rights outrank these users. This includes the governments of all seven American states in the Basin.

While Minnesota is far from the Colorado River Basin, the Arizona v. Navajo Nation decision should open our eyes to the ways climate change could impact any American state.

Minnesota’s winters and summers have both been warming and the state has seen heavier rains in the last several decades. This summer has also seen multiple waves of air quality alerts as clouds of wildfire smoke drift down from Canada. 

Should long-term or sudden climate disasters touch our lives, who will be guaranteed a seat at the policymaking table? Whose legal rights to resources like water or clean air will be upheld? Whose will suffer? Who will be caught in the crossfire between states and governments?

However these events unfold at the state level, who will the highest court in the land side with?

The Supreme Court has sent a clear message. It is aware of the effects of climate change and accepts its disproportionate impact on certain groups and places. We must ask ourselves: if we cannot trust the Supreme Court to protect such a nonpartisan right as access to water, what can we expect them to do for us?

It has been a few weeks since the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action in the American higher education system.

The decision’s blunt severity starkly contrasts the jubilation we knew only a year ago when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in.

Her nomination and confirmation as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court was touted as a landmark victory for diversity and representation on the highest court in the land. It was a time for national celebration. 

These days, the memory feels bittersweet.

Since the new Court burst onto the scene, breaking with decades of legal precedent to overturn federal abortion access protections, it has only accelerated its activist agenda. 

The Justices have not gone on record to say climate change is false or its impact exaggerated, but the conservative majority has seriously curtailed the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact anti-pollution regulations. The Court has yet to tackle challenges to state bans on transgender patients’ access to medical care, but experts suggest such a case is on its way.

The Supreme court has plunged chest-deep into America’s culture wars and the water is still rising. As we look forward to future decisions from this court, it’s looking like the best way to predict outcomes of cases is to bet against science, evidence and experts’ recommendations.

Take the amicus briefs of the affirmative action case.

Amicus briefs are arguments submitted by outside parties for the consideration of the court in its decision-making process. They can be submitted by individuals or organizations and are often co-signed. Their purpose is to provide supplemental arguments and evidence from interested groups and to express public support for one side or the other.

Nearly a hundred briefs were submitted during the affirmative action case, representing hundreds of invested parties.

The range of amicus briefs in support of affirmative action reflects the broad impact of the policy on American society. They include professional organizations, universities, businesses and more.

Among those supporting affirmative action are 11 law school deans, 35 top former military leaders, the College Board, the American Bar Association, 10 current and former Southern governors and the company Microsoft.

Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Women’s Law Center, the Center for Reproductive Rights, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human

Rights and the National LGBTQ Task Force also submitted a brief.

Some of the most distinguished schools in the country did as well: Brown University, Columbia University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Yale University and more than 40 institutions of higher education in total.

The list is truly astonishing, an impressive testament to the reach and legacy of affirmative action. Support was expressed from every corner of America’s professional and educational realms.

The opposition, expressed in 33 briefs, came from a far narrower slice of society.

Among those who filed amicus briefs against affirmative action is the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, an organization that campaigns against the acceptance of transgender children in schools under the guise of parental rights.

Arguing against affirmative action are professors, politicians and economists. There is also the American Center for Law and Justice, whose amicus brief compared the universities’ affirmative action policies to the racial classification practices of Nazi Germany.

An amicus brief was also filed by the Legal Insurrection Foundation, a far-right organization that rails against the teaching of supposed critical race theory in schools, a popular ideological stance rooted in pervasive misinformation. On its website, it boasts of its legal challenges to a librarian fellowship program, a business boot camp and a teacher loan forgiveness program.

It’s impossible to say whether the Supreme Court was swayed at all by these fringe groups or if they even read their briefs. There were nearly a hundred of them for this case alone, after all.

Instead, it’s likely the court’s conservative majority already knew what their decision would be going into the case.

“Given what the court has done with precedent in the areas of abortion and religious freedom law in the past two terms, it was pretty clear that the six-person conservative majority was going to overturn the existing precedent dealing with affirmative action in college admissions,” Tim Johnson, professor of political science and law at the University of Minnesota, told the Minnesota Daily after the decision.

There may not be a causal relationship between the opinions of extremist political groups and the decisions of the Supreme Court. But the correlation is undeniable. In the face of overwhelming credible and reputable support for affirmative action, the court sided with the ideology of fringe groups.

The logic of the court’s decision might be consistent with legal arguments made in the case, but the outcome caters only to the misinformation and fomented agitation that guide contemporary politics.

Regarding future cases, it may be in our best interest to bet hard against the evidence-based argument. At the very least, we might save ourselves a little heartbreak. For now, we share our frustrations with the court’s minority.

“Because the court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives, it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinion. “No one is fooled.”

When he was a student at the University of Minnesota, José Antonio Zayas Cabán had to walk across Interstate 94 every day to get to campus.

Now, as executive director of Our Streets Minneapolis, he is advocating for a bold solution.

“The Twin Cities Boulevard Project is a vision to propose the removal of Interstate 94 and replacing it with a multi-model boulevard,” Zayas Cabán said.

The interstate was constructed in the 1960s with funding from the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The highway reaches from Montana to Michigan, cutting through Minnesota in the process. In the Twin Cities, it runs directly between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.

This section of the highway was constructed by destroying homes and cutting through neighborhoods. Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood in St. Paul, was split in half by the new infrastructure. Seven hundred family homes and three hundred businesses were destroyed.

The effects of this construction are still felt today.

Today, the community organization ReConnect Rondo estimates that the construction of I-94 has contributed to an intergenerational wealth gap in the community of at least $157 million by 2018. This number represents the equity in homes that were razed for the construction of the highway and therefore could not be passed down to the descendants of Rondo’s homeowners.

Now nearly 60 years later, this stretch of I-94 that cuts through the Twin Cities is aging. The time has come to repair it, expand it or remove it.

In 2015, Charles Zelle, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), publicly acknowledged the harm that had been caused through the construction of the highway. He announced the Rethinking I-94 project, which intended to engage with communities in a 15-mile stretch of the highway between the Twin Cities in order to determine a way forward.

“This Rethinking I-94 project is a once-in-a-multiple-generation opportunity to reconsider this infrastructure,” said Alex Burns, advocacy and policy manager for Our Streets Minneapolis. “And for the first time since the freeway was built, now we have to figure out if we want to rebuild it, change it, remove it.”

Though it is yet to be publicly scheduled online, MnDOT will be holding a meeting on July 17 to share proposals for potential alterations to the highway, Burns said.

“For the first time, we’re going to see what MnDOT is proposing,” Burns said. “We think it’s likely that they propose a full spectrum of options from expanding the highway, making it bigger, to rebuilding it as it is, to reducing the size of it and then also removing it or replacing it with the boulevard.”

The Twin Cities Boulevard Vision comes from Our Streets Minneapolis.

The proposal calls for the highway trench to be filled in and raised to street level, where homes, businesses, parks and public transit and bicycling infrastructure could be built. Roads for vehicles would remain, but the plan prioritizes pedestrian movement and community connection.

The Twin Cities Boulevard Vision also includes recommendations for ensuring development and investment are carried out equitably and according to the needs and guidance of community members.

The bold proposal was developed through extensive research and community outreach. Our Streets Minneapolis has knocked on more than 30,000 doors in the neighborhoods lining the project’s boundaries.

“That’s 30,000 more than MnDOT has,” Burns said.

Though the Rethinking I-94 project is a long-term one, the needs of the almost 750,000 people living in the neighborhoods along the highway feel urgent.

Air pollution in the communities in the Rethinking I-94 project corridor is nearly three times worse than what the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency deems unhealthy. The air quality in the area has led to increased rates of asthma hospitalization and decreased life expectancy.

Living near a roadway can lead to an increased risk of cancer, cardiovascular conditions and respiratory diseases. Noise pollution from traffic is also associated with stress, anxiety and hearing loss.

“People who live in the community surrounding the highways suffer from the highest health impacts and some of the worst economic impacts,” Zayas Cabán said.

Many living in close proximity to the highway are low-income. More than one in four households within the Rethinking I-94 project corridor do not have access to a car.  In these neighborhoods, the average household income is 25% less than the average in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A critical message of the boulevard vision and its development is the need for alternate ideas for the future.

“They don’t have to live with the highway in the future,” Zayas Cabán said, referring to the residents along the interstate. “There are other ways to move forward.”

Though MnDOT will not share proposals until the meeting on July 17, there is another community proposal on the radar.

ReConnect Rondo, the community organization in the neighborhood bisected by the highway’s initial construction, proposes a land bridge.

The highway would remain intact, capped by a lid that reconnects the streets now divided by I-94. Cars would continue to travel through, effectively, a tunnel beneath a reunited Rondo neighborhood that boasts businesses, homes and renewed economic vitality.

Because the land bridge would leave the highway in place, its air and noise pollution in the area would continue.

“While some of the mitigation is addressed by developing the area on top of a land bridge, the health impacts would remain intact,” Zayas Cabán said. “If we’re really going to acknowledge these harms, we have to go just as far as other communities have enjoyed. The highway has to be removed and people should have the opportunity to decide what to do with the land. Leaving the highway in place and covering it up is asking people to live with less.”

Still, the group is open to other options. While advocating for the boulevard proposal, Burns stressed the priority is moving forward, together toward a collaborative solution.

“We’ve talked with other people that had creative ideas for keeping part of the trench in or having grade-separated transit below it. And those are the ideas that we want to see the community continue to bring to the table,” Burns said. “We welcome different ideas. We don’t feel like we have all the options.”

The scale of the boulevard vision goes beyond bold. For highway loyalists or devoted commuters, it could be seen as heretical. But the proposal’s high hopes are exactly what the situation demands. Righting both historical wrongs and present injustices demands investment and commitment to serious changes.

Until MnDOT’s proposals are released at the meeting on July 17, the boulevard remains our best chance at that much-needed transformation.

“Self-determination, decolonization really requires us to think deeply about removing the infrastructure and giving people the opportunity to imagine how to use that land themselves for themselves and to their own benefit,” Zayas Cabán said.

Spring arrived in Minneapolis and the Nice Ride bike share disappeared.

Over the winter, Blue Cross Blue Shield, the program’s primary corporate sponsor, pulled its funding, ending the longstanding bike share’s contract with the city.

In its place, a flurry of companies stepped in to ensure Minneapolis riders would have options available this summer, and here they are. Several different, brightly-colored fleets of branded e-bikes and e-scooters now litter the streets.

I finally tried out the new system on a sunny, breezy day at Lake Bde Maka Ska. I rented an e-bike for my partner but had to trot several blocks away to find a matching scooter so we could initiate a group ride from the same app. Less than a minute into our trip, we found that the e-bike my partner rode wasn’t working. The app said the bike was at least halfway charged, but the motor didn’t kick in when pedaling.

I walked down to a second scooter down the path. This one, despite a two-thirds-full battery, only operated at half the speed of the other.

On and on the ordeal went. We spent at least an hour searching for a pair of e-bikes or e-scooters to ride. We combined different apps, picked up random scooters left on the side of the path and paid a string of rental fees for rides we had to cancel after less than five minutes.

One brand’s e-bikes wouldn’t even let me rent them. Each of the four bikes I tried only offered me an error message in the app. None were available to be rented, though not for lack of charging.

The e-bikes and e-scooters had a host of problems. Their geolocation was imprecise, often claiming we were riding on the sidewalk when we weren’t. They were poorly maintained. They were all only partially charged.

And they were expensive.

“It’s really cost prohibitive,” said Alex Burns, advocacy and policy manager for Our Streets Minneapolis. “It is one thing if you want the bike share to serve tourists that are here for a long weekend and want to take a bike ride around the lakes. But if you want this to actually be a mobility option that serves the residents of Minneapolis, most people are not going to consistently pay that.”

Without docks, it was difficult to predict where one might be available to rent, especially if looking for more than one at a time. Most of these micro-mobility vehicles use a lock-to method, allowing riders to end their trips anywhere, so long as they can lock their e-scooter or e-bike to a rack.

In practice, this allows riders to lock an e-scooter to trash cans, benches, railings or even nothing at all. Several scooters I ran into were missing their locks altogether, wires poking out where the locks had been cut off.

There are a slew of other flaws, both in the individual bikes and scooters and in the broader system.

“One of the things that has been a long-standing problem is the lack of coordination between St. Paul and Minneapolis,” said Elissa Schufman, director of strategic partnerships for Move Minnesota.

This problem dates back to at least 2018 when St. Paul exchanged its Nice Ride contract for one with Lime. Only a few months later, that contract also fell through.

Schufman says the lack of a unified system across both cities is a barrier to people’s transportation.

“I know that folks between those jurisdictions have tried for a very long time to coordinate and we haven’t been successful at that,” Schufman said. “But people in St. Paul want to go to Minneapolis and people in Minneapolis want to go to St. Paul.”

It’s hard not to miss what Nice Ride offered: reliable docks, well-maintained bikes and an affordable price point with options for low-income residents through the Nice Ride for All program.

“I feel like the Nice Ride system, both for myself and for my friends, was not just a novelty, but a core part of our mobility options,” Burns said. “It was relatively affordable, it was reliable. It was evenly distributed, for the most part, across the city.”

I won’t say that I’ve sworn off using these new e-bikes and e-scooters. When they finally worked, they did work. But on a day-to-day basis, the point is moot — since the Nice Ride docks were removed, there are almost never any bikes or scooters available in my neighborhood.

“There’s a fundamental problem with running a bike share system for profit and by a private corporation or through private-public partnerships that rely on a for-profit model,” Burns said, noting that it’s poorer neighborhoods and already marginalized communities who suffer the most. “With the need to provide people with affordable mobility options and the need to dramatically drive down our transportation emissions, it’s a no-brainer to make this a major public investment by the city.”

As far as transportation in the Twin Cities beyond the bike share system goes, Schufman is hopeful.

“This is actually a very exciting time for bicycling in Minneapolis because of all of the outcomes of the Minnesota legislative session,” Schufman said. “As part of our dedicated advocacy initiatives, [Move Minnesota] secured dedicated metro area funding for walking, biking and transit. That means the metro area is going to be getting about $60 million we didn’t have before to invest in walking and biking infrastructure, which is very cool.”

Both Burns and Schufman also praised Minnesota’s adoption of an e-bike rebate program to incentivize purchases of electric bicycles. The program could offer a rebate of up to $1500 on the value of a new e-bike.

No one had answers for me about whether Nice Ride could come back, either in its former glory or in a newer, better incarnation. Some things are impossible to predict.

For now, it’s clear that riders in Minneapolis deserve a better system than this one. Once again, I have to ask: why do companies’ for-profit motivations determine whether I can get around? At what point will we realize this is a failed experiment, that corporations cannot make up for the stable, consistent investment that government funding can provide for public goods?

“Nice Ride proved for our region that there is demand for ongoing regional bike share,” Schufman said, referencing the pre-2018 days when the Nice Ride system covered both of the Twin Cities. “We really do need to figure out how we get grounded in the fact that biking, like other forms of mobility, is a public good and bike share is a public good. And nobody seems to have figured out exactly how to do that yet.”