James Sanna, Intern

Caravaggio is British director Derek Jarman’s 1986 foray into the violent and tumultuous life of Michelangelo di Caravaggio, the celebrated Renaissance painter and convicted criminal. Because Jarman’s tale of love, sex, and manipulation relies less on dialogue than on dramatic gestures, some viewers may find the movie hard to follow. However, once I accepted that Jarman was trying to challenge my hidebound concept of storytelling, I appreciated the film’s intense emotion. MORE »

Saturday is School Choice Day in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you’re the parent of a student, you have the opportunity to send your child to either the public school in your neighborhood or a magnet school. You also have the opportunity to send your child to a charter or a private school. Both school districts, and metro-area charter schools, are planning one-stop information fairs where, they say, you can find out all you need to know about schools where you might want to send your child. MORE »

How do you market an investment that costs almost twice as much as the losses it’s designed to offset? One way is to wait for someone else to fund it. MORE »

Two opportunities to speak out on budgets, local and state:

The Minnesota Coalition for a People’s Bailout and the Welfare Rights Committee are organizing a campaign to demand a “People’s Bailout” of increased and extended aid to the poor, protection of public education funding, and no layoffs. The campaign kicks off with a protest at the state capitol on Tuesday, January 6 at noon, during the opening session of the state legislature. MORE »

The high schoolers in Claire Hypolite’s chemistry class are clustered in little knots of desks, heads down and pencils flying as they grapple with packets of homework problems. They toss solutions and gossip back and forth in English, Somali, and Hmong while they work. Watching this entirely generic classroom scene, it’s hard to believe more than 80% of these kids were failing this class only a few months ago. MORE »