Napoleon LaDuke was my great uncle. I’ve always had a liking for that name. He was a brown man from the Anishinaabe in Minnesota’s Northwoods who served in the Army in World War I and came back “shell ...

“Metro Surge,” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation unleashed on Minnesotans in early December, is the largest single deployment of immigration agents in the history of the country. In ...

“I look at the calendar, I can see it is December 30, 2025, but it feels like December 30, 1933, in Germany.” This first year of the Trump administration has seen a threefold rise in clients reaching ...

This story was published with permission from The Rural Route Review. Recent headlines have been filled with renewed talk from the Trump administration about taking over Greenland, perhaps seizing it ...

When I started high school in rural upstate New York in 2006, most of the adults I knew worked in farming, construction or hospitality. A handful of classmates in my grade had parents who worked as ...

A version of this story first appeared in The Iowa Mercury. Ten years ago, the Sierra Club published cute illustrations with an article about how robots were picking lettuce in vertical farms. The ...

I suppose everyone who has ever lived into their 90s has found the world they still inhabit confusing and at times unknowable. An ancestral aunt of mine, Mary Barker, was born in Newbury, England, in ...

Editors Note: As we enter 2026, Barn Raiser marks the New Year by republishing “Finding Common Ground at a Montana Barn Raising,” an excerpt from Daniel Kemmis’s 1992 Community and the Politics of ...

While the media is full of details about how the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores was organized, one should focus on how strange this act is: Venezuela is now de facto occupied by ...

In Haitian Kreyòl, there’s a saying: Lè w pa gen manman, ou tete grann—“If you can’t get breast milk from mom, you get it from grandma.” Darline, a Haitian immigrant on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, ...