In the mid-1990s, when his band wasn’t touring, Jeff Nelson would work at local coffee shops. He was, he admits, “just OK” at making coffee, but quickly found a knack for designing the shop’s menu chalkboards.

At first, he just considered the task to be a creative bright spot in an otherwise uninspiring day job. But then he received a call from another cafe wanting him to do their chalkboards. And then another.

“It was kind of like Instagram before there was Instagram, because your portfolio was there for anyone with a low-grade caffeine addiction,” he said. “And word has it that lots of people in food service like coffee.”

At some point in the early 2000s, he said, the scales tipped: The requests he was getting for menu board gigs were keeping him just as busy as the coffee shop job. The decision of which path to pursue “was a no-brainer,” he said.

Now, under the moniker “Jephemera,” Nelson works full-time from a studio in the Lowertown Underground Artists cooperative, a basement space on Prince Street founded by artists like Nelson who formerly had studios in the Jax Building before it was converted to apartments.

Nelson’s handiwork regularly announces what’s new at places like Cooks of Crocus Hill, Subtext Books and The French Hen Cafe. He drew the wall of flavor signs for Grand Ole Creamery’s outpost inside what’s now known as Grand Casino Arena, and this year, he designed signage for the St. Paul Farmers Market’s new indoor space.

His work shows up in other formats, too, from magazine covers to beer cans to building walls, including the floral mural he painted behind Grand Avenue art shop Wet Paint in 2019. For the past couple years, he has created map guides for theater company Wonderlust Productions’ interactive Hidden Herald audio storytelling project.

Speaking of maps: When Nelson isn’t working on client projects, he creates extraordinarily detailed maps — but not of places that exist in real life. They’re mostly not even places at all: One, “The Glorious Island of Cheese,” imagines every ‘country’ on a fictional island as a variety of cheese with ‘cities’ marked as suggested pairings. Other maps break down the famed 23 flavors in Dr. Pepper soda and visually organize favorite albums from artists like Weezer, They Might Be Giants and Tom Waits.

In college, he said, he’d format his class notes as maps.

“It’s a way of cataloguing taxonomical information in a visual kind of way,” he said. “Everything’s kind of a taxonomy when you get down to it. You have a big body of knowledge and you drill it down to the smaller parts.”

Nelson, in his classic cheekily self-deprecating way, denies he’s an artist. No, he says: He’s an illustrator. Or maybe, in a way, a translator.

“I really only have, like, three really good original ideas a year,” he joked. “I really love working with other people who have something they need to get out there in a visual way. It’s a ton of fun to work with people who have something they care a lot about and to be able to put that into a visual medium.”

But, as the name “Jephemera” implies, the work he creates for businesses around town is ephemeral. It’s meant to be temporary. When it’s time to roll out new specials, Nelson’s work disappears beneath a fresh coat of black paint.

“It’s really freeing to work in a medium that’s not meant to be forever,” he said. “It’s fun to be part of that madness. If people want to change things up completely, we change it up completely. People are much more willing to play around when it’s a medium like a chalkboard.”

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When Minnesota launches its taxpayer-funded paid family and medical leave program on Jan. 1, it will be the 13th state to offer such benefits — and one of only a few that has built its system from the ground up in the past decade.

Greg Norfleet, the chief architect of the program at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, has said he is confident that the new benefits system — one of the most significant new benefit programs in state history — will work as intended on “day one,” though ambitious new state systems have encountered problems as they’ve launched in the past.

Minnesota’s vehicle licensing and title system, MNLARS, was plagued by software issues when it started in 2018. MNsure, the state’s health insurance marketplace, had significant delays due to software issues when it opened for applications in 2013.

Minnesota’s new system appears on track to start on time, and it’s already accepting early applications for parental bonding leave. Though, it’s yet to be seen if claim projections will align with costs.

Other states have had successful paid leave launches, although some have had problems in recent years.

For instance, Maryland passed paid leave in 2022. Its 2025 launch date was delayed two years to 2027 due to issues with costs and organization. Taxes would start in 2027, and payments would be available beginning in 2028 under the current plan.

Washington program’s financial woes

Washington state’s paid leave program has been operating since 2020, but has been plagued by staffing shortages, benefit payment delays and financial troubles.

In September, a state actuarial report found the program could face a $346 million deficit by 2029 and a nearly $1 billion deficit by 2030 under the current tax rate limits.

That comes after the state transferred $200 million to the paid leave fund in 2023 when the account for the program risked running out of money. The extra cash stabilized things and allowed the state to lower the tax to fund it, but didn’t resolve long-term issues.

Currently, the tax rate for Washington’s program is 0.92%. It’ll increase to 1.13% at the start of next year, and is expected to grow until it reaches a maximum of 1.2% in 2027. Once it reaches that projected ceiling, the program will struggle to remain solvent without extra state funding as claims will outpace premiums, according to the report.

Minnesota’s program

Minnesota’s paid leave program will be funded by a new 0.88% payroll tax on most employers. It will be split between employers and employees.

Employers can choose to cover the entire cost of the benefit, but most can charge employees up to about half the amount: 0.44%.

Asked if Minnesota’s program might face a similar fate to Washington’s, Norfleet said Minnesota has the advantage of being the 13th to launch the benefit.

“We know a lot more about the demand for these types of programs than we did even five years ago,” said Norfleet, who developed a similar program for Massachusetts, the eighth state to do so. “We’re starting higher than some other states have started, which I think does give us more financial stability over the longer term.”

Claims outpaced premiums

When Washington started collecting taxes in 2019, a year ahead of its program launch, the premium rate was at 0.4%. That gave the state around $467 million to fund the program at the beginning. But paid leave proved popular and claims quickly outpaced taxpayer premiums.

Around 113,000 people claimed the Washington paid leave benefit in 2020, costing the state around $613 million. By 2023, the number of claims grew to more than 210,000, and the cost doubled to nearly $1.5 billion.

After the Washington Legislature provided the program additional funds, payments and premiums continued to grow. In the 2025 fiscal year, 240,000 claimed the benefit, costing the state around $2 billion — $300 million more than the previous year.

Growth is stabilizing in the program, according to the state’s Department of Employment Security, but deficits still loom. Washington had a population of 7.7 million in 2020 and 8.1 million in 2025. Minnesota, meanwhile, has a population of 5.8 million, up from 5.7 million in 2020.

Washington’s program has a staff of 318 as of 2025, according to a recent legislative report. Meanwhile, Minnesota hired around 300 earlier this year and plans to have a staff of around 400 new state employees for its program.

Why officials say Minnesota’s program will be different

Minnesota’s paid leave launch is different from Washington’s in a few ways. First, there was no payroll tax in the year before the 2026 launch. Instead, the program is seeded by $668 million from the historic $17.5 billion state budget surplus in 2023.

Secondly, the standard premium rate for Minnesota’s program is more than twice what Washington’s was in its earliest years. The starting rate in Minnesota will be a 0.88% payroll tax shared between employers and employees.

Minnesota officials estimate that nearly 132,000 people will apply for the benefit in the first year, and that the state will collect around $1.6 billion to fund it.

The initial estimated tax rate grew from the earlier projection of 0.7% when the Legislature passed the program in 2023. Last year, the House passed a bill boosting collections by about $312 million after a new actuarial analysis found 0.88% would be the most effective initial rate to fund paid leave.

The maximum rate allowed under current law will be 1.1% — down from the original 1.2% when paid leave was first passed in 2023. House Republicans were able to reduce the overall maximum rate by 0.1% as part of a budget deal with the DFL-controlled Senate and Gov. Tim Walz earlier this year.

Groups like the National Federation of Independent Business warned of growing premiums before the program was enacted two years ago.

An early test

One component of Minnesota’s paid leave program is already operating in a sort of “beta” test phase. DEED is currently taking applications for parental bonding leave with certain employers. That early benefit access could expand to a broader group in the coming weeks, according to state officials.

Part of the reason for this is to test a small part of the system before it goes live, but also to help alleviate a large number of parents applying for birth-related benefits at the beginning of the first year, something Norfleet said is referred to as the “baby bump” in paid leave circles.

That’s because if a parent had a child in 2025, they are eligible for benefits in 2026 up until the child’s first birthday. With early access to applications, Norfleet said he hopes DEED can process around 5,000 leave applications before the rest of the program goes live on Jan. 1.

Past the paid leave pilot testing, DEED has held more than 300 public engagement sessions with employers across the state to help them prepare.

Minnesota Chamber’s concerns

The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce has pointed to issues other states, such as Washington, have faced that may be warning signs for Minnesota’s program.

Lauryn Schothorst, who handles workplace issues for the group, said they’ve discussed problems like program rollout and call center staffing with the state.

“DEED is very well aware of our concerns based on experiences in other states like Oregon and Washington,” Schothorst said in a statement. “DEED has said loud and clear that they are also tracking these cautionary tales and have been preemptively working to prevent them. We’ll have to see.”

Their primary concern, however, is the effect new rules and regulations will have on businesses across the state. Schothorst said some of the biggest troubles for businesses will be revising benefits packages and employees on extended leave during workforce shortages.

How it works

Starting in 2026, most Minnesota employers will be required to offer employees 12 weeks of family leave and 12 weeks of medical leave. Annual time off will be capped at 20 weeks.

Events like having a child, a serious illness or caring for a sick family member are eligible for coverage. Supporting a family member called to active duty in the military, responding to personal safety issues and bonding with a child also qualify.

The amount of money workers will qualify for under paid leave will depend on their wages.

Someone who earns less than 50% of the state’s average weekly wage, according to the state Labor Department, would get 90% of their normal pay.

A worker earning more than 50% of the state’s average weekly wage would get 66%. Those earning double the weekly average pay would receive 55% of their regular wage.

A person earning Minnesota’s annual average salary of $71,300 would get $1,075.72 a week in payments from the leave program. DEED has calculators that provide estimates of premiums and weekly payments on its website.

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St. Paul PD’s first AI policy: How is it being used and what’s next?

Artificial intelligence is upon us, and just as other historical breakthrough technologies have proved, it is not a matter of how it will accommodate us but how we must accommodate it.

Education, finance, law, transportation and energy are all sectors that are being dramatically transformed by AI, and medicine will be no exception. What will the AI automation of health care mean for patients?

With more diagnostic power available to patients than ever before, they will have more agency than they could have imagined. The AI transformation of medicine likely will sharpen diagnoses, streamline treatments and improve patient outcomes. Convenience will be the coin of the realm; many doctors’ appointments and emergency room visits will become unnecessary. The long era of sitting quietly while the doctor pronounces what ails us and what to do about it is ending.

Unfortunately, the future may not be as promising for physicians. The machines will soon out-doctor the doctors: AI will diagnose better and more quickly, and robotics will perform procedures more efficiently (the next generation of robotic surgery will need minimal human supervision). Physicians, especially the less experienced, are likely to overrely on machine AI in the pursuit of efficiency and speed. Doctors could become drone workers to the queen bee of AI. If that happens, what point is there in training new physicians? It is a notoriously cost-inefficient process.

But it doesn’t mean physicians can be completely eliminated, if for no other reason than AI “hallucinations” — the misleading results that machine learning occasionally generates. The diagnosis or treatment that AI suggests could be completely wrong, and the machine will not realize its error. Amr Awadallah, chief executive of an AI startup, told The New York Times, “Despite our best efforts, (AI systems) will always hallucinate. That will never go away.” Infallible machines turn out to be fallible. So there will have to be a physician somewhere in the equation to monitor the process.

But the biggest risk of AI in medicine will be cybersecurity. Of course, you will be assured that your information is secure. But it won’t be, because there is no such thing as total security. Electronic medical records were once touted as secure, but whole hospital systems have been taken down and held for ransom by malefactors. Given the national interconnection of medical databases, an AI agent could in theory take down the medical systems of the entire country.

Between hallucinations and hacking, there will have to be a role for physicians. The brilliant family physician and medical blogger Dr. Buzz Hollander once described the importance of the physician in the era of AI, “The internet has been a godsend for medicine; it has democratized medical knowledge away from the medical center libraries and academic journals and put it in everyone’s hands, at a faster pace than ever before. However, there is no device capable of reasoning through complex medical problems less prone to hacking, malware and corruption than the brain of a physician. No large scale attacks can be made on this form of intelligence.”

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The government, insurers, the health care industry, Big Science and Big Pharma will welcome, and eventually demand, that medicine be turned over to AI. The speed, efficiency and, of course, the profits will be too hard to pass up, risks be damned. Everyone in charge of health care will come to the same conclusion — the tremendous upside of having AI in charge of health care is worth the foreseeable risks. But, of course, not all risks are foreseeable, and those that are will be borne primarily by patients.

The AI revolution will be of immense benefit, but at the same time, it also will demand that all of us — patients and physicians — be aware of its shortcomings and potential pitfalls. Patients are the nexus between responsible health care and a dangerous technologic tsunami. They must make their desires known, the sooner the better, especially if they want the human contact that physicians, nurses and therapists provide. High tech should be tempered with high touch.

The author Avi Jorisch, who wrote a treatise on technology, “Thou Shalt Innovate,” observed, “Like every true revolution, it will begin within us — with the ancient, ever-new realization that technology is a mirror. What it reflects depends entirely on who we choose to be.”

Dr. Cory Franklin is a retired intensive care physician and the author of“The COVID Diaries 2020-2024: Anatomy of a Contagion as It Happened.” He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

Today is Sunday, Nov. 23, the 327th day of 2025. There are 38 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Nov. 23,2005, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected president of Liberia, becoming Africa’s first democratically elected female head of state. She guided her nation through recovery after its exit from a decade-long civil war.

Also on this date:

In 1863, thousands of Union soldiers under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant marched out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and battled Confederate forces through Nov. 25, forcing their retreat into Georgia in a significant blow to the South in the American Civil War.

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In 1939, early in World War II, the British armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi was on patrol when it was shelled and sunk in an engagement with two German warships southeast of Iceland, leaving more than 200 dead aboard the Rawalpindi and only a few dozen survivors.

In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed Nov. 25 a day of national mourning following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In 1971, the People’s Republic of China was seated in the United Nations Security Council.

In 1980, an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people were killed by a series of earthquakes that devastated southern Italy.

In 1984, Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie completed one of the most famous passes in college football history, connecting with Gerald Phelan for a 48-yard touchdown with no time left on the clock as Boston College defeated the Miami Hurricanes 47-45.

In 1996, a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767 ran out of fuel and crashed into the Indian Ocean near the Comoro Islands, killing 125 of the 175 people on board, including all three hijackers.

In 2006, former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko (leet-vee-NYEN’-koh) died in London from radiation poisoning after making a deathbed statement blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In 2008, the U.S. government unveiled a bold plan to rescue Citigroup, injecting a fresh $20 billion into the troubled firm as well as guaranteeing hundreds of billions of dollars in risky assets.

In 2011, Yemen’s authoritarian President Ali Abdullah Saleh (AH’-lee ahb-DUH’-luh sah-LEH’) agreed to step down amid a fierce uprising to oust him after 33 years in power. (After formally ceding power in February 2012, he was killed in 2017 by Houthi rebels who were once his allies.)

In 2024, Israeli airstrikes in central Beirut killed at least 20 people and wounded dozens more, the latest strikes in renewed fighting between Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah militants. (A U.S.-brokered cease-fire would be reached on Nov. 27, with sporadic violations of that truce for months afterward.)

Today’s Birthdays:

Actor Franco Nero (“Django”) is 84.
Singer Bruce Hornsby is 71.
TV journalist Robin Roberts (“Good Morning America”) is 65.
Composer Nicolas Bacri is 64.
Poet and author Jennifer Michael Hecht is 60.
Olympic gold medal sprinter Asafa Powell is 43.
Ice hockey player Nicklas Bäckström is 38.
Singer-actor Miley Cyrus is 33.