FRANK BURES: Minnesotan discusses “Pushing the River,” his collection of real-life stories about joys and dangers of canoeing, part of Minnesota History Center’s North Star Voices series. Free. 2 p.m. Saturday, Minnesota History Center, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul.

TASHA CORYELL: Hosts the launch of her new thriller “Matchmaking for Psychopaths,” in which matchmaker Lexie discovers at her 30th birthday party that her best friend and her fiance are in love. Then Lexie gets involved with two of her clients, both of whom are psychopaths. When Lexie starts receiving strange and bloody packages, she has to figure out who is trying to orchestrate her downfall and whether this is relevant to her estranged parents and their criminal history. In conversation with award-winning author Kathleen West. Coryell, who lives in St. Paul, is the author of “Love Letters to a Serial Killer,” which got rave reviews. Free. 7 p.m. Tuesday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls

What else is going on

It isn’t too early to mark your calendars for Oct. 12, when Rick Atkinson, Jade Chang, Jason Mott and Nita Prose will be guest readers at Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s annual Opus & Olives benefit dinner at St. Paul RiverCentre.

Prize-winning historian Atkinson is author of “The Fate of The Day,” which covers the middle years of the American Revolution. Chang’s debut novel, “What a Time to Be Alive,” is about a broke, unemployed woman in California who becomes a self-help guru. In Mott’s novel “People Like Us,” two Black writers try to find peace in a world riven by gun violence. Prose, bestselling author of “The Maid,” introduces “The Maid’s Secret,” in which Molly Gray, special-events manager at a hotel, discovers during a TV appraisal show that she has a priceless treasure that vanishes from the hotel in a sensational heist. Look for more about these authors and their books closer to the event. You can find ticket information at thefriends.org/opus.

What’s a Silent Book Club? It’s the newest expansion of Next Chapter Booksellers’ monthly book club offerings. “Unlike our other clubs, this one will not be structured around a shared read or conversation,” the  store announced online. “Every second Thursday of the month, from 5 to 6 p.m., we’ll be staying open late, putting on soft music, and inviting (everyone) to read with us in the bookstore. Each meeting will end with the chance for attendees to share a little about what they’re reading with the group and browse the shelves.” Space is limited so readers are advised to bring their own cushions, beanbags, blankets. The store is at 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul, where the next Silent Book Club meeting will be Aug.14.

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There are few things most American politicians seem to agree upon, but banning mobile phones in classrooms seems to be one of them. Based on the experiences of some schools that have required students to prioritize learning over TikTok scrolling, there’s also a welcome side benefit: less conflict and more “hellos.”

When school starts this fall, students in most U.S. states and D.C. will be required by law to turn over or turn off their smartphones during all or most of the school day, according to an Education Week tally.

Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Utah have statewide bans. Another 24 states have adopted rules or laws that require restrictions on mobile phones but leave it up to school districts to decide whether to ban them or not. Two states offer districts incentives to restrict phones. Another seven recommend local districts enact their own restrictions.

The methods and policy details vary widely between states, but the reasons for silencing phones are pretty universal. A growing body of research has found that the more time children and their developing brains spend on smartphones, the greater the risk of negative mental health outcomes — from depression, to cyberbullying, to an inability to focus and learn.

Social media is intentionally designed “to expose users to an endless stream of content” which makes it addictive, said Carol Vidal, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. That’s especially risky for children and teens, she said, “because their brains are still developing, and they have less control over their impulses.”

The laws are spurred in part by the research discussed in the 2024 book by Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation.” The New York University professor elevated this theory after reviewing dozens of recent studies linking social media and smartphone use by kids and teens to the explosive increase in rates of anxiety among young people, including emergency room visits for self-harm.

The idea of severing the phone from the classroom not only has legislators and governors in red and blue states giving it near-unanimous support, a 2024 survey by Pew Research found that 68% of US adults support a ban on smartphone use among middle- and high-school students during class.

But a ban in theory is not the same as putting it into practice, especially for the large numbers of parents worried about being unable to contact their kids during the school day.

That’s something Principal Inge Esping noticed when she barred phones from classrooms at McPherson Middle School in Kansas, an hour north of Wichita. In 2022, when Esping started as the school’s principal, she noticed that the spike in online bullying among students was happening during the school day.

“Middle schoolers are a little notorious for when they’re trying to make fun of someone,” she told me. “They’ll take a picture of the person that they’re making fun of and share that via social media — especially during lunchtime.’’

Absences and suspensions were rising, with too many students staying home either because they feared confronting their bullies or because they were bullying others. She and her staff decided to impose a rule in the 2022–23 school year requiring students to turn off their phones and store them in their lockers from the first bell to the last.

With few exceptions, children who had grown up with mobile phones “simply accepted it,” Esping said. It was their parents who protested.

“I don’t think we really realized how much parents were reaching out to their students during the school day,” Esping recalled. Many parents feared being unable to communicate with their children during school hours, particularly in an era of school shootings. Others didn’t trust the school to notify them when their child needed them, she said.

She and her colleagues then embarked on an ambitious plan to persuade parents of the value of keeping phones out of reach during school hours. She organized back-to-school events to increase communication, engaged more parents in volunteer and visiting opportunities, and refined the school’s alert system that notifies families when there’s an emergency.

As parents grew to accept the new system, the results for their children were dramatic. In the first year, the school saw a 5% increase in their state assessment scores in both reading and math. School suspensions dropped 70% by Christmas and have remained at half the rate they were before the ban. And absenteeism went down from 39% to 11% — because taking phones away prevented many of the harmful social media comments that kept bullied kids from coming to school.

Other school districts with mobile phone restrictions reported similar results in student discipline. A year after the Orange County School District in Florida implemented its phone ban in 2023, fighting went down 31% and “serious misconduct” issues decreased by 21%, Superintendent Maria Vazquez told Florida lawmakers in January.

Results like that are, in part, what have spurred elected officials to act.

“Arkansas’ phone-free schools’ program isn’t about taking anything away,” declared Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders when she signed Arkansas’ mobile phone ban earlier this year. “It’s about giving kids the freedom to learn without distractions.”

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The idea is getting some traction in Washington, too. One of the final acts of the Biden administration’s Department of Education was to issue a recommendation that all states and districts adopt measures to manage smartphone use in schools.

In February, Sens. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, and Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, introduced legislation to study the effects of mobile phone use in schools. Recently, Democratic Sen. Elise Slotkin of Michigan called for a ban on “social media and cell phones in every K-12 classroom in America.” She blamed technology for interfering in “problem-solving skills that will be valuable in the future economy.”

But for teachers, the most tangible difference has been the “huge vibe change,” said Esping, who was named Kansas Middle School Principal of the Year in April. Teachers reported that students were now more engaged — in the classroom and school corridors.

“The year before the phone ban, you’d say ‘hello’ to a student and they would ignore you and move on because they’re so tied to their cell phone,” Esping told me. But after the ban, “kids were looking up and talking to one another,” especially in the lunchroom and as students transitioned between classes. “When you’d say, ‘good morning’ to them, they’d say ‘good morning’ back.”

As always, students may be teaching the rest of the nation something here. Maybe more smartphone bans are exactly what we need.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

Edward Lotterman

Starting his first day in office, Donald Trump initiated a blizzard of tariff announcements. New tariffs would hit imports from Columbia, Canada, Mexico and China. Americans would pay a 10% tax on imports from any nation. Additions, revisions, delays and special punitive actions have been added on a near daily basis. (For a comprehensive list through May 25, see “A timeline of Trump’s tariff actions so far” at pbs.org.)

April 2 was “Liberation Day,” with tariff rates announced on imports from nearly 90 nations following a formula that was nonsensical to economists. But these were soon paused for 90 days. We were told that hundreds of deals were in the making. Other nations said there were nearly none. The deadline was moved to July 9. No, now the end of August. Threats, revisions, new punitive measures and delays continue to fill the news. Treasury and Commerce secretaries backpedal, bob and weave to keep up.

At the end of April in an interview with the editor of the Atlantic, our president eclipsed French King Louis XIV’s “L’État, c’est moi,” or “I am the state,” with the flat declaration that “I run the country — and the world.” His actions bring that attitude to life.

They have continued in spades. On news of the 17th summit of BRICS nations in Rio de Janeiro, Trump threatened that U.S. importers would have to pay an additional 10% on goods from any nations he’s “aligning” with the largely symbolic and powerless group.  Days later, he decreed that U.S. families or businesses would have to pay an additional 50% tax on coffee, orange juice, steel, architectural tile and stone or other products from Brazil. Why? Because Jair Bolsonaro, an authoritarian-leaning former president of that country, is charged with organizing a tropical version of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on our capitol.

Friends, this is madness, economic as well as political. To use Nixon adviser Daniel Moynihan’s famous phase, we have “dumbed deviancy down” in facing an increasingly out-of-control president. The Big Beautiful Bill is supposed to revitalize our economy, but the president who asked for it is destroying that economy with his erratic, uninformed and ill-judged dictatorial outbursts.

Step back and review fundamentals in economics:

— Information has economic value to households, businesses and government.

— Ample, correct information boosts economic efficiency at all levels. Scanty or false information decreases it.

— Risk and uncertainty sap the usefulness of information even if correct when generated. The greater the levels of uncertainty, the harder it is for any decision-maker, whether individual, business or government, to use resources productively.

— Chaos — uncertainty raised to dominance — destroys value. Anything or anyone creating chaos reduces output of needed goods and services. They make society poorer, not richer. British historian Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Well, chaos cripples the creation of value. Absolute chaos destroys it all.

Step back to the early days of our country. The Declaration of Independence aimed to eliminate arbitrary actions by a king. The Constitution separated and limited powers of each branch. The provision that any changes in taxes must not only come from Congress but also must originate in the House protected families and businesses from hasty and unwise alterations of policy.

The establishment of the civil service system in 1881 reduced corruption and sudden zags in policy. The Federal Reserve reduced economic instability. Institutions created after the financial crisis starting in 1929 fostered transparency and made investments in new business ventures less risky. The 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act set us on a 60-year crusade to put international trade under transparent and enforceable rules.

Benefits were huge. The “most-favored-nation” principle slashed administrative costs for importers. No longer did they have to employ platoons of clerks to comb tariff schedules to find what tax they would have to pay on coffee from Kenya versus Brazil or Costa Rica or on tin from Malaysia rather than Bolivia. Different countries still had differing taxes on imports. These could be changed, but importers in any nation still could choose where to buy based on quality and cost rather than differing tariff rates charged by their own country.

Moreover, the fact that many nations “bound” their tariffs — contracting to not change them without prior negotiations with other countries — meant that an importer, whether Target Corp. or Angela’s Exotic Teas, could establish on-going business relationships with good suppliers with no danger that their costs suddenly be uprooted by some whim in the Oval Office.

Exporters, like U.S. farmers, could plan purchases of seed and fertilizer to plant crops secure in the knowledge that a presidential whim would not suddenly torpedo either input or product prices. Grain traders like Cargill or CHS could build loading and unloading terminals knowing that the rules of the game would be constant long enough to recoup these tens of millions in long-term investments. And a family-owned contractor bidding on five county road bridges in Cottonwood County would know the price of rebar would not suddenly jump between submission of a bid and having crews on site.

Yet that now is all being torn up and tossed aside.

The president claims his trade offensives will bring manufacturing back to our nation. But it can take five or seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new automobile plant. If this president can impose tariffs, the next one might abolish them. If Trump could destroy 70 years of integrating U.S. and Canadian auto industries, what whim might his successor decree?

Thinking of investing millions to manufacture brass valves here rather than in China? What if radio news driving home tells you of a new a 50% tax on imported copper plus God knows what on zinc?

It is too late for retailers to change orders for holiday season merchandise. But what if an additional 20% U.S. tariff is imposed when their containers are being loaded on ships in Dalian, China, or Haiphong, Vietnam?  And should your farm cooperative-owned soybean plant contract today to buy beans at $9.89 next July if sudden retaliation by an angry China drops the market price to $7.09 by then? You know prices of your products, soy oil and soybean meal, will fall in tandem.

Every day, some presidential impulse generates more uncertainty. Every day, Congress and the media stand by in complaisant silence that tells the rest of the world we U.S. citizens cannot be trusted to elect prudent leaders. We are poisoning our own economy with a speed and severity not seen in any democracy in a century.

St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

A novel about three teens and a Norse woman’s journey, plus memoirs about political activism in the Black community, and life in all its big and small experiences, are being launched by Minnesota authors this week.

(Courtesy of Soho Press)

“Ashes to Ashes”: by Thomas Maltman (Soho Press, $29)

Even if the stone lies, carved in a previous century by an enterprising shyster, what is true is that winter calls the stones from under the earth, and some of them rise bearing a strange magic. — from “Ashes to Ashes”

Thomas Maltman (Courtesy of the author)

Thomas Maltman blends contemporary teen life with a Norse saga in this inventive novel, one of the best of this literary season.

Set in a small Minnesota prairie town, it begins after Ash Wednesday services when the ashes on a congregations’ foreheads do not wash off. Is this a curse or a blessing?

Among them is Basil, a “gentle giant” who’s thought to be mentally slow, prodded by a coach who painfully pinches him to make him angry enough to hurt another player. Basil’s father was injured when he rescued Basil from being “drowned” in a corn bin, and the teen’s mother has been in a mental facility for years. Basil is not mentally impaired, and he wants to change, to be taken seriously and not hurt people. So he decides to fast and pray but keeps his vow secret from his best friends Lukas and Morgan. The trio call themselves “a gay, a goth, and a giant.” Luke is the gay one, but he’s afraid to come out in such a small town, and goth Morgan is a writer.

When a windstorm blows over a big tree, the teens discover under the roots the remains of an explorer whom they call The Lady in the Hill. And this is where the magic grows strong as they read from pages of a diary that describe her journey into inland North America in the 14th century. Her chapters are written in a cadence that begs to be read out loud:

“I knew the sea even before I was born, adrift

within my mother’s womb waters,

hearing the dull drum-thumping of her heart

washing over me in waves…”

Maltman drew inspiration from the real-life Kensington Runestone in a museum in Alexandria. The inscription (which he quotes on the first page) tells of “eight goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the West” in the 14th century. The runestone, discovered  in 1898 in a Swedish farmer’s field, is controversial — whether it is a hoax is still debated.

The three teens decide to honor The Lady by staging a historical pageant just before the COVID lockdown, from the early centuries to contemporary times, subtly working Luke’s sexual preference into the script.

Both stories — contemporary and Norse — end tenderly. “Ashes to Ashes” has everything you want in a novel — interesting plot(s), family problems, an old saga involving magical dreams of humans in fish form.

Maltman has an MFA from Minnesota State University at Mankato and teaches at Normandale Community College in Bloomington. His previous novels are “The Night Birds,” about the 1862 Dakota Conflict; “The Land,” which explores a white supremacist enclave deep in the Minnesota North Woods; and “Little Wolves,” in which a teen shoots the town’s sheriff. There is a hint of magic in some of these plots, but nothing like the aura that surrounds “Ashes to Ashes.”

Maltman will launch his novel with a conversation with award-winning Minnesota author William Kent Krueger at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Bryant Lake Bowl and Theater, 810 W. Lake St., Mpls., presented by Valley Bookseller of Stillwater and Literature Lover’s Night Out. Music by Nate Boots. $10. Information at bryantlakebowl.com/theater/ashes-to-ashes.

(Courtesy of the University of Nebraska Press)

“At the Corner of Past and Present”: by Pamela Carter Joern (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, $17.95)

These days I am overly tender about the clumsiness of our efforts to get by. I cry over Hallmark card commercials. The wafting of a memory, the rustle of a rabbit through a snowbank, the unfolding of a rose. I am scraped raw by precious things on the brink of being lost. — from “At the Corner of Past and Present”

Pamela Carter Joern (Courtesy of the author)

In this wide-ranging memoir in essay form, the author writes a love letter to her native Nebraska, where she worked on the farm. She explores her experiences raising children, surviving cancer and becoming a writer.

Author of four novels and six plays that have been produced in the Twin Cities, Joern shares on her publisher’s blog that the personal essays in this book “are chock-full of disparate pieces brought together: my father’s life and the experiments of Isaac Newton; the Shaker colonies and butchering chickens; Salvador Dali and considerations of time to a cancer patient; even the ancient art of alchemy and writing processes… I do like shining an observation from one aspect of life on something seemingly unrelated to see what I might learn.”

Joern, who has taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, will discuss her book with Minnesota author Sheila O’Connor at 7 p.m. Thursday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

(Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society Press)

“Rewind: Lessons from Fifty Years of Activism”: by T Williams with David Lawrence Grant (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $24.95)

We also understood something else that our white allies did not: Even if all racially prejudiced Americans lost that prejudice overnight, there was still a long road ahead in targeting and dismantling the systems of institutional racism that had long been oppressing Black access to capital, decent housing, equitable employment opportunities, a quality education, and equality under the law. — from “Rewind”

Theatrice (“T”) Willliams and his family moved to Minneapolis in 1965. After military service and earning a master’s degree in social work, Williams became a leader in the Minneapolis Black community beginning in 1975 when he was named executive director of the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center, a Minneapolis institution.

Williams’ new memoir is a mini-history of the successes and struggles he participated in through the murder of George Floyd and beyond.

One of his biggest accomplishments was helping form the Minneapolis Urban Coalition after the Plymouth Avenue violence in 1967. The coalition was a rare political collaboration among community, corporate and political leaders to address issues of race and poverty. After the 1971 rebellion at Attica prison in New York, Minnesota Gov. Wendell Anderson appointed him the first corrections ombudsman in the country. Williams was also a teacher and school board member, always working for his community’s betterment.  Now he is an independent consultant specializing in questions of social and distributive justice with emphasis on issues affecting minority populations.

Williams will discuss his book with co-author David Lawrence Grant at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

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