By THOMAS ADAMSON

PARIS (AP) — He is known as the French Banksy — or simply JR. Now the artist popular across France for large-scale projects, from photographs to graffiti and street art, wants Parisians to do something unusual on the city’s arguably most famous bridge: stop.

In June, he plans to transform the bustling Pont Neuf that dates back to the 17th century into a walk-through “cave” — a temporary, monumental public artwork that will cover the stone arches with a rocky illusion and invite visitors to cross the River Seine through a tunnel, complete with sound and digitally augmented reality.

He says it’s possibly the “largest immersive installation ever made” and — one that will be accessible around the clock and offer a “totally different approach” to the bridge.

“We’re about to leave something pretty incredible in the middle of Paris,” JR told The Associated Press at his studio in eastern Paris, wearing his trademark hat and shades.

His project, the Pont Neuf Cavern is to run June 6-28, spanning 120 meters (yards) in length and over 17 meters in height.

French artist JR shows his project Pont Neuf Cavern during an interview with The Associated Press in his studio, in Paris, France, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

A tribute — and a gamble

The installation is a nod to a Paris legend: the late artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude who in 1985 wrapped Pont Neuf — and its streetlamps — in a pale golden fabric. The project, which took years of negotiations with the authorities, helped define the genre of monumental public art in modern cities across the world.

To JR, the homage is both aesthetic and personal.

“I had the chance to meet Christo along the years,” he said. “We had big respect for each other’s work.”

French artist JR shows his project Pont Neuf Cavern during an interview with The Associated Press in his studio, in Paris, France, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

While walking recently on the street with an AP crew, an older woman stopped JR — now, a household name in his country — to share her memories of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping. She told him she was excited to see the bridge transformed again.

Still, JR — a pseudonym stemming from first name, Jean-René — acknowledges the weight of following in the iconic pair’s footsteps.

“It’s pretty hard to go after them,” he said, “but I’m doing it in a very different style, in my own way.”

His idea is about “bringing back mineral and nature” to the heart of Paris.

From the outside, his installation will make Pont Neuf look “as if it has been overtaken by a prehistoric outcrop,” a structure visible along the banks of the Seine — a rocky mass that is “literally going to break the landscape,” he said.

A photomontage shows the project by French artist JR called Pont Neuf Cavern in his studio, in Paris, France, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

Two experiences: the city, then the cave

JR said there will be two main ways for people to experience his installation. From the outside, those heading to Pont Neuf will see the giant installation hundreds of meters away.

And from the inside, once visitors enter the “cave” on Pont Neuf, they will be able to walk through a long tunnel-like structure, having a feeling of “total immersion,” he said.

The cave will allow no daylight in and once inside, visitors “will lose track of time,” JR said.

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A key collaborator on the project is Thomas Bangalter, a former member of French rock band Daft Punk who is creating the sound to accompany the installation — “something you’ll only hear from the inside,” JR said.

Snap’s AR studio in Paris is developing the augmented reality technology. Visitors will be able to use their smartphones to “experience and see things that you can’t see with your eyes,” JR said.

He is intentionally mysterious about what that is — keeping it a surprise until closer to the opening.

JR’s team conducted extensive engineering studies, including tests in a hangar at Paris’ Orly airport, to understand how the structure behaves, especially in an emergency when the electricity that fuels the cave’s air supply cuts off. Tests show the structure stays the same. There is also the security question — the bridge is a busy zone, especially during Paris’ tourist-packed early summer.

JR said visitor numbers will be limited at any given time, and that his team is consulting with authorities on that. During the three weeks of the exhibition, the installation will be continuously monitored.

A photomontage shows the project by French artist JR called Pont Neuf Cavern in his studio, in Paris, France, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

A cave, and a metaphor

JR is best known for his large-scale art — enormous portraits pasted on buildings, border walls and rooftops. Because of his origins in graffiti and street art he has inevitably drawn comparison with Banksy, the elusive U.K.-based artist famous for his huge murals and activism.

JR’s installation will not have any massive faces, but the theme is still human, he says: gathering, connection, and what people project onto a shared space.

He says his installation is also an allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave in which chained men interpret shadows on the cave wall as reality, ignorant of the real world outside — and compares that to the fake reality created by the visual world of our social media platforms.

“What are our caves today is our phone,” JR said, “because we … believe that … our algorithm on social media … is the reality.”

During the installation, which will coincide with June’s Paris Fashion Week and World Music Day, the bridge will close to traffic.

By Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Some of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts hit so hard, viewers may be grateful to come across one that simply follows donkeys visiting an observatory in the desert — even if it bumps up against the very boundaries of the genre.

‘All the Empty Rooms’

Director Joshua Seftel hadn’t spoken with his former colleague, longtime CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman, in 25 years. Then Hartman, famed for stories of human kindness and compassion, reached out: He and photojournalist Lou Bopp had been documenting bedrooms left behind by children killed in American school shootings.

“I said to him, ‘This could be a great film,’” says Seftel, though Hartman asked not to be in it. “I said, ‘You are the “Good News Guy” and people trust you. If the Good News Guy is telling you he’s got some bad news, people are going to listen.’ ”

The rooms provide silent testament to those who once lived there. One is festooned in SpongeBob memorabilia; another contains the rack on which a girl would arrange her outfits for the week.

“You meet these families and hear the stories and there’s a heaviness” in the rooms, says Seftel. He says he could see them weigh on Bopp and Hartman. A filmmaker friend, on seeing the film, told Seftel, “Steve Hartman is a haunted man.”

A scene from “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud.” (HBO/Warner Bros. Discovery/TNS)

‘Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud’

Brent Renaud and his brother, Craig, made documentaries in Haiti, Egypt, Iraq and other hot spots, and won awards for their portrait of a troubled Chicago school. Then, while covering the war in Ukraine, Brent was killed by Russian soldiers.

“For Brent, it was always a focus on people caught in the middle of conflicts,” says Craig Renaud. “Going back to the front lines over and over again, we often had to be on the ground for months at a time in these war zones.”

Included in the clips of Brent Renaud’s work: a weeping Iraqi woman clutching the bloody jeans of her slain son; Renaud interviewing a Honduran boy embarking on the hazardous trek to the U.S. on his own; and a Somali man telling Renaud, “The way you hold the camera, you’re doing it from your heart.”

It also includes casual mention of his diagnosis as neurodivergent.

“He’s calm as a monk in a firefight,” Craig Renaud says, “but a cocktail party in Brooklyn is absolutely terrifying.”

‘Children No More: Were and Are Gone’

In Tel Aviv, a group of Israeli protesters stands silently, holding posters emblazoned with the faces of Palestinian children who have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.

“They didn’t choose to be part of this war,” says Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia. “They were killed not because they brought it on themselves, but because someone decided they needed to die.”

Medalia’s film follows activists whose silent vigils draw both support and condemnation. So far, despite sometimes having to abandon their protests when situations become potentially threatening, they remain undaunted.

“Their focus is to stop the war and this war crime and other things that are happening in our name, and to force the general public to confront those images and to look at the kids and to feel for them,” Medalia says. “It’s amazing to me how humanity and compassion become an act of resistance.”

A scene from “The Devil Is Busy.” (HBO/Warner Bros. Discovery/TNS)

‘The Devil Is Busy’

At a women’s health clinic in Atlanta, a typical day includes religious protesters on megaphones (“All men,” points out co-director Geeta Gandbhir) and women seeking help only to discover their pregnancies are just past the six-week mark, making terminating them illegal in Georgia.

“We decided to focus on the providers,” says Gandbhir. “They’re putting themselves at risk to provide care. What you see are the hurdles they face.”

Co-director Christalyn Hampton says the burdens on these independent clinics have drastically increased as about 50 Planned Parenthood sites closed last year. She points out the spectrum of healthcare provided and the complexity of situations for both patients, many of whom must travel considerable distances, and providers.

“When the technician is giving the young lady a sonogram, the [patient] goes through several emotions: She’s happy, she’s crying, she’s nervous. That speaks to the vulnerability these women feel when they have to make certain decisions. That emotional moment [reminds us] of that human aspect.”

‘Perfectly a Strangeness’

A trio of donkeys traverses a desert to an observatory. Captured with creative camera angles and accompanied by an imaginative score, Alison McAlpine’s film pushes the boundaries of what documentaries are.

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While shooting her previous feature in Chile, McAlpine noticed donkeys hanging out around an observatory. “We hired three gentle donkeys [for the film]. It was a combination of trying to direct the donkeys up from the valley to the observatory, and sometimes we just followed the donkeys.”

McAlpine acknowledges that her film has been difficult to categorize. “Sometimes it’s at IDFA, which is an international documentary festival. Sometimes it’s just competing with fiction, where it’s been lucky to win awards sometimes. But what is a documentary? As soon as you put on a lens and a frame, it’s a personal document, not something objective.

“I’ve been moved because people have been touched; they seem to be transported elsewhere, which is what one wants as a filmmaker.”

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Malia Mendez, Los Angeles Times

According to relationship scientist Paul Eastwick, online dating is a market where there are dramatic winners and losers. “I think our modern existence happens to pull from modes of interaction that really amp up the importance of mate value,” Eastwick said. “But it does not have to be this way, and for a long time, it was not this way.”

This is the genesis of Eastwick’s decades-long research about how people initiate and maintain close relationships. His new book “Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection” argues against evolutionary psychology’s philosophy of dating and relationships — debunking ideas like money matters most to women, looks matter most to men and everyone has an inherent objective “mate value.” In his work, the University of California Davis psychology professor offers a dating and relationships alternative in which compatibility trumps all.

His new book “Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection” argues against evolutionary psychology’s philosophy of dating and relationships— debunking ideas like money matters most to women, looks matter most to men and everyone has an inherent objective “mate value.” (Handout/Crown/TNS)

Since the dawn of his career, Eastwick has had more than one bone to pick with evolutionary psychology.

The theoretical approach, which studies human behavior, cognition and emotions as products of natural selection, depicts relationship formation as sales-like, highly gendered and strategy-based. That model, which Eastwick calls the “EvoScript,” has never squared with his view of close relationships.

The researcher has long viewed the EvoScript as outdated and exaggerated if not completely incorrect. But it was only a few years ago, when online communities of so-called incels started latching onto evolutionary psychology’s story of close relationships that he began to see the EvoScript as dangerous.

“It was upon realizing that there’s this fun house mirror version of [evolutionary] psych out there that I was like, I think it’s time,” Eastwick said. “There was a wake-up call for me that, we need a scientific book out there that’s going to bring the most contemporary science to people.”

In his work, Eastwick argues that desirability is subjective and unpredictable — and that all anyone really wants is a secure attachment bond that sustains them through good and bad seasons.

The Times talked to Eastwick about how to reimagine the dating “numbers game,” tips for better dates and why men and women ultimately want the same thing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You write in your book that “online dating can bring the worst parts of dating to the fore by exaggerating gender differences and making you feel like a clearance item at the bottom of the bin.” What are the long-term and short-term psychological effects of that on people as they go through their dating lives?

“It makes dating feel a little bit like a job, like you’re making sales pitches, and you can set your sights high, but ultimately you’re going to have to settle. It makes the whole thing feel like you’re trying to get a deal, and I just think these are bad metaphors, especially if we want to be happy in the long run. But there is a slow burn approach that feels more like finding connection, opening oneself up, spending time getting to know other people sometimes just for the sake of getting to know other people. Part of what I want to do in the book is remind people that there are other ways — and those other ways also happen to be more democratic, for lack of a better word there — that pull for more idiosyncrasy and give more people a chance to find partners that will really appeal to them.

If you’re trying to tackle the EvoScript, as you call it, what is your thesis about dating?

My thesis is that, if we want to think about the nature of human relationships, how did people evolve to form close relationships, I would describe it as a search for compatibility in small groups. What people classically have looked for and what classically makes for the best, most satisfying pairings are finding and building something compatible with another person from a pretty limited range of options.

OK , so I need to meet people in person. I need to make friend groups. Where do you go to do that now, when things are expensive and a lot of life is online?

For somebody who’s heterosexual, if you’re a woman, it’s like, “OK, where am I gonna meet guys? Where are the guys out there?” Don’t worry if the guys are going to be there, because oftentimes when people meet partners, it’s like, friends of friends of friends, right? It’s all making connections. Maybe it’s sports, maybe it’s activities, maybe it’s a cooking class, maybe it’s a dancing class. Maybe it’s just calling back up the people from your last job that you haven’t seen in a while, getting together over drinks and making it a regular thing. I get it, people are really busy, and everything online is a draw. But the importance of hanging out with people in person, those loose acquaintances, that’s where so much of the magic happens.

People talk a lot about how it’s just a numbers game: You have to go on more dates, you have to swipe on more people. What’s your response to that?

It is a numbers game, but maybe, let’s think about the numbers like this. Rather than numbers of people, it’s numbers of interactions. So you could meet 12 people one time, or you could meet three people four times. I choose the second one, right? Meet fewer people more times. We’re still talking about numbers. We’re still talking about how much time you’re out there interacting with people, figuring out whether you click. But 20-minute coffee dates really pull for a snap judgment. In a perfect world, swiping right on somebody would mean I’m going to do a coffee date with you, and then we’re going to go to some interactive class, and then we’re going to go to a concert and I’m going to spend time with you in all three settings and kind of see how that goes in total and then assess it. So it’s not that the numbers game is misguided, you do have to get out there and try different things, but we often think, “Oh, I can just sample people really briefly, and eventually I’ll get lucky.” The smaller those samples are, the more painful this whole thing gets.

Coffee dates feel like interviews to me. But from a scientific standpoint, why do you recommend an activity-based date over the classic coffee date?

The best evidence that we have for what can you do to make yourself more appealing to someone is not to share your CV and impress them with those details. Do something that reveals a little bit about who you are, how you interact, how you relate to the world, and, best of all, something a little bit vulnerable about yourself. The 36 Questions test, sometimes called the Fast Friends procedure, is truly the best tool we have. Within an hour or two of something interactive, people have gotten to the point where they’re willing to talk about things that they regret, or things that they really like about the other person that they’ve just gotten to know. And this is all in that Fast Friends procedure. So when I think about people doing activities where their attention isn’t just on interview mode, it’s like, “Oh, we’re tackling something together,” it really decreases that self-promotion instinct, which is usually misguided.

In your book, you call compatibility “curated, cultivated and constructed.” Does that mean, to you, that you can theoretically be compatible with anyone?

If you take this idea to its extreme, if you push me, ultimately I land on probably. And of all the things I say that people are going to be resistant to, I think that’s the one that people are like, “No.” Again, I go back to the people involved in small groups. They made relationships work with the limited number of options that were available, and because we are creatures who engage in motivated reasoning, it is very, very possible to be happy with who you’re with, but that does not mean that people just get to turn off all of the alternatives that exist. I think the best way to think about it is, I think a lot of pairs have compatibility potential, but I also think that the many decisions along the way matter a lot.

If the idea of romantic destiny is, as you call it in your book, “the weakest idea ever promoted by scientists,” what is your number-one dating myth you feel your personal research has debunked?

That men and women want different things out of partnerships, that they’re either pulling for different traits or look like these totally different entities, I just think the evidence for this is completely wrong. We see differences when you ask men and women, “What do you want in a partner?” But when you look at the attributes that actually matter, it’s really amazing the extent to which men and women are similar. And it’s not to say that there are no differences, like there is a difference in the strength of the sex drive thing. It’s smaller than people say, but it is there. But if you think about, what do men and women want out of a close relationship? What they really want is somebody who’s going to be supportive, is going to celebrate my successes and is going to have my back.

How do people practically apply that in their dating lives?

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Refocusing on attachment, I hope that reduces some of the heteropessimism out there in the world. We have arrived at this very bleak view of relations between men and women, like we see the world differently, we’re just always at odds. And boy, when you come at relationships with this attachment frame, and you look at the things that make people happy, men and women can absolutely build beautiful things working together, and they often do. Because we are creatures who attach, there is so much potential for genuine connection over a sustained period of time.

Do you have any predictions for what the future of dating might look like?

It certainly feels like people are getting tired of the apps and that they’re looking for more ways to socialize in person. I think that’s wonderful. I worry about what AI is going to do, like, is that going to feel so real that it causes our interactional muscles to atrophy? That’s the big question mark on the horizon. I’m not here to be grandpa, but I also hope that we don’t totally lose the ability to interact with real people.

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Edward Lotterman

Managing the money supply of a modern economy is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

For some 110 years, we have had an operating central bank, the Federal Reserve system, to do that. It could reduce harm to businesses and households from bank failures. Well thought-out, it could increase or decrease the money supply as needed to maintain credit availability without inflation.

So how has it done?

The answer is “pretty well,” at least for the first 85 years. The Fed made mistakes, especially in the 1930s and 1970s, but so did virtually all central banks around the world. Yes, central bank mistakes contributed to the Great Depression, but the causes of that went deeper.

Ditto for the high inflations hitting most economies in the 1970s. The Fed under chairs Arthur Burns and G. William Miller let the money supply grow far too fast. But there also were commodity-price shocks. Prevailing economic doctrines proved flawed. However, by the 1990s, growth was strong, unemployment low and prices stable. Yes, many farm lenders had failed, as did a class of banks called “savings and loans.” But these problems had been handled. On the whole, the economy during this period was in fine fettle. But harsher challenges would present in the new millennium.

Most recently — and current Chair Jerome Powell would probably acknowledge this — the Fed misjudged how long the sharp inflation following COVID would last, and this became a political liability for President Donald Trump’s first term, and more dramatically for his successor, Joe Biden.

To understand the Fed’s role in all of this, one must understand that the key function of any central bank is to manage the money supply — not “set” interest rates. Nearly all the general public doesn’t get this. News reports stating that the Fed raised or lowered interest rates don’t tell us what’s really happening — that the central bank is actually increasing or decreasing the amount of money in circulation. Hardly anyone in politics or the media adequately explains the correlation, including virtually all reporters covering finance as well as general news. This also points to failures in the teaching of economics.

An often-used analogy is that if a driver decides to move the speedometer from 50 to 70, they have to step harder on the gas. It is the flow of fuel to the motor that is important. The speedometer only indicates the result. In the same way the flow of the money supply determines interest rates.

Next, one must understand key indicators showing how much money is in the economy. The “money supply” consists of currency, physical bills or coins, plus bank deposits. Subdivisions to various degrees, depend on which deposits count, from simple checking, to long-term CDs. The Fed has great influence over the money supply, but does not “control” it.

The “monetary base” consists of currency plus bank reserves. These are deposits not loaned out. The Fed can control this closely. Historically here and in many other countries yet today, the “reserve ratio,” or minimum percentage of deposits that must be kept in reserve, is a key variable. In the U.S. there no longer is a reserve requirement but prudent banks still keep reserves.

The money supply and monetary base look at assets, money held by banks or the general public. But the point of view of the central bank also is key. It can create or destroy money by changing the level of reserves in a nation’s banking system as a whole. This leads to an important point that takes up an entire econ class session to explain. So just understand that in a system of “fractional reserve banking,” an increase in total banking reserves by a central bank causes a much greater increase in the money supply.

A central bank has a number of ways to increase reserves.

First, it can change the required reserve ratio. Decreasing it lets banks lend more. Increasing it does the opposite. This was important when the Fed was established and still true in much of the world, but is moot for the U.S. because we no longer have required minimums.

Second, the Fed can make direct loans to banks at its “discount window.” The framers of the Federal Reserve saw this as its central function. (This was described in the Feb. 15 column.) Again, understand that when the Fed makes such loans, it creates the money out of thin air. It does not come from the U.S. Treasury or anywhere else. And when such loans are repaid, money goes poof and disappears.

Third, it can inject new money into the economy by going into open bond markets where bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury, corporations, or anyone else are traded. To increase the money supply, it buys bonds by paying for them with newly created money. To decrease money in the system it sells bonds and the money received disappears.

Historically, the Fed only bought and sold U.S. Treasury bonds. This was extended to include “repurchase agreements” or “repos” and “reverse repos.” These are derivative securities based on Treasury bonds.

Such central bank buying and selling of bonds to increase and decrease bank reserves, and thus the money supply, is called “open-market operations.” That is why Fed officials who decide how much to buy or sell make up the “Federal Open-Market Committee.” It includes the seven members of the Board of Governors that includes a Chair, currently Powell, plus the 12 presidents of Fed district banks. However, while all participate, only five of the 12 vote in any given year.

Such buying and selling is analogous to feeding more or less gas to a car. The FOMC chooses a short term interest rate to target just as a driver decides to drive at 55 mph or 70 mph. To raise interest rates, the Fed sells bonds. To lower them, it buys more.

The original Federal Reserve Act did not include such bond market actions. But discount window lending depended on banks seeking loans. If the economy needed more liquidity, but no banks came to borrow, available money did not change. Benjamin Strong, president of the New York Fed, implemented open-market operations in the 1920s. The New Deal Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935 incorporated them and created the current Fed structure. Over time, discount window lending dwindled and open-market operations dominated Fed control of the money supply.

The ability to create new bank reserves and thus more money is how central banks quelch financial crises of the type that plagued the U.S. economy prior to 1913. It can stop chains of bank failures that were once common. But this creates huge danger. If any central bank steps in too often and too drastically, it creates “moral hazard,” incentivizing banks to lend carelessly and excessively. Large banks that are deemed “too big to fail” get a “heads we win and tails the Fed loses” mentality. Which brings us to today. Such perverse incentives have plagued the U.S. financial system for 40 years.

Yes, the Fed failed to intervene effectively in the 1930s, contributing to the Great Depression. It let the money supply grow too fast in the 1970s, contributing to inflation. But then, in 1984, when Continental Illinois, the seventh largest U.S. bank, was going bust, the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. intervened to bail it out. This led critics, especially at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and in key university economics departments, to warn of the enormous moral hazard thus created.

They were right. New legislation was intended to limit this, but in 1998, the Fed stepped in when a hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, went broke. It later flooded the economy with liquidity after 9/11. And then, when a financial crisis in very short term lending broke out in August 2007, followed by the failure of investment banks Bear Stearns in March 2008, and Lehman Brothers that October, a panicked Fed opened money taps to an unprecedented degree. This included creating ways to directly buy mortgage-backed securities rather than only Treasury bonds.

It more than tripled its holdings of securities, Treasury and private, from about $900 billion in August 2008 to $2.9 trillion in August 2011. Then, fighting a recession that regulatory failures had helped create, it lifted this total to $4.5 trillion by late 2014. Pausing, it let its holdings ebb to $3.6 trillion in mid-2019. But the outbreak of COVID in 2020 prompted even greater injections, reaching $7 trillion in June 2020 and $9 trillion in mid-2022. What happens to all this extra money? In this case, it caused the inflation that ejected Trump, then Biden four years later, from office and stoked the roaring stock market, crypto, “private debt” and “private equity” bubbles dominating financial news today, as well as inflated house prices benefitting baby boomers at the cost of anyone younger. In short, moral hazard on steroids.

The monetary base has fallen from a peak in late 2021, but remains nearly seven times as high as in March 2008. The broader M2 money supply, currently at $22.4 trillion, is three times as high over the same period. Gross domestic product, the total value of all goods and services produced, has only doubled.

Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to be the next Fed chair, has been outspoken in calling for the Fed’s balance sheet to be reduced. This means selling off many of the securities the Fed gorged on in a stair-step of crises over the last 18 years. Yet such a move would raise interest rates and slow the economy. Trump wants him to do the opposite. How this will play out is unknown.

The media, blind to the central role of the money supply, fails to see this conundrum. We’ve gotten pretty good at predicting and responding to disastrous weather events, but nearly everyone ignores looming financial storms to our perhaps greater, and longer-lasting, peril.

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