In 2019, the St. Patrick’s Association approached Peter Kenefick about donning the green jacket of Mr. Pat, the king of the city’s Irish community’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Kenefick is a busy guy, organizers worried: Alongside a career as a financial adviser, he also owns Grand Avenue restaurants Emmett’s Public House and Saji-Ya and is an avid wintertime platform tennis player. Would he have time for it?

“I said, if you ask me, I’ll be all in,” Kenefick said. “And I was. I went to every button blitz, every event, every old folks’ home. Everyone goes, ‘Peter, no one else has done that; you’re not required to do that.’ Well, I said I would be all in!”

Kenefick was crowned as the 89th King Boreas at the St. Paul Winter Carnival’s Royal Coronation on Jan. 23.

And he has every intention of going full-throttle as Boreas, too.

Even before his identity was unveiled to incoming members of the Royal Family and the public during the coronation, Kenefick said in a mid-January interview, “the word that’s already spreading to all the candidates is that this Boreas is going to be the ‘all-in king.’”

‘Turn that big ship back around’

Kenefick grew up on Norfolk Avenue in Highland Park, the oldest of five siblings in a third-generation St. Paul Irish Catholic family. He helped put himself through college by taking odd jobs doing roofing and gutters and selling shoes at Powers Department Store, he said.

He started as a financial planner in 1980 with two $1,000 retirement accounts in his portfolio, and today, he leads a team at UBS Financial Services in Wayzata that manages $1.6 billion in assets, he said.

Also early in his career, in the mid-1980s, Kenefick took over the Grand Avenue building that housed Saji-Ya and Esteban’s, the Mexican restaurant where playwright August Wilson once told the Pioneer Press Dispatch he wrote much of the Pulitzer-winning play “Fences.” Esteban’s closed in 1985, and Kenefick brought in friends Steve Goldberg and Mike Andrews, of J.D. Hoyt’s Supper Club in Minneapolis, to open Dixie’s on Grand in its place.

By the time Emmett’s Public House opened, on St. Patrick’s Day 2015, Kenefick said the single-story building was reaching the end of its life. He wanted to replace it with a five-story apartment building with restaurant spaces on the ground floor, but zoning codes capped new structures at three stories tall, so he’d have to petition the City Council to rezone the site. The proposal proved more controversial — and some residents’ reactions more vitriolic — than he expected, he said, and council members only very narrowly agreed to the rezoning by a 4–3 vote.

The new building, Kenton House, opened in 2024 and, though Dixie’s was not included in the redevelopment plans, the building is now home to Saji-Ya, Emmett’s and Razava Bread Co.

Grand Marshall Peter Kenefick, waves to parade goers during the Grand Old Day parade in St. Paul on Sunday, June 2, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

From Kenefick’s perspective, the fact that similar development plans are in the works for the former Billy’s on Grand building a few blocks down at Victoria Avenue, and that he was invited to be grand marshal for the Grand Old Day parade in 2024, are both vindications of his vision for Kenton House and Grand Avenue more broadly.

“Grand Avenue is changing, there’s no question,” he said. “I played a small, small role, but I did stick my neck out with my dear partners, who are gems, and we are helping turn that big ship back around. But (five years ago), Grand was not grand.”

When the Kenton House project was still in early stages, Kenefick loaded all the architects and designers and project managers onto a bus and drove them around town. He had them get out in Frogtown and Lowertown and Cathedral Hill and look carefully at what gives a building a “St. Paul feel.”

“We want to hang onto the past and, what I’ve always said is, also have discussions about thoughtful development,” he said. “Don’t just put up steel and glass. Does it look like it belongs? Look at (Kenton House) now — there are trees taller than the building. It looks like it’s been there forever. And you come downstairs, you meet neighbors on your walk — it just has that small-town feeling we’re trying to achieve on Grand, in my opinion.”

‘Who doesn’t need some kindness?’

Friday night, after Boreas’ identity was unveiled and Kenefick met the Royal Family, he handed each member a signed sheet of paper.

In one corner is his Boreas crest, containing a Celtic cross, lions and the logos of his restaurants. Lining the edges of the page are illustrations reminiscent of medieval manuscript marginalia. The sheet is titled “The Royal Family of Boreas Red LXXXIX Code of Conduct,” adapted from a passage by Virginia historian John Walter Wayland.

“Each member of the Royal Family is the one whose conduct proceeds from good will,” it begins. “Who … speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deeds follow their word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than their own.”

To Kenefick, being an ‘all-in king’ doesn’t mean he feels the need to make every decision — quite the opposite, he said. He characterized his approach as one of horizontal leadership where, rather than top-down hierarchy or strict seniority, the focus is on sharing decision-making power, facilitating more personal relationships and demonstrating a broader culture of mutual respect.

“It’s just knocking people off their stereotypes a little bit, in a fun way,” he said. Within the Royal Family, “I’m going to remind them that I just happen to have this part. But I’m not the boss. We are the bosses, and we’re going to lead as a team.”

As Kenefick tells it, all this goes hand-in-hand with his Boreas motto, “Respect Reigns and Kindness Rules.”

“We can’t control how cold it’s going to be. We can’t control if the float breaks down. We can’t control if we get the flu. The only thing we can control is our attitude,” he said. “So we’re going to bring positive attitudes. Because you tell me, from little kids to retired people or to senior living, who doesn’t need some kindness right now here in Minnesota?”

Fast Facts: Boreas Rex LXXXIX

Who: Peter Kenefick

Hometown: St. Paul; now lives in his wife’s hometown of Edina

Family: wife, Ruth — their 46th anniversary is on Feb. 1, the last day of this year’s Winter Carnival — and their two children and four grandchildren. His son’s family lives in Florida, and he joked: “I have it backward. I have grandkids living in Naples and grandma and grandpa living in Minnesota. We’re reverse snowbirds.”

Occupation: Senior vice president at Kenefick Bolstad Kottke Wealth Management, a UBS financial advisory in Wayzata, and owner of Emmett’s on Grand and Saji-Ya

Favorite hobby: Playing platform tennis, an outdoor wintertime sport also sometimes called paddle tennis that, yes, looks like pickleball but is different

Boreas motto: “Respect Reigns and Kindness Rules”

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As Bob Dylan once said: “The times, they are a-changin’.”

One only need to look to the emergence of artificial intelligence to know the lyrics from this 1964 song continue to ring true today. But for all its strengths — from offering travel tips to investment advice to writing term papers and poetry — AI content is also a double-edged sword, littered with bogus references and conclusions based on biased studies or incomplete information.

And AI comes with a price to pay. For many people, that price will be measured in dollars and cents, as AI takes over jobs that used to belong to human beings. Why pay someone to write a report or plan a budget if AI can do it by pushing a button? Even if someone’s job is not taken over, AI may require them to undergo significant retraining to keep it.

But there is another price to pay, which cannot be measured in dollars and cents: the cost of intellectual stagnation. At its best, AI reflects the current thinking on a particular issue. That may be a good starting point. But what if the current thinking is wrong? What if we need a whole new way of looking at things? Where will new ideas come from?

Unless there are people willing to challenge the current thinking, the price we pay is intellectual stagnation.

Consider the kinds of questions that go beyond the retrieval of information or the completion of technical tasks, the hard questions that many of us face from time to time. Does God exist? Are some actions unforgivable? If someone you love committed a serious crime, would you turn them into the police? Should terminally ill patients be allowed to take their own lives? Here AI is of limited value. There is no way to tackle these questions without deep reflection and a great deal of soul-searching.

In the face of growing conformity, critical thinking skills are needed more than ever. According to a study, released last year, by the Journal of the American Philosophical Association that looked at 600,000 college students, those who majored in philosophy not only ranked higher than all others on verbal and logical reasoning, but also displayed more open-mindedness and intellectual curiosity. There is even evidence that philosophy majors have a higher acceptance rate to medical school than students who major in traditional subjects such as chemistry or biology.

While some may be surprised by these results, I am not. Standardized tests don’t just measure a student’s recall of facts; they also try to determine whether students can analyze arguments and are sensitive to verbal nuances. Because they are trained to question basic assumptions, define key terms and construct logical arguments on their own, philosophy majors often have an advantage over others.

When I taught basic classes in philosophy, for example, I made sure that for every thinker we read arguing for one position, we read an equally important thinker arguing for the opposite: an atheist and a believer, a materialist and an idealist, a defender of morality and a critic of it. Papers and exams were structured so that students had to analyze arguments both for and against a particular position and decide which side is right. In addition to the ability to analyze arguments, I hoped to instill a willingness to consider unconventional approaches to problems.

So while intellectual stagnation may not have an immediate effect on one’s pocketbook, it is a serious problem at a time when people have become so entrenched in their political views that they no longer listen to people who do not share them — in other words, a time when simple slogans and dogmatic pronouncements have become all too common. In this case, the price we pay is a deterioration in public discourse and a corresponding rise in prejudice and misunderstanding.

I am not arguing, of course, that philosophy has a monopoly on critical thinking. It often borrows insights from other subjects. It rarely produces established results in the way the sciences do, and other majors in the liberal arts also encourage creative thinking.

But if the recent study of college students is accurate, philosophy, though not a panacea, does an especially good job of preparing them for the AI age we are entering.

Kenneth Seeskin is professor emeritus of philosophy and the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick professor of Jewish civilization at Northwestern University. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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In the aftermath of the U.S. military strike that seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has emphasized its desire for unfettered access to Venezuela’s oil more than conventional foreign policy objectives, such as combating drug trafficking or bolstering democracy and regional stability.

During his first news conference after the operation, President Donald Trump claimed oil companies would play an important role and that the oil revenue would help fund any further intervention in Venezuela.

Soon after, “Fox & Friends” hosts asked Trump about this prediction.

“We have the greatest oil companies in the world,” Trump replied, “ the biggest, the greatest, and we’re gonna be very much involved in it.”

As a historian of U.S.-Latin American relations, I’m not surprised that oil or any other commodity is playing a role in U.S. policy toward the region. What has taken me aback, though, is the Trump administration’s openness about how much oil is driving its policies toward Venezuela.

U.S. military intervention in Latin America has largely been covert. And when the U.S. orchestrated the coup that ousted Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the U.S. covered up the role that economic considerations played in that operation.

By the early 1950s, Guatemala had become a top source for the bananas Americans consumed, as it remains today.

The United Fruit Company, based in Boston, owned more than 550,000 acres of Guatemalan land, largely thanks to its deals with previous dictatorships. These holdings required the intense labor of impoverished farmworkers who were often forced from their traditional lands. Their pay was rarely stable, and they faced periodic layoffs and wage cuts.

The international corporation networked with dictators and local officials in Central America, many Caribbean islands and parts of South America to acquire immense estates for railroads and banana plantations.

The locals called it the pulpo — “octopus” in Spanish — because the company seemingly had a hand in shaping the region’s politics, economies and everyday life. The Colombian government brutally crushed a 1928 strike by United Fruit workers, killing hundreds of people.

The company’s seemingly unlimited clout in the countries where it operated gave rise to the stereotype of Central American nations as “banana republics.”

In Guatemala, a country historically marked by extreme inequality, a broad coalition formed in 1944 to overthrow its repressive dictatorship in a popular uprising. Inspired by the anti-fascist ideals of World War II, the coalition sought to make the nation more democratic and its economy more fair.

After decades of repression, the nation democratically elected Juan José Arévalo and then Jacobo Árbenz, under whom, in 1952, Guatemala implemented a land reform program that gave landless farmworkers their own undeveloped plots. Guatemala’s government asserted that these policies would build a more equitable society for Guatemala’s impoverished, Indigenous majority.

United Fruit denounced Guatemala’s reforms as the result of a global conspiracy. It alleged that most of Guatemala’s unions were controlled by Mexican and Soviet communists and painted the land reform as a ploy to destroy capitalism.

United Fruit sought to enlist the U.S. government in its fight against the elected government’s policies. While its executives did complain that Guatemala’s reforms hurt its financial investments and labor costs, they also cast any interference in its operations as part of a broader communist plot.

It did this through an advertising campaign in the U.S. and by taking advantage of the anti-communist paranoia that prevailed at the time.

United Fruit executives began to meet with officials in the Truman administration as early as 1945. Despite the support of sympathetic ambassadors, the U.S. government apparently wouldn’t intervene directly in Guatemala’s affairs.

The company turned to Congress.

It hired well connected lobbyists to portray Guatemala’s policies as part of a communist plot to destroy capitalism and the United States. In February 1949, multiple members of Congress denounced Guatemala’s labor reforms as communist.

Sen. Claude Pepper called the labor code “obviously intentionally discriminatory against this American company” and “a machine gun aimed at the head of this American company.”

Two days later, Rep. John McCormack echoed that statement, using the exact same words to denounce the reforms.

Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Sen. Lister Hill and Rep. Mike Mansfield also went on the record, reciting the talking points outlined in United Fruit memos.

No lawmaker said a word about bananas.

Seventy-seven years later, we may see many echoes of past interventions, but now the U.S. government has dropped the veil: In his appearance after the strike that seized Maduro this month, Trump said “oil” 21 times.

Aaron Coy Moulton is an associate professor of Latin American history at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas and the author of “ Caribbean Blood Pacts: Guatemala and the Cold War Struggle for Freedom.” This column for the Los Angeles Times was produced in collaboration with the Conversation.

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Today is Sunday, Jan. 25, the 25th day of 2026. There are 340 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Jan. 25,1971, Charles Manson and three of his followers were convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people, including actor Sharon Tate.

Also on this date:

In 1924, the first Winter Olympic Games opened in Chamonix (shah-moh-NEE’), France.

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In 1945, the World War II Battle of the Bulge ended as the German army concluded its final offensive on the Western Front; approximately 19,000 U.S. soldiers were killed during the five-week campaign.

In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city to add fluoride to its public water supply.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy held the first live televised presidential news conference.

In 2004, NASA’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars and sent its first pictures of the planet to Earth; originally planned as a 90-day mission, the rover remained operational for over 15 years, traveling a total of 28 miles across the planet’s surface.

In 2011, Egyptians began nationwide protests that forced longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak to step down amid the Arab Spring uprisings that swept the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed an order reversing a Pentagon policy that largely barred transgender people from military service.

In 2024, Alabama conducted the nation’s first execution using nitrogen gas, putting to death Kenneth Eugene Smith for his conviction in the 1988 murder-for-hire killing of a pastor’s wife.

Today’s birthdays:

Football Hall of Famer Carl Eller is 84.
Actor Leigh Taylor-Young is 81.
Actor Jenifer Lewis is 69.
Hockey Hall of Famer Chris Chelios is 64.
Actor Ana Ortiz is 55.
Actor Mia Kirshner is 51.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is 48.
Soccer manager and former player Xavi is 46.
Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys is 45.
Football Hall of Famer Patrick Willis is 41.
Actor-singer Ariana DeBose is 35.
Rapper Lil Mosey is 24.