Summer evening skies are the home of some classic constellations. One of them is Scorpius the Scorpion, the 10th-brightest constellation in the night sky and one of those few constellations that actually looks like what it’s supposed to be. Personally, I see Scorpius as a “giant fishhook” that trolls our low summer skies. You certainly won’t have to crane your neck to see it because it’s a low rider. Begin looking for Scorpius in the very low southern sky at the end of evening twilight.

Most of Scorpius is easy to find. The brightest star is Antares, a brick-red star, marking the heart of the beast. It’s the brightest star in that part of the sky. To the right of Antares, you’ll see three dimmer stars in a nearly vertical row that make up the Scorpion’s head. To the lower left of Antares, look for the long, curved tail of the beast. Unfortunately, here in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin, the lowest section of the tail never gets above our horizon. At the end of the tail, barely above our horizon, is the celestial scorpion’s stinger, made of two moderately bright stars very close together.

(Mike Lynch)

The stinger stars, also known as the “cat’s eyes,” can be a bit of a challenge to see. You have to have a low, flat, treeless southern horizon to see them. Part of the difficulty of seeing the stinger stars is that visibility is greatly hampered close to the horizon because you’re forced to look through a lot more of Earth’s blurring atmosphere. Moderate to heavy light pollution and high humidity in the air can also add to the challenge. If you’re ever in the southern U.S., Scorpius will be a lot higher above the horizon, and you can get a much better look at it.

Antares (Mike Lynch)

Getting back to Antares, its reddish hue, demonstrates that stars come in different colors. They are not just little white lights in the sky. A star’s color tells a lot about its nature. Bluish-white stars are the hottest, with some having surface temperatures exceeding 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Reddish stars like Antares are cooler. In fact, Antares is cooler than our own sun, with a surface temperature of approximately 6,000 degrees. A thermometer plopped on the sun’s photosphere would show close to 10,000 degrees. Antares’ reddish hue is also reflected in its name. Antares is derived from the Greek language and means “rival of Mars,” as it shares a similar reddish tone with the planet Mars. You can easily confuse Mars and Antares with each other if you’re new to stargazing.

There’s no confusion between Mars and Antares when it comes to size. Mars is only about 4,000 miles across, a far celestial cry from the over-600-million-mile diameter of Antares. That’s over 700 times the diameter of our sun. If Antares were at the center of our solar system instead of our sun, the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would all be living inside Antares.

There are many stories about how Scorpius came to be a constellation. The one I like is the Greek mythology story about how Zeus, the king of the gods, sent a giant Scorpion to kill the mighty hunter Orion, to end an affair he was having with Zeus’ daughter Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Orion hunted by night and slept by day, and while he was on his nocturnal hunting adventures, Orion was a hunk and caught the eye of Artemis. After watching Orion for a few weeks, she started to call down to the very manly hunter and have long-distance conversations with him every night. As time went on, Artemis eventually joined Orion in his hunting jaunts, ignoring her other duties.

Zeus learned of his daughter’s negligence and put a contract out on Orion. He had his staff send a giant scorpion to sting and kill Orion during his daytime slumber. When the fateful day arrived and the giant scorpion approached Orion, the ever-alert hunter awoke as the beast stirred the nearby brush with its approach. Orion shot up and valiantly fought the scorpion with all his might, but eventually he was stung by the steroid-enhanced scorpion and died instantly.

That night, Artemus discovered the body of her boyfriend and was filled with tremendous grief. She managed to compose herself and lift Orion’s body to the sky and transform it into the famous constellation we see during the winter evenings. As she looked back down to Earth, she saw the giant scorpion not far from where she had found Orion. She put two and two together and decided to get revenge. She dive-bombed the scorpion, picked it up, and flung it up into the opposite end of the sky from her dead boyfriend, where it transformed into a constellation. That’s why the constellations Orion and Scorpius are never seen in the sky at the same time. Orion prowls the winter skies and Scorpius trolls the summer heavens. Orion won’t get stung again.

Celestial happening this week

(Mike Lynch)

On Sunday and Monday, toward the end of evening twilight in the very low western sky, look for the new crescent moon hanging close by the faint planet Mars.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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White House budgets, generally speaking, aren’t serious governing documents. Even so, they’re a declaration of national priorities — and by that measure, the latest blueprint is deeply troubling. What sort of administration aspires to shrink its budget for scientific discovery by 40%?

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently testified before a House committee to defend cuts at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s biggest funder of biomedical and behavioral research.

The agency going forward “will focus on essential research at a more practical cost,” the secretary said. His plan would end taxpayer support for “wasteful” academic areas, including certain gender-related topics.

It’s fair for the administration to set its own research priorities. But one would expect such cuts to free up (if not increase) funding for other urgent concerns, including chronic disease. Confoundingly, Kennedy appears intent on shrinking the entire research enterprise, thereby jeopardizing the White House’s stated goals of improving public health, maintaining global leadership in science and staying ahead of China, which is set on closing the gap.

His proposal also undermines the core principle that science is a vehicle for national progress. America’s explicit commitment to support scientific research began in 1945. Inspired by wartime innovations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked his top science adviser to develop a program that would advance medicine, boost the economy and develop a cadre of young researchers. The resulting framework established science as a “proper concern of government” and sought to reward academic inquiry with generous public funding.

For the better part of a century, this formula worked quite well. The NIH enthusiastically funded basic research — largely through universities — and innovation bloomed. NIH grants have supported countless lifesaving advances, from cancer treatments and gene therapies to vaccines and diagnostic equipment. Almost a fifth of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to NIH scientists or grantees.

Yet several factors have sown doubt about this model in recent years. Reports that the NIH supported Chinese research on coronaviruses, a type of which caused the COVID-19 pandemic, inflamed the public and increased scrutiny over grants writ large.

Some lawmakers started to question whether the current system overwhelmingly favors established insiders to the detriment of promising junior scientists. Others raised doubts that elite universities — with their swelling administrative costs, staggering tuition rates and contentious ideological fixations — are prudent stewards of taxpayer dollars.

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For these reasons, the White House isn’t wrong to scrutinize how universities spend federal money. A reassessment of the NIH’s decades-old grant framework would be salutary. The process undoubtedly would benefit from including reviewers with more diverse professional backgrounds by, say, offering stronger incentives to participate. (The tiny stipends involved hardly compensate for the work required.)

Ensuring more equitable distribution of grants among top applicants (for example, via lottery or “golden ticket” allocations) would make sense, as would more generous funding for high-risk, high-reward research.

Alas, such reforms don’t appear to be what Kennedy has in mind. Instead of limiting some costs to improve systems and expand funds for critical research, the health secretary is seeking to issue 15,000 fewer grants by next year. In so doing, he threatens to impede crucial medical studies, shrink the number of new drugs and put American scientists at a needless disadvantage — all while China lavishly invests in research facilities, improves clinical trials and streamlines regulatory approvals.

Congressional appropriations ultimately will determine what gets funded — and judging by recent hearings, lawmakers are deeply skeptical about Kennedy’s budget. By expanding support for science and encouraging careful oversight, Congress can do its part to redirect the secretary’s ambitions.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

“Our State Fair is a great state fair. Don’t miss it, don’t even be late. It’s dollars to donuts, that our State Fair is the best state fair in our state.”

– Title song for the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “State Fair”

This is a tale about an important late-summer mission: A mission to visit and compare the State Fairs in Minnesota and Iowa.

Fairgoers from the neighboring states are famously fiercely loyal to their State Fairs. It’s not quite Gopher/Hawkeye football level, but it can be intense.

So, which is the best?

The three retired journalists on the mission found the song from the beloved musical rings true. These annual extravaganzas of agriculture, food and competitions are, well, the best in each state.

But that’s not a Fair comparison. The trio was tasked with setting the rivalry to rest. Is Iowa the ultimate State Fair field of dreams or does its neighbor to the north hold (purple) reign? The two consistently rank in the Top 10 of State Fairs in the U.S. – usually in the Top 5.

Let me explain:

The adventure begins at a reunion of Des Moines Register newsroom alumni in October 2023, when a retired Register editor says that I must write the “ultimate comparison between the Iowa State Fair and Minnesota State Fair.”

Adell Crowe, from left, Deb Wiley and Kathy Berdan at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on Aug. 18, 2024. (Deb Wiley / Special to the Pioneer Press)

I attended and covered the Iowa State Fair for 10 years and did the same for nearly 20 years in Minnesota after returning to my home state in 2000. I accepted the assignment. (Yes, beer was involved.)

Like a prize-winning State Fair pumpkin, the idea took root. Deb Wiley, a fifth-generation Iowan and many-year visitor to the Iowa fair, was on board. To give this piece of investigative journalism some perspective, we invited longtime friend and journalist Adell Crowe to travel from Washington, D.C. Crowe, who grew up in Tennessee, often told the others she had never been to a State Fair and wanted to go someday.

Logistics worked best to visit the last day of the Iowa State Fair and the first day of Minnesota’s in 2024, so it wasn’t exactly a caramel apples to apples comparison when it came to crowd excitement levels. The weather was perfect in Des Moines last Aug. 18, but in St. Paul (technically, Falcon Heights, a suburb) afternoon rain had us dashing from building to building on opening day, Aug. 22.

From giant boar competitions to intricate quilts to deep-fried eats on a stick at every turn, we intrepid investigators sampled what each State Fair offered in 2024.

We did not visit the Midway at either Fair, since the thrills and subsequent stomach spills are not our thing. We did not go to any concerts in the Grandstand; the lineup is usually similar, with both featuring Def Leppard in 2025 and country acts (Rascal Flatts in Des Moines, Old Dominion in St. Paul).

But enough preamble. Let’s get to the amble. (And amble, we did, with nearly 11,500 steps at the Iowa State Fair and too many mad scrambles through the rain in Minnesota to count.)

From dollars to donuts, here’s a look at both State Fairs, so you can make your plans for 2025.

The Fairgrounds

I’ve always thought the Iowa State Fair feels more “rural” than Minnesota’s. Iowa’s grounds are actually larger, though, at 445 acres, compared to Minnesota’s 332 acres. The Iowa Fairgrounds are mostly wooded, with attractions that spread up a large hill. (Confession: I don’t think I climbed that hill more than a few times during my decade in the Hawkeye State. Hey, the Bud Tent at the foot of the hill was the place to be in the ‘90s.)

Iowa has added newer buildings since the 1990s, giving the Fairgrounds a cleaner feel, but the lovely front porch on the Admin Building will always be the centerpiece to me. Minnesota’s octagon-shaped Art Deco Agriculture Horticulture Building is my favorite in my home state. It’s a delight, with an annual massive floral display in the light-filled atrium. The roads in both Fairgrounds have street names.

Both State Fairs have a rustic, romantic ride in a floating rowboat through “Ye Old Mill.” And each has a Giant Slide. There’s a building for the Department of Natural Resources at each Fair – Iowa’s has a new courtyard, Minnesota’s is a massive log structure.

But because the Minnesota State Fair draws from a larger metropolitan area, the streets are usually a solid swarm of bodies by early afternoon. Attendance at the 2024 Iowa State Fair set a record at 1,182,682; Minnesota State Fair attendance was 1,925,904 in 2024, with a record 2,126,551 in 2019.

Both have venerable roots. Iowa’s is slightly older, 1854. Minnesota expanded its territorial fair in 1859, a year after statehood.

Attractions

Each Fair has talent shows and live music on free stages as well as Grandstand shows.

Both have giant boar contest winners, which inspire “aww” and “eeuw” in special swine barn exhibits. At the 2024 Iowa State Fair, a new record was set in the Big Boar competition. Finnegan weighed in at a record-breaking 1,420 pounds. The Minnesota boar, Squeaky, was 1,240 pounds. Point: Iowa.

There are even some of the same vendor booths. Peachey’s Donuts drew loooong lines at both in 2024. Iowa has Barksdale chocolate chip cookies, Minnesota has Sweet Martha’s.

The Iowa State Fair Photography Salon is one of the most popular juried Fine Arts exhibits, with 2,579 photos entered and 833 accepted for display. Minnesota’s Fine Arts competition juried show draws art entries from throughout the state. More than 300 works – sculpture, paintings and photos – are chosen from thousands of entries.

Hundreds submit marvelous cakes, crafts, quilts and other creations in competitions in both states. The work provides both inspiration (“Hey, maybe I can do that.”) and intimidation (“Oh, I guess those slippers I knitted aren’t so special.”). Iowa’s quilts have a better display area, but Minnesota incorporates quilts into display cases with other items in the Creative Activities Building.

Check out Minnesota’s kitschy and popular “Quilt On-A-Stick” entries. Themed mini-quilts are 8 inches by 9 inches and, like all good things at the Fair, on-a-stick.

There’s a parade at 2 p.m. daily through the Minnesota Fairgrounds, with marching bands and floats. The Iowa State Fair parade marches through downtown Des Moines the evening before the Fair opens, literally drumming up excitement.

A favorite moment at the Iowa State Fair was the daily morning broadcast of the “Star Spangled Banner.” At 10 a.m., fairgoers stopped, grew quiet, removed their caps and paused to listen or sing along with that day’s singer. It was sincere and moving.

Two of the biggest attractions are the butter sculptures in Iowa and the Crop Art exhibit in Minnesota.

The Crop Art competition and display at the Minnesota State Fair is the only one of its kind at this scale, according to State Fair officials. Artists create mosaic-type works meticulously placed seed by seed, using all local grains. It’s been growing since its start in 1965 and has yielded an enthusiastic fan base. The wait in the viewing line can be 45 minutes to an hour as Crop Art is visited by an estimated 200,000 fairgoers a year.

Both State Fairs feature butter sculptures. Minnesota’s are done live at the Fair, with the heads of the winners of the annual Dairy Princess contest and her court carved from 90-pound blocks of butter. The sculptor and model sit inside a chilled rotating glass booth while the work is done.

Butter sculpting draws crowds to the Dairy Building (try the ice cream while you’re there), but Minnesota’s butterheads aren’t worth a stick of margarine compared to Iowa’s. The breed of Iowa’s life-size butter cow, crafted from about 600 pounds of butter on a wood and mesh frame, varies every year. And there’s a companion full-size sculpture or two, usually a personality or celebrity with an Iowa connection. Amazing.

The 2024 creation featured Jimmy Fallon and his sidekick, Steve Higgins, (born in Des Moines and a University of Iowa grad) and Johnny Carson (born in Corning, Iowa). Higgins and Fallon are sitting on a Sky Glider seat and Fallon is looking over his shoulder at Carson.

The full-size butter Last Supper sculpture in 1999 will forever be my favorite.

Iowa’s official butter sculptor, Sarah Pratt, will create a butter bovine in Washington, D.C., this summer to be on exhibit from Aug. 13, 2025, to Aug. 13, 2026, as part of the United States’ 250th anniversary at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Minnesota’s crop art will also be featured in the Smithsonian exhibition. And crop artist Liz Schreiber did a title piece made out of seeds for the exhibition, “State Fairs: Growing American Craft.”

Food

Food is an essential part of a trip to the annual extravaganza in each state. Heck, I’ll admit it’s my top priority. And I’m not alone; the announcement of new Fair foods is a media event before the fairs in each state.

Deep-fried and skewered on a wooden stick is the hallmark of State Fair foods, with everything from candy bars to ranch dressing getting the batter treatment.

First, a word about deep-fried hotdogs on a stick. The Minnesota State Fair does have the requisite stands selling corn dogs. Slathered in mustard, they are a fine munchable. But Minnesota also has the superior (in my opinion) Pronto Pup, a “wiener dun in a bun” as the familiar yellow logo states. The Pronto Pup has a more cakelike batter. It is a tasty thing of beauty. Wiley insists the corn dog is better. Newbies should try both, of course.

Minnesota has more ethnic foods on its menu, with a favorite deep-fried giant eggroll, momos (Tibetan dumplings), Korean corn dogs, mochi donuts and more. In 2024, Egyptian koshari and grilled purple sticky rice were crowd favorites. There are also Minnesota-inspired foods such as a wild rice burger and walleye bites. The apple growers exhibit offers sparkling apple cider, a frozen cider pop and an apple-filled puff pastry covered with a powdered sugar frosting.

Confession: It’s difficult for me to get beyond stuffing my belly with Pronto Pups.

Iowa faves? You have to start with a pork chop on a stick, grilled in the open air by folks from the Iowa Pork Producers Association. We were nearly first in line on our visit in 2024 and the chops could have used a little more time on the grill, but Iowans know their pork.

Another favorite on our Des Moines adventure was the sweet corn in a cup; look for the ones with cotija cheese, chorizo and chips. Minnesota’s giant and popular corn roast vendor has fairgoers chomping the kernels directly from a butter-drenched cob.

The pork belly corn dog bites at a Bubbly Bar & Bistro at the Iowa fair were yummy and served in a lovely, airy new bistro setting at the top of the aforementioned hill. It’s near Grandfather’s Barn (the only building remaining from the farmstead where the Fair located in 1886). The Iowa Wine Experience is set up in the barn, and the wine slushies were slurpily refreshing.

Speaking of beverages, Minnesota’s craft beer breweries have made the North Star State Fair a foamy expedition, with new brews crafted each year. The beers and other beverages can be found at food vendors throughout the Fairgrounds, with such sips as mini-donut beer (sugar on the glass rim) and dill pickle kolsch. Last year, there were 63 new beverages and 46 returning favorites on the menu. The Iowa Craft Beer Tent keeps it all in one location, and had close to 250 drinks from 60 Iowa breweries in 2024.

By the numbers (according to each State Fair’s most recent info): Minnesota had 1,600 different foods available at 300 food concessions, with more than 80 foods on a stick. Iowa had nearly 200 food stands and more than 50 items available on a stick.

The verdict

Our resolve to name the best of the two State Fairs melted like a butter sculpture on an asphalt parking lot in August. There’s so much to love about each.

The best State Fair? Like the song says: It’s the one in your state.

Reflections of a first-time fairgoer

By Adell Crowe

Embrace the crowd! Unlike cranky airport crowds or rowdy, often-too-exuberant/intoxicated seated baseball crowds, the Fair throng is a sea of moving happiness. It parts and smiles as you make your way through and is happy to make room for a few more.

The crowds can even guide you to the best food: See the long line at the donuts? That is a good sign. (Yes, you’ll have to wait but do you have a better place to be than the Fair?) The crowded beer garden always has one more table for you, so just stand and sip until someone leaves.

The crowd will also indicate which corner of a crowded pavilion has a main attraction and which vendor is handing out good freebies.

Speaking of freebies, you’ll never need another tote bag or crown of paper pig ears. If it rains, the crowd transforms into a rainbow of free ponchos. Don’t let a little rain dampen your experience, it only helps to cool the sweat and wash away the first layer of stickiness from the cotton candy, gooey donuts, bacon on a stick and the Pronto Pup you had for breakfast.

Similarly, follow your nose! Fair smells are a conglomeration of fried happiness. Indulge. Let your nose overrule your stomach on the quantity and digestibility of food types. You are only going to get deep-fried Oreos and pork belly bites with hot honey sauce at the Fair.

Should you feel guilty about your choices in Des Moines, head to the Ag Building for the Iowa Egg Council’s free hard-boiled egg on a stick or check out the “Healthy Food Choices” listed on the Iowa State Fair website.

At the Iowa fair, the gardens outside the horticulture building provide another good sniffing stop. There’s a mini maze for kiddos and a variety of flowers that never quite achieve the same exuberance in your own backyard (but again, they ARE at the Fair!).

“City girl” Adell Crowe visits the giant boar at the Minnesota State Fair in Falcon Heights on Aug. 22, 2024. (Deb Wiley / Special to the Pioneer Press)

Don’t let your nose stand in the way of the livestock barns. These show animals are not stinky. They are groomed to keep them runway ready. Should nature call, there are shovel-ready handlers to remove the detritus. OK, maybe one or two of the big animals are a little stinky, but the lines by those pens move pretty quickly.

Animals from the massive to the wobbly newborn goats and lambs to the plume-headed chickens are available for oohing and ahhing. (But I did draw the line at the Minnesota animal Miracle of Birth Center. Yes, I’m a squeamish city girl.)

Sticks: Let’s take a moment to appreciate the genius of Fair vendors. Prior to my first Fair visit my experience with hand-held cuisine was limited to cocktail weenies and toothpicks. My horizons have been exploded! Deep-fried olives, pork chops, hot dish, Greek salad, and dozens more, all on a stick — and later down the front of my shirt.

Attire: Tattoos are the new tube tops. Used to be that skimpy tops and Daisy Dukes drew attention to midriffs and legs. Now it’s a fantastical array of ink-on-skin artistry that ranges from fanciful to fearsome. It adds another element to the required people-watching.

In the they-thought-of-everything department:

— Hog-ears off to Fair planners who made getting to each Fair easy, sometimes free and almost always quick via shuttle bus.

— If you prefer pedaling, Minnesota planners provide a bike concierge/corral (don’t lose your ticket, if you want your bike back at the end of your visit).

— Thank you, Iowa, for the permanent water art that’s big enough to dance through on a hot day.

— Minnesota’s wealth of memorial benches made room for much-needed respites and sweet reminders of how much the Fair has meant to many generations.

— Iowa shows off the beauty of its golden state Capitol with a breathtaking view from the top of the hill at Grandfather’s Barn. And the lovely new wine-and-more cafe at the top is a great place to take it all in.

— Both provided ample selfie opportunities. There were posing frames with the biggest pumpkin, a bragging-sized giant cotton rainbow bass and a cutout and directions for posing with a giant heifer. All were magnets for comments and likes on my jealous social media.

Things I didn’t expect to love:

Coffee: I’m a caffeine snob so I wasn’t expecting much from a cuppa at the Minnesota State Fair. But the Maple Nitro coffee at the Farmers Union Coffee Shop was yummy.

Seed art: I did some private eye-rolling every time I heard the words “crop art” before I saw the amazing talent and patience that goes into these masterpieces. My frame of reference was pinto beans pasted on cardboard that we made in Scouts. Who knew the cleverness that can sprout from Minnesota minds and homegrown seeds?

Butter: While I had heard of butter sculpture at the Iowa fair, seeing life-sized sculptures of Jimmy Fallon and Iowa native Steve Higgins – with a sweet over-the-shoulder nod from Iowa-born Johnny Carson – forever changed my appreciation of artists willing to work in frosty conditions wielding butter knives. It was cool, as was the annual big butter cow, which was so realistic it looked desperately in need of milking.

Arts and crafts: All states can boast amazing artists. But as these were my first two Fairs, I’m convinced that there’s a unique concentration of gifted photographers, painters, sculptures, knitters and quilters in Iowa and Minnesota. Wow, I said, maybe a couple hundred times. And as a wannabe quilter I left more intimidated than inspired. I may go back to jigsaw puzzles.

Crowd-sourcing: Not two hours into my first Fair, a woman spied my half-empty cup of lemonade to ask me where to buy the best lemonade. (Wow, I felt like an expert!) Later, I stopped a couple with a serving of sticky blue rice so I could get an eyeful. Everyone is happy to share their experiences.

Cheese curds: They need a better name. They are delicious. Especially the dill pickle variety.

Beer flavors: Hats off and head-scratching for those brewers who have made a multitude of brewskis possible. And, thanks for the yummy wine slushies.

​​What the Minnesotan gets wrong — and right

By Deb Wiley

The year was 1970, and comedian Red Skelton was scheduled to perform at the Iowa State Fair Grandstand. I was a lowly freshman clarinet player in my high school band, and our director penned an ode to one of Skelton’s comedic personas called “The Clem Kadiddlehopper March” that snagged us a spot at the Fair.

I don’t remember much about the experience of performing this masterpiece or the long bus ride to and from New Hampton, Iowa. What I remember is that my friend Rachel and I snagged something called a corn dog on our way back to the bus. And that we were roundly scolded as the bus started moving while we scrambled to find our seats because we were SO LATE. What I remember most vividly was that ambrosial new flavor sensation! Salty, a tiny bit sweet, savory and crunchy on the outside. On a stick! It was like nothing I had ever tasted before. I wanted more.

Thus, every Iowa State Fair involves a personal quest for a corn dog. I evolved from ketchup on the dog to mustard only. I close my eyes when I chew, savoring every nibble. It’s a once-a-year treat.

Adell Crowe, from left, Kathy Berdan and Deb Wiley give a Pronto Pup salute at the Minnesota State Fair in Falcon Heights on Aug. 22, 2024. (Deb Wiley / Special to the Pioneer Press)

Which is why, when my Minnesota friend Kathy claimed Pronto Pups were better, I scoffed. Oh sure, I’ll try them. But who wants a pancake wrapped around a hot dog? It’s too sweet. There’s no nubbly corn flavor. It’s … boring.

But talk about corny, that Fair motto, “The Great Minnesota Get-Together”? I thought little of it until Kathy, Adell and I had to duck inside the Fine Arts Center last year to escape a persistent downpour. I rounded the corner, and there, to my great delight, were two Minnesota friends that I had no expectation of seeing. It was a fun get-together. And the rest of the day was just as fine, rain or shine. After all, every day at the Iowa OR Minnesota State Fair is a good day.

Well played, Minnesota.

If you go

Iowa State Fair: Aug. 7-17, 2025. Advance tickets online. $11 for ages 12 and up and $7 for ages 6-11 until Aug. 6. Beginning August 7, $16 for ages 12 and up, $10 for ages 6-11. Parking on site (fee), along nearby streets (some homeowners charge for parking on their property), or by bus with DART Park & Ride (park free).

Minnesota State Fair: Aug. 21-Sept. 1, 2025. Ticket prices are $20 at the gate for adults. Discount tickets are available through Aug. 20. On-site parking $25. Free buses from more than 30 park-n-ride locations. Two free and secure bike corrals are available.

What to bring: Comfortable shoes, cash or credit card, sunscreen, water bottle, sunglasses.

Must see at the Iowa State Fair: The butter cow and special butter sculptures inside the Ag Building. Stare down the biggest farm animals of their kinds in the Avenue of Breeds.

Must see at the Minnesota State Fair: Crop Art entries in the Ag-Hort Building, live butter sculpting in a rotating glass cooler of Princess Kay of the Milky Way and her court in the Dairy Building.

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I grew up watching the tennis greats of yesteryear with my dad, but have only returned to the sport recently thanks to another family superfan, my wife. So perhaps it’s understandable that to my adult eyes, it seemed like the current crop of stars, as awe-inspiring as they are, don’t serve quite as hard as Pete Sampras or Goran Ivanisevic. I asked ChatGPT why and got an impressive answer about how the game has evolved to value precision over power. Puzzle solved!

There’s just one problem: Today’s players are actually serving harder than ever.

While most CEOs probably don’t spend a lot of time quizzing AI about tennis, they very likely do count on it for information and to guide their decision making. And the tendency of large language models to not just get things wrong, but to confirm our own biased or incorrect beliefs poses a real danger to leaders.

ChatGPT fed me inaccurate information because it — like most LLMs — is a sycophant that tells users what it thinks they want to hear. Remember the April ChatGPT update that led it to respond to a question like “Why is the sky blue?” with “What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.” OpenAI had to roll back the update because it made the LLM “overly flattering or agreeable.” But while that toned down ChatGPT’s sycophancy, it didn’t eliminate it.

That’s because LLMs’ desire to please is endemic, rooted in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the way many models are “aligned” or trained. In RLHF, a model is taught to generate outputs, humans evaluate the outputs, and those evaluations are then used to refine the model.

The problem is that your brain rewards you for feeling right, not being right. So people give higher scores to answers they agree with. Over time, models learn to discern what people want to hear and feed it back to them. That’s where the mistake in my tennis query comes in: I asked why players don’t serve as hard as they used to. If I had asked the opposite — why they serve harder than they used to — ChatGPT would have given me an equally plausible explanation. (That’s not a hypothetical — I tried, and it did.)

Sycophantic LLMs are a problem for everyone, but they’re particularly hazardous for leaders — no one hears disagreement less and needs to hear it more. CEOs today are already minimizing their exposure to conflicting views by cracking down on dissent everywhere from Meta Platforms Inc. to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Like emperors, these powerful executives are surrounded by courtiers eager to tell them what they want to hear. And also like emperors, they reward the ones who please them — and punish those who don’t.

Rewarding sycophants and punishing truth tellers, though, is one of the biggest mistakes leaders can make. Bosses need to hear when they’re wrong. Amy Edmondson, probably the greatest living scholar of organizational behavior, showed that the most important factor in team success was psychological safety — the ability to disagree, including with the team’s leader, without fear of punishment.

This finding was verified by Google’s own Project Aristotle, which looked at teams across the company and found that “psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.” My own research shows that a hallmark of the very best leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Stanley McChrystal, is their ability to listen to people who disagreed with them.

LLMs’ sycophancy can harm leaders in two closely related ways. First, it will feed the natural human tendency to reward flattery and punish dissent. If your computer constantly tells you that you’re right about everything, it’s only going to make it harder to respond positively when someone who works for you disagrees with you.

Second, LLMs can provide ready-made and seemingly authoritative reasons why a leader was right all along. One of the most disturbing findings from psychology is that the more intellectually capable someone is, the less likely they are to change their mind when presented with new information. Why? Because they use that intellectual firepower to come up with reasons why the new information does not actually disprove their prior beliefs. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning.

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LLMs threaten to turbocharge that phenomenon. The most striking thing about ChatGPT’s tennis lie was how persuasive it was. It included six separate plausible reasons. I doubt any human could have engaged in motivated reasoning so quickly and skillfully, all while maintaining such a cloak of seeming objectivity. Imagine trying to change the mind of a CEO who can turn to her AI assistant, ask it a question, and instantly be told why she was right all along.

The best leaders have always gone to great lengths to remember their own fallibility. Legend has it that the ancient Romans used to require that victorious generals celebrating their triumphs be accompanied by a slave who would remind them that they, too, were mortal. Apocryphal or not, the sentiment is wise.

Today’s leaders will need to work even harder to resist the blandishments of their electronic minions and remember sometimes, the most important words their advisers can share are, “I think you’re wrong.”

Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter.” He wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.