Kling built MPR from a small station in Collegeville, Minnesota.

​Bill Kling has come a long way since he started what is now Minnesota Public Radio 45 years ago. He's now the outgoing CEO of one of the most financially sustainable and commercially successful radio empires in the country -- which in turn has made for plenty of controversy. Here's a recap of our initial interview with Kling at MPR's headquarters.

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Courtesy Savethevikes.org.

Vikings superfan Cory Merrifiled, right, has been lobbying for a new stadium since 2009.

​On Tuesday, a lot of Vikings fans celebrated a victory when team owners struck a deal with Ramsey County to build a new stadium in Arden Hills.

But even with a location supposedly locked down, celebration is premature. The plan still requires the Legislature to pass a bill that would allocate state funds to the stadium -- a deal that's far from complete -- and the clock is ticking on both the legislative session and the Vikings' lease with the Metrodome.

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The mayor says Pawlenty-era cuts have put the city in a tight spot.

​Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak's 2011 budget proposal calls for at least 32 cuts to the fire department. Many in the department think personnel levels are already too low, making it more dangerous than ever to be a fire fighter in Minneapolis. Here is an abbreviated version of our interview with Rybak on the cuts.

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David Carr is riding high. That's a bad phrase to use given the subject matter of his latest book. Let's say, after years of struggle, things are going his way for once. The former editor of the late Twin Cities Reader is touring to support his heartbreaking memoir The Night of the Gun. In it, Carr writes about his time spent in Minneapolis getting high, wasted, and in trouble with the law. His approach to the book was to interview people from his past, and report on himself as he would anybody else. Carr will be reading Aug. 14 at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis and Aug. 18 at Common Good Books in St. Paul at 7:30 both nights.

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Stadium expert weighs in on Twins ballpark

If anything was sorely missing from the recent stadium debates at the Capitol, it was a dutch-uncle figure to bring some much-needed reality to the proceedings. Lawmakers, in fact, would have been wise to consult Neil deMause. In 1998, deMause co-authored Field of Schemes, the authoritative book on stadium boondoggles across the country. Since then, deMause has tracked stadium deals on his web site of the same name, and through various stories on the business and politics of sports in numerous publications.

More recently, deMause contributed to a new book from Baseball Prospectus called Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, where he dispassionately dispels the many myths surrounding the economics of new ballparks. DeMause watched the Twins deal closely, and did this Q&A with City Pages via e-mail.

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Greg LeRoy is the founder of Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that works to insure that companies receiving public subsidies create decent jobs. His latest book, The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation, was published last month. LeRoy will be in town on Monday for a Labor Day event. I caught up with him by telephone this morning.More >>