According to The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, Doug has died. He was 85.

North Dakota. The great expanse. Sounds romantic, in that sun setting over a bison grazing on the prairie, Americana sort of way. Great place to visit; not such a great place to work—North Dakota is also full of oil and gas that ain’t gonna extract itself.

The NCAA declared the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux mascot "hostile and abusive" in 2005, and the state voted to remove it in 2012, which leaves the school without a nickname until 2015. Not to worry, though. A group of students has found a solution: Use the same mascot, but add a beer bong to the logo. There's no way this could possibly backfire.

Craig Cobb, the goofy "14% sub-Saharan African" white supremacist who dreamed of running an all-white North Dakota town for like-minded bigots, agreed to a plea deal Tuesday for menacing and terrorizing that town's inhabitants, and said he'd move out of state.

Courtesy of the Gallup-Healthways State Health Index, here are all of the 50 states, ranked from the absolute worst for your emotional and physical well-being to the most livable.

Leith, North Dakota, was once a ghost town. But recently, there's been a population boom: white supremacists have begun moving into the small town in an effort to take it over. Now, No Weather Productions is making a documentary about the town, its people, and its new tenants.

A train carrying combustable materials derailed this afternoon near Casselton, North Dakota, sending flames as high as 100 feet according to some reports. Emergency crews have issued a code red alert to residents within a two mile radius of the crash, warning them to stay inside.

[North Dakota resident George Loegering saw this large spinning ice circle in the Sheyenne River while out hunting on Saturday. Members of the National Weather Service said a combination of cold, dense air last weekend and an eddy in the river likely caused the large spinning circle of ice bits to form. Photo by George Loegering via AP]

People are strangers out here on the oil patch, and public conversation is terse and muted. You never know when an oil company manager or safety inspector or corporate spy is sniffing around. I learned after the first day in Williston, N.D., that my usual work uniform of an old sports coat and tie made me suspect. Leaving the tie at the motel helped, but not much.

Oil wells and sheet-metal buildings are hideous things, but America the Beautiful resumes as soon as you get past the last grim RV park and last signs of our shoddy civilization. The easiest way to refresh the soul is to look on the map for a big chunk of green: a national park or preserve or forest, or in the case of the Bakken, the Little Missouri National Grassland.

Boomtowns don't have to be ugly. San Francisco was built during the Gold Rush, as was Sacramento and dozens of still pretty towns in the Sierra Nevada. Virginia City, home to the Comstock Lode, quickly built up neighborhoods of ornate mansions and a main street that offered everything from Oscar Wilde lectures in the opera house to exotic prostitutes from Australia and China. But since the 1960s, when America lost its ability to see or create beauty, our endless boom and bust cycle produces nothing but garbage: garbage housing, garbage retail, garbage jobs and garbage products.

Ken Layne, Gawker's America correspondent, is inaugurating his occasional series of reports from the field with a trip to the boom-rich oil fields of North Dakota's Bakken formation, from where he will be filing dispatches all week.

The North Dakota House passed a bill this afternoon that would define life as beginning at conception, effectively moving one step closer to banning all abortion in the state without exception for rape or incest. Approved by the state Senate last month, the bill will now go to voters as a ballot initiative. This latest restrictive measure comes only a week after North Dakota legislators approved bills that would ban abortion beyond six weeks into pregnancy and ban abortion in the case of genetic abnormality, like Downs Syndrome.

North Dakota legislators want to ban abortions after as little as six weeks of pregnancy.

For this week's "Scheels Weather Kid" segment, KVLY North Dakota invited 9-year-old William Hallman of Fargo to help out Chief Meteorologist Hutch Johnson with his 5 PM weather report.

How much would you pay for a sauce if you happened to be eating a sandwich without sauce? $65? $10,000? An infinite number of dollars and promises and begs? What if the sauce was 20 years old? How much would you pay to taste the sauce of glories past?

While there are plenty of athletes who are allies to the LGBT community, homophobia in sports has not suddenly disappeared. Dan Savage shares the story of Jamie Kuntz, a college football player who was kicked off his team after kissing his boyfriend in the press box during a game.

The key rule of responsible long term financial planning is: Whenever you build a financial surplus, even for a moment, immediately blow that surplus on a plan that will also eliminate a steady source of long term income. I was kidding! That is not actually a "good" rule of financial planning. But it is a craven political rule, and isn't that what's really important?

After one week of viral stardom Marilyn Hagerty, the 85-year-old North Dakota restaurant critic famous for her polite review of the local Olive Garden, is rebelling against her new fanbase of disaffected New Yorkers. Have we pushed our beloved Marilyn too far?

The recently-opened Olive Garden in Grand Forks, N.D., is off to a great start, according to Marilyn Hagerty, longtime food critic for the Grand Forks Herald. The restaurant "is the largest and most beautiful" in town and has been patronized by visitors "from out of town as well as people who live here," Hagerty reports in yesterday's positive review.