Montana
In First Visit to Montana, Author Min Jin Lee to Give Talk at Flathead Valley Community College – Flathead Beacon
In explaining why she’ll be taking her first trip to Montana to speak at Flathead Valley Community College for an event that will be free to students of all grade levels, the celebrated novelist and writer Min Jin Lee begins to describe herself as an introvert who happens to receive lots of invitations to things.
As is the case with many introverts – people who gravitate towards quiet, solitude, and more limited social engagements – accepting invitations, and then attending big events can be a draining, exhausting experience, and so Lee said she tries to be selective.
In 2024, that has included participating in a January panel with the writers Colm Toibin and Rumaan Alam at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater in New York City to discuss the 100th anniversary of E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” being honored in February at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s 75th Anniversary Gala, and after her Kalispell talk, another talk at the University of Utah, before her public engagements subside until a May discussion at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston called “Min Jin Lee: Writing and the Korean Wave.”
A quick spin through Lee’s professional biography puts into some perspective why these invitations arrive. Her 2007 debut novel, “Free Food for Millionaires,” landed on top 10 books of the year lists for The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air and USA Today, and was a national bestseller. Her second novel, “Pachinko” was published in 2017, and again earned her accolades and nominations. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, and in addition to being a New York Times bestseller and an international bestseller translated into 35 languages, it was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, and landed on similar lists for BBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, while also appearing on best books of the year lists for NPR, PBS and CNN. As Lee told the Beacon, she recently finished writing the draft of her third novel, and is currently working on rewriting it.
Lee has also received prestigious fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. A member of the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame, and the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and the winner of the 2022 Manhae Grand Prize for Literature in South Korea, Lee is currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst College and recently served as the editor of the 2023 edition of the Best American Short Stories series.
Michael Luo, an editor for The New Yorker magazine, described her in a 2022 piece as a writer whose gift is an ability to “write sweeping, magisterial books that take on ponderous political themes – like the Korean diasporic experience, the invisibility of marginalized groups in history, the limits of assimilation — and to make their unhurried, quiet intrigues read like thrillers.”
As for why she chose to accept an invitation to come to FVCC, Lee said there were two main reasons. On the one hand, she was curious to finally see Montana and meet Montanans for the first time, and figure out just how different things might be from New York City, where she has lived for much of her life.
“I’m from New York City, I was born in Seoul, I’ve lived in Tokyo … it’s very hard to impress me with a city … I think for me Montana is very glamorous. Ohio is very glamorous to me. Wyoming is very glamorous to me, because I think, ‘Oh, I don’t know this.’” Lee said.
As someone who steeps themselves in early 19th and early 20th century American authors – something she explained as part of her ongoing study of omniscient narration – Lee said that she’s also drawn to the South, and described an appreciation for opportunities to visit places where people significant to her once lived. That has included visiting the home in Ketchum, Idaho, where Ernest Hemingway spent his last days; and also a trip to Warrensburg, Missouri, to stand in the same auditorium where her late uncle John Y. Kim, who sponsored her family’s immigration to the United States, studied as a college student at the University of Central Missouri.
But beyond her continued efforts to see and in some way understand parts of the United States with which she is less familiar, Lee emphasized that she is coming to Kalispell because she is big proponent of college education in the United States.
“It’s something that I believe in very strongly,” she said. “I thought it’d be very cool connect to that audience, in particular because very often when you hear about Montana in New York City, very often you focus on elite people who kind of fly in and fly out, and just take advantage of the nature part, but I wanted to meet people who are from Montana, who care about Montana, who feel connected enough to go to community college, and to feel a sense of mission there.”
Her talk will be about failure, struggle, why she does what she does, and writing as a craft.
“It’s what I do better than most people,” Lee said of failure. “I’m really good at humiliation. And I think if I can teach you how to feel better, I’ve done something that’s worth taking a plane trip over.”
For people who are skeptical that Lee’s talk will have relevance to those whose interests don’t lie in reading and writing, she would probably argue otherwise. While she has concerns about the future of reading, or more specifically reading deeply, as it relates to the technologically driven distractions that are so widespread in today’s world, Lee said that she has a somewhat cynical view of why reading will continue to be of importance in the world. In short, she said that in her experience, powerful people read, and read often.
“This is my little TED talk for my students, very often, which is if you want to get ahead in life, if you want to understand human motivation, if I were you, I would read the wisdom garnered from the best kinds of books that you can possibly find,” Lee said. “Because it’s all there.”
Min Jin Lee’s talk at FVCC is part of the college’s WCC Speaker Series. The event is scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m. on March 18 at the Wachholz College Center. The event is supported, in part, by the Broussard family. For more information and to get tickets, visit https://www.wachholzcollegecenter.org/Online/default.asp. Free tickets are available for students of all grade levels.
Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) is facing yet another lawsuit over allegations of unlicensed sampling — only this time, it’s centered on a video clip of the rapper’s infamous 2013 fight with paparazzi.
In a case filed Wednesday (July 15) in Los Angeles federal court, the celebrity news agency Bauer-Griffin claims that Ye, French Montana (Karim Kharbouch) and others used audio from the headline-grabbing incident in “Where They At,” released in 2024 off French’s Mac & Cheese 5.
The May 2013 video, which also features a pregnant Kim Kardashian, shows West charging at a photographer outside a Los Angeles restaurant and shouting “don’t take no photos” and a string of profanities: “All of you m*therf*ckers stop it, man!”
The clip appears prominently in the intro to Montana’s song — a use that the lawsuit calls “blatant and willful” copyright infringement.
“Given Mr. Ye’s history of numerous confrontations with paparazzi, the video was highly newsworthy,” the agency’s lawyers write in legal documents obtained and first reported by Billboard. “Listeners immediately recognized the audio sample that begins the infringing record as being copied from the video.”
Ye has been sued over a dozen times for allegedly using unlicensed samples and interpolations in his music, including a high-profile battle with Donna Summer. In May, he lost a jury trial over using an uncleared sample in an early version of the Grammy-winning “Hurricane” from Donda. He had testified at trial that he’s “very generous” about giving credit and compensation when it’s due, but that “a lot of people try to take advantage of me.”
In Wednesday’s complaint, Bauer-Griffin says the creators of “Where They At” showed no such respect to its rights in the video of the paparazzi incident, using it despite being well aware that sound recordings must be licensed when any amount is directly sampled into a song.
“In the music industry, copyrights are prevalent and well understood,” lawyers for the agency write. “Every defendant knew that they needed to have but did not have permission to use the audio sample.”
Reps for both stars did not immediately return requests for comment. The lawsuit also names as defendants producers Dem Jointz (Dwayne Abernathy Jr.) and BoogzDaBeast (Jahmal Gwin), as well Gamma, the label that released the song, and its distribution unit Vydia.
The confrontation at issue in Wednesday’s lawsuit was one of two high-profile scuffles with paparazzi that year for the rapper, who was then still known as Kanye West. Two months later, he clashed with photographer Daniel Ramos outside of LAX, resulting in a civil assault lawsuit that the star eventually settled two years later on the eve of trial.
As many celebrities have learned over the years, simply appearing in a photo or video does not give someone any legal rights to it. Ownership of such material is always retained by the creator — an inconvenient fact that has sparked lawsuits against Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa.
It’s unclear who filmed the May 2013 incident, which happened outside a Beverly Hills restaurant minutes after the star had also been filmed accidentally banging his head into a signpost while trying to avoid other photographers. But the rights to the footage have been owned by Bauer-Griffin from the beginning: When TMZ first posted it at the time, it came with a watermark crediting the agency.
“The infringing record has been widely distributed on various streaming platforms, in flagrant violation of plaintiff’s exclusive rights under copyright laws,” Bauer-Griffin’s attorneys write. “Plaintiff brings these claims to vindicate those rights.”
Governor’s Office
HELENA, Mont. – Governor Greg Gianforte today announced Montana ranks in the top ten states with the highest year-over-year job growth rates.
“Montana continues to rank as one of the best states to start or grow a business, earn a competitive wage, and secure a good-paying job,” Gov. Gianforte said. “As we continue to reform our regulatory environment to support job creators and cut taxes to give money back to the hardworking Montanans who earned it, we see the results of conservative policies at work as the Treasure State ranks in the top ten states with the strongest job growth.”
According to a report by Stat Ranker, which compared all 50 states based on year-over-year growth in total nonfarm payroll employment between February 2025 and February 2026, Montana ranked ninth in the nation for both jobs added and overall job growth adding more than 2,100 jobs over the year, representing a 0.4 percent job growth rate.
Last week, the governor attended the groundbreaking for Janicki Industries in Great Falls to celebrate the aerospace manufacturers’ investment expected to create more than 2,000 jobs over the next ten years and the ribbon cutting for Amazon’s sixth delivery station in Montana that brings the company’s total employment in the state to over 800.
Last month, the governor announced Montana was ranked in the top five states with the fastest-growing economies since 2021. The report from Visual Capitalist found that between 2021 and 2025, Montana’s GDP grew 16.1 percent while the national average in the same time period was 10.8 percent. When it comes to wage growth, Montana ranks third in the nation for fastest wage growth and is only one of two states in the nation where wage growth has outpaced inflation since 2020. The average wage earned by Montana workers reached $60,037 in 2024.
Earlier this year, Gov. Gianforte also announced Montana’s fiscal health surged into the top ten states nationally under his leadership, rising from 22nd in 2021 to 8th in 2025. Since taking office, the governor has paid off the state’s general obligation debt, making Montana debt-free in 2023 and saving Montanans $40 million over a period of two years.
Montana also consistently ranks in the top fifteen states with the lowest unemployment rates. Last month, the governor announced Montana’s unemployment rate ticked down to 3.4 percent in May, lower than the national unemployment rate which remained at 4.3 percent.
The full Stat Ranker report can be read here.
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