
Michael Finlay: Reading is crucial to future academic success
As schools across our community prepare to head into what we all hope is a sunshine-filled summer, Start Making A Reader Today is celebrating the end of its 26th year fostering a love of books and reading ...
Jeb Bladine: Complex legal web separates families
Americans are trapped in webs of complex laws — laws interpreted by intricate court decisions, implemented through mazes of rules and frequently subject to political and personal whims of enforcement. It’s ...
Chad Marlow: Fate of net neutrality on the line
On June 11, net neutrality protections ceased to exist.
This means your internet service provider is now able to engage in content-based discrimination. Internet content it favors for political or financial reasons can be delivered at top speeds, while content it disfavors is slowed or locked.
Jeb Bladine: Life is a scam, or so it seems
Life is a scam. Overstatement? Perhaps. But today, on a massive scale, criminals continuously target human emotions and weaknesses in their efforts to steal from us. They use threats, exploit fears, ...
Emily Merchant: Citizenship question risks skewing census
By EMILY KLANCHER MERCHANTUniverity of California at DavisThe 2020 U.S. Census is still two years away, but demographers and civil rights activists are already expressing doubt about the validity of the ...

Catharine Wang: DNA testing carries hidden downside
Aggressive marketing techniques and the popularity of bestowing recreational ancestry tests as gifts have led more consumers than ever to the world of personal genetic testing. The recent arrest of a ...

Heather Richards: Alpine, Atticus just taste of things to come
On July 23, 2013, the McMinnville City Council adopted the city’s first urban renewal plan. After years of engagement, dialogue, visioning and evaluation, the plan was designed to guide public investment ...
Jeb Bladine: Medicare ‘A’ needs a sense of urgency
Human nature features some disruptive tendencies. One is a general inability to identify, acknowledge and act to prevent pending financial catastrophes. Two out of three just isn’t good enough. Oregonians, ...
Jeb Bladine: Memories from a half-century ago
Tuesday, it will have been exactly 50 years since Bobby Kennedy was assassinated at a presidential campaign appearance in California. I don’t remember where I was when I heard the news, but for me, ...

Jesse James Maxwell: Finding the light
I was born Jesse James Maxwell on July 31, 1984. The site of the hospital is now occupied by a Walgreens drug store. I was ushered into a low-income, single-parent household, and that presented extreme ...
Jeb Bladine: Police didn't want assault publicized
McMinnville Police Department clearly did not want to see public reports about the violent attack May 12 that sent a McMinnville woman to intensive care at Oregon Health & Science University.Social ...

Frederic Lemieux: Myths of mass shootings exposed
At least 10 students were killed on May 18 at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. Another in a long line of mass school shootings erupting in America, a disgruntled student opened fire with a shotgun and ...

Tom Henderson: Quiet thoughts from a library in Wales
Ronald Reagan frequently referred to America as a shining city on a hill. He was wrong. At least he misinterpreted what Puritan leader John Winthrop meant in his 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian ...
Jeb Bladine: SEC plea bargain back under wraps?
Confused by the latest Evergreen-related kerfuffle? Well, get in line. We have a stack of legal documents, along with access to multiple sources and numerous notes, but we don’t have the first clue ...
Jeremy Shapiro: Science deniers fail to appreciate complexities
Currently, there are three important issues on which consensus has been reached in the scientific community, but not in the community at large: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.