Think Out Loud

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted Friday morning to change its recommendation on hepatitis B vaccines for newborns. 

For more than three decades, the agency has recommended that all infants receive a hepatitis B vaccine, regardless of their risk status. Now, the vaccine will only be recommended for infants born to mothers who test positive f...

Since 1999, there have been more than 430 school shootings across the nation. Oregon alone has had eight incidents since 2008, according to CNN. With school shootings being a concern for parents, teachers and students, a new industry around school safety has emerged. Estimated to be worth $4 billion, school shooting preparedness and security is projected to continue to grow. From panic buttons and ...

Jeanne Maddox Peterson was 13 years old when she began teaching dance lessons out of her family’s living room in Astoria.  

That was 75 years ago. Today, at the age of 89, Peterson is still teaching students at Maddox Dance Studio, which is now located in Warrenton and offers classes ranging from ballet to tap, hip-hop to acrobatic dance. As first reported by The...

Law enforcement agencies across Oregon and Washington use automated license plate readers to identify vehicles and manage traffic. Many of those cameras are run by a company called Flock Safety, which has been criticized for sharing data with immigration officials. A new study from the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights f...

The Ashland Sarcasm Festival is a three-day comedy festival that kicks off this Friday in Ashland. Held in various venues across Ashland, from local bars to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Bowmer Theater, the inaugural festival aims to make the Southern Oregon city a destination for comics on the touring circuit in a place more famous for soliloquies than stand-up. 

Paul Smith, dean of the Linfield University School of Nursing in Portland, was recently appointed chair-elect of the National League for Nursing. Smith is the first male to ever be elected to the post in the organization’s 132 years. 

The National League for Nursing is the oldest nursing organization in the U.S., aiming to create a standardized nursing curriculum sinc...

A recently published paper led by an Oregon State University researcher suggests that installing floating solar panels on top of existing reservoirs could have a variety of positive results. Those include cooling the solar panels, allowing for greater energy generation from those panels, and preventing the water in shallower reservoirs from warming to temperatures that are challenging for fish and ...

 The 2024 Lonerock Fire burned over 137,000 acres in Gilliam County, much of it rangeland. Ranchers whose lands were destroyed faced a common yet costly hurdle to wildfire recovery: new fencing. According to the Gilliam County Soil and Water Conservation District, to replace about 300 miles of fence that had burned in the fire would have ...

Nutrition Inside is a Portland nonprofit that launched last year to improve the quality of food for adults in custody in Oregon prisons. It delivers between 500 and 3,000 pounds of surplus food obtained from farms and hunger-fighting charities to correctional facilities across Oregon each week. The organization is volunteer-based and led by a ...

 The Portland band Møtrik is known for laser lights and fog machines and a driving 4/4 beat. The five piece band pumps out playful, danceable krautrock and has just released its fourth full length album. We talk to Erik Golts, Jonah Nolde, Dave Fulton, Cord Amato and Lee Ritter about their new album “Earth.”

Data from the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit which advocates for criminal justice reforms, shows that Native American children in Washington are nearly five times more likely on average to be incarcerated than their white peers. Furthermore, Native American children are less likely to receive a second chance once they are in juvenile court, a...

This week the board of Prosper Portland votes to finalize a settlement for more than 20 people whose homes and businesses were destroyed in the name of urban renewal from the 1950s through the ’70s. The group of Black Portlanders fought for years to get to this point, and eventually filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the city of Portland, Emanuel Legacy Medical Center and Prosper Portland conspired to d...

Last week, the iconic American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns released his latest series: a six part, 12 hour film on the American revolution. The film follows dozens of figures from various backgrounds, allowing viewers to experience the war through the memories of the men and women who lived through it. Earlier this year, Burns was in Portl...

Indigenous author, botanist and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer is best known for her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which was published in 2013 and is about the reciprocal relationships between humans and the land. Her first book, “Gathering Moss,” was published a decade earlier by Oregon State University Press. We spoke to Kimmerer on May 17, 2024 when she was in Corvallis to accept Oregon ...

The U.S. Constitution likely would not have been ratified in 1788 without Article 5, which allowed for amendment. Many of the original founders championed the idea that the document would need to change as the country changed. As historian Jill Lepore points out in her newest book most of the 27 amendments to the constitution have happened just after times of war or conflict, and after 33 years wit...

Stacey Abrams has published more than a dozen books over the last 25 years. Those include thrillers, romance novels, children’s books and political memoirs and manifestos. That would be a full career for most people, but Stacey Abrams seems to have more energy than most people.

While she has always been a writer, she has also been a tax attorney, a Georgia state lawmaker, ...

A new report from Central City Concern highlights concerns around the “housing first” model the Homeless Services Department uses for prioritizing who gets housing. The nonprofit notes that affordable housing providers have faced a number of challenges that are unsustainable and is pushing to add another model to the mix: engaged social housing. Andy Mendenhall is the CEO and president of Central Ci...

Last week, the Vancouver City Council unanimously adopted a new flag for the city. The flag will be hoisted above city hall for the first time during a flag-raising ceremony on Nov. 28. 

The new flag is a culmination of a months-long process that launched this spring to replace the city’s old flag that has flown for more than three decades, but one that some residents...