It’s Saturday morning as I write this, and the skies outside are a familiar shade of gray, with a tinge of red — and there’s a sprinkling of ash on the cars, symptoms of the wildfires burning throughout the region. Oregon fire officials are very concerned about the weekend prospects, with red-flag fire-weather warnings posted throughout western Oregon, including the Corvallis area, and evacuations in effect in some Oregon locations.

So let’s kick off this edition of the Weekend Reader with a handful of links to help you track the state’s wildfires.

The Oregonian/OregonLive has a fire map that also shows evacuation zones and areas that have experienced or may experience power shutoffs, as utilities work to try to limit additional fire starts. It looks as if the map is outside the paper’s paywall, which is smart thinking by Oregonian editors.

For basic tracking of fires, however, I prefer the InciWeb incident information systems map put together by the National Wildfire Coodinating Group, in part because it’s more frequently updated and somewhat easier to use if you’re looking for information about a specific fire. As of Saturday morning, the big fire in western Oregon is Cedar Creek, east of Oakridge, at about 51,814 acres, which has prompted evacuations in Lane and Deschutes counties. Three smaller fires are burning, but are pretty well contained, south of Cedar Creek. The Rum Creek fire, at 21,347 acres, is burning along the Rogue River. The biggest fire in the state is Double Creek, at about 147,852 acres, which has prompted evacuations in Imnaha. The Oregonian reported that a new fire broke out Friday night at Milo McIver State Park in Clackamas County, prompting some evacuations, but that firefighters had the blaze pretty under control by Saturday morning.

Most any of those fires could be pouring smoke into the mid-valley, so here’s a link to a useful government site that monitors local air quality. (And, yes, I know that I just used the word “useful” and “government” in the same sentence.) Here’s a link to a map that suggests, as of about 10:30 a.m. Saturday, that Corvallis and surrounding areas have “moderate” air quality. And here’s a recent piece from the Environmental Protection Agency about the health risks from wildfire smoke, drawing on a considerable amount of research into the issue.

Finally, of course, you all have weather apps on your phone, but here’s the link I use to access the National Weather Service’s website — which you can personalize with your location. But look: There’s a chance of “patchy drizzle” late Sunday night! And high temperatures starting Monday are expected to be in the 70s.

Cooler and potentially wetter conditions will be welcomed by firefighters. I understand that. But yet, I find myself increasingly blue as the end of the summer approaches. (This is definitely the minority opinion in my household, which is filled with fans of autumn.) Nevertheless, It bothers me, for example, that the sun sets before 8 p.m. these days. Maybe it’s the prospect of darker days ahead that I’m dreading. Maybe it’s just regret that I failed, once again, to spend as much time on my deck this summer as I should have. In any event, here’s a New York Times article about how to deal with the end-of-summer blues. (A subscription is required, but as is the case with all Times articles, I can “gift” a certain number of stories each month to Weekend Reader, um, readers. Just drop a comment below if you want me to share the link.)

Turning away from wildfires and into the fiery hellscape that is U.S. politics, three stories caught my eye this week:

Here’s news that isn’t really a surprise, but it’s still worth considering as we head into the general election season: Americans think they know more about politics than they really do — and this political overconfidence is yet another problem facing democracy in the United States. Ian Anson, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, explains his research on this topic and explores remedies in this piece he wrote for The Conversation website.

Nonaffiliated voters — that is, voters who choose not to align themselves with any political party — recently became the largest bloc of registered voters in Oregon and now enjoy even a slight edge over Democratic voters. But Randy Stapilus, a longtime Oregon journalist who frequently writes commentaries for the Oregon Capital Chronicle, explains why this might not be as big of a deal as you think. (Full disclosure: Not only am I a nonaffiliated voter, I occasionally contribute to the Capital Chronicle.)

And here’s something else you can file under “Not a Surprise, But Still Interesting:” The Pew Research Center reports that the number of Americans holding a positive view of the U.S. Supreme Court has declined dramatically since the court’s ruling in the Dobbs abortion case. Most of the decline has been among Democrats, Pew reports.

A couple of notes about college athletics: An Associated Press story examined which college athletes are cashing in, big time, with the NCAA’s new “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL) rules. Here’s a spoiler: If you’re the quarterback for the Ohio State Buckeyes, you’re doing very well indeed. If you’re on the golf team at the University of Montana, maybe not so much.

Speaking of college sports, Jon Wilner — the nation’s leading Pac-12 Conference reporter — has started another series about the conference realignment that started just a couple of months ago with USC and UCLA announcing plans to depart for the Big Ten. Wilner charts out a variety of possible scenarios for the Pac-12’s future, but notes that the timing of the next seismic shock is uncertain, and that the expansion of the College Football Playoff tosses another unknown factor into the equation. But he suspects that by the 2030s, the Big Ten will have at least 20 teams and that eventually, “the Pac-12, ACC and Big 12 will either cease to exist or become unrecognizable versions of their current selves.” One possibility: Oregon State and Washington State end up in the Mountain West Conference. Wilner writes for the Mercury News, but his column is picked up by The Oregonian and is available only to Oregonian subscribers.

The New York Times had a couple of stories this past week that offered slight rays of environmental hope: First, as the water crisis surrounding the Colorado River mounts, Times journalists journeyed to Washington state’s Yakima Valley, to see if a water pact hammered out there a decade ago could offer answers for the Colorado. The Colorado is a much bigger fish, so to speak, than the Yakima — but the precepts at the heart of the Washington deal might be the starting points for a Colorado solution.

The Times also had a story this week about a Nevada rancher who has declared a truce with beavers — it helps if you stop dynamiting their dams — and now believes that the creatures, nature’s top environmental engineers, have a potentially big role to play as “furry weapons of climate resilence.” (Again, these Times stories require a subscription, but if you act quickly, I can send you a free link.)

Merriam-Webster reports that it has added 370 new words or phrases to its dictionary, words that reflect these changing times but also have met the test of time to some extent. Among the newcomers: “dumbphone,” which means exactly what you think; “greenwash;” “atmospheric river:” “virtue signaling” (hello, Corvallis!) and the quite wonderful “dawn chorus,” defined as “the singing of wild birds that closely precedes and follows sunrise especially in spring and summer.”

Now, I shouldn’t make fun of this — goodness knows I’ve made mistakes on my website and big gaffes during my career at newspapers, and the truth is that Labor Day can be a slow news day. But I couldn’t help notice that the news seemed especially slow in the emailed newsletter that The Oregonian/OregonLive sent out Monday morning.

That’s it for this weekend. Stay cool out there, and remember — “patchy drizzle” might be on the way.