Think fast, Weekend Reader readers: Your cat and a human stranger are both drowning, but you can only save one. Which one would you save? The philosopher who writes The Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine says there is a correct answer, and we’ll get to that in a bit.

But first:

Grants Pass is at the center of what observers call the most significant U.S. legal case addressing homelessness in decades. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case, Johnson v. Grants Pass, on Monday morning. At stake in the case is a controversial decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that essentially barred cities from punishing people from sleeping in public when they have no alternative shelter. Legal experts on both sides expect the high court to roll back the 9th Circuit’s ruling in the Grants Pass case and a similar case from Boise, but the impact of its ruling may be muffled in Oregon, which passed a state law allowing cities to enact “objectively reasonable” restrictions as to time, place and manner of public camping and requires at least 72 hours of advance notice before clearing an encampment. Maxine Bernstein of The Oregonian/OregonLive has this well-done story previewing the Monday arguments.

Today is April 20, so I assume that means you’ve blocked off a bit of time precisely at 4:20 p.m. to smoke a joint in celebration of marijuana’s high holy day or maybe just pop in an edible. But if you’re wondering how April 20 became associated with pot, this Associated Press story has you covered, sort of. You may not be surprised to learn that there’s a connection to The Grateful Dead.

In a possibly related story, Saturday also is Record Store Day, in which stores across the nation celebrate the survival of actual records — by which I mean vinyl albums — by selling a bunch of them. If you haven’t noticed, vinyl records have been staging a big comeback for the last two decades, with sales increasing year over year to the point where they’re a $1.7 billion business. And music listeners who prefer physical copies of their albums — which is to say, not streaming — vastly prefer records. Special releases this year include music from Paramore, Pearl Jam, Fleetwood Mac and the singer Laufey. And it’s probably not a coincidence that Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” released on Friday, also is available on vinyl. It all makes me want to try to find where my old turntable has been stashed in my garage.

One of the reasons why it takes me so long to post the Weekend Reader every Saturday is that many of the stories or links I examine often lead to other stories or links that become unexpected discoveries — which is, I guess, more or less the point of the Reader. My job is to follow these links myself so you don’t have to, saving you precious hours. No need to thank me.

A case in point this week: I read with interest this commentary in The New York Times about the culture war on high school theater — an obvious extension, if you think about it, of the battles raging against libraries. The piece by James Shapiro is well worth reading. But then I clicked on a link in the story to learn more about an effort called Arts for Everybody, which plans to debut 18 participatory arts projects around the nation on the same day, July 27, 2024 (sadly, none of them is planned for Oregon). Arts for Everybody, which makes the case that art is an essential part of thriving communities (no argument here), is a project of an organization called One Nation One Project, which is of interest to Oregonians in part because, it turns out, Nataki Garrett, the former artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is the organization’s co-artistic director.

Speaking of the arts — and as an editor who used to write and buy for local freelancers to review movies for my newspaper in Missoula — I was unexpectedly moved by this long piece about the death of the local movie reviewer in Ithaca, New York — and the general demise of local movie coverage in newspapers across the United States.

Moving onto sports for a moment: If you’re curious about the financial picture behind college athletics — and those of us watching the implosion of the Pac-12 Conference have a particular interest in that topic — Jon Wilner, the top Pac-12 reporter in the country, has this story examining the numbers at 11 of the conference’s 12 schools. (Wilner has numbers for Stanford, a private university, but USC does not release its numbers.) Wilner found that for the 2022-23 fiscal year, the athletic departments for these 11 schools ran a combined deficit of about $300 million. Only Oregon actually turned a profit. That sounds bad — and it is — but Wilner provides important context in this even-handed story.

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at New York University and also writes The Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine, in which he answers ethics questions from readers. Recently, a reader wrote about a conversation she and her boyfriend were having in which they were talking about protecting human life; the boyfriend, possibly distracted because the conversation didn’t have anything to do with sports, said he didn’t think human life was necessarily worth more than any other kind of life — and then added this unfortunate example: If one of their cats were drowning next to a human stranger (who also was drowning), and he could only rescue one, he said, he would rescue the cat. “Is this morally wrong?” the reader asked. Appiah, who apparently is not a cat, answered: The boyfriend is wrong — but quickly added, “I’m saying that your boyfriend is wrong; I’m not saying that he’s rotten.”

As any cat person knows, though, this is kind of a trick question: With just a few exceptions, no self-respecting cat is going to be anywhere near a swimming pool. Besides, cats can swim — most of them just don’t like to.

That’s it for this weekend. I see that the rain has returned. The cat won’t like that.

See you next weekend.