Solar eclipses are back in the news, what with Monday’s solar event across much of the eastern United States. (Out here, we’ll see about a 20% partial eclipse, but remember — don’t look at the sun!) It seems hard to believe that nearly seven years have gone by since Oregon was in the path of totality, but I imagine many of us still have vivid memories of that August 2017 event (even if you had to watch it, as I did, from the parking lot of what was then the Gazette-Times). This piece from The New York Times from astrophysicist Ryan Milligan captures the experience better than anything else I’ve read.

In a country (and a state) that has legitimate worries about the rural-urban division, the controversial new book “White Rural Rage” has struck a nerve. The authors, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, argue that white rural voters pose a threat to American democracy because of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, violent predilections and vulnerability to authoritarianism. But in this piece from The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor at Bates College, maintains that the book not only misinterprets its source data, it misses the real threat: white urban and suburban rage.

Speaking of the urban-rural divide, one of the things I’ve learned from working for Eastern Oregon newspapers is that the public perception of wolves changes dramatically once you get into the eastern part of the state. Conflicts between wolves and Eastern Oregon cattle ranchers appear to be on the rise, and U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz, who represents a huge swath of rural Oregon, called wolves “cold killers” at a public session in Pendleton earlier this week. But, as this story from High County News reports, researchers think drones could play a role in hazing wolves away from cattle.

In this new piece in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson takes note of the decline in churchgoing in the United States and links it to our increasing inability to form meaningful community.

In his piece, Thompson notes that many folks who used to attend churches now spend their Sunday mornings on their smartphones. So I read this story from the Nieman Lab with interest: It’s about how a new emailed newsletter from The Guardian has become the news organization’s fastest-growing email offering ever. The newsletter, called, “Reclaim Your Brain,” is about ways to reshape your smartphone habits: “You have one life,” says an article promoting the newsletter. “Do you really want to spend it looking it your phone?”

The Nieman Lab has a story about a new parody computer game that critiques The New York Times’ coverage of Gaza. The game asks readers to build the front page of the paper each day, choosing stories and headlines and deciding where they’re placed on the front page. The game places an emphasis on coverage of the war in Gaza, and decisions made by the player have consequences for the paper’s profitability and reputation among key interest groups.

Of course, covering the war in Gaza is more than just a game: The Committee to Project Journalists reports that some 95 journalists and media workers covering the war were confirmed dead by late March. That’s the highest number of deaths in one conflict zone over a six-month period since the committee started keeping data in 1992..

You might have noticed the story out of Eugene this week in which a fellow entering a convenience store couldn’t help but notice that a runaway 4-foot circular saw blade was rolling toward him at high speed. The man, Shane Reimche, froze for a moment and then (wisely) decided his best bet would be to get into the store, close the door behind him and hope that the door would stop the blade. (The blade embedded itself in the store.) The whole incident plays out in about five seconds. It’s made national news, and Reimche says he’s now suffering panic attacks — which, frankly, I understand after watching the video a couple of times. This Oregonian/OregonLive story says Reimche’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe account to help him; as of midweek, the story says, it had not attracted any donors. Maybe Stephen Colbert can cough up a few bucks.

Is it just me, or does it seem to you as well that a lot of weird stuff has been happening this year in Oregon? Runaway saw blades, door panels popping off airplanes, ice storms, a legislative session that featured bipartisan compromises, the unraveling of the Pac-12 Conference, the City Council trying to expel a member for an alleged violation of the city charter — I’m as much a fan of keeping Oregon weird as the next person, but would it be asking too much for a couple of relatively normal weeks?

I’m a little late getting to Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (in fact, I just watched the first episode, the uproarious “pants tent” episode, just last week), so it might take me a while to get to the series finale, set to air Sunday on HBO. But I am intrigued by the increasing number of reports suggesting that David, a co-creator of “Seinfeld,” may use the “Enthusiasm” finale in part to pay homage to his much-maligned “Seinfeld” finale, in which the four primary characters were convicted (and jailed) on charges that they essentially were terrible people. Does “Curb” end its run with its (lightly fictionalized) Larry David in jail? And would that be a surprise for a series in which David actually died at the end of the fifth season but was returned to Earth by two annoyed angels?

Before wrapping up this weekend, I wanted to call your attention to this lovely essay by Ed Yong, the terrific science writer, about how he’s fallen hard for birding. The essay ran in The New York Times, and I would have shared it last week, but I had run out of my monthly allotment of “gift” links from the Times. Yong has left the staff of The Atlantic and has started a newsletter (seems like everybody has one); this particular edition of his newsletter, “The Ed’s Up,” features more about birding. Yong is a particular hero of mine because he had the wit to name his corgi “Typo,” the very best name possible for a journalist’s pet — and the name of our next cat, assuming that I can persuade Diane.

That’s it for this weekend. We’ll connect again next weekend.