Jade Carey, the Oregon State University gymnast who won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics as part of the U.S. gymnastic team and a bronze in the vault, had good news for OSU after returning from the Olympics: She’s returning to OSU for her senior season. Les Gehrett, the ridiculously hard-working sports editor at the Gazette-Times, had the story.

This is particularly welcome coming after a year in which OSU athletics were brutalized by transfer portal departures, which made me wonder: Is there a transfer portal for gymnastics? The answer is, yes, of course, but it closed earlier this year. Now, I know what question you’re going to ask next: Which college gymnastics teams were the big winners in the transfer portal? I can’t say — but I can refer you to this piece from the experts at a web publication called College Gym News.

Speaking of Carey: College Gym News recently ranked the 10 greatest Olympic performances by collegiate athletes, and Carey’s gold medal-winning performance in the floor exercise in 2021’s Tokyo Games topped the list.

While we await a decision from a federal judge on the legal battle to oust Charlyn Ellis from the Corvallis City Council, Ellis has confirmed that she’s running for reelection to her Ward 5 seat. She is currently unopposed (I would guess that she’s likely to remain unopposed), and the deadline for candidates to file is Aug. 27. In this story from the G-T’s Cody Mann, Ellis suggests that Corvallis voters may want to quiz council candidates as to whether they think the Ellis affair has been a good use of the city’s time and taxpayers’ money. And when the candidate says something like “Well, I can’t comment on this because it’s in the courts,” consider replying: “I’m not asking you to say anything about the merits of the case. Has it been a good use of city time and taxpayer money?”

(By the way, this might be the first occasion in history when a G-T reporter swung by one of the Government Comment Corners, held Saturdays at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library; they usually are news-free affairs. Nice work, Mr. Mann.)

The investment company that bought Les Schwab Tire Centers from Schwab’s descendants four years ago has put the company up for sale, Mike Rogoway of The Oregonian/OregonLive reports. The selling price: $7 billion. The company has 541 shops in 13 Western states and employs about 7,000 workers.

Rogoway also had an excellent piece outlining the recent woes at Oregon economic mainstays Nike and Intel — and how those troubles could affect Oregon’s economy. Both companies say, despite layoffs and other cutbacks, that they’re still committed to Oregon. But, as Rogoway writes, each company “has made strategic missteps, failing to keep up with changing dynamics in their industries.” All I know about Nike these days is that I can’t buy Nike running shoes any more at Five Star Sports because Nike doesn’t appear to be working well these days with smaller outlets — stores that were among the company’s biggest boosters back in the day.

Here’s your long read for this weekend: It’s a guest essay in The New York Times by Jeff Chang about breakdancing, which is an Olympic sport this year in the Paris Games. Chang describes how breakdancing, an American invention, has been more heartily embraced by other countries — in particular, France, which is the second biggest market in the world for hip-hop. (Breakdancing will not be an Olympic sport in the 2028 Los Angeles Games; as Chang explains, each host country gets to submit additional sports to be part of the games. Los Angeles organizers opted for squash and, um, flag football but passed on breakdancing.)

Nicholas Kristof, that globe-trotting columnist for the Times and erstwhile Oregon resident, has a new column in which he rolls out some of his battle-tested tips for travel. It’s an engaging read, but — despite Kristof’s call to travel to places off the beaten path — I’m not quite convinced I want to go to a place where it’s a good idea to carry a decoy wallet. (To be fair, if you follow Kristof’s tips, all your important stuff won’t be in a wallet at all.)

If you’re thinking that this session of Congress has been unusually unproductive, you’re right. Jennifer Shutt of States Newsroom reports that the 118th Congress thus far has placed just 78 public laws on the books — and with lawmakers due to return for just three weeks in September before Election Day and a five-week lame-duck session after the election, that number isn’t likely to grow much. By contrast, the 117th Congress passed more than 360 measures.

A pair of interesting new studies has disheartening news for fact-checkers — which is, after all, one of the things journalists do. Two studies by a pair of California academics found that “people generally trust journalists when they confirm claims to be true but are more distrusting when journalists correct false claims.” When you think about it, this makes sense: Who likes the guy at the party who keeps correcting everything you say? One suggestion from the researchers is that journalists emphasize transparency and be specific about how they determined that a claim is false. Where that strategy might break down, though, is on those occasions when journalists are confronted with a sea of falsehoods — how do you decide which false claims to confront?

Finally this week: Aaron Pelczar, a reporter at a newspaper in Cody, Wyoming, has resigned after a reporter at another newspaper discovered that Pelczar was using AI to generate quotes that sometimes sounded accurate, but were not what the sources actually said. A big tip-off came when one of Pelczar’s stories ended with this odd sentence: “This structure ensures that the most critical information is presented first, making it easier for readers to grasp the main points quickly,” which is the sort of thing you would expect an AI program to add when someone — say, a reporter — asks it to write a preview story about a parade in an inverted-pyramid style.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back next week with a bunch of new stories suggested by my AI overlords.