There’s no point in burying the lead: This week’s entire Weekly Reader is building up to this headline: “Raccoon goes on drunken rampage in Virginia liquor store and passes out on bathroom floor.” Can’t wait? The link is near the bottom.

This really isn’t a surprise, but now it’s official: Gov. Tina Kotek is running for a second term. Her likely opponent on the Republican side is state Sen. Christine Drazan, although another GOP candidate, former Portland Trail Blazer Chris Dudley, is considering the race. (A third GOP candidate, Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell, also is in the race, but is considered a longshot.) You have to consider Kotek the front-runner in Democratic Oregon, but she could be vulnerable: Many people don’t seem to like her very much, and she narrrowly beat Drazan in 2022 in a race that featured a third candidate, Betsy Johnson.

How did the U.S. Supreme Court come to love political gerrymandering? Adam Liptak at The New York Times explains all.

It seems increasingly likely that the subsidies that make Affordable Care Act coverage, well, affordable for millions of Americans will expire at the end of the year. This will have a real impact on people who no longer can afford health insurance. Will it have a real political impact? That’s harder to know. If you’re just tuning into this debate, this Atlantic article by Toluse Olorunnipa is an excellent place to begin.

The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have chosen “rage bait” as their word of the year. Leaving aside the fact that this word of the year actually is two words, this seems like a particularly apt choice for the moment, as The Atlantic’s Amogh Dimri argues.

Well, now that Donald Trump has won the first FIFA Peace Award — that’s right; the notoriously corrupt and crony-ridden organization that governs World Cup soccer has awarded a peace prize to Donald Trump — it’s almost certainly just a matter of time before the Nobel folks come calling.

It’s never too early to start thinking about the winners of the Academy Awards. Jake Coyle of The Associated Press says the early front-runner for best picture honors is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” The strongest competition, though, might come from Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” — although we still have a few award-bait flicks waiting in the wings, most notably Timothee Chalamet’s “Marty Supreme.” If “One Battle After Another” does end up with the top award on Oscar night — and it’s notoriously hard to remain the front-runner through the lengthy Oscar campaign — Coyle notes that it will be one of the few best picture winners to lose money in its theatrical run.

Speaking of movies, Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s prize-winning novel, is built around the conceit that Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” as a way to deal with the death of his son, Hamnet, Writing in The Atlantic, James Shapiro argues that the the case for that conceit is pretty thin — but that doesn’t stop the book (or the film) from being moving works of art.

Scott Rueck, the head coach of the Oregon State University women’s basketball team, took his team down to Eugene this week for what now amounts to a nonconference game against former Pac-12 Conference foe Oregon. The Ducks won easily, 96-73, in a game that was not particularly competitive and that demonstrated the talent gap between the two teams — one of which, Oregon, plays in the a major conference (the Big 10) while the Beavers moved to the temporary shelter of the West Coast Conference before next season’s launch of a revamped Pac-12. After the game, Rueck said if he had his druthers, the Beavers wouldn’t be playing the Ducks, at least not for the next few years. “Let’s get our bearings back, and then let’s talk about re-upping” the rivalry games, he said.  That makes sense to me: I have faith that Rueck has the skills to take a team deep into the NCAA tournament, but I also don’t see the point of playing these rivalry games just for the sake of preserving the rivalry. And let’s get honest: The revamped Pac-12 will not be joining the list of Power Four conferences.

If you’ve been following the carousel of head coaching jobs in college football — well, you’ve probably been dizzy now for a month or so. The latest turn: Washington State coach Jimmy Rogers, fresh off a 6-6 season (but who lost by a combined nine points to three ranked teams) is headed to Iowa State, to replace a coach who left for Penn State. Now, you may be thinking, gosh, that’s another nasty break for the poor Cougars, isolated up there in the lonely Palouse. But Jon Wilner, the ace sportswriter for the Bay Area Sports Group, outlines the ways in which this could rebound to WSU’s benefit.

A new study from the Pew Research Center confirms what many journalists already know: Young adults — that is, those adults under 30 — follow the news less regularly than any other age group. And they’re much more likely to get their news (and trust it more) from social media. The study also has interesting tidbits about how young adults define journalists.

OK, here it is: The AP’s report on that drunken raccoon in Virginia. I can only hope that the editor who wrote that headline — “Raccoon goes on drunken rampage in Virginia liquor store and passes out on bathroom floor” — understands that it will never get better.

Speaking of drunken animals, you yourself may want to consider swinging by a liquor store for provisions as the mid-valley gets ready for another atmospheric river. In fact, our friends at the National Weather Service have much of western Oregon — including Benton County — under a flood watch starting Sunday night and running through Thursday. It’s all part of what forecasters called a “moderate level atmospheric river.” While the forecasts of flooding may not pan out next week, it’s still a good bet that we’ll be getting wet.

That’s it for this weekend. Stay dry out there, and we’ll gather next weekend.