Let’s start this weekend with breaking news: The Associated Press reports that the man known as the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, has died at the age of 81 in federal prison. Click here to read the AP’s story.

That’ll be big news in Lincoln, Montana — about 80 miles east of Missoula — where Kaczynski was arrested and where my parents lived for decades. Kaczynski, of course, was the Harvard-educated mathematician who, AP reports, “retreated to a dingy shack in the Montana wilderness and ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others.” That’s mostly correct. The shack certainly was dingy, but it was just out of town in Lincoln — although I can see why an urban reporter might confuse Lincoln’s outskirts with the wilderness. (To be fair, actual designated wilderness areas are nearby.)

My mother, Chris McInally, remembered the occasional encounter with Kaczynski — at the library (yes, Lincoln has a very pleasant library) or at D&D Foodtown Grocery. Her recollections, which jibe with those of others in town, is that he certainly seemed to be an odd duck, but not of the sort that you might automatically think, “Well, this guy could be a crazed bomber.”

On the day Kaczynski was arrested in April 1996, I was working at the Missoulian, but I wasn’t in the office that day. Since my wife, Diane, is a certified public accountant, she was in the heart of tax season, and I typically took the first two weeks of April off to look after our daughters (who were young at the time). That was non-negotiable. But I kept in touch with the office as the paper sent reporters to Lincoln, which was — as you might imagine — overrun with journalists who had parachuted in. Here’s one detail I remember from that event, which was relayed to me by Ginny Merriam, an outstanding Missoulian reporter who raced to Lincoln as soon as the news broke: Cell service at the time in Lincoln was extremely spotty — but there was apparently one location in town where you could pick up a signal. There was, Ginny remembers, considerable jostling for that single spot.

One last Unabomber note: A few years back, Donald Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post, spoke at a convention of the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, and remembered the paper’s agonizing deliberations in September 1995 about whether to publish Kaczynski’s 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” In the work, Kaczynski argued that modern society and technology were leading to a sense of powerlessness and alienation. (Boy, how wrong was he about that, eh?)

In any event, Graham’s Post and The New York Times both swallowed hard and decided to publish it. And it led to Kaczynski’s arrest: His brother, David, recognized the tone of the treatise and tipped off the FBI.

Elsewhere in journalism, the week’s big news was the not-unexpected ouster of Chris Licht as the head of CNN. Licht, a veteran producer of morning television and, most recently, the executive producer of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” always seemed like an unusual choice for the CNN job — and he didn’t help his case with a series of high-profile blunders, most recently the town hall event with Donald Trump. Tom Jones, in a Poynter Institute story about Licht’s firing, argued that a recent profile in The Atlantic might have been the last straw. Here’s a link to The Atlantic story, but, as I read it, it struck me more as a story about a guy asking some fundamental questions about journalism and cable news and trying to figure out some answers. (The Atlantic story, which is available only to subscribers, does have a juicy detail about how Colbert and others urged Licht not to take the CNN job.)

Here’s an update from Poynter about this week’s one-day strike by Gannett newsroom employees in about two dozen of the company’s newsrooms. It’s not clear whether the strike extended to the Eugene Register-Guard or the Salem Statesman Journal, the company’s two newspapers in Oregon — but, considering the cutbacks the company has instituted in those two newsrooms, I’m not sure that readers would notice that one particular edition was even lighter on local news than usual.

Speaking of Donald Trump, I understand that fellow has been in the news again this week. If you’ve been hearing about how the indictment in the classified-documents case is a classic example of a readable indictment and have been wondering what that might look like, take a look for yourself in this Times effort, which reproduces and annotates the document. (Times stories are available to subscribers only, but I can send you a free “gift” link to any Times story that I mention in the Weekend Reader. Just send me an email or post a comment below.)

I swear I’m not on Nicholas Kristof’s payroll — at least not yet — but he keeps churning out worthy opinion pieces for the Times. For his new column, he talks to philosopher Peter Singer about an updated edition of Singer’s seminal 1975 book “Animal Liberation.” Since then, Kristof notes, the animal-rights movement has marked real progress — and, to his credit, the column includes Kristof’s own ambivalence about eating meat.

Here in Oregon, the walkout by Republican state senators now is in its second month. But the word is that negotiations to end the standoff are intensifying as June 25, the day the legislative session must end, draws closer. Ben Botkin of the Oregon Capital Chronicle writes that bills regarding gun control and abortion and transgender care continue to be stumbling blocks.

Kristi Turnquist of The Oregonian/OregonLive has compiled a fun list of 10 movies you probably didn’t know were at least partially filmed in Oregon. The reason you probably didn’t know that these movies have an Oregon connection is because you probably have never heard of these movies (well, maybe “The Road”). I mean, the list even includes an obscure Brad Pitt romantic comedy from 1994 — and there aren’t that many obscure Brad Pitt movies.

In a related story, Turnquist has been asking readers what should be designated as the official movie of Oregon. This follows in the wake of an actual bit of legislation this session, House Concurrent Resolution 14, which would name “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” Oregon’s official movie. Now, you may be thinking something along these lines: “This Legislature might not be able to even hammer out a state budget; why are they wasting time on this? Also, what about ‘The Goonies?'”

To be fair, the resolution was introduced much earlier in the session, back when we all had hope that bipartisanship might carry the day. The resolution, stuck in a House committee since February, appears to be dead. Also, when Turnquist put the question to her readers, many of them replied, in essence, “Hey, what about ‘The Goonies?'” Not to mention “Stand by Me” and “Animal House” and “Paint Your Wagon” and “The General,” Buster Keaton’s 1927 silent classic “The General,” filmed near Cottage Grove.

That’s it for this weekend, except for this note: If you go to Lincoln, Montana today, the cellphone service is much better.