Let’s start this weekend with a pair of pieces from The New York Times that have something important to say about life (and, sadly, death) in the American West.

First, reporter Michael Corkery reports on suicide rates in Montana. In a state of 1.1 million people, 955 have died by suicide from January 2021 to November 2023. The state has had the highest suicide rate in the nation for the past three years. About two-thirds of those suicides involved firearms. The story should be of interest to Oregonians — many of the same factors that are driving Montana’s suicide rate are at work in Oregon as well. Corkery builds his excellent (and wrenching) story around the experiences of a Helena woman, Ali Mullen, who distributes gun locks for free around the state — and has personal reasons for doing so.

And here’s a piece from Times columnist Nicholas Kristof with this provocative headline: “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?” Before you say something like, “Surely that headline is overstating Kristof’s case,” here’s an excerpt from the column:

(L)iberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress.

But he notes that it’s not just a liberal problem — for example, Oregon has one of the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness in the nation, while East Coast states run by liberals are doing much better. The same is true for Oregon’s high school graduation rate, its skyrocketing numbers of drug-overdose deaths and its lack of access to youth mental health services. Need more examples? OK, one more: The murder rate in Portland last year was more than double that in New York City.

“Politics always is part theater,” Kristof writes, “but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.”

It might be amusing to ask every local and statewide candidate for office this November what they think about Kristof’s take. I’m not always a huge Kristof fan, but I think he’s dead on the money in this one. Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments section below.

Wildfire season is starting up again, and that means smoke will soon be clogging our skies. As Zoe Schlanger reports in The Atlantic, new evidence is making it clear that exposure to wildfire smoke is a major public-health hazard. What is less clear, she says, is what we’re planning to do about it as climate change fuels hotter and more intense fires.

Nick Daschel of The Oregonian/OregonLive produced an interesting story this week about the athletics budget for Oregon State University for the 2024-25 academic year. The budget, $91.6 million, is about 8.8% less than the 2023-24 budget, when OSU was a member of the Pac-12 Conference. OSU has talked about trying to fund its athletic department at the level of a so-called power conference, so Daschel notes that the $91.6 million figure is still more than any of the schools in the so-called Group of 5 conferences spend on athletics. Of course, it’s nowhere near what the top schools in the power conferences spend: For purposes of comparison, in the 2021-22 fiscal year, Ohio State had $251.6 in revenue and Oregon had revenue of $153.5 million. The good news is that Oregon State expects to break even both in the fiscal year that’s just wrapping up and in 2024-25; in fiscal year 2023, OSU athletics ran a $6.8 million deficit.

The Benton County Board of Commissioners has endorsed a proposal to trim back on creating detailed minutes from its public meetings, Alex Powers reports in the Gazette-Times. Apparently, county staff is experiencing difficulties in keeping up with preparing minutes that include not just motions and how each commissioner voted but also summarize discussion on issues and public testimony. It takes county workers nine hours to type up detailed minutes from a typical three-hour meeting, Powers reported. The result: The county apparently is months, if not years, behind on posting minutes from some meetings.

But there’s a problem with bare-bones minutes from meetings: too often, you lose the intent or reasoning behind a certain decision. Automated transcription services such as Otter could produce transcripts of meetings, but those still require human editing. A better bet might be to summarize some of that pesky detail and include time stamps to YouTube recordings of those particular meetings so that curious members of the public — you know, constituents — don’t have to wade through three hours of video from meetings to find the detail they’re interested in.

Speaking of transcription, you might have heard the sound of journalists worldwide whooping it up this week at the news that their iPhones will, later this year, be able to record conversations on the phone . Then, after they hang up, their phones will transcribe those recordings. (As Joshua Benton of the Nieman Lab put it: “This is a process that used to take up, conservatively, 172% of journalists’ time.”) It’s probably too early to cancel my Otter subscription, though; this iPhone feature might not be available on my iPhone 13. But here’s a confidential note to Benton County commissioners: Maybe you should check this out.

Weird stuff continues to happen in the skies above Oregon, although the most recent event happened much closer to the ground: On Friday night, emergency crews rescued 28 people who were stuck — dangling upside-down — for about 30 minutes at the top of an amusement park ride in Portland. First responders were preparing for a high-angle ropes rescue at the amusement park, Oaks Park, but firefighters worked with engineers to return the ride to its unloading position. No injuries were reported. The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that the park — its motto is “Where the fun never ends!” — will reopen Saturday, but the AtmosFEAR ride will remain closed.

Faithful readers of the Weekend Reader might remember a story from a few months ago about how federal safety officials were frowning upon the humorous messages that sometimes appear on highway message signs: They’re confusing, these federal officials grumbled. Older people might not get them, they groused. The good news is that the feds have apparently softened their opposition to the clever messages, clearing the way for messages like “SLOW DOWN BAD DRIVERS AHEAD” or “CAMP IN THE WOODS NOT THE LEFT LANE.” The only real drawback: New Jersey officials had to warn drivers not to try to take pictures of the clever messages: “It is very dangerous and defeats the message we’re trying to drive home.” The Oregon Capital Chronicle had this story about the apparent federal change of heart.

Speaking of old people, The Associated Press reports that the Biden campaign is rolling out a game it calls “Biden Bingo” to appeal to, well, bingo players, at some of its campaign events. The game works just like bingo, except that instead of numbers like B7 or G54, the caller shouts out words or phrases associated with Biden such as “Malarky” or “Aviators.” Talk amongst yourself whether this seems like a good idea; I’ll be in the back, waiting for “C’mon man” so I can win this blackout round.

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