Let’s start this edition of the Weekend Reader with this promise: It contains nothing whatsoever about Thursday’s debate — unless I find something that makes me laugh.

So, take a deep breath. Relax. Feel better?

Good! Let’s talk about the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s the end of June, and not a day goes by without another blockbuster ruling from the high court. The ruling that got the most attention on Friday — the one involving the use of obstruction laws to prosecute the Jan. 6 rioters — might be the one that has the least import, especially when compared to the ruling finally dismantling the Chevron doctrine.

(Here’s a handy New York Times guide to the biggest cases the court has handled thus far this term. If it’s your sense that the court seems increasingly out of touch with the public, well, that’s probably not wrong — and Clarence Thomas might tell us that’s a good thing. Two blockbuster cases remain on the docket, and look for rulings on those on Monday: One involves former President Donald Trump’s claim of immunity. The other one involves the First Amendment rights of social media platforms.)

The Friday ruling that got the most attention in Oregon was the Grants Pass homeless case, in which the justices, by a familiar 6-3 vote, upheld that city’s ordinances against camping by people who are homeless. The court ruled that the city’s ordinances did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling also means that you’ll see a push in the 2025 Oregon Legislature to overhaul House Bill 3115, which requires municipalities to create “objectively reasonable” regulations regarding the time, place and manner in which people who are homeless may sleep.

Are you not feeling any better? Sorry.

Maybe you need a fast and fun day trip:

Enchanted Forest in Turner — you know, the place you drive by every time you’re on Interstate 5 headed to Portland — recently was named the best family-owned amusement part in the nation. The news prompted Lizzy Acker of The Oregonian/Oregon Live to bundle up her 4-year-old for a reassessment of the park, which Acker hadn’t visited since her teenage years.

Acker also had some shocking news about Girl Scout cookies: The Girl Scout Council of Oregon and Southwest Washington has swapped the bakers for next year’s cookie deliveries. The council previously has used Little Brownie Bakers but is switching to ABC Bakers, for reasons it didn’t divulge. There will be changes: For one thing, ABC doesn’t make Samoas — it makes something called Caramel deLites. Even the Thin Mints will be different — ABC’s Thin Mints reportedly will be thinner and crunchier, which might not be a bad thing.

By the way, if you’re taking I-5 up to Portland this weekend, don’t.

Oregon State University’s Jade Carey appears to be on the verge of returning to the Olympics as a member of the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. As you might remember, she won the gold in the floor exercise in Tokyo four years ago. The U.S. woman’s team that heads to Paris, of course, will be led by the greatest of them all, Simone Biles.

Here’s this week’s long read: Writing in The Atlantic, Brian Stelter has a lengthy take on the current crisis at one of America’s great newspapers, The Washington Post. Stelter makes the case that the bad times at the Post have been brewing for a long time — and wonders if the paper’s generally hands-off owner, Jeff Bezos, might be too hands-off for the good of the paper.

Speaking of journalism, here’s an interesting piece that Nieman Labs picked up from The Conversation: Jacob L. Nelson, an associate professor of communication at the University of Utah, argues that members of the public see journalists not so much as politically biased, but economically biased — that is, they’re biased in terms of generating the biggest audiences for their stories:

The Americans we interviewed believe that news organizations report the news inaccurately not because they want to persuade their audiences to support specific political ideologies, candidates or causes, but rather because they simply want to generate larger audiences — and therefore larger profits.

The problem here, of course, is that there’s a measure of truth in that — journalists do like to work on stories that enjoy strong readership, and a lot of times, those stories might be a little bit juicier than accounts of city council meetings. I can’t count the number of times a reader accused me of printing a story just because it would sell a bunch of papers. (These calls often involved stories that had been buried deep in the paper, and therefore probably did not spark an avalanche of newsstand sales.)

I usually refrained from arguing that there was nothing inherently wrong with doing something to generate sales — no one ever calls the head of Toyota to complain that the changes in the new model of the Camry were made just to increase sales. But now I wonder if I should have done a better job of emphasizing the reasons why a story was newsworthy aside of its appeal to audiences — and tried to explain the firewall that reliable news organizations try to maintain between their newsrooms and their financial operations.

Or maybe, considering the year newspaper journalism is having, I should have just told those callers “You’re darn tootin’! We need every dollar we can wrap our ink-stained hands around.”

Finally this week: It looks as if Kristyn Vitale, formerly of OSU and now at Unity Environmental University in Maine, has become one of The New York Times’ go-to experts on cats: Vitale is prominently quoted in a new Times story about how humans may have underestimated cats’ social skills. Why, they’re not aloof and antisocial after all — they just want you to spend more time with them. So what if they respond to your quality-time overtures with an occasional aloof swipe at your hand? It’s just a test. You’ll pass! You didn’t really need that hand anyway.

That’s it for this weekend. Next weekend, we’ll be in the midst of the big holiday, so we’ll all be in a better mood. Right?

Right?