It’s the last weekend of March – the last weekend of spring break – and we’re getting a splash of sunshine. So, naturally, our thoughts turn to … spring cleaning.

And when I think about spring cleaning, my thoughts turn to decluttering, as longtime readers who followed my failed “365 Boxes” attempt to clean out my garage will understand. (Hey, in my defense, my doctor can attest to the hernia that I was suffering from during the project.)

So I read this useful New York Times story about myths that are preventing us from decluttering with interest. Among the important lessons I learned: My failure to declutter my garage does not make me a bad person.

Of course, I might still be a bad person for other reasons, but that’s an issue for me to hash out with professionals, right? 

The White House will host a mixed-martial arts cage fight June 14 in an event scheduled to honor Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. The event is being touted, as a White House spokesperson says with typical Trump bravado, as “one of the greatest and most historic sports events in history.” The event will be streamed live on Paramount+, which is now owned by … oh, never mind. 

One thing you can say about Trump and the acolytes with which he has surrounded himself: They seem to have plenty of self-confidence – as misplaced as it may be. But that kind of “toxic confidence,” as the Times puts it, certainly isn’t limited to the White House. The Times offers this bracing investigation of the trend, which I now offer to you as a reader of this newsletter – the greatest newsletter in the history of newsletters. 

Weekly Reader readers know of my fondness for pens – really, all sorts of office supplies – so I’m prepared to cut Trump a little bit of slack for his decision to interrupt a Cabinet meeting this week to talk about Sharpies. Turns out he likes them.

A new book purports to offer scientific evidence that God exists. It’s not the first volume to try to make that case, and maybe those books offer a bit of solace to people whose faith sometimes feels shaky. (And I suspect that faith can feel shaky sometimes even for people with toxic confidence.) But, as Elizabeth Bruenig argues in The Atlantic, these books sort of miss the main point, which I can clumsily summarize here: If you could know for sure, you wouldn’t need faith. 

In a considerably more downbeat Atlantic article, Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong make the case that the economy’s increasing reliance on AI means that it’s particularly vulnerable to any sort of shock to the system – say, just as a hypothetical, a war in the Middle East that drives up energy prices and closes a vital passage for global trade. “The range of options seems to be somewhere from mildly bad to historically so,” they write.

Speaking of AI, The Atlantic also reports that content possibly generated by chatbots appears to be sneaking into the opinion pages of even major newspapers. One problem: Such content is increasingly difficult to pin down, and the tools that help identify it are not 100% reliable. 

Meanwhile – and almost inevitably – eastern Oregon communities, which have been battling for so long to rebuild their economies – are embracing data centers. Mike Rogoway reports on the trend for The Oregonian/OregonLive. 

Scott Barnes, the athletic director at Oregon State University, announced this week that he planned to retire at the end of August. Whatever you might think of Barnes’ performance at OSU, this much is undeniable: He was dealt a bad set of cards as the Pac-12 Conference disintegrated. How he played those cards is a matter of some disagreement – and the final reckoning won’t be known for some time, as Bill Oram notes in this column in The Oregonian/OregonLive. 

Corvallis elected officials are considering changes to the structure of the City Council that could allow councilors to serve four-year terms instead of the current two-year terms. This is a common-sense reform that’s long overdue, I think – two years is not long enough to learn the ins and outs of city government, and that tends to undermine the council’s ability to serve as a meaningful check on city staff. It also means that the entire council could turn over every two years, although that rarely happens. (Four-year terms would be staggered so that not every ward would be up for election every two years.) Other suggestions under consideration: reducing the number of councilors from nine and imposing term limits. It might be helpful for the council to have fewer members, but I’m not sold on the necessity for term limits. Any changes endorsed by the council would have to be approved by voters, and that could happen as early as November.  

As I write, the third edition of the “No Kings” protests is playing out throughout the United States – and in Oregon as well, with rallies in Corvallis, Eugene, Portland, Salem and elsewhere. (A similar protest is scheduled in Eugene by progressive Christian churches on Palm Sunday; in Corvallis, congregations were scheduled to join in Saturday’s march.) The “No Kings” protests – or, as the White House called them, “Trump Derangement Therapy Sessions” – were expected to draw a record 9 million people, which prompts this question: What’s next? Stateline, the nonprofit news organization run by States Newsroom, wonders if the protests signal change at the polls or whether the effort will run out of steam when the crowds disperse. 

In this week’s crime news, the Swiss food giant Nestle reports that someone – I’m guessing probably a group of highly sophisticated thieves led by someone who looks just like George Clooney – has swiped a shipment of 413,793 KitKat candy bars en route to Poland. I have numerous questions, in particular how it is that Nestle can be so precise about the exact number of candy bars stolen. Also, if the thieves are caught and put on trial, will their defense be: “Give me a break?” 

I’m so sorry. I couldn’t resist. It turns out that I am a bad person. 

That’s it for this weekend. 

A final note: None of this week’s content was generated by AI; if it had been, you would have noticed right away, because it would have been better-written.