The second weekend of May is shaping up as a warm one. Grab a cool drink and let’s review a dozen or so news stories worthy of your attention this weekend.

The Oregonian/OregonLive has a long but essential story this morning about the health care giant Optum, which — as you will recall — recently acquired The Corvallis Clinic after the clinic’s managers said it was in immediate danger of closing. Jeff Manning and Kristine de Leon report, in detail, what happened when Optum purchased the Eugene Medical Group in 2020. In short, doctors told The Oregonian that the focus of the group became “money, efficiency and quotas” and many of them fled the group, even though they had been saddled with noncompete agreements. The group itself, as you may recall, recently told hundreds, and possibly thousands, of its patients, that it no longer had capacity to treat them and they would have to find medical care elsewhere. Optum (its parent company is the even bigger United HealthGroup) told The Oregonian that it was working to try to fix the issues. But if you believe what happened in Eugene won’t play out iat least to some degree in Corvallis — well, I’ll like a swig of whatever cool drink you’ve having.

On a literally brighter note: The Oregonian reported this morning that you could see the northern lights last night in Lake Oswego, thanks to the big geomagnetic storm that’s now raging. Does that mean you could see them in Corvallis on Saturday night? After carefully consulting the map that goes along with this Oregonian story, my professional conclusion is: It’s absolutely worth a shot. Find a dark spot away from light pollution and look, well, to the north. (And keep the lights low at your home: We’re in the midst of prime spring bird migration season, and darker landscapes make for easier migration.)

If you don’t want to leave your home tonight, The Associated Press has put together a very nice collection of northern lights photographs.

We’re less than two weeks away from the May 21 primary election, and I’ve been reading up on some of the state’s more interesting races — races that, since I am a proudly nonaffiliated voter, I have no say whatsoever on. I was distressed, but not surprised, to learn that all three Republican candidates for secretary of state say they would work to eliminate Oregon’s vote-by-mail system. All three say, without a shred of evidence, that the vote-by-mail system is susceptible to fraud; this is the same nonsense you hear GOP candidates parroting nationwide as they try to convince voters they need to fear voting fraud. (Let me be clear: There is no need to fear voting fraud.)

It was especially disappointing to hear this malarky being parroted by a candidate, Tim McCloud, who has some experience serving on Linn County public boards, since Linn County is the spiritual home of Oregon’s wildly successful vote-by mail system. Here’s a piece from former Secretary of State Phil Keisling remembering Del Riley, the Linn County clerk who really got the ball rolling on voting by mail. (And a reminder to the three GOP candidates running for secretary of state: Secretary of State Dennis Richardson was a champion of voting by mail — and he’s still the only Republican to have been elected to statewide office in Oregon this century.)

A couple of news items involving Gannett caught my eye this week. Longtime readers know that I’ve been harshly critical about the company, which owns the papers in Salem and Eugene, for essentially hollowing out those newsrooms. (The case of the Register-Guard, in particular, ranks among the biggest tragedies in American journalism in the last quarter-century — and that’s saying something.) So I was hopeful when Gannett said it was exploring ways to put some journalists back into its smallest newsrooms.)

Maybe I was too hopeful: A couple of weeks ago, Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute broke a story saying Gannett had paused that initiative.

And it actually gets worse: This week, Edmonds reported that Gannett had fired an editor who was a source for his original story.

Meanwhile, Edmonds also reported on a new study from Pew Research Center in which some 63% of those surveyed said their local news outlets were doing very well or somewhat well financially. Of course, the sample includes the proportion of adults (45%) who don’t pay attention to local news in the first place, but still. The follow-up question for the survey in a couple of years: “Have you noticed that your local news operation has closed?”

The spring window for the college athletics transfer portal closed recently for football and men’s basketball programs, and so Jon Wilner, the outstanding Pac-12 reporter for the Bay Area News Group, was able to offer his assessment of the schools that emerged as winners — and those that didn’t fare so well. The Ducks did well, Wilner writes. The Oregon State and Washington State football teams, not so much: Since April 1, he reports, the two schools combined gained three transfers — and lost 22.

Meanwhile, on the men’s basketball side, OSU coach Wayne Tinkle and his staff have been hitting the portal to rebuild that team — and Tinkle told The Oregonian’s Nick Daschel that they like what they’re seeing so far. (An interesting nugget from that story: Kyle Smith, the former coach at Washington State, once estimated it takes between $1 million and $1.5 million in name, likeness and image money to fund a competitive Pac-12 team. Wonder what he thinks that price tag looks like now that he’s moved to Stanford.)

You know it’s a bad idea to go doomscrolling on your smartphone right before bedtime — but you can’t stop. This Associated Press story could offer relief.

Are your children asking you to take a side in the big rap feud between two of music’s biggest stars, Kendrick Lamar and Drake — but you feel uninformed about the whole matter? This AP story will bring you up to speed in a hurry.

Finally, this weekend: It turns out that Tom Nichols, a writer for The Atlantic, has a soft spot for cats — especially for Carla, a cat that literally saved his life. Nichols has a beautifully written eulogy for Carla on The Atlantic’s website.

Oh, sorry, one more thing: Minutes after I first posted the Weekend Reader, I learned that Corvallis writer Tracy Daugherty was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography for his book “Larry McMurtry: A Life.” Daugherty, of course, seemed the ideal writer to delve into McMurtry’s career and life, and the Pulitzer jury seemed to agree, calling the book “an insightful literary biography of the celebrated author written with brio and humor that evokes the Depression-era Texas of his youth and the myth of the American West that he dedicated himself to exposing.” Congratulations to Daugherty!

The Pulitzer for biography was shared by two books: “King: A Life,” a new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. by Jonathan Eig, and “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom,” by Ilyon Woo, who traces the remarkable flight of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848.

That’s all for this weekend. Don’t forget about the sunscreen this weekend — when Monday comes, you’ll know what parts of your body you failed to protect.