A Weekend Reader reader writes with a request: Lay off the sports stories for awhile, huh? And how about some arts stories instead?

Well … OK. Saturday IS this reader’s birthday. I do take requests. The Beaver football team is off this weekend. And I don’t think there were any bombshell developments with the Pac-12 Conference this week. As for the Yankees — damn Yankees! — call me when the Bronx Bombers learn how to field and run the bases. I’ll be here waiting.

Still waiting.

So here’s what the Weekend Reader’s Arts Desk came up with this week:

• If you watch documentary films — and you should, once or twice a year, make room for a documentary — chances are good that you’ve seen a movie directed by R.J. Cutler, one of the few documentarians who makes a good living solely through making documentaries. Cutler is in the news these days because “Martha,” his new Netflix documentary about Martha Stewart, got panned by Stewart herself. (Cutler, who says he insists on final cut on all his films — even his celebrity profiles — defended his work.) The success of these celebrity documentaries (Cutler directed the Billie Eilish documentary and has a new one coming out this fall about Elton John) raises this question, which The New York Times gamely tries to answer: Does a celebrity documentary actually qualify as a documentary?
• Bill Monroe, the longtime outdoors writer for The Oregonian/OregonLive, was one of the judges in the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s annual stamp-art contest, and he reports that Oregon artists fared well this year. The winners included a delightful painting of a pair of California quail by Buck Spencer of Junction City.
• Jodi Picoult’s 2007 novel “Nineteen Minutes,” about the aftermath of a school shooting, has earned a dubious honor: It was banned in 98 separate school districts across the country in the last school year, making it the most frequently removed book from schools in what turned out to be a banner year for book bans.

I went into this weekend thinking that I wouldn’t post anything about the election, but then I read this riveting story from Tim Alberta of The Atlantic, all about the chaotic last few weeks of the Donald Trump campaign. Honestly, I don’t understand how Alberta still has sources inside the campaign, but he must — and they must be numerous. But I’m sure that if Trump is elected, his second tour in the White House will be different than his crazy campaign. Right? Hello? Anybody there?

Speaking of elections, organizations that you may never have heard of are continuing their efforts to undermine faith in our elections, by claiming (with dubious or no evidence) that our voting system allows massive irregularities and fraud. The end game here, I suspect, is to pave the way to erect barriers to voting — which would run counter to what we’ve done in Oregon to expand the franchise. The wisest course is to debunk these scurrilous reports intended to undermine faith in our election — as The Oregonian/OregonLive and state election officials did this past week.

Are you sitting down to read this? I’m sorry to hear that, especially since an increasing amount of medical research suggests that too much sitting will carve years off your life. Now, I can practically see the smug smiles on the faces of those of you who prefer to use a standing desk — but this story from The New York Times says that a standing desk by itself won’t get you off the hook. The story does include suggestions for those of us who live dangerously by sitting for long hours. Personally, I’m fond of the suggestion that encourages us to fidget more.

Chances seem good that you might have a black plastic spatula in your kitchen. Now comes this advice from Zoe Schlanger at The Atlantic: Throw it out. Not only is it leaching chemicals into your cooking oil, black plastic is particularly troublesome because it likely contains nasty levels of flame retardant.

If you’ve been following the recent struggles of Oregon’s NuScale Power, you’ll want to read this opinion column from the Oregon Capital Chronicle by Kelly Campbell, the policy director at Columbia Riverkeeper. It’s safe to say Campbell and her organization are not fans of nuclear power or the small modular reactors (a spinoff of technology created at Oregon State University) NuScale is trying to build. The column reads like an obituary for NuScale, but that may be premature: Thanks in part to the energy demands created by data centers and AI, there appears to be increasing interest in the small modular reactors that NuScale is trying to bring to market — although the competition in that arena is heating up. This story from Nature, although it mentions NuScale just in passing, offers a good overview.

I was looking for something fun to end this week’s edition, and then I remembered: Daylight saving time ends this weekend. And, no, that’s not fun — I suspect by now every Weekend Reader reader knows my thoughts about the tyranny of our twice-yearly time change. But it gives me another opportunity to link to this classic piece from “Last Week Tonight.”

Spend your “extra hour” wisely this weekend — and remember that it’s not an “extra hour,” it’s an hour they stole from you last spring!