One of the reasons Thanksgiving still stands alone among our holidays — despite continued efforts to completely absorb it into the Christmas season — is that it’s the only American holiday explicitly devoted to gratitude. So this is a weekend to give thanks for our many blessings — but experts say it’s also a good time to shine some gratitude back toward ourselves. as The Associated Press outlines in this story. It reminds me of something I heard once — from a sportswriter, oddly enough, I think: “When you talk to yourself, try to say nicer things.” This story, by the way, also explains why people pay more attention to — and remember — bad news than they do good news. It’s genetic. (The explanation isn’t spelled out in so many words, but it’s in the part about the tiger.)

Here’s another essay about gratitude, this one from Arthur C. Brooks, writing in The Atlantic. Brooks offers suggestions for how you can turn gratitude into a recurring practice, and not limit it to one day a year. As a bonus, this article also explains why our brains are hard-wired to pay more attention to bad news.

I know what you’re thinking: Last week I was so grouchy, so old guy yelling at the kids to get off the lawn, and this week I’m filled with self-help suggestions. I can’t explain it. I should just be thankful, and move on.

This is the weekend after Thanksgiving, so it’s officially OK to reach out under the bed and brush off all the Christmas music you’ve stored away and — what’s that? You haven’t waited until now to start playing Christmas music? You started playing holiday music right after Labor Day?

Well, I guess I understand: It’s been a tough year. But if your stash of holiday music is getting a little tired, here’s the AP’s roundup of new Christmas music. The stash includes, but of course, a new Pentatonix album. But there are intriguing new offerings from country stars like Brad Paisley and Mickey Guyton that might be worth a listen. And a new collection of holiday singles from Chess Records might help fire up your holiday party — that is, if you put up with nonsense such as holiday parties.

Speaking of holiday music, watch my blog for news — perhaps as early as this weekend — that the official nomination period has opened for my (completely fictitious) Holiday Music Hall of Fame. You know the drill: I’m searching for performances of holiday music that are so definitive it should be illegal for anyone else ever to record the song. Put another way: Say you’re going to be stranded on a desert island. You get to take a recording of, say, “White Christmas.” But you can only take one recording of the song. Which one? (This is a rhetorical question, because Bing Crosby’s version already is enshrined in the Hall of Fame. But you get the idea.) If you want to steal a march on others who may want to nominate a recording, that’s allowed; just leave your nomination in the comment section below.

Emma Marris, a Portland-based writer, has an opinion piece in The New York Times about the stunningly quick return of salmon to the Klamath River in southern Oregon. It’s a reminder — a badly needed reminder — of how resilient nature can be, she writes.

Rest in peace, Tom Stoppard: The famed English playwright (and occasional screenwriter) has died at 88. Stoppard might be best-known for his first big hit, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” but he went on to write nearly three dozen plays, and had a hand in a number of screenplays, including “Shakespeare in Love” and “Brazil.” (He also polished the dialogue for “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.’) I have wondered whether the movie version of Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass” would have been better if the filmmakers had been able to salvage Stoppard’s original script; at a reported 178 pages, it was deemed unworkable. Here’s Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, with an appreciation for Stoppard’s work.

Universities nationwide are understandably following the lead of Ohio State University (I’m sorry, The Ohio State University) and trying to figure out how best to integrate AI learning into the curriculum. But there’s a big risk, writes Michael Clune in The Atlantic: In this week’s long read, he suggests that inserting AI into the educational process could undermine the very skills graduates will need in a post-AI world — you know, skills like critical thinking and the capacity to learn new things.

Here’s a story from last weekend that I meant to include back then: It’s the legendary Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins (now no longer with the Post, for reasons Weekend Reader readers will already know about) writing in The Atlantic about how to fix college sports. Her radical proposal:

For every dollar that a university athletic department spends on coaching salaries fatter than a duke’s inheritance, or locker rooms as luxurious as Hadrian’s villa, a dollar should go toward academic funding — to faculty salaries, library maintenance, and other necessities that benefit all students, athletes included.

The impressive thing about Jenkins’ piece is how she shows that the financial arms race among university athletic departments is a logical reaction by athletic directors to a market system that has completely lost its bearings.

Speaking of college football, good luck to JaMarcus Shephard, the new head football coach at Oregon State University. Shephard is assistant head coach and co-offensive coordinator at a little football school called the University of Alabama, but also has coached at Washington and Washington State (under the sadly departed Mike Leach). It’s not wrong to call the OSU job one of the toughest in all of college football, as The Oregonian’s Bill Oram does in this column.

Former Benton County Commissioner Linda Modrell died earlier this month; Brad Fuqua produced this well-done obituary for the Philomath News. I recall meeting Modrell shortly after I arrived in Corvallis in 2005. She was warm and welcoming, but I’ll always remember one wry comment she made at the time, about Circle Boulevard not really being an actual circle. Well, Linda, it’s a little bit closer these days, but still no circle.

U.S. Department of Transportation Sean Duffy says it would help the nation’s cramped air-travel system if we would “go back to an era when we didn’t wear pajamas to the airport.” Alexandra Petri, writing in The Atlantic (so glad she’s writing for that magazine), suggests that perhaps the dress code isn’t the biggest problem with air travel these days.

That’s it for this edition; say something nicer to yourself every day this week and we’ll see how we feel when we meet here again next weekend.