Look, I know that the fate of American democracy hangs in the balance with the election less than a month away — but did you see this story from The New York Times about the raccoons?

Here’s the summary: A woman in Washington state had been feeding a small group of raccoons for years. But then a few weeks ago, a handful of more aggressive raccoons showed up. Then, eventually, the group of raccoons (the collective term, by the way, is “gaze,” as in “Would you gaze at that massive gaze of raccoons in the backyard?”) grew to about 100, all demanding to be fed. The woman eventually had to flee her house, under the protection of sheriff’s deputies.

I am not surprised by any of this. I do not trust raccoons. They’re up to something; why else would nature give them those face masks? If they can use their little paws to scoop bits of cat food into their mouths, is it only a matter of time before they start using firearms? I need to know — no, I demand to know — what our presidential candidates intend to do about this crisis. And I need a better answer than mass deportation.

The Pew Research Center is out with a new report about how Americans view the election news they’re receiving. An increasing number of Americans say they’re paying close attention to the presidential election — no surprise there as the election draws closer — but many of them believe they’re receiving news that’s inaccurate and are having a hard time telling fact from fiction.

And no wonder, because there’s so much misinformation out there.

To that point, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has a piece inspired in part by the horrifying torrent of bad information that has followed in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton. The despairing headline: “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”

Speaking of elections, the November ballot in Oregon includes Measure 117, which would pave the way for rolling out ranked choice voting throughout the state. I’m a fan of ranked choice voting, in which voters list candidates in order of preference on their ballots, but I have a big concern that it will saddle cash-strapped election offices in Oregon’s smaller counties with additional costs that the state may or may not be able to pick up. This story from the Oregon Capital Chronicle does a good job of summarizing the pros and cons. (Portland, by the way, has joined Corvallis as a city that uses ranked choice voting; it will be interesting to see how it goes in November’s election for Portland mayor.)

Oregon State University’s football team has added a game against Wake Forest to its 2025 schedule; it’s part of a two-game deal with the Demon Deacons, with the second game coming in 2029. The catch is that Wake Forest needed to cancel a 2025 game against Ole Miss to open the date for the game against the Beavers, and the contract for that game included a $750,000 penalty for whichever team canceled. No problem: Oregon State essentially is covering that bill, according to this story from The Associated Press.

Longtime readers of the Weekend Reader may have noticed a growing disillusionment with college football, but my disenchantment isn’t anything new — I’ve long thought that there was a growing gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in college athletics, and the recent wave of conference realignment, fueled by TV money, only has accelerated the trend.

So it’s no surprise that there was a lot of attention this week given to the summit meeting in Nashville between the leaders of the two big dogs in college athletics — the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big 10. And, although those leaders talked about how they weren’t pushing for any big changes until they see how this year’s 12-team College Football Playoff works, there’s little doubt that they’ll push for at least three guaranteed bids for both of their conferences into the playoff, to go along with the lion’s share of the revenue they’ll collect. As Ralph Russo reports for The Athletic, a so-called college football “super-league” almost certainly is inevitable — and it might turn out to have just the 34 teams in the SEC and the Big 10, possibly with a few of the stronger teams from the remains of the other two power conferences. Everybody else will be on the outside looking in. But maybe that will be for the best; maybe the have-nots can band together to create a version of college football that isn’t completely driven by the quest for more and more money. (Russo, by the way, used to be the lead college football reporter for the AP but was recently lured away by The Athletic.)

Meanwhile, Chris Vannini at The Athletic says it’s about time that the Pac-12 Conference and the Mountain West put aside their hard feelings and merge already. In Vannini’s words: “We’ve reached the dumbest stage of conference realignment, with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars being spent for no discernible change.” (The Athletic, by the way, still does not allow subscribers to send “gift” links, so you may not be able to access those Athletic stories — but all the other links in the Weekend Reader should work.)

In what is perhaps more important college football news, the actress Sydney Sweeney has spurned the Oregon Duck.

A newly discovered comet should be visible to the naked eye beginning Saturday night in the western sky for the next two weeks or so, Tribune News Service reports. If you miss it, mark your calendar: C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is next expected to be visible from Earth in about 80,000 years.

Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong are drawing terrific reviews for their work in “The Apprentice,” the new movie about the relationship between a younger Donald Trump and his attorney, the notorious Roy Cohn. In this AP story, both men — along with the director, Ali Abbasi, talked about the controversial movie, which now is playing pretty much everywhere in the mid-valley. (An interesting footnote: Kai Bird, the co-writer of “American Prometheus,” the magisterial biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is at work on a new Cohn biography.)

Finally, this week: Oregon was a category on the Tuesday episode of “Jeopardy!” Kristi Lundquist of The Oregonian/OregonLive (with a little help from Chris Lehman at KLCC) has compiled the answers — and the correct questions.

That’s it for this week. I expect you should be able to run the category of Oregon “Jeopardy!” questions, and let’s meet back here next weekend to compare notes.