Here’s something that you’ll spend the next six weeks or so playing around with pretty much nonstop: It’s a New York Times interactive feature in which you can play around with how the Electoral College vote will go by assigning battleground states to either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Today, I had Harris with a slight edge. Tomorrow, who knows? Isn’t politics fun?

Penny Rosenberg of the Gazette-Times has a new column in which she emphasizes a point that I’ve made in previous Weekend Readers: The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Grants Pass homelessness case did nothing to wipe away the Oregon law governing how cities can enforce ordinances to keep homeless residents from camping on public property. The law, as outlined in House Bill 3115, passed by the 2021 Legislature, says that those cities have to offer a place somewhere within the cities where people who are homeless can sleep — and the rules governing those spaces must be reasonable. Nevertheless, I expect at least a bit of a push in the 2025 Legislature to roll back the provisions in House Bill 3115.

State officials reported last week that none of the people in Oregon who were registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the decisive vote. That report followed on the heels of earlier revelations that the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division mistakenly registered some 1,259 people who did not show proof of U.S. citizenship. Just 10 of those people voted, although one of the 10 was, in fact, a citizen who has voted for decades and just didn’t bring proof of citizenship when renewing a license.

Expect some politicians to seize upon this incident to try to undermine faith in Oregon’s election system. Do not pay them any heed. This was a simple mistake. It didn’t affect the outcome of any election. It won’t affect the outcome of the 2024 election. It looks as though efforts are well underway to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It would be a shame if we rolled back any of Oregon’s proud history of expanding the franchise because of this incident.

“Saturday Night Live” is set to begin its 50th season — hard to believe, isn’t it? — and The New York Times marks the occasion with this fun feature about what some of the people who were there for the very first show remember about the moment. (The great Jean Smart, who now has picked up three Emmys for “Hacks” — and who was a key part of the best season of “24” — is the host Saturday night.)

Friday night in Detroit, the Chicago White Sox lost to the Tigers — and broke a bitter baseball record: The loss was the 121st defeat of the season for the Sox, breaking the Major League Baseball record of 120 losses, set by the 1962 New York Mets. (The Sox could put two more losses on the ledger before the regular season closes on Sunday; oddly enough, the Tigers — apparently dead in the water just a few weeks ago — claimed a playoff spot with the win.) Sam Anderson of The New York Times sums up the Sox’s dismal season.

Speaking of sports, Utah State is now a member of the Pac-12 Conference — but since then, a number of schools have declined the conference’s offer to become the eighth member of the rebuilt Pac-12. It’s hard to say what that means: It could be that the attempt to get to the required number of eight football-playing members has hit a major stumbling block, or it could be a relatively minor bump in the road. In the meantime, columnist Jon Wilner says it makes sense for the conference to add Gonzaga (which doesn’t play football, but which of course would be a major basketball boost). Wilner also explains why he thinks UNLV made a big mistake in declining an offer to join the Pac-12.

Joshua Benton of the Nieman Lab has a take on Project 2025 — the conservative blueprint for the next president that Trump says he has nothing to do with. Benton outlines some of the proposals included in Project 2025 that could affect journalism, and it’s not a happy list for the Fourth Estate. And, as Benton notes, almost all of them are proposals that Trump has pushed for at one time or another.

Nieman has another engaging story this week, about a German crime reporter who covered a number of trials — it’s kind of what a crime reporter does — and then discovered that an AI chatbot had identified him as the culprit in some of the crimes that he had covered. It was, as writer Simon Thorne explains, another example of how generative AI often generates what’s called a “hallucination.”

Finally, remember that Nieman Lab story from last week about how some journalists still find joy in their work? Well, that was last week. This week, we have this fresh story from Angela Wu at the Poynter Institute, who reports on a new study that more than half of all journalists have considered quitting — this year — because of burnout.

I would have more to say about this, but suddenly I find that … I … I … just can’t go on. You go on without me, and maybe we’ll connect here next weekend.