Our recent brush with summer-like high temperatures has served as a reminder that, well, it’s still summer — and it’s also served notice that wildfire season is still with us. (In fact, a good chunk of Eastern Oregon is under a fire weather watch this weekend, with “abundant lightning” forecasted for Sunday.)

This year’s record-breaking wildfire season, with more than 1.5 million acres burned, has caught the attention of Republican legislators, who this week called for state action to, among other things, allow more logging on state forests and sweeps of homeless encampments in fire-prone areas. While there is doubtless room for improvement in the management of state forests — and that includes, in my book, responsible thinning — it’s worth noting that about 75% of the acres burned thus far this year have been in grass and shrubland in Eastern Oregon, not in forestlands. And while it is true that some fires this season have been linked to homeless encampments, one unusual thing about this year’s season is that most blazes have been started by natural causes such as lightning. (During a typical year, the Oregon Department of Forestry says, 70% of wildfires are started by humans.)

Besides, as Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle notes in her story, the really interesting fire discussion in the 2025 session will focus on the question of how to pay for fighting wildfires. And that tab isn’t likely to get any smaller in future fire seasons.

Speaking of homeless encampments: If I’m reading the legislative tea leaves correctly, I expect an effort in the 2025 session to roll back or eliminate the provisions of 2021’s House Bill 3115, which required local governments to establish “objectively reasonable” regulations governing the time, pace and manner in which people who are homeless can sleep on public property. Democrats thus far have not expressed much enthusiasm for this effort, but their constituents might have other ideas.

And speaking of heat waves: Sociologist Adam Klinenberg has a suggestion for how to better account for increasingly dangerous heat events, such as the heat dome of 2021 in Oregon and Washington: give each such heat event its own name, like we do with hurricanes and winter storms. Klinenberg’s essay for The New York Times includes this startling fact: In typical years, more Americans die in heat waves than in hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. 

Earlier in the week, news broke that negotiations have broken down between the Pac-12 Conference (now, of course, just Oregon State University and Washington State University) and the Mountain West Conference over scheduling the 2025 football season. In the short run, this means that both OSU and WSU need to find six games to fill out their 2025 schedules. In the long run — who knows what it means? One thing is for sure: By the summer of 2026, the Beavers and Cougars must rebuild the Pac-12 to at least eight teams or join another conference. Jon Wilner had the details.

Speaking of football, perhaps you’ve been watching how the quarterbacks the Beavers lost to the transfer portal have been faring this season. OSU starter DJ Uiagalelei left OSU for Florida State. How’s he doing down there? Let Sports Illustrated tell the story for you: “(H)e’s been slow to process defenses, immobile in the pocket, and inaccurate while not really showing an ounce of leadership or fire on the sideline.” Florida State has lost its first two games and is all but eliminated from the 12-team College Football Playoff. Its collapse has been one of the biggest stories of the year thus far in college football.

Meanwhile, Aidan Chiles — once billed as the Beavers’ next great quarterback — followed OSU coach Jonathan Smith to Michigan State. Smith is at the start of what looks like a lengthy rebuilding at Michigan State, not unlike what he did at OSU. No one expects the Spartans to contend just yet in the loaded Big 10 Conference, so Chiles at least has the advantage of not dealing with the kind of spotlight facing Uiagalelei. And Chiles is doing … OK, considering he doesn’t have anywhere near the experience of Uiagalelei. (At the time I wrote this, the Spartans were tied with conference foe Maryland in their second game. Chiles had tossed two touchdowns and one interception.)

Jake Lahut, a campaign reporter based in New York, laments the loss of local political reporters at downsized or shuttered newspapers, and explores how that loss affects campaign coverage — and campaign strategy — in this piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. That’s an issue, to be sure, but the loss of reporting muscle also has hobbled newspapers’ ability to cover local races for posts like county commissioner or city councilor — positions that likely will have more impact on a community’s day-to-day life than state or even federal races.

Speaking of politics and journalism, the Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton has a story about a new study that sought to determine if people were more likely to accurately identify misinformation when the political stakes were high — for example, in a hotly contested presidential election. Alas, you already know the answer, even without clicking on the link: No.

Meanwhile, a new Washington, D.C. app combines a news feed with a matchmaking service. Users of the app, InPress, fill out a short profile and then are sent a news feed; as they react to the stories in the app, its AI matchmaking starts to sort through possible connections for the user. Does this seem like a good idea to you — or something more likely to hasten our migration into highly polarized silos where we never meet anyone with a different opinion? I have my worries, but InPress still strikes me as a better idea than the vaping device that also offers a news feed.

It remains a mystery why Oregon — specifically rural Oregon — has been the setting for so many horror/thriller movies this year. Now comes word of a fourth: Blumhouse’s “Wolf Man,” due in January, a new take on the old “Wolfman” Universal horror classics. The movie, directed by Leigh Whannell, who knows his way around a horror flick, mostly takes place at a remote Oregon farmhouse — but was shot in New Zealand. Nevertheless, the movie joins “Strange Darling,” “Longlegs” and “The Strangers: Chapter One” as all sharing an Oregon setting. Kristi Turnquist of The Oregonian/OregonLive has the early details about “Wolf Man,” and includes a teaser trailer — which has, I’m not kidding, two substantial jump scares in its 71-second running time. Sure, jump scares are easy, but still.

Let’s end this edition of the Weekend Reader with a (somewhat) lighter read, courtesy of the Times’ Nicholas Kristof:

Kristof marked the end of summer by backpacking along Mount Hood’s Timberline Trail with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn. The outing prompted this nice piece, about the glories of public land in the United States. At another time in the nation’s past (or perhaps in its future), these lands might have gone to wealthy bidders — imagine, he writes, Mount Hood renamed Mount Musk. That hasn’t happened yet — but who knows what the future holds, so enjoy these lands now.

That’s it for this week. Let’s plan on gathering here next weekend for another round.