It's a rough time for higher education. The recently announced shutdown of Concordia University in the Portland area makes the third institution of higher ed to shut down in the metro area in recent years. The surviving schools face increasing costs and declining enrollments as the "birth dearth" of the recession years makes its presence felt. Southern Oregon University was recently singled out for financial vulnerability in a report to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC). SOU

Art has the power to connect us to people and places and feelings. In Molly McBrayer's case, art connects her to her grandmother. The late Nancy Puterbaugh was a respected plein air painter who did not start painting in earnest until late in life. Her work is displayed alongside Molly McBrayer's art, which is frequently made with flowers and other plants. The work hangs at Ashland Natural Medicine .

It's a fair bet that not a single woman thinks with any kind of warm glow about giving birth in jail or prison. But birth behind bars happens, and women have been known to get arrested with the intention of getting the health care that incarceration provides. This is not one of those "welfare queen" stories; Carolyn Sufrin has met the women herself and treated them. Sufrin is both MD--an OB/GYN--and an anthropologist with a PhD. She writes of what she found in Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net

If corporations can have the rights of people under the law, why not rivers? The question made sense to Will Falk, and he answered it yes. Falk is a lawyer, and he got to represent the Colorado River in a lawsuit. So he spent time along the river, in something of a conversation with it. Falk tells the story in his book How Dams Fall .

Spend enough time in one place outdoors, and you're bound to see a few things happen. So it was for Ronin Demele, who spent 25 years working as a wilderness ranger in the Trinity Alps. Creatures great and small, humans included, caught his eye, and he conveys some of the stories in prose and poetry in Pacific Crest Trail: Mountain Encounters of a Wilderness Ranger .

New and improved! Bigger and better! We've been getting advertising messages all our lives about how we could have the good life. Just ONE more product could make you happier, they implied. Which would be difficult to prove in the best of circumstances; now multiply by seven billion, and can any human get there? Hope Jahren, award-winning scientist and best-selling author, raises the question in her book The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here . The book follows

The Arcata Playhouse production of "A Woman's Place is in Her Home" is more than theater. Because the seed for the production is a series of interviews with people living homeless in the Humboldt Bay area, and the people who work to help them. Theater, dance, and media combine in the interactive work.

The days when 90% of the American population lived on farms are long past. Farm population is smaller, and farms are generally bigger. Generally... but small farms still dot the countryside, and they can use a little guidance in agriculture and business practices. Extension agents help, especially the ones who focus on small farms, like Maud Powell .

Life may be tough some days, but at least we're not plugged into a computer, like in "The Matrix" movies. We're not, right? Rizwan Virk wants you to consider the possibility. He is the author of The Simulation Hypothesis , a book on the belief that the world we perceive is not the real one. The belief predates computers; even Plato wrote about the shadows of the "real world" that we see in our world.

Discrimination has been common against both indigenous people and people who identify as LGBTQ or queer. Imagine the challenges for people who identify with both groups. Southern Oregon University's curriculum includes a course in Queer Indigenous Studies, which culminates in the annual Queer Indigenous Gathering , the 5th of its kind, on March 11th.