Marissa Ross is now the wine editor at Bon Appetit. Which might surprise a few people, Marissa included. Because admits she has no qualifications for writing about drinking wine, other than that she does it all the time. Now we're not sure if she means the writing or the drinking, but we talked about both in a previous interview, when she joined us to talk about her book, Wine. All the Time. The Casual Guide to Confident Drinking .

Major league baseball is just beginning the first games of spring training, but college baseball and softball have been at it for weeks now. For the women of Southern Oregon University, it's the season for their championship defense; the 2019 Raider softball team won the national championship in the NAIA, the small college organization. The Oregon legislature is set to pass a resolution commending the Raiders on their championship season (assuming Republicans return to work).

Vanport was a thriving city during World War II, with a high percentage of African-Americans who came to Portland to work in the shipyards. It was still home to thousands of people in 1948, when a Columbia River flood broke through a dike and wiped the community out in the blink of an eye, killing 15 people.

It's time for some rosin on the bows; the musicians have arrived. The Mill City String Quartet from Minnesota comes to the Rogue Valley for a short residency with the education program of the Britt Festival. Two violins, viola, and cello make up the quartet, which plays music for audiences familiar with chamber music--and not.

Our civic duty, our constitutional right, our privilege in democracy. We apply these labels and more to voting, but the act of voting can be surprisingly hard in some parts of the country. Higher ID requirements, purges of inactive voters, and restricted voting hours and places have all prevented some Americans from voting. Author and liberal radio host Thom Hartmann mentions these and more in his book The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get It Back .

Gas in, gas out, application made, application withdrawn... you can be forgiven if you've missed a few of the twist and turns in the saga of the Jordan Cove LNG project. As most recently proposed, Jordan Cove would be a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal on the Oregon Coast, with a 230-mile pipeline running to it from the Klamath Basin. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, pushed off a decision on its fate on February 20th, a process watched closely by LNG opponents Rogue

Ariana Neumann knew her father had escaped the Nazis in the second World War. But she didn't know much more than that--until he died. Then she began digging in earnest into the story of what happened to members of her family, and an amazing story emerged. Neumann tells this story in her book When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains . It's a tale as big as a world war and as personal and intimate as getting to know her own father better.

State parks are for everyone to enjoy, but not everyone in the state has a chance to visit them. Urban dwellers, especially people short on money, miss out on camping expeditions. So Oregon Parks and Recreation set up the Park Explorer Series , a program for under-represented groups to take part in camping weekends at specific parks on specific dates. Eight weekends are scheduled, and OPRD will take applications from organizations for the weekends through March 6th.

The State of Jefferson separatist movement has competition: some Northwest residents want to make Idaho bigger, to take in parts of Oregon and Northern California. The "Greater Idaho" vision would push the western boundary of Idaho hundreds of miles west, to go all the way to the Pacific. The point is to consolidate conservative parts of the region that feel steamrolled by the blue-state attitudes of Oregon and California. Places like Eugene and Bend are conspicuously absent from the plan.

It's been more than a century and a half since slavery was legal in the United States. But 250 years of captivity built up some feelings and habits we have yet to overcome. It helps to hear the stories of people who remember slavery, and those stories are conveyed in the book River of Blood: American Slavery from the People Who Lived It . Editors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams revive material collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, photos and firsthand accounts of people