The Oregon Shakespeare Festival play "Cambodian Rock Band" packs a lot into a single production: music, comedy, tragedy, even genocide. The murders of more than a million Cambodians (closer to two million) by the Khmer Rouge is just one of the storylines in the play by Lauren Yee, with music by the band Dengue Fever. Imagine the work it takes to pull it off on stage night after night.

Oregon's struggling child foster care system took another hit recently. The Audit Division of the Secretary of State's Office released an audit that showed the Department of Human Services making only slow progress on problems pointed out in an earlier audit a year ago. The major problems center around numbers: too many children in foster care for the available placements, and too few caseworkers to guide children to appropriate care. There are some signs of progress in the latest audit, too.

Humboldt Redwood Company trumpets its environmental stewardship to the public. But not all of the public is pleased with the company's logging on Rainbow Ridge, west of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. In fact, protestors have demonstrated against the logging, with a handful getting arrested on Monday (June 10th). Lost Coast League is one of the groups taking issue with HRC's logging in the Mattole River watershed.

Having the candidate who won the most votes lose the presidency is not just a demonstration of the workings of the Electoral College. It's also an example of a set of circumstances that provide opportunities for each political ideology, but not spread evenly across the country. Political scientist Jonathan Rodden gets into the details in his book Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide . He shows how events both accidental and deliberate make Democrats and the left

We don't have to like death, but we do have to accept it. Any life will include some grief, and that's why WinterSpring exists. The Medford-based nonprofit helps people grieve in healthy ways, through group counseling and other activities. Hogan Sherrow is the Executive Director of WinterSpring.

Many of the people we talk to in Stories of Southern Oregon work the land... farmers, loggers, and miners. But someone has to feed the people who work the land, and that's where Cory Hamann comes in. She runs the Sugar Pine Company Cafe in Butte Falls, feeding people on their way to and from working in the woods and other jobs.

The news of a couple of weeks ago only confirmed the continuation of a trend: fewer American women are having babies. In fact, the most recent figures (from 2017) show the lowest U.S. birth rate ever. No surprise for sociologist Amy Blackstone, who has no children of her own, and writes of people in the same circumstance in Childfree by Choice: The Movement Redefining Family and Creating a New Age of Independence .

Close to half the people on Earth can speak more than one language. The percentage (43) is actually higher than the percentage of people who speak only one language (40). But in this country, only about a fifth of the population is bilingual, and foreign-language programs are often the targets of budget cuts in schools and colleges. That troubles foreign-language learners at Southern Oregon University , who want to see more support, not less.

Anybody who watches a fair amount of sports is used to the concept of concussion. It's bad enough when adults get their brains rattled; it can derail a life plan for a young person working to get through school. So the University of Oregon's Center for Brain Injury Research and Training (CBIRT) started a project to help teachers help students with brain injuries. We learn about the project from CBIRT Director Ann Glang and Project Coordinator Melissa McCart in this month's edition of Curious:

High costs and low availability can discourage just about anyone in the real estate market. Those conditions can also make options like tiny homes more attractive. The fascination with very small houses has been around long enough that some books on the subject are now in second editions. Those include A Tiny Home to Call Your Own , by Patricia Foreman. And some builders specialize in tiny homes, like Oregon Cottage Company in Eugene.