Summer is (almost) here, and with it a huge variety of arts events around the region. We highlight as many as time will allow in our First Friday Arts segment. It's all listener-generated content: we invite arts organizations to call with news of their events-- 800-838-3760 --and keep taking calls until they run out.

Artificial Intelligence, AI, is already at work in our lives. The concern is how it might work in the future. Some of our science fiction shows a future with robots running wild. James Adams, journalist and entrepreneur and former JX host, put his own thoughts on AI to paper in the book Artificial Intelligence: Confronting the Revolution .

It was right around this date in 1968 that Senator Robert Kennedy died after being shot in Los Angeles, right after winning the California Democratic Presidential Primary. So it's only fitting that we bring back our interview with Larry Tye, who wrote Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon . The "making" of the title was by no means overnight; RFK had received some of his earliest political training from the orbit of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the infamous communist-hunter.

The Humboldt County community of Scotia exists because of industry. But that does not mean that residents have a fondness for all industry.

"We are not in the news business," said a Facebook executive recently. The remark followed Facebook's refusal to take down a doctored video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that appeared to show her slurring words. So that's one thing we can talk about in this month's edition of Signals & Noise. There are always plenty more topics, as we survey a crowded media landscape that never sleeps. Our regulars from the Communication faculty at Southern Oregon University, Andrew Gay and Precious

The destructive fire seasons of recent years have focused attention anew on evacuation. Plans for getting people away from fires were not adequate in both Paradise and Redding last year. Now emergency managers are reconsidering evacuation planning on both sides of the state line. Emergency Management leaders at all levels have some ideas about how to proceed, while the fire department in Redding and the American Red Cross have some hard-earned experience.

The last few fire seasons have a lot of people thinking about smoke. And one issue raised is the possibility of more controlled burns during the non-fire season. That would likely mean a bit of smoke in the fall, winter, and spring, in the hope of a lot LESS smoke in the summer. Stanford University weighs in with a recent study that shows wildfire smoke is worse for children than the smoke from controlled burns.

There was a certain amount of trepidation in Humboldt County about the legalization of marijuana in California; first medical, then recreational. In some parts of the county, people had been growing cannabis in the shadows for generations. With legalization comes regulation and rules and bookkeeping and taxation. And it's been a hard transition for growers in the so-called Emerald Triangle, a situation reported by Emily Witt in The New Yorker .

You probably know well the story of the African-American man breaking the color barrier in his sport. But this is not a story about Jackie Robinson or baseball. A half-century before Robinson suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Major Taylor made his way into the ranks of bicycle racers, at a time when cycling was at its zenith and American race relations were entering their nadir. Taylor's success is told in the book The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor,

Recycling changed for a lot of us last year, when China--which had accepted many of our recyclables--stopped doing so. U.S. communities are still looking for ways to fill some of the gaps created in the recycling system. In Klamath County, Reach, Inc. is stepping up. Reach provides training and work to people with barriers to employment. And it is adding some recycling functions to its work in wood products.