"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice." An old joke, maybe, but also a reality for the leaders of the Jefferson State Choral Coalition , based in the Rogue Valley. JSCC premieres a new work called "Turn The World Around" in Medford on the first of June, then the piece moves to New York for a performance a week later. At Carnegie Hall. The work is composed by JSCC Musical Director Kirby Shaw, with lyrics by Markita Shaw.

The Alaska earthquake of 1964 woke a lot of people up, literally and figuratively. The tsunami it created devastated downtown Crescent City and damaged other communities, and alerted us to the possibility of quakes closer to home. Now we understand the dangers of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Bonnie Henderson ties together personal histories and scientific advances in her book The Next Tsunami .

There were some complaints about the formation of the Oregon Wildfire Council, ordered by Governor Kate Brown. The complaints generally held that Oregon's recent wildfires demanded more robust action than some kind of committee. But Ashland State Representative Pam Marsh is glad to be on the council, looking for appropriate actions to curtail the danger of wildfire and smoke.

The longstanding connection between Southern Oregon University and its sister school in Guanajuato, Mexico includes many cultural interchanges. And those include percussion groups from SOU and Guanajuato University playing together. The first of two concerts comes this week in Ashland (May 24), the second six days later in Guanajuato, with the theme “From North: Rugged Landscapes…to South: Celebración de la hermandad.”

When the baby boomers left for college, it was affordable for many people. When the millennial generation left for college, paying for it often involved taking on debt that would take years to pay back. Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Sternberg examined a number of policies on money matters, and found them tilted in favor of the boomers. He lays out the case in The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future .

Even small doses of the poison cyanide can have harmful effects on humans and other creatures. But for years Oregon law allowed the use of cyanide traps, essentially small cyanide bombs that would kill coyotes--and other animals that blundered into the traps. The state legislature just outlawed the devices, known as M-44s, at the urging of the group Predator Defense .

Oregon got a significant place on one of those lists that rank all the states. Unfortunately, the place was last: WalletHub ranked Oregon 50th of the 50 states in "Best & Worst States for Military Retirees." If you want nearby comparisons, California ranked 21st and Washington got 28th. So what makes Oregon a bad place for veterans to retire?

Bubonic plague in California? It happened, more than a century ago. The first case showed up in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1900 and was quickly confirmed. But not by authorities, who denied the existence of the disease for a full two years. Then it fell on health workers to address the outbreak and keep it from spreading. David Randall tells the story in the book Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague .

People have lived in what is now California for something like 19,000 years. But read a history textbook from a California school, and you're likely to find most histories begin with the arrival of Europeans a few hundred years ago. The California Indian History Curriculum Coalition aims to backfill the story of the first people on the land. They went by many names and spoke many languages before enforced assimilation. Dr. Khal Schneider of the Graton Rancheria and Gregg Castro of the Ohlone are

The Humboldt marten is a species in decline. It's a subspecies of the Pacific marten, similar to cats and foxes and yet not. While most martens live in forests, there is an isolated population of Humboldt martens living in the Oregon dunes, and scientists are not sure why. Since the animals can be notoriously hard to locate, Oregon State University scientists have been studying their scat . That's right, poop can provide some answers.