Nobody likes to be called a big chicken, and there's a good chance the poultry industry won't appreciate the term, either. But journalist Maryn McKenna says the power and practices of the business lend themselves to the name. She uses it for the title of her book, too: Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats . Note the focus on antibiotics, still used in chickens at a time when doctors are warning against the casual use

"Let's go watch people read scripts out loud," may not be everyone's idea of a good time, but it packs in the crowds in Ashland. Especially for the Ashland New Plays Festival , which returns with four new plays this week (October 18-22). Audiences get to hear new works, and their authors get to hear the works out loud, with audience reactions. Beth Kander is this year's host playwright.

The reaction was sharp and negative when Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of one of its drugs... from $13.50 per pill to $750.00. The company CEO was later sent to jail, but not for the drug prices. Regulators appear powerless to affect drug prices. Or did, until California passed a state law to require drugmakers to provide more information and time when they raise prices. We discuss drug prices and how they are set with Mariana Socal of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health . We

Everyone from our parents to our doctors often counsel us to be positive. And just look at the tone on social media sites: be happy! Those negative emotions do have their uses, though. Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener point out how, in their book The Upside of Your Dark Side . Robert Biswas-Diener joined us a few years back to demonstrate how those "negative" emotions can produce positive results.

By Friday morning, the wine country fires collectively had become the deadliest outbreak of fires in California history, to no one's surprise. Eight of the deaths occurred in Mendocino County, in the Mendocino Lake Complex Fires. The number is expected to go up, and more days of fire lie ahead, unless the weather forecast is very wrong. Residents who had to flee the fires took shelter in Ukiah and Willits. Ashley Tressel has been covering the story for the Ukiah Daily Journal.

Our society came to the conclusion that keeping people locked up in mental hospitals was unfair. But the system that followed can hardly be called a system. People with mental illness don't often go to the hospital, but they can end up on the streets or in jail. Compass House in Medford offers an alternative... a "clubhouse" model in which people help themselves and each other back from mental illness.

Maybe the big infrastructure bill President Trump promised has not emerged. But specific projects are getting approved, including in our region. The city of Weed has some money coming from the federal government , $2.4 Million for improvements in and around the South Weed Interchange. How much of an effect can working on one interchange have on the local economy? The city says up to 80 jobs.

Think of it as the "gig economy" on wheels: older people supplementing meager retirement income by traveling the country in vans and campers, taking odd jobs here and there. Sound like retirement to you? Journalist Jessica Bruder hit the road with the weekday warriors to document their patchwork employment. The result is the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century . It's a lifestyle that may become familiar to more people, with the skads of baby boomers retiring every day.

There's almost as much buzz about the movie on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover as there was about the takeover itself. Armed protestors took control of the refuge in January 2016 and held it for more than a month. David Byars made a documentary about the takeover, "No Man's Land." It already played film festivals in Klamath Falls and elsewhere, and has picked up some awards. The film will be the closing event at Varsity World Film Week, Friday (October 13th) at 7:30 in Ashland.

It's not quite a trade war; not yet, anyway. But there are bad feelings between the United States and Canada over softwood lumber. The stuff used to build our houses comes across the border with Canadian subsidies, says the U.S. Lumber Coalition. And the United States is ready to slap tariffs up to 27% on the Canadian lumber as a result. Oregon mill towns might see some relief, welcome news to Swanson Lumber in Glendale. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden supports action on the Canadian lumber.