Running a farm is like running a factory, except you're not quite sure how much you'll produce until the season is over. That's just one of many challenges in agriculture, and there are many more, especially for smaller family farmers. Agri-giant businesses have economies of scale that the small farms lack. But plenty of people are still dedicated to growing crops and a livelihood with them, just on a smaller scale. Ted Genoways follows a farm family in Nebraska in his took This Blessed Earth: A

We can all stand to learn a few things from nature. For a young woman named Tori, nature was her primary teacher for most of a year. Tori has been diagnosed with dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, and short-term memory problems. She and four other young women spent a year in the Oregon Cascades, living very close to the land. The story is told in the documentary film "Earth Seasoned," one of the films in this year's Jefferson State FlixxFest in the Scott Valley.

Rain. The word itself sounds pretty after a long stretch of hot weather and fires and smoke. And it began falling in the region over the weekend (September 17th), giving hope that the worst of the fires and smoky conditions might be behind us. That's not necessarily true, as fire managers remind us. October can be a big fire month, too, and has been in several fire seasons.

All eyes are on North Korea at the moment, thanks to its ongoing weapons tests. But Richard McGregor urges us to look elsewhere for the real story in Asia: the lingering and growing distrust and dislike between Japan and China. McGregor is a journalist who has covered Asia extensively, and he writes about the rising tensions in the region in Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century . Ancient enmities and modern missteps, including in Washington, are

Do you even know what your grandparents did for a living? Bill Nicholson does, because he does it too. He is the third generation of his family to farm Nicholson Ranch in Fort Klamath. And the ranch has just been recognized by the Oregon Farm Bureau's Century Farm & Ranch program, honoring places where people have worked the land for 100 years. There's even a Sesquicentennial Award for operations continuing for 150 years.

More than half the population, yet still not equal in pay and other measures. Women still have some gender biases to overcome. Those and many other issues are addressed at the Women With Wings conferences held across the country, including in Ashland next month (October 19-22). Di Strachan and Nancy Swift of Jefferson Economic Development Institute (JEDI) are among the speakers.

Ask people to list scary diseases, and there's a good chance Lyme disease will show up on the list. Not just because of its many and varied symptoms, but because it can be so hard to diagnose correctly. In Andrea Caesar's case, it took 25 years. She wrote of her experience in A Twist of Lyme: Battling a Disease That "Doesn't Exist." Andrea joined us in 2014 to talk about her long journey with the affliction.

40 filmed features and shorts are crammed into just three days at the Klamath Independent Film Festival , coming to Klamath Falls next weekend (Sept. 15-17). And they are all by or about people in Oregon and Northern California. The KIFF offerings include the Oregon premiere of "No Man's Land," a documentary about the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in early 2016.

The Mount Shasta organization known as W.A.T.E.R. chose a name that stands for "We Advocate Thorough Environmental Review." And its members got their wish: an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) on the plan for Crystal Geyser's water bottling plant in Mount Shasta. The EIR is now out, sure to gladden some hearts and impact others adversely.

Star Trek did it. Superman did it. Even Woody Allen traveled through time in one of his movies (bonus points for knowing which one). In short, we've been talking about traveling through time for a very long time. James Gleick, who writes about science and its practitioners, travels back in time to the origins of people thinking and writing about time travel. It's all on the table, from Jules Verne to the present day, from art to science to philosophy, in Gleick's book Time Travel: A History . It