When we have differing opinions and can't even agree upon the facts, is there any point in trying to have a conversation? Yes, say Marla Estes and Rob Schläpfer. They offer workshops on “How to Change Minds (Including Your Own)" to provide some guidance for people who really do think a little dialogue might go a long way to reducing the current polarized state of American discussion. A session by that title comes to the Medford library on Saturday, July 1, part of The Weekly Talk series.

Anybody who's ever flown has an airline or airport horror story. But this much can be said: planes seldom collide in the skies. The federal air traffic control system is robust and effective. President Trump wants to spin the operations off to a private entity, and there are questions from members of Congress and local airport managers. The Rogue Valley International-Medford airport is the region's largest commercial airport (south of Eugene, that is).

Ashland takes pride in thinking of itself as an open, caring, multicultural community. But comments and threats to people of color roiled the city in recent years, and it has produced some community-wide soul-searching. And a candidate for a vacant seat on the Ashland School Board. Kamilah Long works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and wants the spot, saying she could be an effective voice for students of color. Long reports an increase in hate speech in the schools as well as on the streets

If you are at all into eating mushrooms, can you tell the yummy from the deadly? Identifying mushrooms can be a very tricky process, with very high stakes in making a mistake. More than a dozen people have been sickened in Northern California over the last year from eating toxic mushrooms like Amanita phalloides. Debbie Viess from the Bay Area Mycological Society is an expert on Amanitas. Michael Beug, professor emeritus at The Evergreen State College, also shares some 'shroom thoughts.

Suction dredging is gone from many streams in Oregon, never to return. The legislature recently passed, and the governor signed, a bill making a "temporary" moratorium on the gold mining process permanent. Environmental groups who want to see more fish in the streams are thrilled. You can guess how miners feel about it. But you don't have to: Tom Kitchar of the Waldo Mining District talks to us about suction dredging.

To hear some employers tell it, there's a lot of eye-rolling in the workplace these days: eye-rolling from the young employees given tasks, eye-rolling from the managers assigning tasks. Millennials do get a bad rap at work, and Crystal Kadakia explains why and how in her book The Millennial Myth: Transforming Misunderstanding into Workplace Breakthroughs . Are millennials lazy, entitled, disrespectful, and disloyal? Kadakia says no, these are all myths. She addresses those and moves on to

The story is the same in many of our communities: renting a house is costly. Lots of people want housing, and the supply is low, driving up the price and keeping vacancies rare. Now a minimum wage job can't provide enough money for even a basic apartment. Those are findings from the National Low Income Housing Coalition . We dive into the numbers with Diane Yentel, the president of NLIHC.

It's a familiar story in American health care: people getting their primary medical care from a hospital emergency room instead of a primary care physician. The air and ground ambulance service Mercy Flights teamed up with Jackson Care Connect to try a new approach in Jackson County. And the pairing got a grant to test the theory. It worked: people who got regular visits from paramedics in non-emergency situations cut their ER visits in half. More than half, actually (56%).

Any effort to improve your life would probably not begin at the doorstep of an economist. But let's keep an open mind about this. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, is best known for writing about "the invisible hand" of the market. But he also wrote works about morality and encouraging good behavior. Russ Roberts dug up this more heart-centered version of Smith for his own book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life .

Isn't nature wonderful in how it allows creatures to adapt to their surroundings? Well, yeah, unless you're the creature who ends up host to a parasite or something else that wrecks your life. Examples abound, and WIRED science writer Matt Simon serves them up in gruesome detail in his book The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar: Evolution’s Most Unbelievable Solutions to Life’s Biggest Problems .