Think Out Loud

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his novel "The Underground Railroad." It's an alternate history of slavery in America from an author who has built a reputation on tweaking the boundaries of reality in order to reveal more about the world we live in. We listen back to an interview with Whitehead at Oregon State University.

Jakob Hollenbeck moved from Eugene to Portland over this past summer. While he had witnessed homelessness in Eugene, and even wrote an opinion piece about it for his university, he was still surprised by what he saw in Portland. Over time, he became friends with some of his neighbors experiencing homelessness. They were ultimately forced to move after the city posted a notice for them to vacate the area. Hollenbeck says his neighbors deserved to stay. He joins us with more on his experiences and how he views Portland’s policies toward homelessness.

In November, voters in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District elected Lori Chavez-DeRemer as their new state representative, flipping a district that has been controlled by Democrats since 1997. Chavez-DeRemer is the former mayor of Happy Valley and is the first Republican congresswoman to represent the state. She joins us to share some of her priorities for her first year in office.

Winter in Oregon signals rain and snow pack which may help dry conditions in some parts of the state. Still, Central Oregon continues to face extreme drought. How will the relentlessly dry conditions affect the region? We check in with Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist and Eric Klann, a longtime engineer for the city of Prineville.

One of the biggest surprises of the midterm elections this past November took place in Southwest Washington, where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez narrowly defeated Joe Kent, a former Army Green Beret who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. On Saturday, Gluesenkamp Perez was sworn into the 118th Congress representing a district which was held for six terms by her predecessor, Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler. Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez joins us to talk about adjusting to her new role on Capitol Hill, her legislative priorities and where she thinks she can reach bipartisan consensus with Republican lawmakers on the top issues facing the region and the nation.

Archaeologists at Oregon State University have found projectile points in Idaho that date back nearly 16,000 years — making them the oldest such artifacts found in the Americas. The points were uncovered at the Cooper’s Ferry site along the Salmon River in western Idaho. Though the land is currently held by the federal Bureau of Land Management, it’s the traditional territory of the Nez Perce Tribe and its ancestors.

OSU anthropology professor Loren Davis joins us to talk about the discovery and about what it means to fill in the region’s historical record with physical artifacts. We’ll also hear about the artifacts’ cultural significance from Nakia Williamson-Cloud, director of the Nez Perce Tribe Cultural Resources Program.

With the critical shortage of housing, it might seem to make sense to convert empty office buildings into condos or apartments. But it’s not that simple. From the regulatory and zoning hurdles to the high costs of retrofitting existing structures, in many cases the price of conversion would be far greater than building new housing. The idea is being considered elsewhere in the country, including in California, where lawmakers put $400 million toward grants for developers to offset conversion costs. Willamette Week reporter Sophie Peel has been covering this story and joins us to tell us more.