Think Out Loud

In Oregon, employment in the newspaper industry has fallen nearly 80% since 2000, according to OPB reporting.    And when communities lose journalists, information gaps can be exploited. The Ashland Daily Tidings closed in 2023, and the newspaper’s website was later invaded by artificial intelligence.    When a community loses a local newsroom, residents have fewer places to turn to for regional news that keeps them informed. Report for America is a nonprofit that places journalists in newsrooms across the U.S. to cover under-reported issues in communities, especially in rural areas.     Danielle Dawson is a collaborative investigative reporter for InvestigateWest and she’s based in Bend. Simmerdeep Kaur reports for the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin and covers the effects of federal policy on health and childcare access in southeast Washington. Alexander Banks reports for the Yakima Herald-Republic and covers education gaps in the Yakima Valley with a focus on solutions. And Alex Frick is a roving rural reporter covering peninsula communities for The Port Townsend and Jefferson County Leader in Washington.    They join us with details of their reporting and how their work affects people living in the Pacific Northwest.  

On Monday, a majority of a 3-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the Trump administration can send members of the National Guard to Portland. The immediate impact of the ruling, however, is unclear. The Ninth Circuit’s decision only applies to one of the two temporary restraining orders U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut issued earlier this month blocking deployments both from Oregon and from any other state. Writing for the majority, Judges Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade said that both of Judge Immergut’s restraining orders “rise or fall together” because they’re based on the same legal reasoning. In a dissent, Judge Susan Graber disagreed and said the Trump administration did not challenge the second restraining order, which therefore remains in effect.    Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Attorney General Dan Rayfield and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson responded to the ruling in a joint statement and called for a hearing before the full Ninth Circuit. “Oregon remains united in the fight against this unwanted, unneeded military intervention in Oregon,” Gov. Kotek wrote. Last week, a federal appeals court upheld an Illinois district court’s ruling that blocked the deployment of the National Guard to Chicago. The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the National Guard deployment in Chicago.    Joining us for a legal analysis of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling is Jessica Levinson, clinical professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.    

Starting in elementary school, students might begin learning about the epic expedition Lewis and Clark led 220 years ago to explore the newly acquired territory of the Louisiana Purchase, an 8,000-mile journey through present-day Oregon to the Pacific Ocean and back. While the names Lewis and Clark have been etched into history books, the name York is largely unknown. York , William Clark’s slave, was the only Black man on the expedition. A skilled hunter, naturalist and outdoorsman, York also helped Lewis and Clark during their negotiations and encounters with Native American tribes in the uncharted West. Yet, as a slave, York lacked the agency to tell his own story and was denied his freedom by Clark for nearly a decade after returning home.    Grammy Award-nominated Portland musician Aaron Nigel Smith is today helping bring York’s story to a wider audience in the form of an opera that blends different musical genres, from folk to classical and jazz to hip-hop. “York the Explorer” premieres this Friday at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton for a weekend of performances as part of “York Fest,” a 9-day celebration of the explorer organized by the Oregon Black Pioneers.    Smith produced, co-wrote and composed the music for “York the Explorer.” He also performs in it with his friend Cedric Berry, an artist with the L.A. Opera, who plays York. Jasmine Johnson, the civic engagement and partnerships manager at Portland Opera, plays Rose, York’s mother. They join us for a discussion and in-studio performance of several songs from the opera.  Disclosure: Patricia Reser Center for the Arts and Oregon Black Pioneers are OPB sponsors. OPB's newsroom maintains editorial independence and is not informed by financial support/individuals to the organization.

The Portland Trail Blazers’ first game of the 2025-2026 NBA regular season  tips off tomorrow at the Moda Center against the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Blazers’ roster this season consists of several exciting new additions, including rookie Yang Hansen. The Blazers selected the 7-foot-1 center from China as the 16th-overall pick in the first round of the NBA draft in June.    Less than a month later, ESPN broke the news that Damian Lillard had agreed to return to the Blazers on a three-year, $42 million contract. The Blazers traded Lillard in 2023 to the Milwaukee Bucks, at his request, after Lillard spent 11 years playing in Portland without winning a championship trophy. Lillard’s time with the Bucks ended after he tore his Achilles tendon during the first-round of the NBA playoffs in the spring.    The start of the Blazers’ new season coincides with an out-of-court settlement that clears the way for the team’s sale to a group of wealthy investors led by Tom Dundon, the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team. Last month, the estate of Paul Allen announced it had entered a formal agreement to sell the Blazers to Dundon, pending approval from the  NBA’s Board of Governors. Mike Richman, host of the “Locked On Blazers” podcast, joins us to preview the new season and the hopes and uncertainties lying ahead.   

Your Tech Q is a youth-led nonprofit that gives free workshops and presentations on technology and digital literacy in various communities, with a focus on older adults. It’s run by 16-year-old Catlin Gabel high school junior Atef Siddiqui. He got involved with the workshops about a year after the organization was founded in 2022 by Portland students. At the time he was in middle school and doing similar work tutoring Afghan refugees. Siddiqui says he and other youth volunteers find the kind of one-on-one tutoring extremely rewarding. The feedback they get in real time, and afterwards in written evaluations from participants, tells him Your Tech Q is providing a service that is in short supply. Your Tech Q now has chapters in San Diego and Houston. And Siddiqui says he’s happy to share the nonprofit’s knowledge base with any group of young people that would like to take on a similar mission. We talk with Siddiqui about Your Tech Q and his hopes for the organization and the mission as it grows.

JR Ujifusa is a Multnomah County senior deputy district attorney and heads its Human Trafficking Team. He’s also the chair of the National Advisory Committee on the Sex Trafficking of Children & Youth. His team and other partners working to eliminate trafficking and support survivors are trying to locate anyone who was trafficked on the now defunct Backpage(dot)com, which was one of the largest online prostitution sites in the world. The DA’s office wants to let survivors know there is money available to them in the form of restitution from the successful prosecution of those who profited from that trafficking. Ujifusa joins us to share more about that effort, and the progress that’s been made more broadly since he began working in this area in 2008.

More than 40 thousand people turned out in Portland alone for the No Kings protest, and people turned up en masse in scores of cities and towns throughout Oregon and Washington. They were part of an estimated 2,500 coordinated demonstrations across the country against President Trump’s use of presidential authority, extrajudicial deportations, immigration sweeps and attempts to deploy the National Guard in Democratic cities, including Portland. We’re joined by two organizers for a first hand report of what the protests were like: Isabelle Fleuraud in Burns, and Alan Unell in Vancouver.

“We do not need any more nonprofits in Oregon,” Libra Forde wrote that in an op-ed published by The Oregonian/OregonLive in June 2025, calling it a “difficult truth.” She’s the executive director of Women’s Foundation of Oregon, a philanthropic organization which does grant-making, research and policy advocacy. We heard more from Forde on how nonprofits should move forward as federal funds shrink and how merging organizations could serve communities better.

Pacific Northwest National Lab scientist and Hanford manager on radioactive tank waste, vitrification and clean-up progress In September 2024, we packed up our van and drove about four and a half hours from Portland to Richland, WA, to set up a mobile broadcast studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities, in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting. We broadcast a week of shows that included conversations about the WW II and Manhattan Project history that created the radioactive waste from war-time plutonium enrichment at Hanford. Our coverage from the region also included in-depth interviews with Indigenous leaders and a tour of the infamous B-reactor, along with conversations about the economy and culture of the region. We listen back today to two of these conversations. The first is with Carolyn Pearce, a PhD and chemist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory working on the science of the  vitrification, the glassification process that will be used to turn some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste  into radioactive glass logs for storage. In the second half of the show, we revisit our tour of one part of the Hanford nuclear reservation. The 56 million gallons of waste are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different “farms.”  Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Karthik Subramanian, chief operating officer of Washington River Protection Solutions, the tank farm operations contractor, was our guide. After the tour, we sat down with Brian Vance, who at that time was the Department of Energy’s top manager in charge of Hanford. He resigned in March of this year. Vance talked with us about tank integrity, the status of the vitrification plant and the overall clean up progress. The opening of that waste processing facility -- which has now cost $30 billion  - was thrown into doubt earlier this month, but the Department of Energy is now allowing the project to move forward and the first glass logs are expected to roll out as soon as this week, ahead of the October 15 deadline.

Elizabeth Gilbert rocketed to fame for her best-selling romp “Eat, Pray, Love.” Her  latest memoir has a very different tone. “All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation” details her journey to heal from sex and love addiction. It is also about the love of her life, Rayya Elias, a Syrian-born recovering addict and musician. Elizabeth Gilbert joins us for a live broadcast in front of an audience at the Literary Arts bookstore.