The Jefferson Exchange

Flying passengers into small cities can be a tricky business. Not the flying part; the keeping the airline in business part. Two airports in our region provide the lesson, one in Klamath Falls and the other in Crescent City . Crescent City still has flights (to Oakland), because it is a federal Essential Air Service airport. Klamath Falls just missed out on getting EAS funding in an act of Congress, so remains an airport with no commercial flights.

The City of Ashland owns a big chunk of property across Interstate Five from town, and there are always ideas floating around for uses for the land. The Imperatrice property, as it's known, has been proposed for the location of electricity-generating solar panels, among other ideas. Which thrills people who favor renewable energy, but poses some issues for bird fanciers. Because the land is home to a colony of grasshopper sparrows, a bird species that has mostly disappeared in some parts of...

Kiese Laymon has had an interesting life, to put it mildly. Fortunately, he's a good writer, too, so we get to read about his life and how he's dealt with a number of challenges. They include issues with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and gambling. He presents the challenges, and how he overcame them, in his memoir, titled simply Heavy . Rob Goodwin, the host of our segment The Keenest Observers, returns to host Kiese Laymon.

It's astonishing to look at maps from hundreds of years ago and realize just how accurate some of them are, despite their creators possessing very primitive mapping tools. Things are just a bit easier for the people at the University of Oregon's InfoGraphics Lab . They have satellites and myriad other technologies available in helping them create maps and other visual aids for the Department of Geography, the University at large, and Oregon state government agencies. One of the lab's recent...

Contemplating the end of life itself is an enormous task. And there's an additional degree of complexity when someone considers making use of an assisted-suicide law, like the ones on the books in Oregon and California. End of Life Choices Oregon works as a third party, sharing its expertise on Oregon's Death With Dignity Law with people considering ending their lives. Sue Porter is the founding executive director of EOLCOR, as it calls itself.

Octavio Solis is used to telling the stories of other people in his work. He's a playwright with a large body of work and several awards to show for it; his plays have been produced at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among many other venues. Now he's strayed from his usual genre by writing a memoir focused on his early years in El Paso, Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border .

OnTrack provides substance abuse treatment in the Rogue Valley, and has been working to right its ship after several bumpy years. A new bump emerged in October, when Josephine County cancelled its contract with OnTrack on short notice. County commissioners said the break was necessary after an audit showed funds being used improperly.

We may be getting better over time, but society still fears mental illness in ways it does not shrink from physical illness or injury. Many organizations are set up to make life easier for people who struggle with mental illness, including Southern Oregon Compass House in Medford. Once a month we hear a personal story from a clubhouse member about their own experience. This month Compass Radio features a woman with a physical injury among the issues she faces.

Maybe you're not the kind of person who ever gets on her knees and kisses the ground, but you do like the Earth, right? We get so many good things from it. The OTHER meaning of "earth" gets a full exploration in a series of essays compiled into a book called Dirt: A Love Story . You read that right, it's a bunch of essays that praise dirt and all it gives to us. Barbara Richardson, the editor, and Jeanne Rogers, one of the contributing writers, visited in early 2016.

It just seems like magic. A machine uses wood chips and a few other ingredients to pull moisture out of the air, to produce water. 30 gallons a day, in the smallest unit. The name is apt: Skywater ; it just won the XPrize competition by perfecting a technology to provide fresh water to places that need it. David Hertz is the co-founder of the Skywater/Skysource Alliance.

Consumed any media lately? The flood of news and ads that comes with any major election seemed relentless of late. But that gives us plenty to talk about in our monthly survey of the media landscape, Signals & Noise. Andrew Gay and Precious Yamaguchi of the Communication faculty at Southern Oregon University keep tabs on many events in media, and we talk them over with your input.

The raw facts about the Vietnam War are hard enough to take: 58,000 Americans died protecting a country that ceased to exist soon after we left. Historian Andrew Wiest took a more intimate approach in his research, talking to the women and girlfriends of a single Army unit that fought in Vietnam. The result is the book Charlie Company's Journey Home . As you'd expect, those journeys range from bumpy to harrowing and beyond.

Nike co-founder Phil Knight gives away a lot of money. Sometimes, there are strings attached, like when he offered half a billion dollars to Oregon Health & Science University for a cancer center... and OHSU had to come up with matching money. Fast-forward to September, when the Knight Cancer Research Building opened in Portland. Yep, they matched the money.

The mid-term election, anticipated for two years, is finally over on Wednesday morning. There was a lot for voters to consider, everything from immigration to school funding, governors to city council members. So now let's talk about what happened. We follow the election with the return of our "Two Cents Day" segment... numbers and analysis, to be sure, but also a chance for you to vent on the results and how they do or do not match your hopes and expectations. Put your voice out...

Remember how fun Thanksgiving was after the 2016 election? Not so tranquil across some dinner tables, we hear. And the same thing could happen again this year--well any year, really--because our relatives share meals, but don't necessarily share politics. Marla Estes and Rob Schlapfer, who encourage people to converse across the political divide in Bridging the Divide , offer a special program for Thanksgiving called "Holiday? Or Hollerday?"

Rogue Valley artist Marigny Goodyear brings a lot of skills to her work; she's an artist with a business degree. Her usual modes of expression are abstract painting and essays. And one of her recent essays packed a wallop: it was an open letter to all the men who took advantage of her sexually in her teen years.

A man with a mallet at the Eiffel Tower. Should we call the police? No, because he has government permission to whack on the tower. Confused yet? Joseph Bertolozzi is a composer and percussionist, and he marveled at the range of sounds produced by the most visible symbol of Paris. So he took a variety of strikers to a variety of surfaces, recorded the sounds, and ended up with an album called "Tower Music." It will be performed in public live for the first time on Thursday at Southern Oregon...

Even when we're not uttering malapropisms, we may not be using the exact words we intended. Charles Harrington Elster can help; his voluminous knowledge of the English language has led to nearly a dozen books. Those include the new How to Tell Fate from Destiny . It's not about religion or philosophy, just the terms themselves.

The signs are cropping up all over: Industrial Hemp: No THC! The drop in price for THC cannabis has led many farmers to switch to industrial hemp to feed the CBD market. Hemp Inc. is a national company that has just opened a facility in Medford to process all that No THC hemp so that farmers can get the product to market. Bruce Perlowin is Hemp Inc's CEO.

Self-driving cars may be a while off, but our vehicles already seem to have minds of their own. In a sense, they do: computers control or at least monitor many of the functions of our vehicles' engines and other systems. Zach Edwards, the owner of Ashland Automotive , remembers what it was like to work on cars in the pre-computer age. He's also kept up with the times in how to repair cars now that they can tell technicians what needs fixing. Zach joins us once a month for a segment we call...