Chris Honoré: A darkness of the spirit
A friend sent me an excerpt from a collection of essays written by Mary Oliver titled “Upstream.”She writes:“In the winter hours I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature,...
View ArticleChris Honoré: The first 100 days — a long, dark winter
If you are a progressive, the first 100 days of this Republican administration has been an ordeal, sometimes wrenching, as well as exhausting if followed closely.There are moments when it all seems...
View ArticleChris Honoré: ‘Fearless Girl’ and ‘Charging Bull’
In lower Manhattan, on Wall Street, stands a massive bronze statue of a bull, head lowered, its powerful body all sinew and muscle, horns threatening. A matador’s chest-tightening nightmare. According...
View ArticleChris Honoré: All roads lead to Russia
Part OneLast Tuesday, May 9, President Trump fired James Comey, the Director of the FBI, who was in the middle of leading a wide-ranging criminal investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded...
View ArticleChris Honoré: All roads lead to Russia
Part TwoFrom the moment Donald Trump announced his campaign I shook my head in disbelief. His statements in interviews and from the campaign podium were jaw-dropping to reprehensible: John McCain...
View ArticleChris Honoré: The fire and the fire brigade
Part OneWinston Churchill said, during a particularly fraught moment leading up to World War II, “I refuse to be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade.”I would argue that the train of...
View ArticleChris Honoré: Into the weeds: The deep state
At the risk of wandering too far into the weeds, I want to try and define what is meant by “deep state,” a term of art used to describe much of the government Trump Inc. now presides over.To begin...
View ArticleChris Honoré: Silence and our national shame
When Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana was shot, along with three others, while practicing for a congressional charity baseball game, the press and the pundits found themselves facing a dilemma....
View ArticleChris Honoré: Republicans and the safety net
Part OneIn one of his last speeches, Hubert H. Humphrey said, “... the moral test of a government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the...
View ArticleChris Honoré: Republicans and the safety net
Part TwoFor well over half a century it has been a fundamental tenet of our society that we will provide a safety net for all Americans. To generation after generation, it has been a promise made and a...
View ArticleChris Honoré: ‘If you’re not busy, let’s do coffee’
As I write this, Donald Trump is in France for Bastille Day, at the invitation of the also recently elected president, Emmanuel Macron.But I keep thinking about his trip the week before to Germany...
View ArticleChris Honoré: An irrefutable existential threat
How to write about climate change and convey in the words and sentences the abiding urgency of what is now an irrefutable existential threat? I’m not sure. I do know that in the midst of all the sturm...
View ArticleChris Honoré: There but for the grace of ...
How can any Republican with a shred of decency seriously participate in the Kabuki dance recently performed in the Senate, its purpose to dismantle the Affordable Care Act?To a person they know, absent...
View ArticleBlacksmith, harness shops provided essential services
Blacksmith and harness shops were as essential 100 years ago as auto mechanics and service stations are today. In Yreka, California, they included the Swan & LeMay Carriage Making and Blacksmith...
View ArticleAs It Was: School building serves as church rectory
Soon after its founding in 1883, the Medford community needed a school for its children. The first school was a one-room building on South Central in Medford, a subscription school that cost $5 to...
View ArticleBureau of Reclamation rescued Bear Creek irrigation
Three irrigation districts in Southern Oregon first realized in the 1930s that their infrastructure was deteriorating. Founded years earlier as private companies, they also realized they couldn’t...
View ArticleGood coffee comes to the Rogue Valley
It used to be hard to get a good cup of coffee in the Rogue Valley and the rest of Oregon. That's all changed. Said one aficionado, "Coffee was watered down ink when I left in the late 1960s. When I...
View ArticleAs It Was: Central Point vs. the Railroad
First it was the Oregon and California Railroad that chose to run its tracks straight as an arrow through the Bear Creek Valley, bypassing the tiny town of Central Point, Oregon, by a half mile in...
View ArticleAs It Was: Hotel Medford met fiery end
The date of Aug. 8, 1988, may ring a bell for those people living in or near Medford, Oregon, for that day is remembered as the day a fire destroyed the Hotel Medford.Built in 1911, the hotel was...
View ArticleAs It Was: Cats eat rats, rats eat cats, everyone gets rich
It is estimated more than 50 million fur-bearing animals, including cats and dogs, are killed each year for their skins, most grown on fur farms around the world. Southern Oregon historian Ben Truwe...
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