Summertime is peach, tomato, and archaeology season! While investigations happen throughout the year, field schools, public outreach, and big excavations peak during the warmer months. By fall, our boots are dusty, feet are sore, and labs are overflowing with the summer’s haul.

I was very excited to hear about the 2025 Southern Oregon Lavender Festival, which takes place in summer over two weekends: once in June and once in July. It was the perfect excuse for me to continue exploring this beautiful region. Spending a lovely, sunny July day driving around the Applegate with my dog, Herbie, and visiting friendly, family-run lavender farms sounded just about perfect to me.

The loss of all federal funding with little advance notice has rocked the public media ecosystem. Hardest hit are stations serving small, rural communities which reach less wealthy parts of the country and which need to support and maintain expensive infrastructures because their audiences are spread across larger geographic areas – stations just like JPR.

I knew about the Rogue Valley’s thriving food scene long before I came to live here. I’d spent the better part of two years driving up on the weekends with my dog, exploring the towns, strolling through quiet neighborhoods, and getting a taste of the region’s offerings: its wineries, friendly eateries, natural craft foods, and organic markets. But when I arrived to join the Jefferson Public Radio team, what struck me most wasn’t just the scenic beauty or the food—it was the people.

That goes for me too. Maybe especially for me. I’ve done my fair share of freaking out about AI both in conversations with friends and colleagues as well as right here, in writing, in past columns. Perhaps saying “freaking out” is a bit hyperbolic, but let’s roll with that.

On June 12th the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act of 2025, by a vote of 214-212. This is the bill advanced by the Trump Administration that would claw back funds previously appropriated by the current Congress and authorized by President Trump to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes operating grants to public radio and television stations around the country.

According to Google, its latest quantum computing chip, Willow, is capable of solving a complex computation problem in just 5 minutes that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years to solve.

For most of us, there is a soundtrack to our lives. Songs from our childhoods, our weddings, or the background for the big and small events, parties, and road trips that shape us. Music is inherently ephemeral, and often only made available to archaeologists via ancient instruments or illustrations, but archaeological investigations from a former commune in Northern California have provided an exciting opportunity to explore the “sonic debris” from the mid-20th century.

In the academy award winning Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, Timothèe Chalamet, (portraying Bob Dylan) suggests that to truly create something new, you have to destroy the past. The British writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch referred to this as “killing your darlings.” David Lowery of the band Cracker sings, in Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now) “What the world needs now is another folk-singer like I need a hole in my head.” The idea is that to create truly original art, literature, music, or cultural movements, you must forget the past.

The drumbeat to cancel all federal funding for public media has continued in Washington and significant new steps have been taken to make this outcome a reality. Here’s an update on where we stand.