The Jefferson Exchange

It's become everyday in our age of anxiety. Many of us just don't sleep well, don't sleep enough, or both.

20 percent of Americans suffer from some sort of sleep disorder. Science writer Henry Nicholls comes to this topic from a different personal experience: he sleeps too much. He first noticed symptoms of narcolepsy when he was 21, and his disorder has progressed.

In his latest book, Sleepyhead: The Neuroscience of a Good Night's Rest, Nicholls digs into the latest neurological research on the spectrum of sleep disorders, from insomnia to narcolepsy to sleep apnea to restless leg syndrome, and finds that they have a lot in common. 

Ocean fishing with large nets always catches creatures besides the intended fish; "bycatch," it's called in the business. 

But some large nets are known for scooping up and killing marine mammals as well as fish.  Driftnets were banned in Washington and Oregon years ago. 

Now California legislators have passed a law to ban driftnet fishing a few years down the road. 

Turtle Island Restoration Network and allied groups are thrilled with the passage. 

College is necessary, college is expensive.  Both of those things are true for many young people today. 

And making college more accessible is the driving force behind "promise" programs, which offer incentives--like free or reduced tuition--to students who meet certain benchmarks. 

Ben Cannon administers the Oregon Promise program at the Higher Education Coordinating Commission.    

Who knew board games could still be a big deal in the age of video and virtual reality?  Jeff DeBoer, for one. 

He turned his love for board, card, and table games into a business model years ago: Funagain Games.  The company runs physical stores in Ashland and Eugene, but sells games both new and old online to customers all over the world. 

Our business segment, The Ground Floor, pays a visit to Jeff DeBoer to learn more about how he got his game business from square one to success. 

Beer drinkers are living in a very good time.  They have a plethora of choices in colors, flavors, makers, and more. 

The United States has more breweries now than at any time since Prohibition.  But any business that grows this fast is bound to have some growing pains, and John Holl says it certainly does. 

Holl is the author of Drink Beer, Think Beer: Getting to the Bottom of Every Pint.  And that subtitle is a double-entendre; Holl gets to the bottom of the story about beer in our time, illuminating some of the issues in the business and its products. 

The stigma may be lifting from mental illness, but it's a slow lift.  People get help and compassion with a physical infirmity, but often suspicion and fear with a mental health problem. 

Southern Oregon Compass House in Medford brings people who have dealt with mental health issues together in a common clubhouse, for support and resources. 

Once a month we visit with a club member about living with mental illness, and keeping up the recovery. 

Have you met durian?  You'd probably remember if you did. 

Durian is not a person, but a fruit.  In fact, the King of Fruits, says Lindsay Gasik.  She's a Rogue Valley native now living and working in Thailand and Malaysia, giving tours of the places where durian grow. 

And she blogs about this spiky-looking but tasty fruit, too. 

Nationalism is getting a bad name in parts of the world, especially in the United States, where it is often preceded by the world "white." 

Yoram Hazony will not defend that brand of nationalism, but he does see plenty to like in the impulse to defend independent states. 

He lays out the case in his book The Virtue of Nationalism, which sees the alternative a kind of globalist "universalism." 

Bob Woodward, of Nixon-era fame, publishes a tell-all about President Donald Trump in his new book. The New York Times publishes its own tell-all in an op-ed written by an anonymous source working near the president. And Nike features an ad with Colin Kaepernick's face overlaid with text that reads: "Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Sounds like another exciting month in the media business, up for discussion in our media segment, Signals & Noise. 

Our guests, Andrew Gay and Precious Yamaguchi, teach young people about the media at Southern Oregon University. 

Slavery has long been illegal in the United States, but people are still forced to work and have sex against their will. 

Law enforcement continues to work to crack down on human trafficking, but it's a long haul.  Truckers are keeping their eyes out for people being trafficked; that's the focus of Truckers Against Trafficking. 

The program comes complete with a training program to make truckers more effective at spotting trafficking. 

Fire season clearly still has a while to go, but it's never too early to talk about what happened this year, and why. 

A Smoke and Fire Summit is set for next weekend (Saturday, September 15th) at Southern Oregon University, to help people better understand the contributing factors to a destructive and smoky summer. We hear from Marko Bey of the Lomakatsi Restoration Project, and Don Ferguson, retired from a long career at the federal Bureau of Land Management working on wildland fires.

Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy recently published a study looking at the history of wildfire behavior in the Rogue River Basin, and will follow it up with a public field trip to look at parts of the forest affected by fire. We hear from its lead author and forest ecologist Kerry Metlen.

You can find film festivals all over the country now, but few that focus on just films from and about Oregon. 

But that is the mission at the Klamath Independent Film Festival, lighting up screens in Klamath Falls the weekend of September 14-16. 

From features about imperiled horses ("Lean on Pete") to documentaries about the arts scene in the Klamath Basin itself ("Ragland"), there's a bunch to see. 

Notice all the colored folders next time you're at the doctor's office; many medical records are still stored on paper. 

But the industry has been pushing for years now toward more computerization, more use of electronic health records (EHR).  It's taking time to convert, but one trend is clear: more IT workers in the health industry. 

William Hersh, MD and teacher of medical informatics at Oregon Health & Science University, tracks the trends in health record adoption. 

The number of women who report being sexually assaulted in America are surprising enough.  But the numbers are shockingly high for Native American women. 

And the shock goes beyond sexual assault to murder and kidnap... these too happen at higher rates for native women than for the rest of the population. 

The back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s did a lot to populate the hills and hollers of our region. 

Thalia Truesdell was one of the people who came looking for a simpler way of life... she settled in Sawyer's Bar on the California side, buying some land there. 

Her experiences there and later in the Applegate Valley are the subject of this month's edition of Stories of Southern Oregon, curated by Maureen Flanagan Battistella for the Southern Oregon Digital Archive. 

The great explorers all had a whole lot of unknown in front of them.  They had no idea what they'd find, and they came back with big surprises (think Charles Darwin, for one example). 

The mystery is mostly gone on an Earth now completely mapped.  Or is it? 

Protecting animals on the Earth can be a tricky proposition.  Case in point: creating marine reserves to protect fish and other ocean creatures. 

In the South Pacific, the announcement that reserves would be created in the future actually led to increased fishing before the reserves were established.  This is just one impact on fisheries tracked by economist Grant McDermott at the University of Oregon. 

He is this month's guest in Curious: Research Meets Radio. 

One of the better features of modern cars is that they can tell you what's wrong with them.  Not in words, but with computer codes. 

The advent of computer diagnostics makes it a whole lot easier to figure out what ails a car.  But somebody's still got to fix it, and that's Zach Edwards' business at Ashland Automotive. 

Once a month he visits to answer our questions and yours about mysteries under the hood.  We call the segment The Squeaky Wheel, and invite you to call or write and be that wheel. 

Mark Leibovich's normal beat for the New York Times Magazine is Washington, DC and presidential politics. But for the last four years he's also been shadowing the NFL, publishing profiles of the game's more controversial figures, like Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

Leibovich says we've hit "peak football," and he sees the NFL's decline in the past few years as a metaphor for the country's political and cultural anxiety. His book is Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. 

Ah, the balance of September.  A little summer, a little fall, the days roughly equal in length to the nights, the temperatures (usually) not too extreme. 

Sounds like a great month for arts activities, and there will be plenty to enjoy. 

Our First Friday Arts segment showcases them, with the help of many phone calls.  We invite arts groups from around the region to call 800-838-3760 live in the morning to plug arts events for the coming weeks.