SAIF Corporation, Oregon’s state-chartered workers’ compensation insurer, has occupied a unique place in the state’s economic ecosystem for more than a century. Created in 1914 after Oregon adopted one of the nation’s earliest workers’ compensation systems, SAIF was intended to serve as a stable insurance option for employers while protecting workers injured on the job. Over the decades, the organization grew into one of the most influential quasi-public corporations in Orego

It is 9:47 AM, an hour at which I have abandoned my morning but not yet earned my afternoon, and I am reading about a missile sale that fell through. I am drinking coffee out of a mug a friend gave me that says something encouraging on it, in a font I associate with hospitals. The rain outside is doing the thing where it cannot decide if it is rain or simply a mood the sky is in. And I am, for reasons I cannot fully explain to myself, deeply invested in a Norwegian arms deal.

It is 9:47 AM in a kitchen that gets about forty minutes of usable light per day, and I am eating a piece of toast that I have already decided was a mistake, scrolling past the local news to read about a train I will never take. This is one of my hobbies. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I worry, with great specificity, about the infrastructure of New York. It is cheaper than therapy and almost as humiliating. The story is this: the Long Island Rail Road, which the Associa

It is 2:14 PM on a Friday, an hour I have learned to distrust because it is too late for productivity and too early to forgive myself for not having any, and I am eating leftover rice standing up over the sink, which is the only way I eat rice now, when I see the video. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the man whose company is currently worth more than several countries I could name if pressed, is also eating noodles standing up. He is in Beijing. He looks happy. The Associat

It is 4:18 PM in a kitchen that gets exactly twelve minutes of direct sunlight per day, and I am eating peanut butter off a spoon because I have decided that lunch was a concept invented by people with better dental insurance than mine. The spoon is one of the good ones. The peanut butter is not. On my phone, somewhere between an ad for a mattress and a notification about a calendar event I do not remember accepting, I read that the President is in Beijing, meeting Xi Jinping

It is 4:18 PM, an hour at which the light in my apartment has begun to commit to whatever it's going to be, and I am eating cold rice directly out of the container because washing a bowl felt, today, like a moral overreach. My laptop is open on the counter. I am not working. I am performing the small ritual of pretending to work, which mostly involves reading GeekWire while a tab somewhere groans with an unanswered email from a person who deserves better. This is how I find o

It is 4:12 PM, an hour at which I have failed to be productive but have not yet earned the right to start drinking, and I am eating a piece of cheese over the sink because plates feel like a commitment I cannot make today. The window is open. The neighbor's wind chime is making its small, polite complaint. I am refreshing GeekWire on my phone because I am a person who has confused dread with information, and the two have been dating for years. The headline asks if we are on a

It is a Wednesday evening, the part of Wednesday where the light in my kitchen has gone the color of a manila envelope nobody important sent, and I am eating cereal out of a mug because every bowl I own is in the dishwasher, which is running, which means I am also listening to a small appliance digest my decisions. This is the hour at which I read the news. I do this to myself voluntarily, which is its own diagnosis. The headline, when I find it, is on GeekWire and it concern

I was standing in the kitchen attempting to decide whether the small amount of coffee left in the pot constituted "more coffee" or simply "a sad puddle I should pour out and pretend never existed," when I saw the headline. Retail sales up 0.5% in April. I read it the way I read most economic news, which is to say with the dim awareness that someone, somewhere, has measured me and found me to be a decimal. The Associated Press, via The Seattle Times, informed me Thursday that

It is 10:14 PM, which is the hour at which I have given up on the productive evening but have not yet committed to the slow surrender of sleep, and I am eating a piece of cheese directly off a knife in the kitchen, which is a thing I do when I am alone and reading the news on my phone and pretending the cheese is dinner because dinner, as a concept, has slipped past me again. The kitchen light is the kind that makes everything look like it has been left in a drawer too long.

It is 9:47 AM, an hour at which I have abandoned my morning but not yet earned my afternoon, and I am standing in my kitchen holding a mug that says nothing on it because I have reached the age where I no longer want my dishware to have opinions. The rain is doing its part. The cat is doing its part. I am reading the news on a phone I am holding too close to my face, the way my grandmother used to hold envelopes she didn't want to open. Honda, it turns out, has lost money. No

Las Vegas in January is a fever dream wrapped in LED lights and regret, the kind of place where the air hums with the promise of innovation

Fifty years after Cuckoo’s Nest fluttered into American theaters, Salem still carries the echo.

Oh, Salem, Oregon—you sweet, soggy corner of the Pacific Northwest, where the rain falls like a perpetual apology and the libraries, bless their underfunded hearts, have been gasping for air like a goldfish flipped out of its bowl. I remember my own library days, back when I was a kid dodging the fluorescent-lit aisles of some forgotten Midwestern branch, pilfering paperbacks that smelled like mildew and other people’s regrets. Libraries were my escape hatch, my free therapy

Good day, friends—or good evening, depending on when you’re reading this. In the quiet corners of America, where the weight of personal trials meets the strength of human spirit, stories emerge that remind us what courage really looks like. Today, in Salem, Oregon, one such story is unfolding, not with fanfare, but with quiet determination. It’s the tale of Desiree Guerra, a woman who turned her own escape from the shadows of domestic violence and human trafficking into a bea

In the predawn haze of September 23, Marion County, Oregon, became the stage for a reckless ballet of speed and folly, starring...

In the haze of a September night, Brian Del Werner, a 32-year-old drifter from Kalispell, Montana, carved a jagged scar through Salem’s...

Imagine strolling down the street of Salem when suddenly your calm evening is interrupted by the arrival of the bomb squad—no, not some dram

I’ve been roaming CES floors for a decade now, and CES 2026 (January 6–9, 2026 in Las Vegas) already feels like the next chapter in tech...

South Salem, OR—At 4:15 AM, when the world is supposed to be still, the kind of still where you can hear your own heartbeat if you listen...