Oregon Humanities

What Rises Up to Meet Us

After bicycling to Oregon Humanities to lead a weekly staff yoga session, our fearless yoga leader Maggie admitted that she was wearing borrowed pants. Not from her sister or her best friend, but loaners that were given to her by a woman in the class she was leading after a tragically wet bike ride. We laughed about what the world offers up to us when we are down. In this case, Maggie is pretty used to getting caught riding her bike in the rain; she gets around Portland by bike... Read more

23 June 2010 | Posted by Carole Shellhart in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas | Permalink | Comments? (1 so far)

Is Local Always Good?

There’s an old joke: Did you know that in China they call Chinese food “food?” We could revise this joke to consider our current love affair with “local food.” It would go like this: Did you know that they used to call local food, “food?” Our contemporary vocabulary reveals a revolution in our relationship to what we eat. We have developed a new lexicon to combat the rise of industrial food production—“community-supported agriculture,” “locavore,”... Read more

09 June 2010 | Posted by Reiko Hillyer in Inside O. Hm. | Permalink | Comments? (3 so far)

The Only Blame

Last month, Sweden-based wikileaks.org published a classified US Army helicopter gun-camera video on youtube, and my inbox immediately filled with friends and acquaintances and people I didn’t even know asking me what I thought about it. The video showed an American helicopter attack in the “Sadr City” neighborhood of Baghdad. I was sought for comment because I had covered Iraq as a photojournalist in the early years of the war.

Like tens of millions of other people... Read more

01 June 2010 | Posted by Thorne Anderson in Inside O. Hm. | Permalink | Comments? (1 so far)