The Jefferson Exchange

Reduce, reuse, recycle. We're pretty well along in the third of those, but not so organized on the first two. Rogue Valley Habitat for Humanity wants to focus on the second one: reuse. Its "ReStore" in Medford and a sister store in White City already sell items for home and construction that have been used already. Now there's a plan to go further into repairing items for re-sale, to cut down on the financial and environmental costs of obtaining new raw materials for manufacturing.

John and Gordan Javna are no strangers to the sound of laughing. They produce a lot of it themselves: John started, and Gordon continued, the series Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. The brothers Javna leave the restroom and join forces on Life Is a Joke: 100 Life Lessons (with Punch Lines) . Good jokes abound, but good lessons come from them, too.

How did so many things get "-ista" on the end? Sandinistas we understand, but fashionistas? Fermentistas? You've probably heard that one less, but it's a thing. Self-applied, too, by the likes of Applegate Valley farmers Kirsten and Christopher Shockey. Earlier this year they released a new book on preparing fermented foods. We go back to an interview about their earlier book, called simply Fermented Vegetables , in this re-run.

It's been more than a year since the Ashland City Council passed the "10 by 20" ordinance. It was a citizen idea to require the city to generate 10 percent of its power by the year 2020. The council adopted the ordinance rather than hold a public vote on it. But passing ordinances and building electric facilities are two different things, with a number of obstacles on the building part. We get an update on putting a major solar installation on city property.

The prevailing theory until lately was that humans arrived in North America on foot... across the Bering Land Bridge, before polar ice melted and covered it with the Bering Strait. But that's a VERY long walk, and boats might have worked just as well. And probably did, as new evidence shows. Our monthly underground history segment pairs us up with the researchers at the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) . And this month we hear about Matthew Des Lauriers' work at

Men are lucky in that they do not have to deal with menstruation every month. They've also been lucky to mostly avoid the subject: women have generally steered clear of very public discussions of menstruation. Naama Bloom blows up that silence with her book HelloFlo: The Guide, Period; The Everything Puberty Book for the Modern Girl . It is a print version of the offerings Bloom put on her health site, Helloflo.com .

Many people and organizations are working hard to bring back Pacific salmon. Fishing and habitat loss depressed salmon populations; some are on the endangered species list. But some of the impacts do not come from people. Marine mammals are voracious eaters of salmon, and the mammals have been protected by law for nearly 50 years. Recent research shows that while human harvest of chinook salmon dropped, killer whales and harbor seals ate more of the fish.

The epidemic of opioid drugs has kept people who help people recover from addictions busy. So it was a blow to the greater Medford area when OnTrack , a longtime provider of addiction treatment, went through some major wobbles this year. OnTrack fired its executive director of several decades, and was forced to close and modify some of its programs. Dr. Alan Ledford is now the executive director at the agency.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they eat. And evidently, you can tell a lot about a country by the food it consumes. The British empire is the focus of Lizzie Collingham's book The Taste of Empire . It shows how items on the British table--and the quest for them--dictated where in the world English people went, and how they treated the people and products they found.

We admit to being just a little uneasy in a recent discussion of artificial intelligence, especially when the talk turned to autonomous weapons. Think of drone swarms gathering overhead... we'll leave it there. But we explore it further with the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute at Oregon State University, which is working on drone swarm technology, along with other projects.

We get skads of information from the federal census every ten years: how many people live in the United States, where they live, how much money they make, and much more. But that's every ten years, and it is a gigantic undertaking. It is augmented in non-census years by the less comprehensive, but still expensive, American Community Survey (ACS). Couldn't we use other, available information to come up with more frequent and cheaper data on people? The answer appears to be yes , especially if we

A professor of Yiddish literature and a journalist walk into a studio. You were expecting a joke? Actually, there will likely be several as we visit with Jeremy Dauber, the author of the book Jewish Comedy: A Serious History . The book takes in the development of Jewish comedy in America, but also extends much further back into the history of the Jewish people. When you're often persecuted, a sense of humor can help.

Oregon's budget is tight enough that keeping all the programs required a new revenue source. So the legislature narrowly passed a tax on health insurance premiums last summer. And it surprised no one when a small group of legislators organized a petition drive to force the measure to a public vote. Ballots for Measure 101 will go out the first week of the new year for the January 23rd election, and campaigns are already organized, pro and con. Yes for Healthcare chose a name that makes its

Things are humming these days at Gary West Meats in Jacksonville. It is a true "fourth-quarter" business, making most of its sales and money around Christmas. Gary West himself is out of the picture now, but his daughter Whitney Murdoch and her husband Paul keep the business going, providing all manner of meats to happy carnivores. We learn more about the business in our monthly chat with entrepreneurs and their followers, The Ground Floor.

It's not quite a trade war; not yet, anyway. But there are bad feelings between the United States and Canada over softwood lumber. The stuff used to build our houses comes across the border with Canadian subsidies, says the U.S. Lumber Coalition. And the United States is ready to slap tariffs up to 27% on the Canadian lumber as a result. Oregon mill towns might see some relief, welcome news to Swanson Lumber in Glendale. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden supports action on the Canadian lumber.