Nominations for our Give Guide are pouring in! We love how many nonprofits you love! Keep them coming. If there’s a nonprofit you’d like to support and encourage others to donate to before the end of the year, have them send us their contact information (phone, web and mailing address) as well as the name of a supporter and a one-sentence endorsement of their work from that person. Send to Editor@EugeneWeekly.com by 5 pm Dec. 7 to be considered for inclusion. Bonus points if there’s a high-resolution photo of the nonprofit doing their good deeds!
• Want to support a good cause, and be comfy and cool doing it? Buy a Eugene Weekly Local and Vocal hooded sweatshirt! Only $55 gets you a hoodie and the joy of knowing a little of the cash goes to pay for the pages we print. They make great holiday gifts too! Go to CustomInk.com/fundraising/eugene-weekly-local-and-vocal-hoodie-version-2.
• The Register-Guard’s recent decision (well, really it was the paper’s Gannett ownership’s decision) to no longer run opinion pieces has resulted in an embarrassment of opinion-based riches for Eugene Weekly. We will be expanding our online viewpoint offerings, but we also really really just love our print pages (and we noticed you do too, you 30,000 folks who pick up a copy each week). Recently, longtime RG outdoor writer (and before that, EW outdoor writer) Bill Sullivan reached out to see if we would like to run his pieces again. We would love to! But we can barely fit our other outdoor writer, Chandra LeGue, into our slim pages. It would cost us about $500 a month to run Sullivan or another regular columnist in print. Want to sponsor a writer? Hit us up! Editor@EugeneWeekly.com.
• We noticed sneaker tycoon and mega Duck donor Phil Knight courtside at Oregon Duck basketball games in Portland over the holiday weekend. Ironic that so many Duck hoopsters are out with foot injuries. Let’s hope they heal before Washington State University comes to town for the Ducks’ Pac-12 opener.
• Speaking of Knight, college sports insider John Canzano’s piece that ran in his Bald Faced Truth email newsletter after the Ducks’ embarrassing fourth quarter collapse against Oregon State speaks volumes about donor tensions. On Nov. 27, Canzano reported that donors are frustrated with athletic director Rob Mullens because they had poured millions of dollars into the football program, only to be upset by the Beavers. Hey, boosters, if you’re really upset with Mullens, send some money to UO’s academic programs. Nothing says forget football like $1 million to the humanities.
• What we’re reading: Elizabeth Kolbert’s brilliant article on climate change in the Nov. 28 issue of The New Yorker. Called “Climate Change From A To Z: The stories we tell ourselves about the future,” this long-form piece is a real education on deep research and fine writing on the most difficult and important issue facing us today. We all need to know what Kolbert is telling us.
• Speaking of climate change, check out the online guest viewpoint on climate change at EugeneWeekly.com talking about the 6 pm Thursday, Dec. 8, discussion about climate change at the downtown Eugene Public Library. The discussion will be facilitated by Caroline Lundquist and Paul Bodin as part of a monthly series of library-sponsored Community Philosophy Circles.