Loneliness can kill

Portland, and the Pacific Northwest in general, have a reputation for being a little more polite than most other parts of the country. I don’t know if that’s true, as I’ve spent all my life in Oregon and the Midwest, where not only are we super-polite, we pat ourselves on the back in celebration of our politeness.

You need to read

How many of you wish you read more often? Or rather, how many of you wish you could read more often, and take some time to relax with a good book? Yeah, me too. A lot of us wish we had more time to read. But we don’t. In fact, most of the country doesn’t. The National Endowment for the Arts has been conducting a survey called Reading At Risk, a study of reading habits in over 17,000 adults in the past 20 years.