Between Us

Paul Sowards is a bell ringer for the Salvation Army in Wilsonville, Oregon. He says the organization has saved his life as well as let him reach out to people in his own unique way. But for a secular community like Portland, the Salvation Army is viewed skeptically for ... Read more

Friday, November 27, marked 5 years since the FBI set up Somali American teenager Mohammed Mohamud in a sting operation at the Christmas Tree lighting ceremony at Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square. Portland Copwatch among other organizations, were part of a moving protes... Read more

Mic Crenshaw is many things; a hip hop artist, a music ambassador, an activist and a co-manager at radio station KBOO in Portland. But one thing he is not is someone who holds his tongue about the music scene as it is affected by race or race as it is affected by society. D... Read more

Rosemary Gladstar founded the California School of Herbal Studies in 1978. Later, she and her family established Sage Mountain Retreat Center and Native Plant Reserve in Vermont. She's also an author and she's written a new book, "Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner's Guide". For h... Read more

Novelist Sue Grafton has just finished the 24th novel in her alphabet themed series of detective novels that she began in the mid 1980s.  Her heroine, Kinsey Milhorne, has only aged eight years in 30 years of storytelling, which the author says makes her "more advanced' tha... Read more

Coloradan Karin Lazarus had a brainstorm in 2009, start a bakery with pastries that are infused with marijuana.  In 2013, NY Magazine called her, "the Queen of the Munchies" and said she's "brought a pastry chef’s savvy to the world of pot brownies"  Her new cookbook, calle... Read more

Richard Rothstein is a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute.  He has written extensively on the effect of inequitable education on black and minority children in the US.  His latest piece for the EPI, focuses on the complicity of the Federal government in c... Read more

Psychoanalyst and research Robert Garfield has focused on men and the friendships they form for many years.  In his new book, "Breaking the Male Code", Mr. Garfield explores the rules that keep men spinning in a culture that doesn't always know what it wants them to be.  Th... Read more

The Oregon Supreme Court recently overturned the efforts of the Oregon Legislature to correct some of the funding problems as they affect PERS.  I interviewed more than a half-dozen legislators in 2014 about what they thought about the PERS funding issue and how they would ... Read more

Author Alice Eve Cohen has told two stories of personal upheaval that have visited her family in the last six years; "What I Thought I Knew" in 2009, and her most recent memoir, "The Year My Mother Came Back".  She talks with Don Merrill about what those two different stori... Read more