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Good Morning, Portland! We’re out here this morning like “Name an instance of bullshit that I went for!” Last Friday, Earl Sweatshirt dropped the contrarian and beautiful Live, Laugh, Love, an album laden with both irony and earnestness. While the vibes of that particular lyric feel real, the artist freely admits it’s a flex. “I’ve been duped so many times,”he said to NYT culture reporter Joe Coscarelli, during an interview. Anyway, if you know me, you know I’m making everything about this album, and you want me to shut up about it. SO LET’S GET TO THE NEWS. ⚡
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• This story has been rightfully everywhere; US Border Patrol agents entered a firefighter worksite on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula—where a crew of 44 was battling a blaze for a privately owned company—checked their identifications and took two into custody. One man is an Oregon resident, OPB reports, but his attorney has not been able to contact him since Wednesday when border patrol agents dissapeared him.
• Portland City Councilors Jamie Dunphy, Candace Avalos, and Mitch Green will fly to Vienna next month to spend six days learning more about city’s world-renowned approach to social housing, the Oregonian‘s Jonathan Bach reports. The Councilors’ offices have said that they will pay for the trip from their office budgets. This might be the number one thing your conservative uncle will be yelling about at your family’s Labor Day picnic, but Vienna’s Gemeindebauten have led to it gaining the title of “world’s most livable city.”
• The other story your uncle is upset about this weekend is the revelation that Councilor Avalos has been using OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to compose the three columns she’s so far published on her city webpage, along with social media posts and on the record remarks. According to the Oregonian, Avalos revealed she used the chatbot after “a reporter contacted her about her potential use of generative artificial intelligence, which can produce subtle but recognizable writing styles and patterns.”
• Even after losing federal grant funding, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art pushes forward with a Time-Based Art Festival festival filled with queer opera, Native storytelling, and radical soundscapes. If we want risk-takers to keep showing work in our city, now’s the time to support them, yeah? Check out Lindsay Costello’s picks for the fest.
• Today in news to meeeee, I ran past Paradox Cafe, and it’s closed! Closed for since a month ago! Dang. RIP to a real one. Most who recall the cute lil diner think of it as a vegan breakfast spot, but the Oregonian’s Michael Russell pointed out that “for its first couple of decades at least, the paradox behind the menu was that grass-fed beef burgers and chicken-apple sausage links sat alongside the tofu-veggie ‘ScramBowls.’”
• Local burrito chain Laughing Planet is still going strong! 25 years!
Laughing Planet celebrates 25 years at Belmont Street Fair on Sat Sept 13. Everyone I know bags on em, but TBH it’s nice there’s a place where you can get a kind of bland burrito when you just cannot possibly have one more thing go wrong.
— Suzette Smith (@suzettesmith.bsky.social) August 26, 2025 at 1:10 PM
• The Oregonian‘s Veronica Nocera has written yet another story that I wish I’d done. Fucking incredible—here is a mother. fucking. list. of where all the mother. fucking. Spirit Halloweens are going to be this fall.
• When you wipe your jaw off the floor, you’ll want to make plans for whatever it is that’ll hold you over til you can get into a mother. fucking. Spirit Halloween near you. A concert? Could spark joy. EverOut has the lastest round-up of concert tickets going on sale this morning!
IN NATIONAL NEWS:
• The Daily spoke with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the recently resigned director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, about his decision to resign on Wednesday, following President Trump’s firing of the agency’s director Susan Monarez. “No one from my staff has ever briefed [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] on anything,” Daskalakis told the Daily, “I believe that CDC science is going to be compromised by HHS. If that science becomes biased—if it becomes unduly influenced, then I can’t have my name on that science—as something that I think should be used for important decisions for people’s lives.” Daskalakis also posted a scathing letter on social media. Fun fact, the person Daskalakis sent this resignation letter to also resigned. (That’s actually not a very fun fact.)
• A federal judge in DC will hear Lisa Cook’s request to allow her to continue to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors’s board while she contests the President’s attempt at firing her on Monday. Despite assertions that Cook’s firing is related to mortgage paperwork discrepancies, her firing has largely been viewed as part of the President’s wish to fill the Fed with his loyalists, after the board refused to lower interest rates at the President’s request.
The future of the Federal Reserve and whether it will continue to operate as an independent institution or become subject to the whims of the White House rests largely on Lisa Cook’s shoulders after she filed a lawsuit challenging her attempted dismissal by President Trump.
— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) August 29, 2025 at 8:40 AM
• A senior White House official told the Associated Press that President Trump has revoked Secret Service protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris. That sounds very petty, but AP notes that former vice presidents usually get six months of protection after leaving office and that President Biden had quietly extended it before leaving office.
• I don’t know if people can still watch and enjoy Neon Genesis Evangelion if they aren’t a depressed teenager because it’s pretty weird, there are several (many!) moments in the story when a rational adult would just “nope” right out of there. But it is a prerequisite to understanding the joke I’m sending you into the weekend on. My friend Justin says the joke also works for Metal Gear Solid.
• Okay okay here’s one for the normals—just kidding, if you weren’t a depressed teen who watched anime you don’t get to enjoy this moment of pure joy! Yoko Takahashi still has it!
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Suzette Smith
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