This January, Jefferson Public Radio was selected as a 2026 newsroom partner by Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in newsrooms across the country as a way to strengthen coverage of under-covered communities and issues.

In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence in 2045, triggering “the singularity”—that cosmic inflection point when machine intelligence becomes so advanced that it fundamentally and irreversibly transforms human civilization.

The emerging singer/songwriter Tyler Ballgame just released his debut – For The First Time, Again. It’s steeped in classic rock sounds, giving a platform to Ballgame’s honest and thoughtful songwriting, and his dynamic voice that’s drawn comparisons to Roy Orbison.

2025 is behind us. It’s safe to say we live in interesting times. When you sift through all that took place last year, one thing stands out: people who create are going to create no matter the circumstances, and people like me will feel compelled to express our opinions about it. For me, that means music.

Proliferating AI is overloading our already overloaded power grids that are now buckling beneath skyrocketing computational demands to process all those bits and bytes so that we can have AI-generated pictures of Donald Trump hugging a kitten or riding astride a majestic lion as well as entirely AI-generated short films with thoughtful titles like Broccoligeddon and Drinking Gasoline.

Fancy cocktails seem ubiquitous these days, with everyone trying to put their own spin–with what seems like as many ingredients as possible–into a chilled glass for a premium price. Much of this rise to fame and expansion of our boozy palate can be attributed to pioneering cocktail historian and enthusiast, David Wondrich.

As we look ahead to the challenges and opportunities of a new year, it’s becoming clear that our work to preserve independent public broadcasting stations, along with NPR and PBS, as vital institutions of our democracy and our culture has only just begun.

The Martin family went missing on December 7, 1958 after heading east from Portland in search of greenery for holiday wreaths. The following spring, the bodies of two of the three daughters were recovered from the Columbia River but, despite search efforts, the fate of the rest of the family remained a mystery. Fast forward several decades to 2025, and enter Archer Mayo: artist and professional diver with a penchant for solving mysteries.

This fall there have been some intriguing new full-length releases we’ve been spinning on Open Air.

Many of today’s most popular generative AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude still utilize WIMP for interaction with users typing prompts into a GUI. But that’s rapidly being replaced by humans interacting with AI systems using spoken language.