News & City Life

Culture Cheat Sheet: Essay

Portland’s Cultural Exports Might Never Take Over the World. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.

Almost famous is just fine by us.

11/14/2016 By Shawn Levy

Education

Wise Up! A Guide to Portland’s Best, Weirdest, and Most Enlightening Educational Opportunities

Get smart, get crafty, or get cooking with the city’s coolest classes for grown-ups.

11/14/2016 Edited by Rebecca Jacobson

Education

Wise Up! A Guide to Portland’s Best, Weirdest, and Most Enlightening Educational Opportunities

Get smart, get crafty, or get cooking with the city’s coolest classes for grown-ups.

11/14/2016 Edited by Rebecca Jacobson

Wise Up: PCC

A Beginner’s Guide to Portland Community College

Ninety thousand students. Four main campuses. PCC can be tough to navigate, but here are three tips for taking the leap back to school.

11/14/2016 By Webb Wright

Wise Up: Learn Something New

Yes, You Can Study That: 29 Portland Classes You Didn’t Know Existed

Tuvan throat singing to hula dance to beekeeping, it’s time to get enlightened.

11/14/2016 By Rebecca Jacobson

Wise Up: Get Artsy

6 Places in Portland to Embrace Your Inner Artist

Darkroom photography to improv comedy, here are the city’s best spots to get artsy.

11/14/2016 By Ko Ricker

Wise Up: Get Crafty

Basket Weaving to Spoon Carving, WildCraft Offers Arts & Crafts for Grown-Ups

It’s like summer camp forever.

11/14/2016 By Rebecca Jacobson

Wise Up: Do It Yourself

5 Places in Portland to Get Your DIY On

Screen-printing to shoe cobbling, soapmaking to soldering, here are the city’s best places to make something with your hands.

11/14/2016 By Rebecca Jacobson

Wise Up: Alterna-Master's Degree

Reed College’s Only Graduate Program Puts Intellectual Exploration above Practical Payoff

Or, how to become a Reedie past age 22.

11/14/2016 By Zach Dundas

Wise Up: Humanity in Perspective

How a Class Designed for Low-Income Portlanders Changed One Mind—and Life

Mary Thompson grew up in the foster system and didn’t graduate from high school. Now she’s on a course to a writing career.

11/14/2016 By Rebecca Jacobson

Wise Up: Get Smart

7 Places in Portland to Exercise Your Brain

From literary seminars to an underground grad school, here are the city’s best places to stretch your mind.

11/14/2016 By Rebecca Jacobson

Wise Up: Get Cooking

6 Places in Portland to Up Your Kitchen IQ

Knife sharpening to cocktail making to pig butchery, here are the city’s best spots to build your kitchen skills.

11/14/2016 By Benjamin Tepler

The Shakedown

2016: Sizing Up the Year That Can’t End Soon Enough

No, really. What was that?

11/14/2016 By Marty Patail

Skull Games

How One Portland Special Agent Went Undercover to Stop Poaching and Smuggling

Make no mistake: we’re part of the world’s poaching and smuggling epidemic. Meet the Portland investigator battling it.

11/14/2016 By Ramona DeNies

Ventures

Versi Carves Out a Bigotry-Free Space for Latino Digital Commerce

Founded by a trio of Mexican-born entrepreneurs, the Portland start-up is a Spanish-language digital Yellow Pages.

11/14/2016 By Marty Patail

Essay

Why We Need Portland’s Burgeoning Hip-Hop Scene Now More Than Ever

A onetime local rapper reflects on the young talent and activism currently boosting the city’s scene.

11/14/2016 By Mac Smiff

Tao of Meow

Meet the Man Using Data Sets to Map Portland’s Feline Friends

Want to see the city’s finest cats? Follow computer programmer Max Ogden on Instagram.

11/14/2016 By Amy Martin

Star Trek

14 Portlanders Who Made It Big in Tinseltown

Clark Gable to Christina Hendricks, these screen stars all passed through Portland on their way to Hollywood.

11/14/2016 By Marty Patail

Politics

Why Did Oregon Ban Rent Control?

Rent control is a hot-button topic today, but the story goes back to 1985.

11/14/2016 By Arlo Voorhees

Oregoniana

Travel Back to 1846, the Year Oregon Became American

In other words, that time we were dumped by the Queen of England.

11/14/2016 By Zach Dundas