If you appreciate the Mercury‘s interesting and useful news & culture reporting, consider making a small monthly contribution to support our editorial team. Your donation is tax-deductible. You can also subscribe and have our papers delivered!
Good Morning, Portland! The forecast looks pretty boring! High of 83, sunny, not a lot of rain. The weekend is similarly, wonderfully dull: mid-70s, partly cloudy. This is why Portland fall is truly the best weather we get. Let’s hit the news!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Multnomah County prosecutors revealed Wednesday that they have attached another death to alleged serial killer Jesse Calhoun, who is accused of killing five—now six—women between 2022-2023. A grand jury indicted Calhoun on first-degree manslaughter of Elizabeth Gibson, though officials did not say how the disappeared woman was connected to Calhoun or under what circumstances she was found to be missing. Her body has not been recovered, but they believe she died in November 2022.
• Via Bolts Magazine, Healing Hurt People PDX is an Portland-area organization focused on supporting shooting victims and their families, with the hopes of quelling the crimes of vengeance that sometimes occur in response to gun violence. But the actual point of the article is the program’s precarious funding. One factor is the Trump administration’s cuts to community safety and violence intervention program grants, which it implemented nationwide last year. Healing Hurt People had really hoped to use that funding to improve training and outreach. Check out the whole piece for more.
• Speaking of shots fired, Portland Police Chief Bob Day is gunning for a Portland City Councilor caught up in a classic deleted tweet scandal. On Saturday, Portland pundit Max Steele unearthed a boatload of old tweets made by District 4 representative Mitch Green between 2020 and 2021. It seems worth noting that some of the most egregious tweets Steele cites are not actually archived or visible. The Oregonian picked the story up on Wednesday, reporting that Green’s tweets contain an array of ideas that range from wanting to do away with the institution of policing to calling police “shit and absolute monsters.” On Wednesday afternoon, Chief Bob Day stated: “I no longer have confidence that this Councilor is evaluating the Police Bureau reasonably and objectively.” Both the police and firefighters’ unions have called for Green’s resignation. Green posted a response to the situation soon after, writing: “as the Portland Police do not want to be judged by their misconduct on the streets in 2020, I should not be judged solely for the tweets I posted in that same year.”
• If you are loving all the spectacle, we highly recommend Clayton Lee’s Goldberg Variations—a performance art piece that was staged at TBA 2026 this past weekend. A new version of it unfolds at On the Boards in Seattle, Sept 17-19! Read HR Smith’s rundown of all the fetish, professional wrestling, and the raw vulnerability cinched into the work’s metaphorical sequined jockstrap.
• Another weird thing you could see at On the Boards soon: experimental clown artist Alex Tatarsky’s Sad Boy in Harpy Land, which runs at audiences full tilt, armed with tinned fish and a rubber chicken. Mercury writer Lindsay Costello reviews the version Portlanders saw at this year’s TBA!
• Our music editor Starly Lou Riggs may be out on tour, but they’ve got you covered with this week’s Mercury Music Picks, making sure you don’t miss the best live shows out there. Check out New Jersey neo-emo darlings the Front Bottoms at Rev Hall, Ali’s Indonesian psychedelic soul at Jack London Revue, English art rockers Everything Everything at the Aladdin Theater, and many more.
IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• So it’s not that Canada could become a member of the European Union (EU)—you know, that thing Britain is not a member of, but 27 European countries are. Right now, there’s just a proposal from the European Commission president that Canada become the EU’s first-ever “associate member.”
• In response, US President Donald Trump said that, if Canada became an “associate member,” it could be viewed as a “hostile act.” And he threatened to impose more tariffs on the EU in response.
• Today in, that sounds good! We should do that more? Associated Press reports a federal judge has issued an order blocking immigration officers from making warrantless arrests in Southern California unless they determine the person is likely to escape.
• Oh, and I guess Judge Judy was still on. But not for much longer!
• In conclusion, sending you into Thursday with this energy:
