Recalling those good old days — whenever they may have been — is human nature. I work with young University of Oregon journalism students who speak with nostalgic glee about coming home from kindergarten to watch Steve Irwin’s adventures on “The Crocodile Hunter” — yet they now eschew television as an obscure and passé medium. For many of them, Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys songs are their oldies but goodies, not Frank Sinatra or even the Beatles. And some watch the gentrification of Albina as a theft of Portland authenticity, dismissing new shops opening in the fast-changing neighborhood as peddling what one derides as, “garbage that no one needs and that doesn’t create a community.”

Read the full opinion piece by Peter Laufer, James Wallace Chair in Journalism & Co-Director of the Institute for Intercultural Dialogue and Conflict-Sensitive Reporting, in OregonLive here.