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Apatient described being awake for her brain surgery as "fun" after doctors asked her to sing through the procedure. Krystina Vied, from Keansburg, New Jersey, put on a "little concert" for her doctors as she sang along to Disney's Moana during awake brain surgery. She had a tumor removed in late June at the Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute at Jersey Shore University Medical Center. Vied, now 30, was diagnosed with epilepsy at 21 years old after experiencing multiple seizures. (Dewan, 7/17)

When Daniel Belquer was first asked to join a team to make a better live music experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, he was struck by how they had developed work-arounds to enjoy concerts. "What they were doing at the time was holding balloons to feel the vibrations through their fingers, or go barefoot and flip the speakers facing the floor," Belquer said. (Vanasco, 7/17)

Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems. (Hinch, 7/19)

Electric vehicles, you might have heard, are miraculous. Just a sliver of new cars sold in the United States are EVs, but these machines have united a mishmash of people eager to move America away from gasoline. Environmental groups are all-in, and the federal government is offering hefty incentives to spur sales. Automakers now offer twice as many EV models as before the pandemic, and are pumping out endless commercials to promote them. “We believe in an all-electric future,” General Motors CEO Mary Barra said in an interview a few weeks ago. Even car enthusiasts are getting on board: YouTube offers endless videos of people racing their EVs. (Zipper, 7/19)

More than a third of people 65 or older report having tried marijuana, a proportion that has tripled since 2009. That trend has not gone unnoticed by reader Elizabeth Albright of Fountain, N.C., who asks about gray-haired customers of legal marijuana dispensaries. Specifically, Elizabeth wants to know if they are unusually likely to be NPR listeners. (Van Dam, 7/14)