Today Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley joins us to talk about how religious faith affects peoples’ views of the environment.

A developer plans to build a large luxury home and commercial development on scenic agricultural land in the Colorado River floodplain just outside Moab, and a residents’ group, as part of a groundswell of local opposition, has formed to oppose the development. KZMU's Molly Marcello and other guests join to discuss.

Today we’ll talk with Rep. Clancy about mental health issues, homelessness, and other issues.

We revisit our conversation with Philip Eil about his book Prescription for Pain. It follows his years-long investigation into his father’s old classmate: former high school valedictorian Paul Volkman, who once seemed destined for greatness after earning his MD and his PhD from the prestigious University of Chicago but is now serving four consecutive life sentences at a federal prison in Arizona.

In the tradition of books like Breath and Wintering, Sleepless combines science, historical research, and personal experience to explore the complicated relationship women have with darkness.

On this Valentine’s Day we're joined by Jeannie Thomas to talk about love spells, heartbreak rituals, a study about fruit flies and breakups, and anthropologist Helen Fisher’s studies on what happens to our brains when we fall in love.

Lisa Thompson and the Natural History Museum of Utah have a new book out called Wild Wasatch Front, an urban adventure guide that invites both locals and tourists to discover unexpected nature thriving in the cities and suburbs of the Wasatch Front

On this episode we’ll talk about water policy as it's being debated and acted upon at the Utah Legislature. Our guests include Salt Lake Tribune water and land use reporter Leia Larsen and Rep. Joel Briscoe, D-SLC.

Our guest is Great Salt Lake Commissioner and Great Salt Lake Strike Team Co-Chair Brian Steed, here to talk about the Great Salt Lake Data and Insights Summary, prepared for the 2024 Utah Legislature.

We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . . But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon? Recipient of three James Beard awards, Anya von Bremzen joins us to discuss.

Today historian Tanisha Ford will join us to talk about her biography of Mollie Moon, who was one of the most influential women of the civil rights era.

Michael Finkel’s book The Art Thief chronicles one of the most outrageous crime sprees in history.

On this episode of Access Utah we check in with Cache County Executive David Zook to talk about housing, transportation, the economy, homelessness and more.

Today we’ll talk about energy policy as it's being acted upon at the Utah Legislature.

We're once again joined by Craig Johnson, the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels.

Today we'll talk with UCLA Professor Patricia Turner discusses her latest book, Trash Talk: Anti-Obama Lore and Race in the Twenty-First Century.

Sara Sanders Gardner is the openly autistic designer and developer of Bellevue College's nationally recognized Neurodiversity Navigators program, and they are the guest for this episode.

On this episode we talk with scientists and reporters who have been researching and reporting at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

As the 2024 session of the Utah Legislature enters its second week there are many organizations advocating for their causes. We’ll talk to several of these groups today.

Today we talk cats. Our guest is Jonathan Losos, and on this episode we discuss his book The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa.

On this episode we talk speech. We revisit our conversation with Valerie Fridland, professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno and author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English.

The year 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act. It was also another year in an ongoing crisis of biodiversity loss, species extinctions, climate change, and natural disasters. On this episode we talk with Lowell Baier about the new books: The Codex of the Endangered Species Act, volumes 1 & 2.

We revisit our converstaion about music in the movies! We're joined by Frank Lehman, Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. He is author of Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema and recent essay, How to Write Music for Rolling Boulders.

We continue our tradition of bringing you poetry in the New Year. This year we feature conversation with and poetry from Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, along with poets Michael Sowder and Ben Gunsberg.

We're once again joined by USU English professors Jeannie Thomas and Lynne McNeill to talk about folklore. On this episode we focus on the most popular memes and digital trends of last year.

Today we’ll spotlight the William A. Burnard Warming Center in Logan. We’ll also talk about the causes of homelessness in Cache Valley and how those differ from other areas of the state.

Today we’ll talk with Deborah Kasdan about her new book ROLL BACK THE WORLD: A Sister’s Memoir. Threaded throughout this love letter to her older sister are stories of four siblings and their parents. As the second sibling, Deborah Kasdan struggled for decades with painful emotions of grief, shame, and survivor’s guilt before deciding to share her story, and her family’s.

Where can you find a chunk of the Matterhorn enshrined at a Utah ski resort? What is the origin of Iosepa, the Hawaiian ghost town in the desert? And why is Utah called the Beehive State?

"To Boldly Grow" allows us to journey alongside Tamar Haspel as she learns to scrounge dinner from the landscape around her and discovers that a direct connection to what we eat can utterly change the way we think about our food — and ourselves.

"Time to Think Small" examines ways we can leverage the growing power of smartphones and other technologies to protect threatened species, reduce the risk from climate change and stop ocean plastic.

Today we’ll talk to two reporters participating in the Great Salt Lake Collaborative who recently traveled to Las Vegas to learn what that water-starved city is doing and what Utah might learn from them.

We revisit our conversation with Rabbi Steve Leder about life, death and the concept or writing an ethical will.

On this episode we talk about math. We're joined David Brown who recently delivered the 47th Annual Honors Last Lecture on the USU Logan Campus, which was entitled: Our Sixth Sense: Math.

On this episode we're joined by zoologist Bill Schutt to talk about the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales.

We revisit our conversation with Jim Enote to talk about the different ways that western scientists and Native people understand the world, Bears Ears National Monument, challenges facing the Colorado Plateau, Native response to rock art and more.

On this episode we talk folklore and music with Steven Hatcher, the Idaho Folk Arts Coordinator, and Damian Rodriguez, a Tejano musician who performed as part of the 2022 Fife Honor lecture.

On this episode, we discuss how Utah’s trigger law (SB 174) went into effect briefly following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision earlier this year, but is now being appealed and an injunction is in place.

On this episode we talk with Katherine Corcoran about her new book: In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press.

On this episode we're joined by Temple Grandin to talk about her new book Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions.

On this episode we recap the 2022 midterm election with Utah State University Political Science Professor Damon Cann.

On this episode we feature another episode in our periodic series of programs about the internet and social media, and our guest today is Scott Cleland.

Today’s program is all about man’s best friend. In the first half of the program we talk with Alexandra Horowitz about her new book "The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves." In the second half, Jules Howard joins us to talk about his new book "Wonderdog: The Science of Dogs and Their Unique Friendship with Humans."

In his new book Indivisible, historian and law professor Joel Richard Paul tells the fascinating story of Daniel Webster. Joel Richard Paul joins us to discuss.

Utah food producers provide products that are unique to the state referred to as specialty crops. In the Cropping Up series, Utah Public Radio has been featuring some of these crops, their health benefits, and the role they play in helping us access fresh food.

On this episode we have a conversation with members of the Fry Street Quartet and physicist Dr. Robert Davies about The Crossroads Project.

Kristin Du Mez joins us to talk about her new book, 'Jesus and John Wayne', which is on our latest UPR Community Booklist.

On this episode we discuss Pride Flags in Schools and are joined by Larry Williams, Logan City School Board of Education President; Katie Lee-Koven, parent of a Logan elementary school student; Yvonee Marcyes, Board President of Logan Pride; and Andrea Sinfield.

On this special 'Bringing War Home' edition of Access Utah we talk with Rich Etchberger, recorded live from our event at the USU Moab Campus.

On this episode we're joined by Hal Cannon to talk about (and listen) to his new release, Nothin' Lastin'.

We’ll talk with Ute Tribe Business Committee Chairman and Uncompahgre Band Representative Shaun Chapoose regarding a new monument designation, and we revisit a portion of our conversation with Senator Mazie Hirono.

Poet David Lee joins us today to talk about his latest collection Rusty Barbed Wire.

We're joined by Priyanka Kumar to discuss our place in the landscape—and in the cosmos—by way of watching birds.

On this episode we're joined by Eric Saylor, Professor of Music History at Drake University, to discuss the compositions of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Dr. Benjamin Pykles will deliver the 2022 Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture, titled “Historical Archaeology and the Latter-day Saint Past” Thursday evening at 7:00 in the Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall at Utah State University.

Susan Madsen is the Inaugural Karen Haight Huntsman Endowed Professor of Leadership in the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University and Founding Director of the Utah Women & Leadership Project. Today we’ll check in with Dr. Madsen to explore topics concerning Utah women.

Today we revisit our conversation with Judy Kawamoto, winner of the 2022 Evans Handcart Award from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University, for her book Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman's Search for a Home in America.

Terryl Givens, winner of the 2022 Evans Biography Award from the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University, for his new book Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism.

We're joined by Professor Sam Arungwa from the USU Blanding campus, Rep. Lowry Snow, and Jason Torgerson, San Juan County Sheriff.

Former NPR Moscow Bureau Chief Corey Flintoff joins us once again to discuss the current state of affairs in Ukraine and Russia.

On this episode, It’s another non-profit spotlight where we highlight your favorite non-profits within the community.

What do sports and religion have in common? Randall Balmer joins us to discuss.

We know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. On this episode we discuss.

A conversation with John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, which tells the story of how Tolkien embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe, revealing the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introducing the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life.

We're once again joined by Craig Johnson, the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels.

We're joined by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas to discuss the science of music and the brain, and Rogers also takes us behind the scenes of record-making and working with artists like Prince.

It’s a member drive special edition of the program today and our special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders.

On this special member drive episode, we talk with Jason Gilmore about bridge building and civil discourse in our current political climate.

Today in a special Member Drive edition of the program we’re going to talk about food with Tammy Proctor, Jeannie Sur, and Jaimie Sanders, hosts of Eating the Past and Lael Gilbert, one of the hosts of Bread and Butter.

In the first of our member drive specials for Fall 2022, we discuss the Great Salt Lake. We're joined by Wayne Wurtsbaugh, Bonnie Baxter, Jaimi Butler and Aimee Van Tatenhove.

Adam Dorr, an environmental social scientist and technology theorist, explains why he's optimistic about coming disruptions to energy, transportation and food technologies. Dorr says these changes will usher in a new era of prosperity and freedom.

Many of us are familiar with wartime souvenirs, whether we have direct experience with the battlefield or not. Molly Cannon, USU Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Susan Grayzel, USU Professor of History, join us to discuss how these objects can tell timeless stories of our veterans.

Queen Elizabeth II was England's longest serving monarch, and the second-longest reigning monarch in history. She served with 15 Prime Ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill. We put her long and eventful reign in context.

On this episode we talk with Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle, who created the After Ayotzinapa series for Reveal.

In the past thirty years, more than 2,700 innocent American prisoners - their combined prison sentences adding up to nearly 25,000 years - have been exonerated and freed.

On this special Access Utah book show we discuss what we are currently reading, and want to know what you are reading too.

On this episode we're joined by Logan Mitchell, faculty in the University of Utah’s Department of Atmospheric Science. We talk about pollution and the history of air quality in Utah.

In this look into to the 2022 Moab Music Festival we're joined by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate (Chickasaw, who will be attending and performing) and Pianist and conductor Timothy Long (Muscogee, Thlopthlocco, and Choctaw).

"Rock art holds power that words from the mouth don't carry," writes Craig Childs in his new book. We revisit our conversation.

Shannon Hale is the Utah-based New York Times best-selling author of the Princess Academy series, Rapunzel’s Revenge and Austenland, which was made into a movie. Her latest, Amethyst, is on our latest UPR Booklist. We revisit our conversation.

On this episode, a conversation with David Maraniss about his new book "Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe."

Isabel Allende is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 75 million books. She is our guest for today's Access Utah.

Next time on Access Utah we’ll revisit our conversation from March with writer Azar Nafisi. We’ll talk about her new book “Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.”

Our guest for the hour on Tuesday’s Access Utah is Brian Steed, the new Executive Director of the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water and Air at Utah State University. Established in 2021, the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air connects researchers from Utah State University with problem solvers and decision-makers around Utah. The institute envisions a state with a high quality of life for our citizens that values and optimizes our state’s shared resources while managing continued growth. We value data-driven decision-making, shared partnerships, and a non-partisan perspective as we share the latest land, water, and air research.

About one in five adults reported experiencing food insecurity in the previous 30 days. Al Switzler joins us to discuss Tabitha’s Way, a Utah-based food pantry.

We revisit our conversation with Dr. Christine Montross about her book, "Waiting For an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration."

Gregory Madden joins us to talk about his research, which has applications for public health including substance-use disorders, pathological gambling and obesity.

We're joined by storyteller Anastasia Zadeik and talk about her debut novel “Blurred Fates,” which addresses issues of mental health and family dysfunction, among other themes.

We're joined by author Kirk Wallace Johnson to discuss the story of white fishermen and Vietnamese shrimpers clashing on the Texas coast in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Open space will be on the ballot in northern Utah in November. In this episode, we talk about a proposed $20 million bond in Cache Valley that would buy up open space to preserve it.

Gallup says that support for a third U.S. political party is at a high point. On this episode, we talk with representatives from the United Utah Party, the Constitution Party of Utah, the Utah Libertarian Party and the Green Party of Utah.

A recent report says that the Colorado River is America’s most endangered. Today we’ll talk with reporter Alex Hager.

On this episode we talk about some of the history behind the transcontinental railroad.

Today, Nicole Chung joins us to talk about her book and about several recent topics covered in her I Have Notes newsletter from The Atlantic, including writing about trauma and grief.

For much of a year, writer Sebastian Junger and three friends—a conflict photographer and two Afghan War vets—walked the railroad lines of the East Coast.

Journalist Amanda Ripley joins us to discuss her new op-ed titled, “I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?”

In her new book, Jessica Fanzo explores how in the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate crisis and inequitable food availability, food systems need to be re-oriented to ensure they can produce enough food to nourish the world.

On this episode we're joined by Teow Lim Goh, author of 'Western Journeys', and we discuss immigration, history and the American West.

R.E. Burrillo is an archaeologist and conservation advocate. He is the author of Behind the Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape. He joins us to talk about his new book, 'The Backwoods of Everywhere: Words from a Wandering Local.'

Today, we’ll partner with DEBUNKED, which dispels myths about the opioid crisis and harm reduction, for a conversation with Brian Neilson and Michelle Church.

On this episode we do a summer check-in with the arts and talk with with Michael Ballam, Founding Director of the Utah Festival Opera and Musical Theater; and Herb Newsome, who is performing with the Lyric Repertory Company.

Author & illustrator Carli Valentine joins to talk about her new book, 'The Fun Thieves'.

Charles McCollum is Managing Editor of The Herald Journal in Logan. He regularly surveys readers via Facebook. He’ll join us to share the results of some of those surveys.

Cache County Executive David Zook joins us to talk about housing, availability and affordability.

Amy Anderson, Director of Outreach for the Sunshine Terrace Foundation and Spiritual Counselor with Sunshine Hospice in Logan will join us to discuss non-profits, and we also hear from Utah Nonprofits Association CEO Jill Bennett, Nicole Burnard with the William Burnard Warming Center and Wendi Hassan with the Cache Valley Center for the Arts.

Jim Enote joins us to talk about the different ways that western scientists and Native people understand the world, Bears Ears National Monument, challenges facing the Colorado Plateau, Native response to rock art and more.

We're Joined on this episode by Dr. Susan Madsen to discuss The Utah Women and Leadership Project, their podcast and more.

Nate Schweber joins us with his new book, This America Of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild.

Thomas LeCaque, Associate Professor of History at Grand View University, joins us to discuss the rise in far right violence and extremist groups.

On this episode, Sharon McMahon joins us to talk politics, polarization, identity and more.

On this episode of Access Utah, we preview the Northern Utah Conference on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, which takes place next week at Utah State University.

In a changing reading landscape that now includes ebooks consumed on your device, what is the role of the public library, and how is that role changing?

Social capital refers to the bonds between people and among networks, which they can use to benefit themselves and the group as a whole. Low levels of social capital often lead to poor economic and social outcomes, both for individuals and for populations.

Today we talk about Juneteenth and USU's corresponding events. We're joined by Cree Taylor, Lecturer in the USU English Department and event organizer, and filmmaker Mauli Junior Bonner, whose film, “His Name is Green Flake,” will be screened on Saturday.

Today we talk beavers with environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb, author of “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” and Cache Valley resident Nate Norman, who works with the USU Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center.

Rabbi Steve Leder joins us on a conversation about life, death and the concept or writing an ethical will.

We are joined by USU Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Chris Babits and former student Chloe Miller, and dive into some short podcasts on myths and misconceptions of American religious history.

What causes bullying? How can defenders reduce its frequency? Is bullying preventable? Diana Meter joins us to help answer these questions.

On this episode, a conversation with Wyoming-based writer Craig Johnson. He joins to discuss his latest novel in the Longmire series, “Daughter of the Morning Star” and more.

Today we feature a conversation with Utah State University President Noelle Cockett. where we discuss telework and the labor market, preparing students for careers as K-12 teachers, mental health issues and more.

We revisit our conversation with writer Sandra Cisneros. Her book Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo is included in our UPR Community Booklist.

We're joined by William Anderegg, Associate Professor in the University of Utah School Of Biological Sciences, to discuss the effects of threats, including climate change and drought, on trees and forests.

Juli Berwald joins us for Access Utah to talk about her new book “Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs.

Award-winning Utah essayist Phyllis Barber has a new book out titled The Precarious Walk: Essays from Sand and Sky, which she discusses on this episode of Access Utah.

After hearing her mother’s story, Thottam set out to discover the full story of Nazareth Hospital, which had been established in 1947 by six nuns from Kentucky. She joins us on this Access Utah.

On the next Access Utah we’ll partner with DEBUNKED for a conversation with Valentina Sireech, Member of Ute Tribe and Program Coordinator for the Tribal & Rural Opioid Initiative Resource Center with USU Extension - Roosevelt Office. Her passion is to inspire Indigenous and Rural communities to create art as a form of healthy healing. We’ll also be talking with Larry Cesspooch, Ute Filmmaker/Storyteller/Spiritual Leader, who uses all forms of media to tell his stories, film, music, and lecture.

According to Politico, in a draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade. Quoting the Salt Lake Tribune: “Depending on how the Supreme Court officially rules, either Utah’s trigger law — which outlaws most abortions in the state — or a ban on the procedure after 18 weeks of pregnancy are likely to go into effect.” in Utah. On Monday’s Access Utah we’ll talk with Planned Parenthood Association of Utah President and CEO Karrie Galloway; and Mary Taylor, President of Pro-Life Utah.

Utah has launched a “Pledge to Protect the Past” campaign to protect archaeological sites and artifacts. And Utah State Historic Preservation Office public archaeologist Elizabeth Hora says that summer often brings an increase in vandalism to important preservations of the past. To discuss, we're joined by Elizabeth Hora and Angelo Baca.

On this episode we're joined by Chelsea Sachau and Pedro De Velasco to discuss the situation at the border and Title 42.

Smell can collapse space and time, unlocking memories and transporting us to worlds both new and familiar. In her new book Revelations in Air, Jude Stewart takes us on a fascinating journey into the weird and wonderful world of smell.

How does creativity work? How can we maximize our creative potential? Matt Richtel joins us to help answer these questions.

We're joined by Jaigris Hodson and discuss why speech on Twitter, and we revisit a 2021 conversation with Eli Saslow.

Wildlife in urban areas can pose some concerns, especially as our population grows. Joining us to discuss is doctoral student at U of U Austin Green and USU Professor and Extension Wildlife Specialist Terry Messmer.

In his new book Was It Worth It?, Doug Peacock, loner, iconoclast, environmentalist and contemporary of Edward Abbey, reflects on a life lived in the wild, recounting adventures both close to home and farther afield. He joins us on this Access Utah Episode.

Rick Ridgeway joins us on this episode to share stories and talk about his new book, Life Lived Wild.

Hear some fascinating stories told inside of a C-130 aircraft on this episode of Access Utah.

We're joined by Stephanie Coontz and Greg Smalley to discuss different perspectives on marriage.

On this episode we talk with Emily White and USU Associate Professor of Journalism Matthew LaPlante about the challenges of being a journalist in an increasingly hostile environment for journalism.

On this episode we discuss climate change with Eugene Linden, and talk about his new book Fire and Flood.

Last summer we devoted an entire episode to monarch butterflies and fireflies, and after a listener suggested we do a similar episode focused on birds, we've done just that!

We're joined by Katharine Coles, and dig into her new collection, '(Solve For) X' in this poetry-filled Access Utah.

On this episode we're joined by Partick Mason and Lauren Kerby to discuss the importance of teaching and understanding religion.

David Schwendiman served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice for more than twenty-five years. He joins on this episode of Access Utah to discuss war crimes and the war in Ukraine.

Peter Coleman joins on this episode of Access Utah to help us dive into why we are so politically polarized, and why it's making us miserable.

Damon Cann joins to discuss how things stand in Utah and nationally, in this election year, as we head toward the primaries.

Tamar Haspel joins on this episode to discuss "first-hand food", including gardening, foraging and hunting.

Chad Ford joins to discuss his book Dangerous Love, which is about conflict and how to work though it.

On this special Access Utah book show we discuss what we are currently reading, and want to know what you are reading too.

A bill regarding transgender girls and sports was passed in the recent legislative session, and we discuss on this episode of Access Utah.

On this episode we are joined by Lynne McNeill. We talk Slenderman's origins, The Kevin Bacon Number and more.

On this special Member Drive edition of the program we’ll talk about the Bringing War Home project with USU History Professor Susan Grayzel and Molly Cannon, Director of the USU Anthropology Museum and the USU Mountain West Center.

Today it’s another Member Drive special edition of the program and our guest is former NPR Moscow Bureau Chief Corey Flintoff. We’ll talk about the war in Ukraine, the situation in Russia, and about reporting on war.

It’s a member drive special edition of the program today. My special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City.

Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: the very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, uncovers what followed the horrifying events that took place almost ten years ago, when a shooter entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and killed twenty first-graders and six teachers.

Cambridge Professor of Political Economy Helen Thompson analyzes the intersecting energy, financial, and democratic crises facing our world today and reveals the disruptions that have led us to this turbulent point.

A recent report regarding sexual misconduct on university campuses proposes some new ideas to help educate students on how to respond. We're joined by the authors of that report.

We are joined once again by Anna Pechenkina, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Utah State University. We talk about the current situation unfolding in Ukraine, the possible future and some of the politics involved.

Today our guest is writer Azar Nafisi. We’ll talk about her new book Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times.

Stigma is a major barrier to recovery, because people don’t want to be labeled as “junkies” and experience social exclusion when they ask for help. What can we do?

We talk with House Speaker Brad Wilson; Senate Majority Whip Ann Millner; and Rep. Jennifer Dailey-Provost, D-Salt Lake City.

"Rock art holds power that words from the mouth don't carry," writes Craig Childs in his new book. He joins us on Thursday's Access Utah.

A growing body of research confirms the link between nature and physical, emotional and mental health. How and why does nature wield these benefits?

This year marks the 125th anniversary of Bernard DeVoto's birth, a man described by Wallace Stegner as “Utah’s most prominent writer,” yet who has been largely forgotten in Utah and in his hometown of Ogden.

What barriers prevent women from running for office? We talk with Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, and Yándary Chatwin and Nina Barnes, hosts of the “Real Women Run” podcast.

We hear about Matthew LaPlante's experiences as a reporter in the Iraq war, and also reflect on his experiences in Ukraine, the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova and the "frozen conflict" state of Transnistria.

One of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 75 million books, Isabel Allende is our guest for today's Access Utah.

A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether.

Shannon Hale is the Utah-based New York Times best-selling author of the Princess Academy series, Rapunzel’s Revenge and Austenland, which was made into a movie. Her latest, Amethyst, is on our latest UPR Booklist.

A TikTok video of a young Scottish mailman singing the traditional sea shanty “Soon May the Wellerman Come,” and memes that poked fun at the self-described “QAnon Shaman” were among the top digital folklore trends of 2021.

There are many needs in our communities and many step up to help. On this episode, we shine a light on non-profits and individuals doing good in our communities.

We’ll talk about fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear, hydrogen, methane and more.

In the past thirty years, more than 2,700 innocent American prisoners - their combined prison sentences adding up to nearly 25,000 years - have been exonerated and freed.

We hear from many these days who say “the news is depressing” or “the news just makes me mad.” Today we’re going to talk about how news consumption can affect our mental health.

Could the liberal arts be the future of the digital world?

Have you ever thought about how Covid-19 has changed the way our religious communities continue to organize their efforts in promoting and maintaining spiritual faith? On this episode of Access Utah, we are joined by five religious leaders/academics who will be informing us what kind of changes they have noticed in their respective religious communities throughout the pandemic, and what the future might hold in store for them.

Many people have not returned to the workforce following the height of the Covid pandemic. Higher-than-usual numbers of employees have quit in some areas.

HB 147, sponsored by Rep. Lowry Snow, R-St. George, which would have repealed the death penalty in Utah and replaced it with a possible sentence of 45 years to life, was defeated in committee. The debate will go on, however, today on Access Utah.

Since U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement last month, speculation about his replacement has ramped up.

Rep. Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, is sponsoring HB98 which would create a third-degree felony offense of sexual conduct without affirmative consent. Current Utah law defines sexual abuse as when “the victim expresses lack of consent through words or conduct.”

The New York Times reports that “Russian troops are encircling Ukraine from three sides. In Washington and Brussels, there are warnings of crushing sanctions if Vladimir V. Putin orders an invasion. Embassy families — both American and Russian — are being evacuated from Kyiv.” We will be talking with Anna Pechenkina, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Utah State University.

Cache County Executive David Zook joins us to talk about public health, transportation, homelessness, mental health, the economy, immigration, COVID and other issues.

The Times reports that mink farms (some of them in Utah) threaten to become a source of new coronavirus variants — and an object lesson in how ‘spillback’ can make deadly diseases even deadlier. Today we’ll talk with David Quammen about spillover, spillback, Coronavirus and future viruses.

How do we heal from the traumas of the past, without forgetting the events that happened? Today on Access Utah we explore the Hyrum City Museum's newest exhibit and ongoing events commemorating the 159th anniversary of the US Army’s massacre of Shoshone at Boa Ogoi.

Every ten years, following the United States’ release of the Census report, we take to the drawing board and redefine district lines in order to more appropriately represent U.S. citizens in the House of Representatives. On this episode, we discuss what the new maps mean for Utah.

On Thursday's Access Utah, we talk about such issues as recognition of rights, the sharing of Jerusalem, delineation of borders, West Bank settlements, security and refugees.

Rep. Brad Wilson, Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, is convening a Great Salt Lake Summit, and ahead of that summit we’ll be talking to Lynne De Freitas, Executive Director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake; Wayne Wurtsbaugh, USU Emeritus Professor of Watershed Sciences; and Marcelle Shoop, Director of the National Audubon Society’s Saline Lakes Program.

Recent events at several Utah schools have shown the danger, including the potential for violence, in the misuse of social media. We talk about the risks, the causes and how to address them on Access Utah.

Tuesday was the opening day of the 2022 Utah Legislature. We broadcast live from the state capitol in Salt Lake City and talked about the issues likely to be addressed in the legislature this year.

The Choir of Man is a hit musical from Andrew Kay and Nic Doodson, featuring pub tunes, folk, rock, choral and Broadway numbers. We talked with three of the cast members on Thursday.

Almost two years into the pandemic, there are record numbers of new COVID cases and hospitalizations. Today we’ll talk with ER doctor and writer Marion Bishop about hope, endemicity, health care workers and about how many of us are just “over it” — and where that leaves all of us.

Poets get to the heart of what we’re thinking and feeling. As we open the new year, we’ll hear from Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal; Logan Poet Laureate Shanan Ballam; and poet and Sonosopher Alex Caldiero.

Today we’ll be talking with Pitzer College professor Suyapa Portillo and DePaul University professor Ester Trujillo about the root causes of immigration from Central America, the dangerous immigrant journey and integration of immigrants into the United States.

In her new book, “Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America,” Judy Kawamoto offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II.

One beautiful September day, three men convene on Martha’s Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn’t have been more different then, or even today – Lincoln’s a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin’ age.

With police shootings in Utah reaching record highs amid a nationwide debate over police accountability, FRONTLINE and The Salt Lake Tribune are presentingShots Fired: the first nationally broadcast documentary stemming from FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative.

As we head toward the holidays we want to know what you’re reading. What’s on your nightstand or device right now? Is there a book that has had a big impact on you? Which books are you looking forward to reading or giving as gifts? Perhaps you’d like to tell us a personal story connected to a favorite book. We’d love to hear about books in the adult, young adult and children’s categories. One suggestion or many are welcome.

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece is the true crime story-behind-the-story of Dostoevsky’s greatest work, Crime and Punishment, and why it changed the world. November 11th marked the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth and author Kevin Birmingham spent years researching archival material to evoke Czarist Russia at the birth of the Russian intelligentsia, along with Siberian prison camps, high-stakes trials, and gory murders and the details of Dostoevsky’s fascinating life.

Bridge of Clay is the new sweeping family saga from Markus Zusak, author of the international bestseller The Book Thief, which swept the world and was made into a movie.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan raises important questions about the meaning of peacekeeping and peacebuilding in the 21st century. There is a panel discussion today (4:30 p.m. in Old Main 115 at USU and on Zoom) called “The Afghanistan Crisis: The Challenges of Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding.”

As the planet warms, winter is shrinking. In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes. In his new book “The Last Winter,” journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything—from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of the world as we know it. This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine.

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture.

Brooke Williams walked twice into Southern Utah’s Mary Jane Wilderness: at the beginning of the Trump presidency, and four-years later at its end. In Mary Jane Wild, Brooke Williams documents his experience in this magical place, his sense of what happened during the Trump presidency, why and its possible long-term effects. It is also his story of how walking in the wilderness heals, helps him identify, then adapt to changing modern conditions and understand the role wildness continues to play in the evolution of life.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History.

There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.

Medical researcher and ICU physician Samuel Brown says, “While writing a book about death culture and American religion before the Civil War, I read hundreds of accounts of the ‘good death.’ I began to wonder why good dying was incredibly rare in the hospitals where I practiced medicine.”

Today we’ll talk with Robin Wigglesworth, the global finance correspondent at the Financial Times, about his new book "Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever."

The Moth is true stories, told live and without notes. You hear the Moth Radio Hour each week on UPR. The Moth Mainstage, the live stage show, is coming to Cache Arts in Logan. Ahead of that event, one of the Moth Mainstage hosts, Jon Goode, will join us today.

Today we’ll be talking about theArab-American University in Palestine. Several USU faculty members and others played a role in the founding and early success of AAUP in the early 2000s.

Today a conversation with Sen. Brent Hill about civil discourse. Brent Hill is the Next Generation Program Director for the National Institute for Civil Discourse. He’ll be talking with Neil Abercrombie, USU Vice President for Government Relations, in an event at the David B. Haight Center on the USU campus on Monday at 4:00 p.m.

Our guest for the hour today is Chad Anderson. He has made a documentary film called Dog Valley which tells the story of Gordon Church, a young gay man who was kidnapped, raped, tortured and brutally murdered in rural Utah, as well as the stories of the two men who killed him, Michael Archuleta (currently on death row) and Lance Wood (currently in a minimum security prison). The film features an interview with Wood himself and delves into true crime and the long-term effects of trauma.

Two decades before official missionary work began, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pamphlets, books and other church materials began circulating in West Africa, leading to a unique “native” Mormonism. Believers crafted churches from these bare materials and doctrinal interpretations during the 1960s and 1970s.

Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.

Janice Brooks, Chairwoman of the Utah Humanities Council, governing board member for Intermountain Healthcare St. George Regional Hospital and IHC Ethics Committee member, will give a keynote address to the One Utah Summit titled Leading with Creativity, Kindness and Inclusion. That speech is tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. The summit is ongoing today and tomorrow at Southern Utah University and is being streamed live at suu.edu/sutvlive.

Stephen Trimble’s new book The Mike File is a memoir. Psychosis overwhelmed Trimble’s brother Mike at 14. Trimble’s parents had no choice but to commit Mike to the Colorado State Hospital. Mike left when Steve was six. He never lived at home again. In his new book Trimble takes readers along on Mike's heartbreaking journey, noting that Mike’s life parallels the history of our treatment of the mentally ill over the last 70 years. Stephen Trimble and Douglas Goldsmith, the former Executive Director of The Children’s Center in Salt Lake City will join us today.

The USU College of Science is presenting a panel discussion titled “A Time to Die.” This virtual panel is tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. Everyone is welcome. Panelists will discuss physician-assisted dying, currently legal in a number of U.S. states, and how this practice might be implemented in Utah.

In conjunction with the Moth Mainstage event coming to Logan next month, UPR and Cache Arts are presenting 15 Things Utahns Can’t Live Without in a Pandemic, which is based on NPR’s 15 Things Folks Can’t Live Without in a Pandemic. The project is about the power of storytelling, and how it can be a catharsis and a way of processing as we collectively deal with this ongoing global pandemic.

Today we are presenting our sixth live episode of Debunked, the only Utah podcast combining evidence-based health practices with storytelling to challenge the stereotypes, and debunk the myths about harm reduction, substance use disorders and homelessness.

The economy says we must always consume more: even the slightest drop in spending leads to widespread unemployment, bankruptcy and home foreclosure.

It’s UPR’s Fall Member Drive. During our Spring Drive we talked with emergency room doctor, writer and UPR member Marion Bishop, who works at Cache Valley Hospital and Brigham City Community Hospital. We also talked with her last year as a part of an episode featuring frontline workers.

It’s a special Member Drive edition of the program again today. And today we’ll shine a spotlight on the Cache Refugee and Immigrant Connection (CRIC), an organization in northern Utah devoted to helping refugees. We’ll review the history of refugees in northern Utah as well as current needs and we’ll talk about doing good in challenging times.

Once again it's a Member Drive edition of the program. Our special guest for the hour is Craig Jessop, Music Director of the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra.

It’s a member drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite recent episodes of the program.

Dixie State University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences is bringing the “Remember the 43 Students” art installation to their campus. This installation commemorates the six people who were killed and the 43 students who were “disappeared” in a night of unspeakable political violence in Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico on September 26, 2014.

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants.

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’”

The Man Who Caught the Storm is the saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring, and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon.

Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity: it's what children feel at summer camp. But in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back.

Daniel James Brown’s bestseller The Boys in the Boat is a story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.

Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. We’ve lost 50% of the world’s coral in the last 30 years. Scientists say that climate change is now their greatest threat and it is estimated that only 10% can survive past 2050. In a new documentary film, “Chasing Coral,” a team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why coral are vanishing and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.

The U.S. Department of Education launches an investigation into Utah's ban on school mask mandates. Health officials hope personal stories — like that of a Vernal woman who got COVID after declining a vaccine — will help change minds. Gov. Spencer Cox questions the effectiveness of masks, contradicting healthcare professionals. And what the data from a European soccer championship can tell us about the spread of coronavirus at sports events in the US.

In Eager, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat.

Douglas Tallamy’s first book, “Bringing Nature Home,” awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. “Nature’s Best Hope” shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. Talllamy says that because this approach relies on the initiatives of private individuals, it is immune from the whims of government policy. Even more important, it’s practical, effective, and easy.

An alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducts a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses. The horses and prisoners both arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many— the horses often abandoned and suspicious, the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addiction, emotionally, physically, and financially shattered. Ginger Gaffney’s job is to retrain the untrainable. With time, the horses and residents form a profound bond, and teach each other patience, control, and trust.

Today we feature a conversation with renowned actor and author George Takei. He is coming to Utah for the Moab Music Festival, which has commissioned a new work based on his speeches, personal writings, and recollections of his and his family’s internment in camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Take a look at your favorite pair of jeans. Maybe you bought them on Amazon or the Gap; maybe the tag says “Made in Bangladesh” or “Made in Sri Lanka.” But do you know where they really came from, how many thousands of miles they crossed, or the number of hands who picked, spun, wove, dyed, packaged, shipped, and sold them to get to you?

Today we present a live episode of the Debunked Podcast. Host Tom Williams and Debunked Podcast host Don Lyons welcome Mary Jo McMillen, Executive Director of USARA (Utah Support Advocates for Recovery Awareness) and Ashanti Moritz, Outreach Director for the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes' Warrior Spirit Recovery Center to debunk the myth “indigenous and non-indigenous groups can't work together to solve social problems.”

We’re going to talk about housing in Utah today. Here are some headlines from the past several months: How tight is Utah’s housing market? Some buyers offer $100K over asking; ‘Hyper-, hyper-competitive’ Salt Lake area housing market is white hot, but are Californians to blame?; What’s driving Utah’s housing crisis? It’s not what you think, says economist; Housing affordability in Utah entering ‘perilous territory,’ study says; The pandemic has supercharged Utah’s housing market.

A while back on Access Utah, Michael Sowder, USU professor of English and affiliated professor of religious studies, helped us learn some of the history and current practice of yoga. On Tuesday’s Access Utah he’ll lead us in an exploration of mindfulness and meditation, which may be of special interest during these times of pandemic.

Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Jevin West is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington. He directs the Center for an Informed Public, whose mission is to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse. He is co-author with Carl Bergstrom of “Calling Bullshit,” a book on how to spot and refute misinformation.

The Personal Librarian is a historical novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict, and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray.

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

In a 6-3, party-line vote, the Salt Lake County Council votes to overturn the public health school mask order issued by county health director Dr. Angela Dunn. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issues a call to its members to wear masks and get vaccinated. And new census figures cement Utah's place as the fastest growing state in the nation.

“Sleeper Agent” is the story of the only Soviet military spy to have full security clearance in America’s top-secret project to build the first atomic bomb. He was a U.S. soldier born and raised in Iowa who charmed everyone he met, loved baseball and Walt Whitman, and all the while he was sending atomic secrets to Moscow to help build their own atomic bomb. He was never caught.

Today we’ll talk with Senator Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, the first Asian American woman and the only immigrant currently serving in the U.S. Senate. Her new memoir "Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter’s Story" is an inspiring account of one woman coming into her personal and political power, a heartwarming homage to the women who raised her, and a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most fraught moments of the Trump administration.

St. Anne’s Retreat, located in Logan Canyon, is well-known to Cache Valley residents due to the folklore of the place: tales of demonic nuns, evil witches, murdered babies, and more. Often referred to as “The Nunnery,” the site is a hub for thrill-seekers who trespass onto the property to see for themselves if the stories are true.

Part memoir, part meditation on poetry, part conversation with her husband, friends, and the many animals that live with and around her, Katharine Coles’s The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Coles begins this collection of lyric essays with a meditation on walking, and “the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger, estranged.”

Quoting the Salt Lake Tribune: “In response to the uproar over critical race theory, the Utah Board of Education has approved a new set of standards that spell out what teachers can — and especially what they cannot — say to their students about ethnicity, inclusion, equity and culture.” The Utah Legislature has also passed resolutions on the topic. Today we’ll try to define what Critical Race Theory is and isn’t and talk about what should and shouldn’t be taught in Utah’s K-12 schools.

In 2019, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The result is “West: A Translation:” a linked collection of poems that responds to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America.

Today we’re doing another non-profit spotlight. There are many needs in our communities and many step up to help. We’d love to shine a light on your favorite non-profit or individual doing good in your community.

In his new book, Last Best Hope, award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic George Packer explores the four narratives that now dominate American life and describe our divides: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression.

It sometimes seems like life is nothing but conflict these days, with heated disagreements on Social Media and around the dinner table. And you may be dreading a high-stakes conversation in your near future. Next time on Access Utah we’ll talk with consultant and USU lecturer Clair Canfield.

Jean Lowe is an American pop/conceptual multimedia artist whose work carefully and humorously unpacks the ironies and challenges of our 21st-century culture. Lowe employs wit and satire to create work that is both entertaining and seductive as well as intellectually provocative. Her work revolves around the intersection of popular culture, environmentalism, commerce, politics, and art history.

Next time on Access Utah, we’ll present another live episode of Debunked, the only Utah podcast combining evidence-based health practices with storytelling to challenge the stereotypes, and debunk the myths about harm reduction, substance use disorders and homelessness. This time we’re debunking the myth, “There are plenty of resources but people just don’t want the help.”

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him.

We hear from many these days who say “the news is depressing” or “the news just makes me mad.” Today we’re going to talk about how news consumption can affect our mental health. We’ll explore how to vet the news and how to find trustworthy news sources. There’s a growing divide in what we collectively accept as facts. What do we do about that? How do we combat misinformation?

In the span of a single lifetime, light pollution stemming from Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) has severed the connection with the stars that we’ve had since the dawn of time. With the nocturnal biosphere significantly altered, light’s anthropogenic influence has compelled millions of people to seek out the last remaining dark skies.

Dr. Susan Madsen, Director of The Utah Women & Leadership Project (UWLP) at Utah State University will join us on Tuesday’s Access Utah to talk about new research from UWLP into how the pandemic has affected women and work, specifically focusing on caregiver experiences.

Christine Montross has spent her career treating the most severely ill psychiatric patients. Several years ago, she set out to investigate why so many of her patients became caught up in the legal system when discharged from her care—and what happened to them in that legal system.

8:36 P.M. EST, December 12, 1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt braked to a stop alongside Nansen Crater, keenly aware that they were far, far from home. They had flown nearly a quarter-million miles to the man in the moon’s left eye, landed at its edge, and then driven five miles into this desolate, boulder-strewn landscape. As they gathered samples, they strode at the outermost edge of mankind’s travels. This place, this moment, marked the extreme of exploration for a species born to wander.

In his memoir, “The Weight of Shadows,” José Orduña chronicles the process of becoming a North American citizen in a post-9/11 United States. Intractable realities—rooted in the continuity of US imperialism to globalism—form the landscape of Orduña’s daily experience, where the geopolitical meets the quotidian.

American Indian Services Pre-Freshman Engineering Program (AIS PREP) is a free STEM summer school program for middle schoolers from eight different Native American tribes. Alice Min Soo Chun, founder and CEO of Solight Designs, Inc., is this year’s AIS PREP graduation keynote speaker.

All of us—people, fish, and many other creatures—depend on the water in Utah’s rivers. The choices we make about how to develop water resources have big impacts on river habitats. In “Decisions Downstream,” an exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah, watershed scientist Sarah Null teams up with artists Chris Peterson and Carsten Meier to explore new ways of seeing river habitats. Critical water decisions are being made in Utah. “Decisions Downstream” highlights the water development tools, trade offs, and alternatives that can guide our choices.

For much of a year, writer Sebastian Junger and three friends—a conflict photographer and two Afghan War vets—walked the railroad lines of the East Coast. It was an experiment in personal autonomy, but also in interdependence. Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers, the four men forged a unique reliance on one another.

American Festival Chorus and Orchestra (AFCO) is performing the Mozart Requiem this weekend. Craig Jessop, Director of AFCO and Gary Griffin, Managing Director of Utah Festival Opera and Musical Theater (UFOMT) will join us in-studio to talk about Mozart, the Requiem, and performing arts as we come out of the pandemic.

When the pandemic struck, nature writer David Gessner turned to Henry David Thoreau, the original social distancer, for lessons on how to live. Those lessons—of learning our own backyard, rewilding, loving nature, self-reliance, and civil disobedience—hold a secret that could help save us as we face the greater crisis of climate. Gessner’s new book is Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight: Sheltering with Thoreau in the Age of Crisis, published by Torrey House Press.

As you know, NPR is celebrating 50 years. You’ve been hearing some memories from UPR staff members and now it’s your turn! Continue the conversation and share your memories by emailing upraccess@gmail.com.

When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver. Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs.

By the time he turned nineteen, Derek Black was regarded as the "the leading light" of the white nationalist movement. While at college he started to question his worldview. Then he decided to confront the damage he had done. In the book, Rising Out of Hatred,” the author, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Eli Saslow, asks what Derek Black's story can tell us about America's increasingly divided nature.

Utah’s path to statehood was the most tortuous in U.S. history, due in no small part to the Mormon practice of polygamy. Frank J. Cannon, newspaperman, Congressional delegate, and senator, guided Utah toward becoming the forty-fifth state in the Union in 1896. But when he lost favor with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his contributions fell into obscurity.

Many wildfires continue to burn across Utah, with the threat of more fire with the persisting hot and dry conditions. We’ll talk about wildfires in Utah today. Our guests will include Staci Olson, who has fought wildfires in the western U.S. for 10 years; Kait Webb with the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands; and Moab Mayor Emily Niehaus.

The Monarch and Other Winged Wonders Festival will happen on Thursday in Nibley. We’ll preview the event next time on Access Utah. We’ll learn about Monarch butterflies, bats, bees, fireflies, night pollinators, dragonflies and birds. We’ll talk about the decline in some of these species and how we can help. And we’ll discuss how being in nature can improve our health and well-being.

History isn’t always written by the victors. 19th century America saw a series of high-profile court cases that stripped civil rights from Black Americans following the Civil War. John Marshall Harlan was the only U.S. Supreme Court justice to stand in dissent, and his blistering, passionate rebuttals inspired future justices, such as Thurgood Marshall, who said that Harlan’s writings were his “Bible” and his blueprint as he helped to tear down Segregation a century later.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled “America’s Brutal Racial History Is Written All Over Our Genes,” Libby Copeland writes: “The debate around race consuming America right now is coinciding with a technological phenomenon — at-home genetic testing kits — revealing many of us are not who we thought we were. Some customers of the major DNA testing companies, which collectively have sold 37 million of these kits, are getting results that surprise them.”

The Mountaintop by Katori Hall is a gripping two-person drama about the last day of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the play, King is alone in his hotel room when he is joined by Camae, a maid who works for the Lorraine Motel. What follows is a reflective, often funny, often touching conversation in which Dr. King examines his achievements, his failures, and his unfinished dreams.

A few months ago we talked with several Covid-19 long haulers. They said that some continued to suffer debilitating effects of the disease months after being infected with the virus. Many long haulers say they had active lifestyles prior to getting sick, but they are nowhere near getting back to normal. Today we’re going to check back in with Lisa O’Brien, founder of a Utah COVID-19 Long Haulers group. We’ll also be talking to Dr. Brayden Yellman of the Bateman Horne Center and Dr. Jeanette Brown, Director of the new post-COVID care clinic at the University of Utah.

Utah residents are facing a housing shortage in virtually every community and a segment of our population struggles with housing insecurity on a regular basis, partially associated with stigma and shame. Some don't fully understand the obstacles many have overcome. On the next Access Utah we’ll present another live episode of the podcast Debunked. We’ll be debunking the myth: Homeless people are lazy and don’t want to work.

On Sunday, Israel’s parliament (Knesset) voted in favor of a new government, ending Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year reign as prime minister. The vote ushered in a “change government”—a coalition of eight different political parties that plan to use a rotation system to fill the prime minister’s seat. Naftali Bennett, leader of the New Right Party, will initially serve as prime minister for two years, followed by Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid for two years. For the first time in Israel’s history, an Israeli Arab party will be part of the government.

Conservation groups have filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department to prevent a highway from being built through Red Cliffs National Conservation Area in Southwest Utah. The groups claim that paving over the protected land would be a violation of environmental laws which require agencies to analyze potential environmental harms before making decisions. Red Cliffs was established as a conservation area in 2009 to help recover a threatened species - the Mojave desert tortoise.

In her new book, “Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage,” Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us are grappling with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up—from climate crises to daily assaults on civility—how can we cope? Where, she asks, “do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back . . . with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?”

Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio’s northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession.

UPR broadcasts a weekly interview with Utah State University President Noelle Cockett, checking in on whatever is happening at the university that week. Earlier you heard the condensed version of this conversation. Today on Access Utah we’ll hear the full interview. We’ll talk about new rules at USU regarding face masks, vaccination rates, transitioning to a more-normal life, and we’ll look ahead to the fall.

Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As she learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis.

Almost one year ago in the midst of a global pandemic, we watched the death of George Floyd. Americans responded, protesting the realities of racial injustice in cities across the country. For many individuals, this may have been the first time they recognized the depth and breadth of discrimination in the United States, in their communities, and in their classrooms.

Gary Paul Nabhan is an Agricultural Ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the interaction of biodiversity and cultural diversity of the arid binational Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement.

On the eve of the Civil War, three American businessmen launched an audacious plan to create a financial empire by transforming communications across the hostile territory between the nation’s two coasts. In the process, they created one of the most enduring icons of the American West: the Pony Express.

When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine—who had never met—began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either side of the Continental Divide.

Today we’ll talk with Sharon Shattuck, director and producer of the documentary film Picture a Scientist, which offers a sobering portrait of struggles women face in pursuing studies and careers in science. We’ll also be talking with Sara Freeman, USU Assistant Professor of Biology, and Sojung Lim, USU Assistant Professor of Sociology. We’ll also hear sound clips from the film.

In a recent article for Terrain.org titled “In Defense of Pinon Nut Nation,” writer and photographer Stephen Trimble says “Piñons and junipers are the size of humans. We don’t look down at them, casually, and we don’t gaze up in awe. We are equal in scale. ‘Tree’ usually means tall, vertical, but these trees often are round. They have the reserved warmth of a Native grandmother. When you live in piñon-juniper woodland, you live with the trees, not under them. You participate, you reside."

Today we bring you another live episode of DEBUNKED, a podcast combining evidence-based health practices with storytelling to challenge the stereotypes, and debunk the myths about harm reduction, substance use disorders and homelessness. We will be coming to you live from the 2021 Intermountain Tribal and Rural Opioid Wellness Summit: Bridging Harm Reduction and Recovery Communities.

In a commentary published recently at Mongabay.com, Paul Rogers, a forest ecologist and Director of the Western Aspen Alliance at Utah State University, argues that forest managers’ “goal should not be to stop wildfire but to reduce conflicts with it.”

“Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World” is a collection of essays that takes inspiration from the ancient seabed in which Jennifer Sinor lives, an elemental landscape that reminds her that our lives are shaped by all that has passed through.

Kurt Bestor is a Utah-based composer and performer, known for his Christmas concerts, his film and television scores, and his haunting musical prayer for peace “Prayer of the Children.” He will be leading performances of “The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber” in Logan on May 21 and 22.

You’ve been hearing about the violence in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and southern Israel. Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah is at his home just outside Jerusalem. He’ll join us for the next Access Utah to give us a report directly from the area. Here’s the Deseret News: “What started as a week of tense clashes in Jerusalem has escalated into violent unrest on the streets of Arab Israeli towns, as well as a deadly aerial conflict. More than 1,000 rockets lit up the skies of Israeli cities, while at least two high-rise buildings were leveled in the Israeli bombardment of the blockaded and impoverished Gaza Strip, home to 2 million Palestinians.”

Part memoir, part meditation on poetry, part conversation with her husband, friends, and the many animals that live with and around her, Katharine Coles’s The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Coles begins this collection of lyric essays with a meditation on walking, and “the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger, estranged.”

Today our guest is Cache Valley resident Maren Johnson. She’ll tell us some fascinating stories from the world of dog sledding. For the past five years she worked for dog sledding businesses in Alaska. She lived on a glacier with 280 sled dogs. She also worked for four-time Iditarod winner Jeff King in his tourist business and assisted him in the 1,000-mile Iditarod race.

In 2019, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The result is “West: A Translation:” a linked collection of poems that responds to a Chinese elegy carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station where Chinese migrants to the United States were detained. “West” translates this elegy character by character through the lens of Chinese and other transcontinental railroad workers’ histories, and through the railroad’s cultural impact on America.

Today Margaret Pettis will join us to talk about her new book of poetry titled “In the Temple of the Stars.” Her previous collection “Chokecherry Rain,” won the Utah State Poetry Society book award.

Nashville, August 1920. Thirty-five states have ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, twelve have rejected or refused to vote, and one last state is needed. It all comes down to Tennessee, the moment of truth for the suffragists, after a seven-decade crusade.

Quoting Kristen Munson in Utah State Magazine: “In mid-January, the internet was awash in sea shanty videos on TikTok. A week later, memes of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, bundled in a Burton coat and sweater mittens, made the rounds on Twitter. Within minutes, Sanders, originally photographed at the January 20 inauguration ceremony, was Photoshopped sitting on a subway, perched on the iconic Friends couch, and on the White House lawn near a boy pushing a lawnmower. Where do memes come from and why do we love them so?”

How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first?

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told.

St. Anne’s Retreat, located in Logan Canyon, is well-known to Cache Valley residents due to the folklore of the place: tales of demonic nuns, evil witches, murdered babies, and more. Often referred to as “The Nunnery,” the site is a hub for thrill-seekers who trespass onto the property to see for themselves if the stories are true.

Today we’ll talk with Senator Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, the first Asian American woman and the only immigrant currently serving in the U.S. Senate. Her new memoir "Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter’s Story" is an inspiring account of one woman coming into her personal and political power, a heartwarming homage to the women who raised her, and a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most fraught moments of the Trump administration.

In the span of a single lifetime, light pollution stemming from Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) has severed the connection with the stars that we’ve had since the dawn of time. With the nocturnal biosphere significantly altered, light’s anthropogenic influence has compelled millions of people to seek out the last remaining dark skies.

Every year for Earth Day, we check in with writer and photographer Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America,” and many other books. Next time on Access Utah, Stephen Trimble joins us along with Terri Martin, Intermountain West Organizer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance; and Jesse Prentice-Dunn, Policy Director with the Center for Western Priorities.

In the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, charged in the death of George Floyd the verdict is in: guilty on all charges. Our guests today include Darlene McDonald, of the Utah Black Roundtable and a member of the Salt Lake City Commission on Racial Equity in Policing; Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City; and Rep. Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City.

Something exciting today: a live episode of the podcast DEBUNKED which seeks to dispel harmful myths and stereotypes about people who use drugs, persons in recovery, and evidenced-based harm reduction efforts. Today we’ll debunk the myth; Native Americans only live on reservations. Our guests are: Sandy Sulzer, Director of the Office of Health Equity and Community Engagement at USU; Kristina Groves, LCSW, Ute/Hopi Tribe, Therapist at Urban Indian Center of Salt Lake; and podcast host Don Lyons.

Montana-based writer David Quammen says that Covid-19 is a reminder of viruses’ destructive power, but that life as we know it would be impossible without them. In his latest article for National Geographic titled “How Viruses Shape Our World,” he reviews the evolutionary origins of viruses and how they have helped shape the history of life.

On Thursday’s Access Utah our theme is farming. In the first half of the program we’ll talk about the AgrAbility program, which helps farmers, ranchers and their family members remain in agriculture when facing limitations due to aging, disease, injury, illness, or other disability. In the second half we’ll talk about an exhibit now showing at the USU Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art called “American Farmer,” which features photographic portraits in addition to interviews with farmers from across the United States, telling the inspiring stories of the stewards of this land.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of global climate breakdown. So how might we develop the inner resolve to confront it? Full Ecology, a collaboration between social-cultural psychologist Mary Clare and longtime science writer Gary Ferguson, suggests a path forward. Breaking the modern impulse to see humans as separate from nature, Clare and Ferguson encourage us to learn from the “supremely methodical and highly improvisational” natural systems that touch our lives. True change, they argue, begins with us stopping and questioning assumptions about our place in the world.

Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland. In her new book, “Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America” Judy Kawamoto offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, In the book, she addresses her personal and often unconscious reactions to her parents’ trauma, as well as her own subsequent travels around much of the world, exploring, learning, enjoying, but also unconsciously acting out a continual search for a home.

When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver. Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs.

On Access Utah, we’ve checked in with arts organizations a couple of times during the pandemic. Today we’ll do so again. We’ll see how these organizations have fared in difficult circumstances, what creative new ideas might become standard practice, and what the future looks like. And we’ll ask you how your habits have changed during the pandemic and what you’re most looking forward to attending as things ease a bit.

We do this periodically. Today we’re doing another non-profit spotlight. There are many needs in our communities, especially during these extraordinary times. We’d love to shine a light on your favorite non-profit or individual doing good in your community.

The Deseret News reports “Guns once again were a contentious issue on Capitol Hill during the Legislature’s 45-day session that ended March 5, and after several tries through the years, lawmakers succeeded in ending the permit requirement for carrying a concealed weapon in Utah. HB60 lets any Utah resident who is 21 years or older and can legally possess a firearm to carry their weapon concealed without needing a permit.”

There’s a recurring line in the musical Hamilton that George Washington says to Alexander Hamilton: “You have no control over who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” Today we’ll feature an episode of the podcast This Is Her Place, which tells the stories of Utah women, past and present. In this episode we talk about two women who were determined to take control and make sure the true story of their people was told: Mae Timbimboo Parry, historian and matriarch of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone; and Betty Sawyer, Community Engagement Coordinator in Access and Diversity at Weber State University and an activist on issues of racial justice in Utah for more than 40 years. We’ll also be talking to podcast co-host Naomi Watkins.

This week in Utah news:

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson recently issued a challenge for more women to get involved in their communities and in politics. Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Henderson have issued a 500 Day Roadmap, which includes a section on Equality and Opportunity. Today, we’ll talk about the Roadmap and issues such as the gender wage gap, women in public office, and opportunities for women in leadership in the private and public sectors.

By the time he turned nineteen, Derek Black was regarded as the "the leading light" of the white nationalist movement. While at college he started to question his worldview. Then he decided to confront the damage he had done. In the book, Rising Out of Hatred,” the author, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Eli Saslow, asks what Derek Black's story can tell us about America's increasingly divided nature.

Russ Beck, an author and a Senior Lecturer in the USU English Department, recently spent some time in southeastern Utah researching the history of uranium mining and milling and talking with local residents about the after-effects of the uranium boom in the Moab/Monticello/Blanding area.

Clinical therapist Em Capito spoke with us in October, ahead of her presentation at the Fall speaker series from the Utah Women’s Giving Circle.Titled “Triaging Resilience in the Midst of Crisis,” Em Capito shared “a research-based tangible framework for triaging our personal resilience along with the strategic shifts that deepen our roots, for ourselves, our families and our teams, toward the collective resilience that will lead our communities into the reinvention and renewal ahead.” We spoke with her about her personal history and why she defines resilience as a skill, rather than a trait.

It’s UPR’s Spring Member Drive. On Access Utah that means some very special programming, including some Best Of segments from favorite episodes and some great new conversations. On Wednesday’s Access Utah we’re talking about bridging racial and political divides. How do we talk to each other, understand each other, connect with each other when the divides only seem to be deepening? Our guest for the hour is Jason Gilmore, Associate Professor of Global Communication at Utah State University.

It’s UPR’s Spring Member Drive. On Access Utah that means some very special programming, including some Best Of segments from favorite episodes and some great new conversations. On Tuesday we’ll be talking with emergency room doctor, writer and UPR member Marion Bishop. We talked with her last year as a part of an episode featuring pandemic frontline workers. We’ll check back in to see how she’s been dealing with the pandemic, professionally and personally, since we talked last. We’ll also talk about the roll out of the vaccines and what the future might look like. And we’ll talk about grieving and loss during the pandemic.

It’s UPR’s Spring Member Drive. On Access Utah that means some very special programming, including some Best Of segments from favorite episodes and some great new conversations. Today we’re talking about food and food culture and folklore with Lael Gilbert, one of the hosts of UPR’s Bread & Butter feature; and Lynne McNeill, folklorist and Associate Professor in the USU English Department. We’ll hear some Bread & Butter segments and a portion of our Access Utah conversation from October with the editors of the book This is the Plate: Utah Food Traditions.

All of us—people, fish, and many other creatures—depend on the water in Utah’s rivers. The choices we make about how to develop water resources have big impacts on river habitats. In “Decisions Downstream,” an exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah, watershed scientist Sarah Null teams up with artists Chris Peterson and Carsten Meier to explore new ways of seeing river habitats. Critical water decisions are being made in Utah. “Decisions Downstream” highlights the water development tools, trade offs, and alternatives that can guide our choices.

January 2021 was the 125th anniversary of Utah statehood. Utah women have always made history, but they’re often missing in our textbooks, history classrooms, and public art. Better Days 2020 said to young people “We need your help to change that!” So they appealed to Utah students grades 4-12 to create an original essay or piece of art to tell us about a woman in Utah history who made a difference in their community, and to include what they are inspired to do today to follow in her footsteps. On the next Access Utah we’ll talk with some of the winners of the essay contest and hear them read their essays.

Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. But these cardboard cutouts and examples of lazy storytelling could never embody the rich traditions and histories of Latinx peoples.

Donald Trump has forged a unique relationship with American exceptionalism, parting ways with how American politicians have long communicated this idea to the American public.

Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio’s northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession.

The 2021 session of the Utah Legislature ended on Friday. Today we’ll recap the session with Rep. Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City; House Executive Appropriations Chair Rep. Brad Last, R-Hurricane; Senate Minority Whip Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, and Senate Majority Whip Sen. Ann Millner, R-Ogden. We’ll talk about Covid-19 restrictions, police reform, the budget, homelessness and more. Continue the conversation by emailing upraccess@gmail.com.

Julie Berry is the award-winning author of books for young adults and children. Her books include Lovely War, All the Truth That’s in Me, The Passion of Dolssa, The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, and Happy Right Now.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled “America’s Brutal Racial History Is Written All Over Our Genes,” Libby Copeland writes: “The debate around race consuming America right now is coinciding with a technological phenomenon — at-home genetic testing kits — revealing many of us are not who we thought we were. Some customers of the major DNA testing companies, which collectively have sold 37 million of these kits, are getting results that surprise them.” We talked with Libby Copeland, author of The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are, last year. The book is coming out soon in paperback. We’ll check back in with Libby Copeland today.

In her new book, “Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage,” Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us are grappling with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up—from climate crises to daily assaults on civility—how can we cope? Where, she asks, “do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back . . . with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?” We begin, Lamott says, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity. Drawing from her own experiences, Lamott shows us the intimate and human ways we can adopt to move through life’s dark places and toward the light of hope that still burns ahead for all of us. “Yes, these are times of great illness and distress,” she says. “Yet the center may just hold.”

Vaccines are being rolled out and warmer weather is approaching. Those are hopeful developments. What else should we know about Covid-19 in Utah right now?

On Monday’s Access Utah we’ll broadcast a full episode from This Is Her Place, a podcast that tells the remarkable stories of Utah women past and present, in all their diversity. Podcast co-host Naomi Watkins will also join us.

Today we’ll talk with Sharon Shattuck, director and producer of the documentary film Picture a Scientist, which offers a sobering portrait of struggles women face in pursuing studies and careers in science. UPR is among several organizations sponsoring a virtual film screening of Picture a Scientist (March 5-7) and a panel discussion (March 8). We’ll also be talking with Sara Freeman, USU Assistant Professor of Biology, who is coordinating the USU events; and Sojung Lim, USU Assistant Professor of Sociology, who is participating in the panel discussion. We’ll also hear sound clips from the film.

The pandemic is coming up on the year mark. More than 500,000 have died in the U.S. and millions have been or are sick. The need for caregiving has increased. Many of us are tired, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Stress and isolation and worry are taking a toll. Today we’re going to talk about mental health during the pandemic.

Last summer, amid the protests demanding police reform following the death of George Floyd, we spoke with Darlene McDonald, of the Utah Black Roundtable and a member of the then newly-created Salt Lake City Commission on Racial Equity in Policing. She said at the time: “Once the protests end and the streets become quiet, it is imperative that we not lose focus. We must redefine a new normal in policing.”

Today our guest is Cache Valley resident Maren Johnson. She’ll tell us some fascinating stories from the world of dog sledding. For the past five years she worked for dog sledding businesses in Alaska. She lived on a glacier with 280 sled dogs. She also worked for four-time Iditarod winner Jeff King in his tourist business and assisted him in the 1,000-mile Iditarod race.

Today our focus is on rural Utah and the legislature. What issues are especially important to residents outside of the Wasatch Front? What legislation is being proposed? Our guests will include Sen. Chris Wilson, R-Logan; Sen. Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City; Rep. Christine Watkins, R-Price; Rep. Kera Birkeland, R-Morgan; and Sen. Ronald Winterton R-Roosevelt. We would love to hear from you. What is the most important issue where you live? Email us to upraccess@gmail.com

In a commentary published recently at Mongabay.com, Paul Rogers, a forest ecologist and Director of the Western Aspen Alliance at Utah State University, argues that forest managers’ “goal should not be to stop wildfire but to reduce conflicts with it.” The headline for the piece is:

The Utah Women’s Giving Circle presented their “Resilient 2020 Speaker Series | From Susan B. Anthony to RBG: The history, resilience and call to community.” The concluding event in the series was held in November 2020, and was titled “New Possibilities Amidst the Unraveling.” Sara Jones, CEO of InclusionPro talked about how to identify opportunities in the midst of turmoil. She reminded us that unraveling our expectations gives us space, freedom, and clear eyes to see things differently.

How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In her new book, “Appropriate: A Provocation,” creative writing professor and Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal addresses a young writer to delineate how the idea of cultural appropriation has evolved—and perhaps calcified—in our political climate. What follows is an exploration of fluctuating literary power and authorial privilege, about whiteness and what we really mean by the term empathy, that examines writers from William Styron to Peter Ho Davies to Jeanine Cummins. “Appropriate” presents a new framework for one of the most controversial subjects in contemporary literature.

Sara Freeman is an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at Utah State University. She studies the neurobiology of strong social bonds. Last year, during the height of the pandemic, her mother died. Sara Freeman wrote recently about science and grief and love in Utah State Magazine, in an article titled “Love and Loss During a Pandemic.” She’ll join us for the hour next time on Access Utah.

Jim Robbins has written recently about pandemic-related overcrowding on Montana’s rivers; the connection between the growth of deadly viruses and the destruction of nature; the effects of public lands policy during the Trump Administration; geothermal energy; and an internet of animals. We’ll talk with him about public lands and related topics as the Biden Administration gets underway.

The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump begins in the U.S. Senate today. We'll provide a preview on the program today. We'll talk about procedure, recent history and all things related. We'll be talking to USU Political Science Professor Damon Cann. And I’d love to know what you’re thinking about this. Is impeachment of a former president constitutional? Should President Trump be convicted or acquitted? What would you advise Senators Lee and Romney? If President Trump is acquitted does that mean the impeachment process is broken? What will the outcome of the trial mean going forward for our national divide? You can send us your comment or question now to upraccess@gmail.com

The film Downwinders and the Radioactive West has been airing on PBS Utah. Today we’re going to review a different part of America’s nuclear history. Susan Dawson and Gary Madsen are retired Utah State University professors whose research and Congressional testimony contributed to passage of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. In addition to providing financial compensation to downwinders and uranium miners and others, RECA also acknowledged that Congress "apologizes on behalf of the nation" to individuals who were "involuntarily subjected to increased risk of injury and disease to serve the national security interests of the United States." Professors Dawson’s and Madsen’s research from 1988 to 2010 focused on radiation exposures to underground and above ground uranium miners, uranium millworkers, and uranium transportation workers.

This special is part of UPR’s ongoing series Project Resilience. Project Resilience is made possible with support from the Utah State University Center for Persons With Disabilities.

On Wednesday’s Access Utah we’ll broadcast a full episode from This Is Her Place, a podcast that tells the remarkable stories of Utah women past and present, in all their diversity. Podcast co-host Naomi Watkins will also join us.

President Biden has issued an executive order placing an indefinite moratorium on new leases for oil and gas development on federal lands. Proponents of the moratorium say it’s a positive step and that previous lease sales on federal lands have harmed some of the West’s most cherished landscapes and slowed the nation’s shift to clean energy. Opponents argue that the moratorium will further harm already hard-hit economies with an outsized impact on rural areas. We’ll talk about it on Tuesday’s Access Utah. Our guests will include Sen. Ronald Winterton, R-Roosevelt; and Steve Bloch, Legal Director with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

At the request of the Utah Legislature, the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute – with the assistance of a 37-person Technical Advisory Committee – has prepared a Utah Roadmap to help legislators make policy to improve air quality and address causes and impacts of a changing climate. We’ll ask legislators and others how the Roadmap is being implemented this legislative session. Our guests will include Rep. Steven Handy, R-Layton and Rep. Joel Briscoe, D-Salt Lake City. Representatives Handy and Briscoe are among the co-chairs of the Clean Air Caucus. We’ll also be talking with Thomas Holst, Senior Energy Analyst with the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute; and Josh Craft, Government and Corporate Relations Manager with Utah Clean Energy.

Today we’ll talk with David Quammen about viruses in general and the SARS-CoV-2 virus specifically.

On Wednesday’s Access Utah we’ll talk about the situation in Russia with former NPR Moscow Bureau Chief Corey Flintoff.

Today on Access Utah we’ll continue our coverage of the 2021 Utah Legislature by checking in with several advocacy and research groups. We’ll ask them what their priorities are and what they hope emerges from this session of the legislature. We’ll be talking to representatives from Sutherland Institute, Libertas Institute, Utah Health Policy Project, Utah Foundation, Utah League of Cities and Towns, and Crossroads Urban Center.

May 1943. The Battle of Attu—called “The Forgotten Battle” by World War II veterans—was raging on the Aleutian island with an Arctic cold, impenetrable fog, and rocketing winds that combined to create some of the worst weather on Earth. Both American and Japanese forces were tirelessly fighting in a yearlong campaign, and both sides would suffer thousands of casualties.

Gary Ferguson’s books include “Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West.” We’ll talk with Gary Ferguson about the wildfires burning now in the west. We’ll also talk about his latest book “The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World.”

Join us for Access Utah on Tuesday: the opening day of the 2021 session of the Utah Legislature. We’ll be talking to Governor Spencer Cox and legislative leaders, including House Assistant Minority Whip, Rep. Angela Romero; and Senate Majority and Minority Whips, Sen. Ann Milner and Sen. Luz Escamilla, respectively. And we hear some of the priorities of our listeners as we head into this legislative session.

Welcome to a special edition of Access Utah on Utah Public Radio. In this hour we’ll be highlighting L.A. Theatre Works, which can be heard on UPR on Friday evenings at 9:00. Susan Albert Loewenberg, founder, host and Producing Director of L.A. Theatre Works will join me to talk about producing theatre for radio and the role the arts play during these pandemic times and other topics. We’ll also hear sound clips from several productions.

The 2021 session of the Utah Legislature begins on Tuesday and we’re going to get a preview of possible priorities, key legislation and the key players today on Access Utah. The Utah Capitol building will be closed to the public on opening day due to security concerns. Issues likely to be addressed by the legislature include tax cuts, education, and the economic effects of the pandemic.

Our guest today on Access Utah is Selina Gallo-Cruz, Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts. We’ll talk about the women’s suffrage movement, women's resistance in civil war, civics education and the ongoing movement for voting rights.

Today we look at the top Digital Trends of 2020, from the fun to the profound. Each year folklore students at Utah State University track digital trends. They then meet at the end of the year to prepare a ballot that goes out to a national panel of experts in digital folklore, which selects the winning trend. Top results for 2020 include #BreonnaTaylor and #GeorgeFloyd, as well as the meme: “How It Started/How It’s Going/How It Ended,” and gender-reveal, presidential election, and Zoom meetings memes.

Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland. In her new book, “Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America” Judy Kawamoto offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, In the book, she addresses her personal and often unconscious reactions to her parents’ trauma, as well as her own subsequent travels around much of the world, exploring, learning, enjoying, but also unconsciously acting out a continual search for a home.

Kevin Holdsworth’s new book is about the Uinta Mountains, Utah's loftiest range. “Red Stone Heart” celebrates the peak bagging experience and shares a little lore. The highest named peaks, The Notorious Nine, form a goal, but as with an Uinta stream, there is much meandering in the book through forest and meadow. Peaks and routes are pulled from a life's rucksack, and we are carried along as we watch a young fool somehow survive to a riper age.

Utah’s first female sheriff, Rosie Rivera, got some good advice when she became an officer: “Don’t try to be a man.” More than a century earlier, Utah’s first female deputy sheriff, Claire Ferguson, said to those who doubted her ability to handle danger, “Why should I fear more than the men?” Today we’ll broadcast a full episode from This Is Her Place, a podcast that tells the remarkable stories of Utah women past and present, in all their diversity. Podcast co-host Naomi Watkins will also join us.

Today Margaret Pettis will join us to talk about her new book of poetry titled “In the Temple of the Stars.” Her previous collection “Chokecherry Rain,” won the Utah State Poetry Society book award.

We hope you’ll join us on Thursday for the Access Utah Holiday Special. Lightwood Duo, Mike Christiansen on guitar and Eric Nelson on clarinet, will play music for the holidays and playwright Tim Slover, author of The Christmas Chronicles, will present readings for the season.

Today we talk with Heather Lende about her new book Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics.

Today we present some readings for the season from a special holiday edition of The Zesty Garden from 2013. This gardening program, hosted by Bryan Earl, ran for several years on UPR and included a regular segment called Petals and Prose. Helen Cannon and Nancy Williams were regular contributors. Today we'll hear from Helen's husband, Larry Cannon, along with Nancy Willians and Bryan Earl with stories, memories and at least one holiday recipe.

In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational–in the fringe–is on the rise. There’s a new book out called “The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained.” The author, Colin Dickey, will join me for the hour on Monday’s Access Utah. We’ll talk about everything from the great Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 to UFOs to QAnon and Pizzagate.

Today on Access Utah we’re doing another non-profit spotlight. There are many needs in our communities, especially during this extraordinary year and this special time of year. We’d love to shine a light on your favorite non-profit or individual doing good in your community.

Katharine Coles, former Utah Poet Laureate and current Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah, joins us today for Access Utah to talk about her seventh collection of poems, Wayward, published last year.

USU Professor Emeritus Ross Peterson is among the most beloved American history teachers ever to step inside a college classroom. Several generations of students have voted him their favorite instructor, and a fair number became teachers themselves. Ross Peterson’s new book “Christmas in Montpelier” offers a look into his early life, where his wry humor, work ethic, and kindness were honed. Twelve Christmases come to life as he grows from a small boy in a hardscrabble farmhouse with no running water inside and a two-hole privy outside, to one of the nation's most honored educators.

With a surge in Covid-19 cases continuing in Utah and a vaccine on the horizon, we’ll look at the current situation and look ahead today. Our guest for the hour is Doctor Stuart Fischer, Medical Director of Bronx Gardens Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in New York City. We’ll talk about the impact of holiday travel on the spread of the virus, how people living with chronic conditions can stay healthy, and lessons learned from the pandemic, among many other topics.

Poet Ben Gunsberg will join us for Access Utah on Wednesday. He’s been writing poems for the pandemic. We’ll hear some of those poems today. His latest collection is “Welcome, Dangerous Life.” He writes about the vulnerability of being a parent.

Thursday on Access Utah we’ll spotlight the ongoing Moab Music Festival. We’ll talk with master fiddler Alasdair Fraser, cellist Natalie Haas, and violinist Charles Yang, all of whom are performing at the festival. We’ll also hear music performed by these artists.

The American Legacy Project is a nonprofit organization committed to helping American veterans and their families memorialize their time in service to the nation so that their legacies are never lost. Wyatt Frasier and Zachery Page, two Army Lieutenants and West Point graduates, started The American Legacy Project to help veterans preserve their stories of service for their families and the American public. Frasier and Page realized that incredible stories, especially those decorating the landscape of the American military, are too often lost, simply because these stories’ protagonists do not know how or where to tell them.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time when extended family gathers together. This year many of us will be gathering in smaller groups, but many of our traditions will endure and hopefully the food will be just as delicious. Today we’ll ask you about your traditions and your plans in this unusual year and we’ll answer your cooking questions.

A coalition of organizations hosted a national virtual event in August on the 75th anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to commemorate the survivors of nuclear weapons and production. Still Here: 75 Years of Shared Nuclear Legacy included highlights from local events, stories from survivors, and a look toward a future free from nuclear threats.

Responding to a recent Access Utah episode on COVID-19 in Utah, Lisa O’Brien wrote us to say that she had founded a Utah COVID-19 Long Haulers group, and that many are still struggling with long term effects of COVID. She says that some have hit 8 months or longer and that studies are now showing that at least 10% are ending up with long term effects & that Post COVID Care centers are going up across the country for Long Haulers to help those dealing with Post Viral symptoms. Today we’ll talk with Lisa O’Brien, Stacie Linderman, and Christine Maughan.

Today on Access Utah, writer Bill Shapiro joins us to talk about what draws him to other people's photos. He says other people's photographs are "like time-travel and a shortcut to empathy." We talk about how photography can pull us outside of ourselves, connecting us to something greater.

Simon Wang is Professor of Climate Dynamics and Assistant Director of the Utah Climate Center at Utah State University. Dr. Wang studies climate variability, weather process, extreme events, and long-term prediction. He recently gave a presentation to news reporters for a virtual event organized by InsideClimate News, titled “Wildfire, Heatwaves, Snowpack and Floods: Climate Change in the Mountain West.”

In a recent article for Terrain.org titled “In Defense of Pinon Nut Nation,” writer and photographer Stephen Trimble says “Piñons and junipers are the size of humans. We don’t look down at them, casually, and we don’t gaze up in awe. We are equal in scale. ‘Tree’ usually means tall, vertical, but these trees often are round. They have the reserved warmth of a Native grandmother. When you live in piñon-juniper woodland, you live with the trees, not under them. You participate, you reside."

Julie Berry is the award-winning author of books for young adults and children. Her books include Lovely War, All the Truth That’s in Me, The Passion of Dolssa, The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, and Happy Right Now. She’s leading a virtual workshop on Writing Historical Fiction for the Provo City Library and The King’s English Bookshop this evening at 7:00.

Governor Herbert has issued a State of Emergency due to an increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations and what he says are unsustainable case rates. The Utah Department of Health says that hospitalizations and ICUs are nearing capacity, and that healthcare providers will be unable to care for Utahns in the coming days if this surge continues.

From Delicate Arch to the Zion Narrows, Utah’s five national parks and eight national monuments are home to some of America’s most amazing scenic treasures. In his new book “Wonders of Sand and Stone,” Frederick Swanson presents little-known accounts of people who saw in these sculptured landscapes something worth protecting. introducing us to the early explorers, scientists, artists, and travelers as well as the local residents and tourism promoters who worked with the National Park Service to build the system of parks and monuments we know today.

“Leave it as it is,” Theodore Roosevelt announced while viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time. “The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” Roosevelt’s rallying cry signaled the beginning of an environmental fight that still wages today.

It’s the day after Election Day. We don’t know for sure who has won the presidential election. Control of the U.S. Senate is still unclear. Many votes are still being counted. The picture in Utah is clearer. We’ll talk about where we are and where we go from here.

Today we check in with representatives from several arts organizations in Utah. With COVID cases not only continuing but increasing in many of our communities, how are arts organizations adapting? And how can audiences support the arts while staying safe?

Utah recently set a new single-day record for Covid-19 cases. Governor Herbert has announced new guidelines. And the Utah Public Health Association is calling for stricter measures to be taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The Utah Women’s Giving Circle is presenting their “Resilient 2020 Speaker Series | From Susan B. Anthony to RBG: The history, resilience and call to community.” The concluding event in the series is on Thursday and is titled “New Possibilities Amidst the Unraveling” Sara Jones, CEO of InclusionPro will talk about how to identify opportunities in the midst of turmoil. She will remind us that unraveling our expectations gives us space, freedom, and clear eyes to see things differently.

On a page on their website titled “Fix Our Broken System,” and in answer to the question: Why a third party? The Green Party says that third parties can force progress on political issues; they can provide an “emotional bridge” for voters weary of voting for one major party but not ready to vote for the other; and they can help turn one of the major parties out of power.

According to the BBC a new round of “...[p]rotests calling for an end to police brutality began on 7 October [in Nigeria]. The demonstrations, dominated by young people, started with calls for a police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars), to be disbanded.” The Sars unit has been accused of extortion, torture and extrajudicial killings. Nigeria’s president has announced that the unit is being disbanded, but protests have continued, with protesters seeking broader reforms. The president has said that criminals have hijacked the protests and has ordered police to end the “violence, killings, looting and destruction of property.”

As the election approaches, we want to hear from you. Today, we're inviting you to join us on Access Utah to share your thoughts and feelings leading up to the election which is, now, one week away. Which candidates are you passionate about? What issues are top of mind? Which races are you following most closely?

The Fall speaker series from the Utah Women’s Giving Circle continues on Thursday with a presentation titled “Triaging Resilience in the Midst of Crisis.” The speaker, clinical therapist Em Capito, says she’ll share “a research-based tangible framework for triaging our personal resilience along with the strategic shifts that deepen our roots, for ourselves, our families and our teams, toward the collective resilience that will lead our communities into the reinvention and renewal ahead.” Em Capito will join us for Monday’s Access Utah.

The first book-length treatment of Utah’s distinctive food heritage, “This is the Plate” traces Utah’s food history from pre-contact Native American times through the arrival of multinational Mormon pioneers, miners, farmers, and other immigrants to today’s moment of “foodie” creativity, craft beers, and “fast-casual” restaurant-chain development.

McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness, a book about the battle over the future of the Republican Party. He appeared last week at a virtual event presented by USU’s Institute of Government and Politics and the USU Department of Journalism & Communication. The title of the event was “The 2020 Disinformation War: How Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, and Fake News are Shaping the Presidential Election -- And What To Do About It” McKay Coppins will join us for the hour on the next Access Utah.

Next time on Access Utah, we’ll preview the upcoming election with Morgan Lyon Cotti, Associate Director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. We’ll talk about the art and science of polling, vote by mail, projected voter participation rates, and what’s on your 2020 ballot, including several proposed constitutional amendments.

“There are few subjects that interest us more generally than the adventures of robbers and bandits.” That’s Scottish writer Charles MacFarlane, quoted in Charles Leerhsen’s new book. One such outlaw was Robert LeRoy Parker, born in Beaver, Utah and raised in Circleville, who became, of course, Butch Cassidy. Charles Leerhsen brings the notorious Butch Cassidy to vivid life, revealing the fascinating and complicated man behind the legend in the new book BUTCH CASSIDY: The True Story of an American Outlaw. Charles Leerhsen joins us for the program today.

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Jump the Moon Art Studio, which offers art-making opportunities to people with disabilities, along with the Cache Employment and Training Center (CETC), is working to bring attention to the strength and diversity that persons with disabilities contribute to our communities.

Whether the issue is a pandemic, vaccinations, or any number of other public health issues, a major challenge for advocates is communicating crucial information in a way that builds trust and changes behavior. Today we’ll hear an episode of the new podcast This Is Her Place which tells the stories of three women who rose to that challenge.

The Utah Women’s Giving Circle is presenting a series of events this month and next titled “Resilience 2020: From Susan B. Anthony to RBG: The History, Resilience, and Call to Community.” The first event is this week. Katherine Kitterman and Tiffany Greene from Better Days 2020 will discuss “The History of Women Reinventing the World.”

When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine—who had never met—began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either side of the Continental Divide.

Christopher Gonzalez and Frederick Luis Aldama join us for the hour to talk about their book “Reel Latinxs” on Thursday’s Access Utah.

“Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World” is a collection of essays that takes inspiration from the ancient seabed in which Jennifer Sinor lives, an elemental landscape that reminds her that our lives are shaped by all that has passed through. Beginning with the conception of her first son, which coincided with the tragic death of her uncle on an Alaskan river, and ending a decade later in the Himalayan home of the Dalai Lama, Sinor offers a lyric exploration of language, love, and the promise inherent in the stories we tell: to remember.

Our guest today on Access Utah is Selina Gallo-Cruz, Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts. We’ll talk about the women’s suffrage movement, women's resistance in civil war, civics education and the ongoing movement for voting rights.

Pulitzer prize winning New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg joins us in the first half of the program today. Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit” explores the science of habit formation in our lives, companies, and society. His book “Smarter Faster Better” explores the science of productivity. Duhigg says that in today’s world, it’s more important to manage how you think, rather than what you think. (Encore broadcast from 2011).

Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard cares about is his ability to keep his children all his children safe.

John Taylor fled to a welcoming St. George in 2018 to escape California’s foul air. A graduate of New York University, writing letters to the editor helped launch a 30-year career as a newspaper reporter and editor. He especially relished covering religion, health care and education. A native of Brooklyn, he’s a fan of the Yankees, the Packers and Fresno State roughly aligning with where he’s worked as a journalist and, until retirement, as public affairs director for nonprofit Community Medical Centers in Fresno. He and wife Judy, a retired teacher, relish chatting with everyone they meet, helping address community needs such as homelessness and discovering the special pleasures of being Utahns.

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.

Part elegy, part ode, part investigative science journalism, Jonathan Thompson’s book “River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster” (Torrey House Press), tells the gripping story behind the 2015 Gold King Mine disaster that turned the Animas River in southwestern Colorado orange with sludge and toxic metals for more than 100 miles downstream, wreaking havoc on cities, farms, and the Navajo Nation along the way.

Gary Ferguson’s books include “Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West.” We’ll talk with Gary Ferguson about the wildfires burning now in the west. We’ll also talk about his latest book “The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World.”

Once again during this Fall Member Drive, we’re doing the Best of Access Utah. Today our focus is on the arts and music.

It’s a member drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Ken Sanders from Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite recent episodes of the program.

It’s UPR’s Fall Member Drive. We’ll be joined for the hour by USU Associate Professor of Communications Studies Jason Gilmore. And we’ll present parts of several recent Access Utah interviews.

It’s UPR’s Fall Member Drive and Tom Williams will be joined for the hour by Lynne McNeill, Co-Director of the Digital Folklore Project at USU and Associate Professor of English.

Katharine Coles, former Utah Poet Laureate and current Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah, joins us today for Access Utah to talk about her seventh collection of poems, Wayward, published last year.

Tom Paxton says folk music is lumber with the bark still on. His legendary career spans six decades of traditional music and topical songs. He says today's political climate presents an embarrassment of riches to the song writer.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

Thursday on Access Utah we’ll spotlight the ongoing Moab Music Festival. We’ll talk with master fiddler Alasdair Fraser, cellist Natalie Haas, and violinist Charles Yang, all of whom are performing at the festival. We’ll also hear music performed by these artists.

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him.

In 2012, photographer Matika Wilbur sold everything in her Seattle apartment and created Project 562, which reflects her commitment to visit, engage with and photograph all 562 plus Native American sovereign territories in the United States. With this project she has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, many in her RV (which she has nicknamed the “Big Girl”) but also by horseback through the Grand Canyon, by train, plane, and boat and on foot across all 50 states.

The Atlantic magazine recently “asked photographers in 24 locations around the globe to point their cameras up to the sky at precisely the same moment—1 p.m. GMT, April 25. At a time when the world is so isolated, these photos are a reminder of what we share.” The resulting article is We Are All Living the Same Moment, written by Gretel Ehrlich.

In 2007, the number of refugees worldwide hit 26 million. Thirteen years later that number has more than doubled to 70.8 million people displaced, cementing this crisis as the humanitarian issue of our time. And while the crisis itself has been well covered, the question that has not been explored is what happens to those “lucky” few who not only manage to escape persecution, but also get what is perceived to be the “golden ticket” of resettlement in the United States?

Renowned American political activist, scholar and author Ibram X. Kendi visited USU in 2017 for a keynote presentation on “How to be an Anti-Racist.” The presentation was sponsored by the USU Inclusion Center.

On August 26th, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Women were no longer barred from voting because of gender. Today on Access Utah, we’ll preview an event happening tomorrow celebrating this anniversary and honoring the people, past and present, who fight for voting rights.

The USU Center for Anticipatory Intelligence (CAI) looks across all disciplines to spot threats posed by emerging technologies and other threats. CAI is an interdisciplinary nexus fusing expertise in national security and geopolitics with cutting-edge instruction in cyber threats, data analytics, and emergent technology. CAI students predicted a novel zoonotic outbreak last year.

You swab your cheek or spit into a vial, then send it away to a lab somewhere. Weeks later you get a report that might tell you where your ancestors came from or if you carry certain genetic risks. Or the report could reveal a long-buried family secret and upend your entire sense of identity.

Today on Access Utah, writer Bill Shapiro joins us to talk about what draws him to other people's photos. He says other people's photographs are "like time-travel and a shortcut to empathy." We talk about how photography can pull us outside of ourselves, connecting us to something greater.

Today we remember a friend of Access Utah, the writer Jeff Metcalf, who died this summer. I had the privilege of interviewing him several times on the show. He was unfailingly warm, witty, open, funny and profound.

A while back on Access Utah, Michael Sowder, USU professor of English and affiliated professor of religious studies, helped us learn some of the history and current practice of yoga. On Tuesday’s Access Utah he’ll lead us in an exploration of mindfulness and meditation, which may be of special interest during these times of pandemic.

Students will be returning to schools in many districts across Utah soon. How are officials planning to keep students and teachers safe amid the pandemic? What will the mix of in-person and online teaching be? How does everyone feel about going back to school?

“Leave it as it is,” Theodore Roosevelt announced while viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time. “The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” Roosevelt’s rallying cry signaled the beginning of an environmental fight that still wages today.

Matthew Crawford, author of the new book “Why We Drive:Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road,” says that once we were drivers, the open road alive with autonomy, adventure, danger, trust, and speed. Today we are as likely to be in the back seat of an Uber as behind the wheel ourselves. Tech giants are hurling us toward a shiny, happy “self-driving” future, selling utopia but equally keen to advertise to a captive audience strapped into another expensive device. Are we destined, then, to become passengers, not drivers? He says that much more may be at stake than we might think.

“There are few subjects that interest us more generally than the adventures of robbers and bandits.” That’s Scottish writer Charles MacFarlane, quoted in Charles Leerhsen’s new book. One such outlaw was Robert LeRoy Parker, born in Beaver, Utah and raised in Circleville, who became, of course, Butch Cassidy. Charles Leerhsen brings the notorious Butch Cassidy to vivid life, revealing the fascinating and complicated man behind the legend in the new book BUTCH CASSIDY: The True Story of an American Outlaw. Charles Leerhsen joins us for the program today.

A coalition of organizations is hosting a national virtual event today, August 6, and Sunday, August 9, on the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to commemorate the survivors of nuclear weapons and production. Still Here: 75 Years of Shared Nuclear Legacy will include highlights from local events, stories from survivors, and a look toward a future free from nuclear threats.

Today on Access Utah we’re doing another non-profit spotlight. We’d love to shine a light on your favorite non-profit or individual doing good in your community. Amy Anderson, Director of Outreach for the Sunshine Terrace Foundation and Spiritual Counselor with Sunshine Hospice in Logan will join us for the hour and we’ll hear from representatives of other nonprofits throughout the hour

Today on Access Utah we’re going to check in with CAPSA, a domestic violence, sexual abuse, and rape recovery center serving Cache County and the Bear Lake area. CAPSA’s Misty Hewitt says that rates of domestic violence are up during the pandemic. We’ll talk about services, reporting abuse, and healing from trauma, among other topics. We’ll also check in with Hilary Renshaw from USU’s Office of Equity, addresses cases of sexual misconduct and discrimination at USU

Poet Ben Gunsberg will join us for Access Utah on Monday. He’s been writing poems for the pandemic. We’ll hear some of those poems today. His latest collection is “Welcome, Dangerous Life.” He writes about the vulnerability of being a parent. He says (in an article in Utah State University Today) “The stakes are raised once you’ve got children. The title [of the collection] sort of hints at the way life seems more dangerous once you have children, once you have this vulnerable being you’re responsible for, and the way the world has colored and changed.” Ben Gunsberg will read some of these poems as well.

“I began my writing career by exploring the tracks humans have left in nature. Now I’m mostly interested in the tracks nature leaves in us.” That’s author Gary Ferguson. He says that nature provides beauty, mystery and community, traits that each of us very much needs. He is the author of 25 books.

Venezuelan double bassist Edicson Ruiz is one of the premier double bass soloists in the world. He is a previous winner of the International Society of Bassists solo competition and in 2003 became one of the youngest members of the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 18. He’s described as a shining example of the ground-breaking El Sistema.

In a world where rational, scientific explanations are more available than ever, belief in the unprovable and irrational–in the fringe–is on the rise. There’s a new book out called “The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained.” The author, Colin Dickey, will join me for the hour on Monday’s Access Utah. We’ll talk about everything from the great Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876 to UFOs to QAnon and Pizzagate.

Following the death of George Floyd in May, protests across the nation have demanded police reform and an end to systemic racism in policing. Today we’ll talk about how we’re doing with this in Utah. We'll speak with Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City; and Darlene McDonald, Chairwoman of the Utah Black Roundtable and a member of the newly-created Salt Lake City Commission for Racial Equity in Policing. We'll discuss systemic racism and police reform on the city and state level.

Today we’ll take a look at the Coronavirus pandemic’s effects in Utah jails and prisons. Our guests will include Salt Lake Tribune reporter Jessica Miller; Mayra Cristobal, whose husband has contracted COVID-19 and is incarcerated at the Weber County Jail; and Angie Millgate, whose former husband is incarcerated in the Washington County Jail.

The work of photographer Craig Law is included in an exhibition at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University. The exhibit is called Sky Above, Earth Below: A History of Western Landscape Photography. You can view the exhibit at artmuseum.usu.edu.

Patty Rayman was born with the ability to communicate with animals and has helped thousands of people resolve many types of behavior, health, attitude and relationship issues with their animal companions. In working with all types of animals, she has developed techniques to help people move from conflict to cooperation in their relationships.

Every year for Earth Day, we check in with writer and photographer Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America,” and many other books. This time, Stephen Trimble suggested we also reach out to his friend, ecologist, ethnobotanist and writer, Gary Paul Nabhan.

While artist Chris Terry is known for his contemplative interior landscapes, an exhibition at the USU Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) featured the experimental work he was able to create during four sabbaticals throughout his tenure at USU.

We’re compiling another UPR Community Booklist and we want to know what you’re reading. What’s on your nightstand or device right now? What is the best book you’ve read so far this year? Which books are you suggesting to friends and family? We’d love to hear about any book you’re reading, including in the young adult & children’s categories. One suggestion or many are welcome.

Today we talk with Heather Lende about her new book Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics.

Douglas Tallamy’s first book, “Bringing Nature Home,” awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives.

Several years ago, writer Paisley Rekdal created a digital community project that mapped the people, places, buildings and events that defined Salt Lake City. When she became Utah’s poet laureate, she decided to build on this idea and create a literary map for the entire state.

Photographer, marriage and family therapist and Utah State University alum Kimberly Anderson was on the USU campus in early March to give a presentation on her work. Her presentation, “Transitioning Within Landscapes: The Photography of Kimberly Anderson,” touched on her work as a photographer interwoven with her identity as a transgender woman.

On Thurday's Access Utah, we looked back on our

Jodi Byrd joined Tom Williams to discuss the next lecture in the USU College of Humanities’ Tanner Talks series: “Digital Animus in the Age of Liberation.”

From Utah State Magazine, "In the parched black desert of northeast Jordan, archaeologists recently unearthed a stone hearth containing loaves of flatbread more than 14,000 years old.

Jeff Meldrum is Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University. He is author of “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.” He is a leading expert on Bigfoot or Sasquatch, or the term he prefers: “Relict Hominoid.” He says “...[I]t is one matter to address the theoretical possibility of a relict species of hominoid in North America, and the obligate shift in paradigm to accommodate it, but there must also be something substantial to place within that revised framework. There must be essential evidence to lend weight to the hypotheses, and counter the critics’ various aspersions. I was once confronted by a colleague, who declared, ‘After all, these are just stories.’ My response: ‘Stories that apparently leave tracks, shed hair, void scat, vocalize, are observed and described by reliable experienced witnesses. Hardly just stories.’”

Meatpacking plants in Cache Valley have been hit hard with COVID-19 with several hundred workers diagnosed with the disease in the past several weeks. Community organizations and individuals are trying to provide needed help to the affected families. Some of the workers at the JBS plant in Hyrum staged a walk-out to protest the company’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

This Is Her Place is a new podcast that tells the remarkable stories of Utah women, past and present, in all their diversity. Businesswomen and religious leaders, poets and politicians, healers and homemakers, artists and activists, women in the Beehive state have never fit into easy stereotypes.

Barbara Farris is a retired health education teacher who lives in Cache Valley. Until March of this year she was in Zambia with the Peace Corps DREAMS program.

Derrik Tollefson is Professor of Social Work and head of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology at Utah State University. He also directs the I-System Institute for Transdisciplinary Studies at USU.

Today on Access Utah, a look at state air quality legislation. This episode was first broadcast in March during the final week of the 2020 session of the Utah Legislature.

Today on Access Utah we revisit a conversation from last year with presenters at the Mountain West Center and Evans Biography Awards Writers Workshop for Auto/Biography.

On Tuesday’s Access Utah, Tom Williams will talk with UNLADYLIKE2020 Executive Producer Sandra Rattley and series creator Charlotte Mangin.

Today on Access Utah, Ginger Gaffney joins us to talk about her memoir “Half Broke," about an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducting a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses.

Co-directors of the USU Digital Folklore Project Jeannie Thomas and Lynne McNeill (USU English Department Head and USU Assistant Professor of English, respectively) will join Tom Williams to talk about the 2019 Digital Trends of the Year.

During these times of unrest and uncertainty we’ve been checking in with writers, poets, and musicians. Next time on Access Utah our guest is Craig Jessop, Director of American Festival Chorus and Orchestra and former Director of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, also former Dean of the USU Caine College of the Arts.

In fighting to pass the 19th Amendment, brave suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Emmeline B. Wells fought to end laws and take down barriers that prevented them from voting. Champions of Change introduces young readers not only to Anthony and Wells, but also to a diverse group of firsts and freedom-fighters in America’s fight for equality.

Today a conversation with Wyoming-based writer Craig Johnson. Craig Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the Netflix original drama. Craig Johnson has received many awards for his books. He lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five. His latest novel in the Longmire series is “Land of Wolves.”

A study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Utah ranks 8th in the nation for the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

David Maisel (b. 1961, New York) is an artist working in photography and video, and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

A team from the University of Southern California has embarked on a 50-state tour to give cybersecurity training to poll workers and state and local campaign staffers who will be the last line of defense against Russian hacking in 2020. The group, called the Election Cybersecurity Initiative, views itself as a bottom-up, grass-roots counterpart to national-level election security efforts led by the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of Russia’s election interference in 2016.” (Washington Post January 30, 2020)

It’s been several days now of unrest, protests, and riots in many cities across the U.S. and the world (including Salt Lake City) since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. We'll talk about it on Access Utah today.

Today, a conversation with Jeff Metcalf about his new novel “Wacko’s City of Fun Carnival.”

The Gates of Eden isa historical novel inspired by Nadene LeCheminant’s great-great-grandmother. When Josephine Bell journeys from the slums of Victorian England to a remote Mormon settlement in Utah, the girl finds the Promised Land is not what she expected. Pressed into becoming the bride of an older polygamist, her struggle to find her own path takes her to unexpected places.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, Utah Public Radio and the Cache County School District, in partnership with the Cache Celebration of Women's Suffrage 2020, sponsored a writing contest for students in elementary, middle, and high school.

The USU Center for Anticipatory Intelligence (CAI) looks across all disciplines to spot threats posed by emerging technologies and other threats. CAI is an interdisciplinary nexus fusing expertise in national security and geopolitics with cutting-edge instruction in cyber threats, data analytics, and emergent technology. CAI students predicted a novel zoonotic outbreak last year.

During this pandemic we rely on frontline workers to provide essential and important services even when they may be at increased risk. We’ll talk to some of them next time on Access Utah.

UPR has been presenting special programs that we’re calling COVID-19 CONVERSATIONS, answering your questions about the pandemic. We’re going to resume our conversation on the next Access Utah.

Retired USU professor Richard Ratliff has developed what he calls the theory of Relationism, which he hopes will help us bridge the many divides we’re experiencing in our increasingly polarized society. He’ll join Tom Williams to explain.

The Atlantic magazine recently “asked photographers in 24 locations around the globe to point their cameras up to the sky at precisely the same moment—1 p.m. GMT, April 25. At a time when the world is so isolated, these photos are a reminder of what we share.” The resulting article is We Are All Living the Same Moment, written by Gretel Ehrlich.

You swab your cheek or spit into a vial, then send it away to a lab somewhere. Weeks later you get a report that might tell you where your ancestors came from or if you carry certain genetic risks. Or the report could reveal a long-buried family secret and upend your entire sense of identity.

A while back on Access Utah, Michael Sowder, USU professor of English and affiliated professor of religious studies, helped us learn some of the history and current practice of yoga. On Tuesday’s Access Utah he’ll lead us in an exploration of mindfulness and meditation, which may be of special interest during these times of pandemic.

From social distancing to new levels of anxiety and distress, the coronavirus pandemic has rapidly transformed our lives. On Sunday morning at 10:00, tune in to UPR to hear an interfaith program featuring messages of hope tailored to this particular moment.

Sadie Hoagland’s new book “American Grief in Four Stages,” a collection of short fiction, asks the question: why does our country do so little for the bereaved? Why do we have only empty cliché to address the grief of others? Why do we expect people to just "get over" insurmountable tragedy?

This time on Access Utah, a public lands cooperation success story. A while back, the aspen on Monroe mountain in Central Utah were in serious need of restoration. The situation could easily have descended into a blame game with wildlife advocates saying that livestock were eating all of the young aspen and grazing advocates saying that wildlife were eating all of the young aspen. Instead all sides launched an innovative project: the Monroe Mountain Working Group. Individuals and groups that in other circumstances might have been fighting came together to solve the problem.

A couple of weeks ago, UPR presented a special program called COVID-19 CONVERSATION, answering your questions about the pandemic. We’re going to resume our conversation on the next Access Utah. As the state moves from Red to Orange level, we’ll ask what that means and how it affects you.

Today, as a part of our series: Stopping Sexual Harassment, we’ll talk with Susan Madsen and Robbyn Scribner of the Utah Women and Leadership Project at Utah Valley University. We’ll talk about sexual harassment and sexual assault. We’ll also talk about voting, leadership, body image and other topics.

Several years ago, writer Paisley Rekdal created a digital community project that mapped the people, places, buildings and events that defined Salt Lake City. When she became Utah’s poet laureate, she decided to build on this idea and create a literary map for the entire state.

While artist Chris Terry is known for his contemplative interior landscapes, a new exhibition at the USU Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) features the experimental work he was able to create during four sabbaticals throughout his tenure at USU.

Douglas Tallamy’s first book, “Bringing Nature Home,” awakened thousands of readers to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation. “Nature’s Best Hope” shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. Talllamy says that because this approach relies on the initiatives of private individuals, it is immune from the whims of government policy. Even more important, it’s practical, effective, and easy.

Andrew J. Russell is primarily known as the man who photographed the famous “East and West Shaking Hands” image of the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869. He also took nearly one thousand other images that document almost every aspect of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.

Conservationist and historian Betsy Gaines Quammen and journalist David Quammen have been on a virtual book tour, conducted from their home in Bozeman and including special guest Boots the Python.

Every year for Earth Day, we check in with writer and photographer Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America,” and many other books. This time, Stephen Trimble suggested we also reach out to his friend, ecologist, ethnobotanist and writer, Gary Paul Nabhan.

On Tuesday's Access Utah, we check in with Utah legislators about the historic special session that began last week in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Corey Flintoff is a former NPR foreign correspondent whose assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Ukraine and Russia.

On Thursday's Access Utah, we check in with our arts community. How has COVID-19 affected local arts organizations? How can audiences support the arts?

In CONFLUENCE: NAVIGATING THE PERSONAL & POLITICAL ON RIVERS OF THE NEW WEST, paddler and journalist Zak Podmore takes readers down Western rivers and deep into some of the most pressing environmental and social justice issues of our time.

“Unselfish: Love Thy Neighbor as Thy Selfie” compiled by Paul Parkinson, features 99 inspiring stories of people putting others before themselves. Everyone is trying to get noticed. Selfies are taking over the internet. We live in a world where success and achievement seem to be determined by how many “likes” or “followers” one has on social media. Selfish behavior seems to be at an all–time high.

How do survivors of sexual trauma overcome the mental health issues that often accompany these kinds of experiences? On Monday’s Access Utah we will talk to survivors about their healing journeys, as well as a wide variety of healers, who help people overcome trauma in many different ways .

Patty Rayman was born with the ability to communicate with animals and has helped thousands of people resolve many types of behavior, health, attitude and relationship issues with their animal companions. In working with all types of animals, she has developed techniques to help people move from conflict to cooperation in their relationships.

We know that the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting the economy as well as the obvious health effects. How is all of this affecting small businesses in Utah?

Jodi Byrd joined Tom Williams to discuss the next lecture in the USU College of Humanities’ Tanner Talks series: “Digital Animus in the Age of Liberation.”

How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting rural Utah? We’ll talk about concerns of smaller healthcare facilities, decisions over closures of national parks, and how the economies of rural communities are being affected.

This year marks the 157th anniversary of the largest massacre of Native Americans in the United States.

One beautiful September day, three men convene on Martha’s Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn’t have been more different then, or even today–Lincoln’s a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin’ age.

Photographer, marriage and family therapist and Utah State University alum Kimberly Anderson was on the USU campus in early March to give a presentation on her work. Her presentation, “Transitioning Within Landscapes: The Photography of Kimberly Anderson,” touched on her work as a photographer interwoven with her identity as a transgender woman.

Thi Bui was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War, and came to the United States in 1978. In November, she presented a lecture "Finding Home," based on her debut graphic memoir, “The Best We Could Do,” a beautifully illustrated and emotional story about the search for a better future and a longing for the past.

Utah’s K-12 public schools are closed and teachers are teaching their students online because of precautions to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first tales of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s, to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal—when liberal women largely forgave Clinton, giving men a free pass for two decades. Many liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus.

We’re compiling another UPR Community Booklist and we want to know what you’re reading.

On Tuesday’s Access Utah, as a part of UPR’s Project Resilience, we’re going to talk about how to be resilient with all that’s happening with the coronavirus pandemic, including social distancing. We’ll also talk about how all of this is impacting children and individuals with disabilities. Our guests will include Vonda Jump Norman, USU Assistant Professor of Social Work and Director of the Trauma Resiliency Project at The Family Place in Logan; Matthew Wappett, Director of the USU Center for Persons with Disabilities; and Kevin Webb, Associate Director of the I-System Institute for Transdisciplinary Studies and a Licensed Social Worker.

DEBUNKED is a new podcast produced by the USU Tribal and Rural Opioid Initiative and USU Extension in conjunction with Utah Public Radio, which focuses on harm reduction and debunking myths around the opioid crisis. Their newest episode focuses on COVID-19.

As we all deal the best we can with Coronavirus and COVID-19, we want to hear examples that you have heard or experienced of people, businesses or organizations doing good.

The Utah Legislature concluded its 2020 session on Thursday. We’ll recap the session on Monday, with a special focus on issues important to people in rural Utah. We’ll also talk about COVID-19 and Coronavirus.

On Tuesday’s Access Utah, Tom Williams will talk with UNLADYLIKE2020 Executive Producer Sandra Rattley and series creator Charlotte Mangin.

The tax reform bill that was passed in December by a special session of the Utah Legislature was soundly repudiated by a referendum drive that collected the required number of signatures before the regular session of the legislature began in January. Lawmakers subsequently repealed the tax reform bill. We wondered: what about now? Is there still a need for reform? What should happen next? What is likely to happen next? We’ll talk with the organizer of the referendum drive, Fred Cox. Our guests will also include Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, a Republican who voted against the bill and two Democrats, Rep.Susan Duckworth, D-Magna, and Rep. Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City.

The Coronavirus epidemic has affected lives around the world and in Utah. We’re going to talk about it Monday on Access Utah. More than 2,500 deaths have been reported in China. Iran is second in numbers of deaths. Two people have died so far in Washington state.

Crystal Marie Fleming, Ph.D. is an author, public intellectual and expert on white supremacy and global racism. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University with affiliations in the Department of Africana Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Fleming is the author of two books: the critically-acclaimed How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide and Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France. Additionally, her scholarship appears in journals such as The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Poetics, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and Mindfulness.

For the first time Utah voters are participating in the Super Tuesday presidential primaries this year, and ballots are already arriving. In the days leading up to the primary we’re interested in hearing what you’re thinking and the factors you’re considering in making your decision on how to vote. Continue the conversation by emailing us at upraccess@gmail.com.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and Teaching of Plants, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Various Moab government and business leaders have come out in opposition to the Trump administration’s plans to allow an oil and gas lease on the nearby Slickrock Trail. The group is decrying what they say is an opportunity currently mis-understood by the Department of the Interior to support the power of world famous recreation assets like the Slickrock Trail. They say that these types of outdoor treasures bring revenue flows and tax receipts to public land communities and create real long term jobs and that oil and gas development does not deliver the same economic benefits. They further assert that with less than 35% of existing leases on public lands now in production, there is no need to damage current recreation economies. The group says that the oil and gas auction scheduled for June includes landscapes within two miles of Arches National Park, span over 60 percent of the Slickrock Trail, a world-famous mountain biking trail, and threatens drinking water supply for the City of Moab.

"Eight years ago, Bob Inglis ran for a seventh term in the U.S. House of Representatives and didn’t even make it out of the Republican primary. He lost by nearly 3 to 1. His estrangement from South Carolina voters ran deep, friends-gone-missing and allies-turned-enemies deep.

Utah State University has signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) concluding its Title IX compliance review of USU’s policies and procedures for responding to reports of sexual misconduct involving students between 2013 and early 2017.

We’re heartened by all the good being done in our communities by dedicated individuals and nonprofits. They sometimes don’t get the recognition they deserve, and you may want to help but don’t know where and how. Today we’re opening the phone lines, email and Twitter to give you the opportunity to spotlight a nonprofit or individual doing good in your community.

The U.S. Senate has acquitted President Trump of both impeachment charges brought against him by the U.S. House of Representatives. Sen. Mitt Romney was the lone senator to break party ranks when he voted to convict the president on the first impeachment charge. today we’re going to look back on this historic impeachment and look forward to the presidential election.

An alternative prison ranch in New Mexico conducts a daring experiment: setting the troubled residents out to retrain an aggressive herd of horses. The horses and prisoners both arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many— the horses often abandoned and suspicious, the residents, some battling drug and alcohol addiction, emotionally, physically, and financially shattered. Ginger Gaffney’s job is to retrain the untrainable. With time, the horses and residents form a profound bond, and teach each other patience, control, and trust.

Co-directors of the USU Digital Folklore Project Jeannie Thomas and Lynne McNeill (USU English Department Head and USU Assistant Professor of English, respectively) will join Tom Williams to talk about the 2019 Digital Trends of the Year.

Sadie Hoagland’s new book “American Grief in Four Stages,” a collection of short fiction, asks the question: why does our country do so little for the bereaved? Why do we have only empty cliché to address the grief of others? Why do we expect people to just "get over" insurmountable tragedy?

Retired USU professor Richard Ratliff has developed what he calls the theory of Relationism, which he hopes will help us bridge the many divides we’re experiencing in our increasingly polarized society. He’ll join Tom Williams to explain.

Over the span of fifty years, Charles M. Schulz created a comic strip that is one of the indisputable glories of American popular culture—hilarious, poignant, inimitable. Some twenty years after the last strip appeared, the characters Schulz brought to life in Peanuts continue to resonate with millions of fans, their four-panel adventures and television escapades offering lessons about happiness, friendship, disappointment, childhood, and life itself.

It's the opening day of the 2020 Utah Legislature, and Access Utah is back at the state capitol. We’ll speak with Senator Lyle Hillyard, Senator Evan Vickers, Senator Karen Mayne, and Representative Brian King. We’ll also hear from Bill Tibbetts with Crossroads Urban Center, Rusty Cannon with Utah Taxpayers Association, and Courtney Bullard with Utah Health Policy Project. You can get us your questions and comments by email to upraccess@gmail.com.

Today, as a part of our series: Stopping Sexual Harassment, we’ll talk with Susan Madsen and Robbyn Scribner of the Utah Women and Leadership Project at Utah Valley University. We’ll talk about sexual harassment and sexual assault. We’ll also talk about voting, leadership, body image and other topics.

Barrie Gilbert's fascination with grizzly bears almost got him killed in Yellowstone National Park. He recovered, returned to fieldwork and devoted the next several decades to understanding and protecting these often-maligned giants. He has spent thousands of hours among wild grizzles in Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, Alberta, coastal British Columbia, and along Brooks River in Alaska's Katmai National Park, where hundreds of people gather to watch dozens of grizzlies feast on salmon. His research has centered on how bears respond to people and each other, with a focus on how to keep humans and bears safe.

Andrew J. Russell is primarily known as the man who photographed the famous “East and West Shaking Hands” image of the Golden Spike ceremony on May 10, 1869. He also took nearly one thousand other images that document almost every aspect of the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.

In fighting to pass the 19th Amendment, brave suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Emmeline B. Wells fought to end laws and take down barriers that prevented them from voting. Champions of Change introduces young readers not only to Anthony and Wells, but also to a diverse group of firsts and freedom-fighters in America’s fight for equality, such as:

Reimagining a Place for the Wild contains a diverse collection of personal stories that describe encounters with the remaining wild creatures of the American West and critical essays that reveal wildlife’s essential place in western landscapes.

From Utah State Magazine, "In the parched black desert of northeast Jordan, archaeologists recently unearthed a stone hearth containing loaves of flatbread more than 14,000 years old.

“Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement” is a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry. Whether reflecting on their teenage selves or their modern-day workplaces, each writer approaches the subject with authenticity and strength. Together the pieces create a portrait of a cultural sea-change.

From Wikipedia: “Sylvia Mendez (born June 7, 1936) is an American civil rights activist of Mexican-Puerto Rican heritage. At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California[1] and paved the way for integration and the American civil rights movement.[2]

The holiday season is back, and so is the Access Utah holiday special. This season is time for special music old and new. It’s also time for wonderful stories humorous and poignant. We’ll hear music for the season performed by the Lightwood Duo (Mike Christiansen on guitar and Eric Nelson on clarinet). We’ll also hear readings for the season by the author of The Christmas Chronicles, playwright Tim Slover.

“Unselfish: Love Thy Neighbor as Thy Selfie” compiled by Paul Parkinson, features 99 inspiring stories of people putting others before themselves. Everyone is trying to get noticed. Selfies are taking over the internet. We live in a world where success and achievement seem to be determined by how many “likes” or “followers” one has on social media. Selfish behavior seems to be at an all–time high.

We’re answering your questions about Electric Vehicles today. Our guests include USU student and EV owner Samuel Bona; EV owner and early adopter John Loveless; EV and Electric Bicycle owner and USU Associate Professor of Computer Science Nicholas Flann; and Rep. Raymond Ward, who is working to develop an EV charging infrastructure in Utah.

Corey Flintoff is a former NPR foreign correspondent whose assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Ukraine and Russia. He was NPR Southeast Asia Bureau Chief and Moscow Bureau Chief. Born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, he now lives in Maryland. He’s now trying his hand at writing and his fiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review and other publications. Corey Flintoff was in Logan last week to help UPR raise money for our broadcast network and for student reporters. We’ll talk with him about his beginnings in Alaska, his reporting from hot spots like Iraq, and about the current news regarding Russia and Ukraine.

Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first tales of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s, to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal—when liberal women largely forgave Clinton, giving men a free pass for two decades. Many liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus.

There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty?

In CONFLUENCE: NAVIGATING THE PERSONAL & POLITICAL ON RIVERS OF THE NEW WEST, paddler and journalist Zak Podmore takes readers down Western rivers and deep into some of the most pressing environmental and social justice issues of our time, including uranium tailings on the Ute Mountain Ute lands near the San Juan River, the treatment of asylum-seekers crossing the Rio Grande, and one of the largest dam removal projects in history on Washington’s Elwha River. CONFLUENCE follows in the tradition of Thoreau or Edward Abbey — it takes us into the wild but always has one eye turned back toward the blessings and ills of civilization.

Over 70% of Americans—and two-thirds of Utahns—think that climate change is happening. Research led by Dr. Peter Howe reveals this statistic, along with much more detailed data about how Americans think about climate change from the national to the local level.

You’re riding in your self-driving car when suddenly the doors lock, the route changes and you have lost all control. Then, a mysterious voice tells you, “You are going to die.” Just as self-driving cars become the trusted, safer norm, eight people find themselves in this terrifying situation, including a faded TV star, a pregnant young woman, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife, and a suicidal man.

Today, a conversation with Jeff Metcalf about his new novel “Wacko’s City of Fun Carnival.”

Yoram Bauman is the world’s first and only stand-up economist. He is co-author of the “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change” and the two volume “Cartoon Introduction to Economics,” and the 1998 book “Tax Shift,” which helped inspire the revenue-neutral carbon tax in British Columbia. He is campaign co-chair for the new Clean the Darn Air initiative, which supporters are working to get on the ballot in Utah in 2020.

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.

Charlie Huenemann is professor of philosophy at Utah State University. He is the author of several books and essays on the history of philosophy, as well as some fun stuff, such as “How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft.” He was recently on the BBC talking about a thought expiriment, "When Capt. Jean-Luc Picard beams aboard the Enterprise, do the carbon atoms that make up his body make the leap, i.e., are the molecules compressed into a data stream? Or is he basically replicated aboard ship using his cellular coding, memories and other neural impulses — basically a blueprint of “him”?" That inquiry was made on BBC Radio4's “Naturebang.” On this episode of Access Utah, we discuss the inquiry and other philosophical questions about the self and continuity.

Today on Access Utah, we preview an event next week. Living historians Nathan Richardson and Renée-Noelle Felice will perform on the USU campus as Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott, honoring their amazing lives and legacies, which are as relevant today as they were one hundred years ago.

Skier and debut author Ayja Bounous explores threats to the winters and watershed in the face of climate change and the far–reaching impacts of a diminishing snowpack on the American West—not only from ecological and economic perspectives, but also in regard to emotional and psychological health, as she realizes how deeply her personal relationships are tied to the snow–covered mountains of Utah's Wasatch range.

Explorer, lawyer, art collector, publisher, and author, Erling Kagge is the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot—the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written six previous books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting, and runs Kagge Forlag, a publishing company based in Oslo, where he lives.

H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times-bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now.

We’re compiling another UPR Community Booklist and we want to know what you’re reading. What’s on your nightstand or device right now? What is the best book you’ve read so far this year? Which books are you suggesting to friends and family? We’d love to hear about any book you’re reading, including in the young adult & children’s categories. One suggestion or many are welcome.

Jeff Meldrum is Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University. He is author of “Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science.” He is a leading expert on Bigfoot or Sasquatch, or the term he prefers: “Relict Hominoid.” He says “...[I]t is one matter to address the theoretical possibility of a relict species of hominoid in North America, and the obligate shift in paradigm to accommodate it, but there must also be something substantial to place within that revised framework. There must be essential evidence to lend weight to the hypotheses, and counter the critics’ various aspersions. I was once confronted by a colleague, who declared, ‘After all, these are just stories.’ My response: ‘Stories that apparently leave tracks, shed hair, void scat, vocalize, are observed and described by reliable experienced witnesses. Hardly just stories.’”

Thi Bui was born in Vietnam three months before the end of the Vietnam War, and came to the United States in 1978. She will present a lecture "Finding Home," based on her debut graphic memoir, “The Best We Could Do,” a beautifully illustrated and emotional story about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. The lecture is Thursday, November 7, at 7:00 p.m. in the Nancy Tessman Auditorium at The Salt Lake City Public Library. The main sponsor/organizer is the Asia Center and the University of Utah along with The Office for Equity and Diversity.

Bill Lipe is professor emeritus of anthropology at Washington State University. He has spent much of his more than 50 year career in Utah archaeology beginning with the archaeological salvage of Glen Canyon before the dam construction and on into Cedar Mesa where he became a leading scholar in the early Basketmaker agricultural societies of southeastern Utah. Dr. Lipe began his work at a time when there was little federal legislation protecting archaeology or guiding preservation efforts. He became a leader in the development of what we now know of as Cultural Resource Management archaeology. Because of his involvement in CRM and his work in Cedar Mesa, he remains one of archaeology's main voices in the Bears Ears controversy.

We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. In her new book “Erosion: Essays of Undoing” Terry Tempest Williams explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She asks: "How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?" And she says what has been weathered, worn, and whittled away is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming.

Crystal Marie Fleming, Ph.D.is an author, public intellectual and expert on white supremacy and global racism. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University with affiliations in the Department of Africana Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Fleming is the author of two books: the critically-acclaimed How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide and Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France. Additionally, her scholarship appears in journals such as The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Poetics,Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and Mindfulness.

From the tempestuous fight for statehood to the evolution of Utah voters from Democrats to Republicans, Rod Decker analyzes the intersection of politics and faith in the complex political culture of modern Utah. Beginning with the state’s roots as a communal theocracy, Utah Politics deftly examines how Mormon morality influenced and continues to shape conflicts on both the local and federal levels.

"Eight years ago, Bob Inglis ran for a seventh term in the U.S. House of Representatives and didn’t even make it out of the Republican primary. He lost by nearly 3 to 1. His estrangement from South Carolina voters ran deep, friends-gone-missing and allies-turned-enemies deep.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

An unusual and significant event is happening today at Utah State University. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the courts just below the U.S. Supreme Court and based in Denver, is in session at the Performance Hall on the USU campus. They are hearing oral arguments in two sessions and then will take questions from the audience.

This workshop is a one-day event, open to novice biographers, seasoned family historians, as well as more experienced writers who might hope to someday win a prize like the Evans Biography Awards. There will be four workshop sessions (two concurrent sessions in the morning and two in the afternoon). Space is limited, so register early.

David Maisel (b. 1961, New York) is an artist working in photography and video, and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Among his chief concerns are the politics and aesthetics of radically human-altered environments, and how we perceive our place in time via investigations of cultural artifacts from both past and present. His work focuses on power and the production of space by examining landscapes and objects that are off-limits, quarantined, or hidden from view. We are also joined in the studio by Katie Lee-Koven, Director and Chief Curator of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.

The United States Marine Corps has a unique culture that ensures comradery, exacting standards, and readiness to be the first to every fight. Yet even in a group that is known for innovation, culture can push leaders to fall back on ingrained preferences.

For those who go in search of the isolation, silence and adventure of wild places it is―perhaps ironically―to the man-made shelters that they need to head; the outposts: bothies, bivouacs, cabins and huts. In his new book “Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth,” Dan Richards says that part of their allure is their simplicity: enough architecture to shelter from the weather but not so much as to distract from the immediate environment around.

David Brown is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Utah State University. A while back he gave a talk in the Science Unwrapped series from the College of Science titled “Artificial Intelligence: Too Late to Stop the Robot Apocalypse?” Professor Brown says “Perhaps ironically, salient technology superstars, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and publicly known geniuses, like Stephen Hawking, have spoken out and warned us about the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). On the other hand, doing so won them the Luddite Award from CNET, and 'alarmist' labels from WIRED and E & T magazines. What's the truth? Is AI the next atomic bomb and are AI research labs the next Los Alamos? If Yes, are there nevertheless compelling reasons to pursue AI? What distinguishes AI from generic computer science or programming or robotics?” We’ll talk about it today on the next Access Utah.

Until ten years ago, geneticist Don Tillman had never had a second date. Then he developed The Wife Project and met Rosie, 'the world's most incompatible woman'. Now, having survived 3,653 days of marriage, Don's life-contentment graph, recently at its highest point, is curving downwards.

It’s anecdotal. But I think it’s a thing. I’m hearing from a growing number of people that they’re disengaging from the news and, in some cases, from politics. We’re going to talk about it next time on Access Utah. My guests will include USU Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Jason Gilmore; and University of Utah Law Professor RonNell Anderson Jones. And I’d love to get your perspective on this. You can email me right now to upraccess@gmail.com.

The Rocky Mountain Anthropological Conference is happening today through Saturday in Logan and will cover such topics as Japanese Railroad Worker Archaeology in Central Utah and Historic Filming Locations of Utah. We’ll talk with archaeologists Ken Cannon, Craig Lee, and Larry Todd about melting ice patches and the race to document thawing artifacts; the long-term presence of humans in current wilderness areas and how that affects our understanding of wilderness; how archaeology informs public policy decisions; and much more.

Eric Kuhn, retired General Manager of the Colorado River Water Conservancy District, will speak about his new book “Science Be Dammed.” The talk was held in ENGR 201 at 3:30p on Wednesday, October 2.

USC Professor Tara McPherson recently gave a lecture in the Tanner Talk series at USU titled "Platforming Hate: The Internet and the Rise of Hate Online." In her talk Professor McPherson examined the ways in which platforms like Discord, Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook are used by various groups to spread hate and white supremacy both on- and off-line. She detailed the active recruitment of white teenage boys in online environments and considered the relationship of these more recent developments to the early digital presence of neo-confederates on the web more than twenty years ago. And she argued that the internet has changed in key ways that help support the spread of white supremacy online.

We’re heartened by all the good being done in our communities by dedicated individuals and nonprofits. They sometimes don’t get the recognition they deserve, and you may want to help but don’t know where and how. Today we’re opening the phone lines, email and Twitter to give you the opportunity to spotlight a nonprofit or individual doing good in your community.

Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture analyzes supernatural creatures in order to demonstrate how German fairy tales treat difference, alterity, and Otherness with terror, distance, and negativity, whereas contemporary North American popular culture adaptations navigate diversity by humanizing and redeeming such figures. This trend of transformation reflects a greater tolerance of other marginalized groups (in regard to race, ethnicity, ability, age, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion, etc.) and acceptance of diversity in society today. The fairy-tale adaptations examined here are more than just twists on old stories—they serve as the looking glasses of significant cultural trends, customs, and social challenges. Whereas the fairy-tale adaptations that Claudia Schwabe analyzes suggest that Otherness can and should be fully embraced, they also highlight the gap that still exists between the representation and the reality of embracing diversity wholeheartedly in twenty-first-century America.

From Wikipedia: “Sylvia Mendez (born June 7, 1936) is an American civil rights activist of Mexican-Puerto Rican heritage. At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California[1] and paved the way for integration and the American civil rights movement.[2]

Barrie Gilbert's fascination with grizzly bears almost got him killed in Yellowstone National Park. He recovered, returned to fieldwork and devoted the next several decades to understanding and protecting these often-maligned giants. He has spent thousands of hours among wild grizzles in Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, Alberta, coastal British Columbia, and along Brooks River in Alaska's Katmai National Park, where hundreds of people gather to watch dozens of grizzlies feast on salmon. His research has centered on how bears respond to people and each other, with a focus on how to keep humans and bears safe.

We’re answering your questions about Electric Vehicles today. Our guests include USU student and EV owner Samuel Bona; EV owner and early adopter John Loveless; EV and Electric Bicycle owner and USU Associate Professor of Computer Science Nicholas Flann; and Rep. Raymond Ward, who is working to develop an EV charging infrastructure in Utah. Originally aired on 9-10-19

John DeVilbiss writes in USU Magazine, "It flashes like a beacon to millions of birds on migratory marathons. It is a sea in the sand that shimmers lavender in one glance and pale turquoise in another. A place you can go for an entire day without seeing a single soul, yet where two million people live within an hour's drive. It is a lake of paradoxes, said historian Dale Morgan, a liquid lie, said Terry Tempest Williams. The salty truth, however, is that the Great Salt Lake, the largest saline lake in the Western hemisphere, is drying up."

On Thursday's Access Utah, Richard White, Stanford University historian and lecturer, joins us to talk about the transcontinental railroad’s impact on Utah’s environment, culture and political atmosphere. We preview his talk Thursday, Sept. 19, at 7 p.m., at the Logan Tabernacle as part of Utah State University Libraries’ 25th annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture.

On this pledge drive edition of Access Utah, we're joined by Dean Joseph Ward of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at USU. We’ll feature segments from our conversations with Nathan Richardson and Renée-Noelle Felice, Jeannie Johnson, and a conversation on community trauma and resilience.

There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.Traffickers and smugglers, pirates and mercenaries, wreck thieves and repo men, vigilante conservationists and elusive poachers, seabound abortion providers, clandestine oil-dumpers, shackled slaves and cast-adrift stowaways — drawing on five years of perilous and intrepid reporting, often hundreds of miles from shore, Ian Urbina introduces us to the inhabitants of this hidden world. Through their stories of astonishing courage and brutality, survival and tragedy, he uncovers a globe-spanning network of crime and exploitation that emanates from the fishing, oil and shipping industries, and on which the world’s economies rely.

On Monday's Access Utah, we preview an Ethics Slam: an event modeled around a Poetry Slam in the sense that it occurs in a community space and it is open mic. Members of the community are asked to share their thoughts in a civil, respectful manner about a pressing social issue. This slam will focus on responding to climate change. The event takes place on Monday, September 9th at 7:00 p.m at Lucky Slice pizza in Logan.

Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook explores the practice of legend tripping, wherein individuals or groups travel to a site where a legend is thought to have taken place. Legend tripping is a common informal practice depicted in epics, stories, novels, and film throughout both contemporary and historical vernacular culture. In this collection, contributors show how legend trips can express humanity’s interest in the frontier between life and death and the fascination with the possibility of personal contact with the supernatural or spiritual. The volume presents both insightful research and useful pedagogy, making this an invaluable resource in the classroom. Selected major articles on legend tripping, with introductory sections written by the editors, are followed by discussion questions and projects designed to inspire readers to engage critically with legend traditions and customs of legend tripping and to explore possible meanings and symbolics at work. Suggested projects incorporate digital technology as it appears both in legends and in modes of legend tripping.

You’re riding in your self-driving car when suddenly the doors lock, the route changes and you have lost all control. Then, a mysterious voice tells you, “You are going to die.”

Utah State University is joining the nation and state in celebrating significant voting rights anniversaries in 2020: the 150th anniversary of suffrage for Utah women; the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States; and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. As the university honors these important milestones in our history, and as part of those celebrations, Utah State University also declares this the Year of the Woman.

“Northern Indigenous Crees were native to Montana and the northern Plains long before the US-Canada border divided the region. But bisected by the line, Crees became asylum-seekers on their own lands 150 years ago. Though some were granted political refugee status, Crees were still denied basic rights. Instead, many were killed, ignored and deported on both sides of the border. … The Chippewa Cree story is little-known outside the tribe, but it echoes the uncertainty in the immigration crises the US faces today.”

Activists battling climate change, a former child soldier and health workers pioneering new treatments around the world are among thousands of participants who will gather in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 26 to 28 August at the sixty-eighth annual United Nations Civil Society Conference for a global conversation on building inclusive and sustainable cities and communities. More information on the conference can be found here.

Yoga is growing in popularity in the U.S. There were 36 million practitioners (or ~9% of the population) in 2016, up from 20.4 million in 2012, and 28% of Americans have participated in a yoga class at some point in their lives. (Yoga Journal 2016 U.S. Market Research Study). We’ll talk about Yoga, past, present and future on Tuesday’s Access Utah. Our guests include Emily Perry, Director of Yoga Studies at USU; Chantel Gerfen, Owner of Transcend Yoga Studio in Logan; Jennifer Sinor, USU Professor of English, who has been practicing yoga for ~20 years; and Michael Sowder, Poet, USU Professor of English, and affiliated faculty member in USU’s Religious Studies Program and its Yoga Studies Program, where he teaches a course on the History of Yoga.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness.

A terminal cancer patient rises from the grave. A medical marvel defies HIV. Two women with autoimmunity discover their own bodies have turned against them. Matt Richtel's An Elegant Defense uniquely entwines these intimate stories with science's centuries-long quest to unlock the mysteries of sickness and health, and illuminates the immune system as never before.

There is much to fear in the dark corners of cyberspace. From well-covered stories like the Stuxnet attack which helped slow Iran’s nuclear program, to lesser-known tales like EternalBlue, the 2017 cyber battle that closed hospitals in Britain and froze shipping crates in Germany in midair, we have entered an age in which online threats carry real-world consequences. But we do not have to let autocrats and criminals run amok in the digital realm. We now know a great deal about how to make cyberspace far less dangerous–and about how to defend our security, economy, democracy, and privacy from cyber attack.

Nearly every US city would like to be more walkable—for reasons of health, wealth, and the environment—yet few are taking the proper steps to get there. The goals are often clear, but the path is seldom easy. Jeff Speck’s follow-up to his bestselling Walkable City is the resource that cities and citizens need to usher in an era of renewed street life. Walkable City Rules is a doer’s guide to making change in cities, and making it now.

One beautiful September day, three men convene on Martha’s Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn’t have been more different then, or even today–Lincoln’s a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin’ age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971: the disappearance of the woman each of them loved–Jacy Calloway. Now, more than forty years later, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery. Shot through with Russo’s trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are . . . also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader’s heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship’s bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family or any other community.

In May, a 5-year-old girl, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Shelley, went missing in Logan. Many in the community got involved in the search. Most in the community sent their thoughts and prayers for the safe return of the girl. Then Lizzie’s body was found and an uncle is charged in her death. This was and is a community experience. A community trauma. Our communities suffer trauma on a frequent basis, recent mass shootings are examples. How does a community heal from such trauma? How does a community become resilient?

Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington’s secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Across our planet since the dawn of humankind, this nefarious pest, roughly the size and weight of a grape seed, has been at the frontlines of history as the grim reaper, the harvester of human populations, and the ultimate agent of historical change. As the mosquito transformed the landscapes of civilization, humans were unwittingly required to respond to its piercing impact and universal projection of power. The mosquito has determined the fates of empires and nations, razed and crippled economies, and decided the outcome of pivotal wars, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. She (only females bite) has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief existence. As the greatest purveyor of extermination we have ever known, she has played a greater role in shaping our human story than any other living thing with which we share our global village.

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

Through the technology embedded in almost every major tech platform and every web-enabled device, algorithms and the artificial intelligence that underlies them make a staggering number of everyday decisions for us, from what products we buy, to where we decide to eat, to how we consume our news, to whom we date, and how we find a job. We’ve even delegated life-and-death decisions to algorithms–decisions once made by doctors, pilots, and judges. In his new book, Kartik Hosanagar surveys the brave new world of algorithmic decision-making and reveals the potentially dangerous biases they can give rise to as they increasingly run our lives. He makes the compelling case that we need to arm ourselves with a better, deeper, more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of algorithmic thinking. And he gives us a route in, pointing out that algorithms often think a lot like their creators–that is, like you and me.

From the tempestuous fight for statehood to the evolution of Utah voters from Democrats to Republicans, Rod Decker analyzes the intersection of politics and faith in the complex political culture of modern Utah. Beginning with the state’s roots as a communal theocracy, Utah Politics deftly examines how Mormon morality influenced and continues to shape conflicts on both the local and federal levels.

Here is the opening passage from Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s book “Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist:”

This lushly illustrated history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

Consider the $20 bill. It has no more value, as a simple slip of paper, than Monopoly money. Yet even children recognize that tearing one into small pieces is an act of inconceivable stupidity. What makes a $20 bill actually worth twenty dollars? In the third volume of his best-selling Naked series, Charles Wheelan uses this seemingly simple question to open the door to the surprisingly colorful world of money and banking.

The New York Times calls A Raisin in the Sun “the play that changed American theater forever.” In this play, Hansberry - a pioneering, female, African-American playwright - covers issues of racism, discrimination, generational clashes, civil rights, and the women’s movement through the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family. The Younger family’s heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration.

USA Today reports, "The firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel who risked their lives answering the call on Sept.11, 2001, may finally be getting the rescue they've been demanding. The Senate Tuesday is expected to pass a bill that would replenish a compensation fund set up shortly after the 2001 terror attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon to compensate first responders who suffered illnesses, injuries and other medical problems as a result of the attacks."

In late July 1776, fathers Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Vélez de Escalante set out from Santa Fe to chart a route to the new Spanish missions in California. The Fransiscans planned to scout the country for mineral wealth and locate the Ute and Navajo tribes for conversion. In present- day Utah, however, the dangers of starvation and hypothermia forced them to turn back. By November the friars were reduced to survival mode: stymied by the raging Colorado River, they had to kill their horses for food. At last they succeeded in fording the river at a place later known as “Crossing of the Fathers.”

Utah State University was awarded a $500,000 three-year Farmers Market Promotion Program grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The grant will fund a variety of capacity-building, outre