Access Utah

This extraordinary campaign season got more so over the weekend. What is your reaction to Donald Trump’s comments from 2005? And Utah Republican’s and some national Republican’s repudiation of their presidential nominee? What did you think of the debate? What is on the top of your mind as you get ready to vote? Cache County Libertarian Party Chair, Jonathan Choate of SD7 Technologies in Logan join...

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem, he sparked a vigorous national conversation about Race, Police, Patriotism, Free Speech and other issues. We’re going to continue that conversation next time on Access Utah. We’ll be talking with Forrest Crawford, Professor of Teacher Education and former Assistant to the President for Institutional Diver...

On April 20, 2010, a blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform killed 11 workers, critically injured others and caused a leak that spilled thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for more than three months. The Deepwater Horizon, one of worst environmental disasters in history, is now the subject of a pulse-pounding new movie. Historian and archaeologist, USU Professor o...

Charles Bock's daughter was 5 months old when his wife was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His wife died two and a half years later, just before their daughter's third birthday. Charles Bock has written a new novel that's based on that experience. It’s titled "Alice & Oliver."

Mark Twain, the highest-paid writer in America in 1894, was also one of the nation’s worst investors. “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate,” he wrote. “When he can’t afford it and when he can.” After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars back when a beer cost a nickel, he found himself neck-deep in debt. His heiress wife, Livy, took the setback hard. She wrote, “I ca...

We’re going to talk about I.Q. v. E.Q. USU professors Jacob Freeman and Jacopo Baggio, along with UT-San Antonio professor Thomas Coyle, are studying the dynamics of nerds and poets. They want to understand the best brew of nerdiness and sensitivity to create teams that get things done. How can people work better together and why do some groups work well under pressure and some groups don’t? Profe...

Nicholas Carr started his blog “Rough Type” in 2005, when MySpace was a fast-growing social networking site and Facebook was a Palo Alto startup. Now in his book “Utopia Is Creepy and Other Provocations,” he has collected the best of those posts and added influential essays such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” which were published in such magazines...

Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–1971) has been called the "forgotten father of television." He grew up in Utah and southern Idaho, and was described as a genius by those who knew and worked with him. With only a high school education, Farnsworth drew his first television schematic for his high school teacher in Rigby, Idaho. Subsequent claims and litigation notwithstanding, he was the first to transmit...

The abduction of Elizabeth Smart was one of the most followed child abduction cases of our time.

On Wednesday’s Access Utah our guest for the hour is Tershia d’Elgin, author of “The Man Who Thought He Owned Water: On the Brink with American Farms, Cities, and Food” (University Press of Colorado).

“Women talk more than men. Text messaging makes you stupid. Chimpanzees have language, just like humans. These are some of the most popular ideas about language that many people think are true. Rumor also has it that men are more direct in their use of language than women; women speak more correctly than men; being bilingual makes you smarter; and the most beautiful language in the world is French...

New York, 1888. The miracle of electric light is in its infancy. Thomas Edison has won the race to the patent office and is suing his only remaining rival, George Westinghouse, for the unheard of sum of one billion dollars. To defend himself, Westinghouse makes a surprising choice in his attorney: He hires an untested twenty-six-year-old fresh out of Columbia Law School named Paul Cravath.

On Thursday's Access Utah, we revisit portions of our favorite episodes on race issues in America. We feature a discussion with Nikole Hannah Jones, talking about her book "A Letter From Black America," a segment from our episode on Black Lives Matter, and a conversation with author Sherman Alexie. Utah State University professor Jason Gilmore joined us in studio for the conversations.

On Wednesday's Access Utah, we revisit portions of our favorite book and author episodes. We feature a discussion with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, talking about her book "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History"; a segment from our episode on with Scott Hammond discussing his book "Lessons of the Lost" and a conversation with listeners from an episode featuring Ron Chernow and his book "Hamilton," whic...

On Monday's Access Utah, we revisit portions of our favorite "fun" episodes. We feature a discussion with USU Philosophy Professor Charlie Huenemann, talking about "the perfect language;" a segment from our episode on fandom and what fans own, and a conversation with award winning musician Rita Moreno.

The Utah Utes and BYU Cougars prepare to meet up at Rice-Eccles Stadium for the big rivalry game. Rep. Jason Chaffetz calls for another investigation into Hillary Clinton's deleted emails. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Weinholtz addresses accusations of religious bigotry regarding a campaign fundraiser. And the summer's algal blooms prompt a deeper look into Utah's water quality and trea...

From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Gregory Pardlo’s collection “Digest” draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of t...

Seventy percent of Americans say they would prefer to die at home, but nearly 70 percent die in hospitals and institutions. Ninety percent of Americans know they should have conversations about end-of-life care, yet only 30 percent have done so.

Mormonism is one of the few homegrown religions in the United States, one that emerged out of the religious fervor of the early nineteenth century. Yet, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have struggled for status and recognition. In his book, “Religion of a Different Color,” W. Paul Reeve explores the ways in which nineteenth century Protestant white America made outsiders...

Nancy McHugh, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg University in Ohio, says the fear of bacteria, hormones, and antibiotics is rampant in our society. She is interested in the ways we go about making knowledge and ignorance about food and its relationship to health and argues that these practices have led to a new food movement, “clean eating,” which in turn has generated a new eating d...

Ash and Pia move from hipster Brooklyn to rustic Vermont in search of a more authentic life. But just months after settling in, the forecast of a superstorm disrupts their dream. Fear of an impending disaster splits their tight-knit community and exposes the cracks in their marriage. Where Isole was once a place of old farm families, rednecks and transplants, it now divides into paranoid preppers,...

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.

Elliott Oring is a folklorist drawn to the study of humor. In his new book, Joking Asides (Utah State University Press), Oring draws on the work of scholars from several disciplines—anthropology, folklore, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and literature—to ask basic questions about the construction and evolution of jokes, untangle the matter of who the actual targets of a joke might be, and ch...

Downwind: A People's History of the Nuclear West is an unflinching tale of the atomic West that reveals the intentional disregard for human and animal life through nuclear testing by the federal government and uranium extraction by mining corporations during and after the Cold War.

Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the father of American landscape architecture, made public parks an essential part of American life and forever changed our relationship with public open spaces. He was co-designer of Central Park, head of the first Yosemite commission, leader of the campaign to protect Niagara Falls, designer of the U.S. Capitol Grounds, site planner for the Great White City of the...