Access Utah

Organizers of the “Clean Air, No Excuses Rally” which happened on Saturday in Salt Lake City say that “...each year clean air protections measures are considered at the legislature, and each year many of those proposals fail to become law. It’s time for a change, it’s time for Utah’s elected leaders to listen to the people. ...We must turn over every stone to find strong proposals to protect our f...

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,...

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...

Join us for the Opening Day of the 2017 Utah Legislature with this special 2-hour edition Access Utah from the Utah State Capitol.

The Women’s March on Washington organization estimates that more than more than 1,300,000 people will participate in the Women’s March on Washington or in one of the estimated 600 sister marches happening on January 21 or in the days following. (The Women’s March on Utah State Capitol is January 23).

VidAngel is Provo-based streaming service that lets viewers set custom filters to screen out content they might not like or find objectionable. VidAngel CEO Neal Harmon says that VidAngel honors two sides of a libertarian coin. “We agree with Hollywood that the director should have the right to determine how their work is performed in a public setting. That’s free speech. That’s everything America...

In his new book “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World,” Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change, and that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

There are many needs in our communities, and there are dedicated individuals and nonprofits working to meet those needs. They sometimes don’t get the recognition they deserve, and you may want to help but don’t know where and how. On the next Access Utah 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.

Join us for Tuesday’s Access Utah when our topic is Fake News & Journalism in the Age of Trump.

Today we revisit our conversation from October with Rita Moreno:

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...

When Michael Copperman left Stanford University for the Mississippi Delta in 2002 - recruited by Teach for America - he imagined he would lift underprivileged children from the narrow horizons of rural poverty. Well-meaning but naïve, the Asian-American from the West Coast says he soon lost his bearings in a world divided between black and white. Trying to help students, he often found he couldn’t...

In her TEDxUSU talk, folklorist Lynne McNeill says “When most people think of ‘folklore’ they think of the old, the rural, the rustic. They typically don’t think of the Internet, a technology that, if anything, is commonly judged to be dismantling our culture: destroying our interpersonal skills, squashing our cultural vitality, killing our individual creativity. Surprisingly, however, communicati...

President Obama has used presidential power under the Antiquities Act to create a Bears Ears National Monument. Some are lauding this as a courageous decision which will protect vital lands. Others are calling it an arrogant act that ignores the wishes of a majority of Utahns. Today on the program we talked about this on a special two hour Access Utah. We were joined by John Kovash, Utah Public Ra...

We hope you'll join us for our Access Utah holiday special. Playwriter of Christmas Chronicles author Tim Slover will read poems of the season. The Lightwood Duo (Mike Christiansen and Eric Nelson) will also be in the UPR studio to play holiday music.

Today on Access Utah, we're joined by Utah State University Professor Candi Carter Olson, Hailey Hendricks, Madi Smith and Mary Kay Anderson for a panel discussion on Objectified: More than a Body, a UPR original series. In partnership with the Utah Women's Giving Circle, Utah Public Radio has presented the original radio series "Objectified: More Than A Body." This 11-episode radio program has pl...

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe funct...

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.

T. J. Stiles won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America." In his biography, Stiles demolishes George Armstrong Custer’s historical caricature and says that the key to understanding Custer is that he lived on a frontier in time. In the Civil War, the West, and many areas, Custer helped to create modern America, but he could never a...

Superhero stories have been called the myths of our day, helping us understand who we are and what unites us. Since Superman first leapt tall buildings with a single bound, the vast majority of the characters have been white, straight, men. Movies and television have consistently held to this standard, giving us Han Solo and Luke Skywalker to root for as they rescue Leia. However, in recent years...

Initially inspired by his own struggles with conflict, consultant and USU lecturer Clair Canfield is committed to changing the way people think and feel about conflict. He says, “Conflict holds up a mirror to our deepest needs and most cherished hopes and it is the doorway of opportunity for creating the change we want in our lives,” and “It is common to feel trapped and stuck when we experience c...

The publishers of Emma Marris’ book “Rambunctious Garden” say that “a paradigm shift is roiling the environmental world. For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller...

Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow joins us for Thursday’s AU. In a recent column, Doctorow says that “all the data collected in giant databases today will breach someday, and when it does, it will ruin peoples’ lives. They will have their houses stolen from under them by identity thieves who forge their deeds (this is already happening); they will end up with...

UPR listeners are avid readers, so our periodic question to you isn’t if you’re reading, but what are you reading? We’re also asking if you have anything special you read for the holidays, and do you have suggestions for books to give as gifts?

From an early age, Margaret Fuller dazzled New England's intelligent elite. Her famous Conversations changed women's sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Megan Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley's offer to be the New York Tribune's front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern fo...