Access Utah

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 sugg...

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 Russia...

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 s...

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 ide...

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 i...

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 s...

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 ment...

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.