Access Utah

Native American Culinary Association founder, Chef Nephi Craig, is visiting Utah State University to conduct a series of foods presentations and deliver a lecture on his work with the “Three Sisters” of Native American cuisine—beans, corn and squash—and to teach nutrition and share cultural heritage.

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 refl...

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, hav...

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...

In a rural Kenyan village, nineteen-year-old Hannah Blake labors alongside her American parents to provide healthcare for a tight-knit tribal community steeped in culture and tradition. But it is impossible for her to deny her true north—her spiritual connection to the wild creatures of the African savanna. When a lion cub is orphaned, Hannah instinctively comes to its rescue and the two form an u...

Over the next several decades, as human populations grow and developing countries become more affluent, the demand for energy will soar. Parts of the energy sector are preparing to meet this demand by increasing renewable energy production, which is necessary to combat climate change. But many renewable energy sources have a large energy sprawl—the amount of land needed to produce energy—which can...

Today on Access Utah, we remember acclaimed folklorist Barre Toelken. Our guests include Randy Williams, folklore curator and oral history specialist with the Special Collections and Archives at the Merrill-Cazier Library, USU Assistant Professor of English Lynne McNeill, and Barre's daughter Kazuko Toelken.

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.

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.

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.

A recent article in the online magazine Yale Environment 360 is headlined “The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits: Will the Colorado Run Dry?” And the sub-headline: “As the Southwest faces rapid growth and unrelenting drought, the Colorado River is in crisis, with too many demands on its diminishing flow. Now those who depend on the river must confront the hard reality that their supply of Colorad...

Tyehimba Jess is winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book “Olio.” With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, his much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and af...

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. Gleaned from historians, journalists, biologists, ranchers, artists, philosophers, teachers, and conservationists, these narratives expose the complex chal...

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. Drawing from large surveys of the American public, Dr. Howe’s research has developed statistical methods to map public opinion, risk perce...

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...

Julia Gossard, assistant professor of history at Utah State University, says that since thousands of witch trials took place across Europe and North America, one stereotypical image of an early modern woman is that of a witch. Gossard teaches a class called “Witches, Workers, & Wives,” which examines attitudes, ideas, and stereotypes about gender, sexuality, and power - including how the witch bec...

From Anne Lamott, the New York Times-bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow, comes the book we need from her now: How to bring hope back into our lives.

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 ex...

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. In one anecdote, he recalls how the only apartment his parents could rent was one that...

Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) is a federally-funded program through the U.S. Department of Education that was designed to help students prepare for and succeed in college. GEAR UP is a highly competitive grant program that helps empower local partnerships comprised of schools, institutions of higher education, state agencies, and community organizations...

An ignored people who, despite all odds, were instrumental in the success of John Wesley Powell's Expeditions. Immortalized in the only existing collection outside the Smithsonian of John Hillers' 116 original 1872 albumen photographs. Now the photos are preserved and this people's incredible story of surviving and thriving in the most inhospitable place in North America can be told.

Today on Access Utah, author Margo Mowbray joins us for the hour to discuss two of her books: An Answering Flame and Havoc Red.

"What a novel my life has been!" Napoleon once said of himself. Born into a poor family, the callow young man was, by twenty-six, an army general. Seduced by an older woman, his marriage transformed him into a galvanizing military commander. The Pope crowned him as Emperor of the French when he was only thirty-five. Within a few years, he became the effective master of Europe, his power unparallel...

Walter Link and Miriam Wollaeger, a young geologist couple in 1920s Wisconsin, set out to find oil to supply the surging U.S. demand. This exciting work will allow them to build their lives in South and Central America, Indonesia, and Cuba. But from the first posting in Columbia, they quickly discover that no women are working in the field in these places. While Walter faces the hardships and thri...

New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands’ latest book is “Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, The Second Generation of American Giants” It tells the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy.