Access Utah

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...

The banjo is emblematic of American country music. It is at the core of other important musical movements, including jazz and ragtime, and played an important part in the development of many genres, such as folk, bluegrass, and rock. The instrument has been adopted by many cultures and has been ingrained into many musical traditions, from Mento music in the Caribbean to dance music in Ireland. Vir...

Tuesday on Access Utah we’ll spend the hour with multiple Pulitzer winning reporter Ken Armstrong, who, with T. Christian Miller (of ProPublica), won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for “a startling examination and expose of law enforcement's enduring failures to investigate reports of rape properly and to comprehend the traumatic effects on its victims.” Tuesday’s episode is par...

Julie Berry was inspired to write her new historical novel, “The Passion of Dolssa,” while listening to a college lecture she found online about medieval France. Fascinated, Berry began a two-year dive into research on the era, learning about the lives of several medieval female mystics like Clare of Assisi, Marguerite Porete, and Catherine of Siena, women who rejected marriage, almost unheard of...

"Oceans are a sonic symphony. Sound is essential to the survival and prosperity of marine life. But man-made ocean noise is threatening this fragile world.” So say the producers of a documentary film, “Sonic Sea,” which takes us beneath the ocean’s surface to uncover the consequences of increased ocean noise pollution, including the mass stranding of whales around the planet, and looks at what can...

On Wednesday’s Access Utah we’ll talk with acclaimed law professor and historian, Annette Gordon-Reed, as a part of the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative.