Access Utah

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...

Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Grea...

John Palfrey, founding president of the Digital Public Library of America and a director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told the Deseret News that he has “been struck by the number of times people tell [him] that they think libraries are less important than they were before, now that we have the Internet and Google. He says he thinks “just the opposite: Libraries ar...

Artist, researcher, and writer Jonathan Bailey is out with a new book: "Rock Art: A Vision of a Vanishing Cultural Landscape"

Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before...

Commemorating twenty years since the wolf’s return to the American West, “Howl” explores passions and controversies surrounding nature’s most fascinating predator. Susan Imhoff Bird travels the West, journeying from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, through Yellowstone and Montana. Along the way, she interviews ranchers and park personnel, wolf watchers, biologists, and families, uncovering a rang...