Access Utah

Writer and explorer Gretel Ehrlich is author of 13 books, including "The Solace of Open Spaces." She has written for National Geographic, The Atlantic, Orion, and other publications. Her recent writing has covered everything from her experience being struck by lightning, to essays about how climate change has been affecting the Arctic communities in Greenland that she has been visiting for the las...

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...

The amount of student debt across the country adds up to almost 1.3 trillion dollars. As a comparison, that is almost how much US currency is in circulation today. Last Thursday students across the country gathered on college campuses for the Million Student March, calling for free tuition at public universities, cancellation of all student debt, and implementation of a $15 minimum hourly wage for...

Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an updated handbook for lay leaders of Mormon congregations mandating church discipline for same-sex couples who marry and prohibiting their children from receiving baby blessings or being baptized until they reach age 18. Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said the new policies are designed...

In some polls, about 25 percent of Americans deny climate change is happening at all. Others know they should care, but want to be spared the details and believe they can’t do anything to affect the outcome anyway. Dennis Dimick, National Geographic magazine's Executive Editor, Environment, says, “These are the people that National Geographic thought about every day in putting together November’s....

In his new book “The Generals” historian Winston Groom tells the intertwined and uniquely American tales of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall - from the World War I battle that shaped them to their greatest victory: leading the allies to victory in World War II. These three remarkable men-of-arms who rose from the gruesome hell of the First World War to become the finest genera...

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 range...

Emily Niehaus says she “founded Community Rebuilds to address an affordable housing need in my rural community with the larger goal of shifting the existing construction paradigm to have a lighter impact...It began as a simple idea to replace old, dilapidated housing (like singlewide trailers built prior to 1976) with homes that cost less to build and less to heat and cool for working families. Th...

In this off year election, turnout was predictably low in many areas, some areas saw a spike, but still many important were addressed. Jackie Biskupski appears to have unseated Ralph Becker for Mayor in Salt Lake City, Proposition 1 went down to defeat in the vast majority of counties, albeit narrowly in some cases. On the national scene, Ohio voters have rejected a marijuana legalization measure,...

CBS reports that the demand for butlers is on the rise, possibly because of Downton Abbey. Steven Ferry, Chairman of the International Institute of Modern Butlers, and a butler himself, says that butling can be an interesting, fulfilling and lucrative career. On Tuesday’s Access Utah, we’ll hear stories from Steven Ferry and UPR Commentator Richard Ratliff, who is special assistant to the Dean of...

This broadcast of Access Utah originally aired in May of 2015.

Sherman Alexie is a major voice in contemporary American literature. He is the author of twenty books including Reservation Blues and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The award-winning, and widely banned, young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won him the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Just exactly where do we find the supernatural in the contemporary world? It's both pervasive--everywhere--and specific--a particular somewhere. Otherworldly traditions and stories still spread through oral narration. They pervade mass media and the digital world and often form the stuff of hypermodern folklore--the stew of folk, popular, consumer, and digital culture that constitutes much of cont...

Today we’ll revisit a conversation with Wyoming-based writer Craig Johnson. Craig Johnson is the New York Times bestselling author of the Walt Longmire mystery novels, which are the basis for Longmire, the Netflix original drama. Craig Johnson has received many awards for his books. He lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians.

Legendary lyricist Sheldon Harnick (Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, Fiorello!) visited Logan for events with the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theater during their 2013 season. While he was in town, he sat down with Tom Williams for an Access Utah conversation.

How does the place we live inform our art? With its valleys and peaks, sagebrush and streams, the Great Basin inspires creative expression in forms as varied as its landscape. Join four distinguished artists—a filmmaker, a photographer, a novelist, and a poet—in a panel discussion about the unique inspiration discovered in the Great Basin.

Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop o...

Downwind: A People's History of the Nuclear Westis 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.

Karen Armstrong, in her book “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” writes that: “In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed the same way almost every time: ‘Religion has been the cause of all the ma...

With Bernard, her husband of fifty-five years, now in the grave, seventy-eight-year-old Harriet Chance impulsively sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise that her late husband had planned. But what she hoped would be a voyage leading to a new lease on life becomes a surprising and revelatory journey into Harriet’s past.

Dr. Douglas Johnston is a scholar, diplomat, peacemaker, and the youngest officer in the Navy to qualify for command of a nuclear submarine. He is founder and president of the Washington DC based International Center for Religion and Diplomacy.

The next night, during the school's homecoming football game, members of the Copper Hills American Indian Student Association collected more than 190 signatures on a petition calling for cultural awareness and tolerance.

Community farms. Mud spas. Mineral paints. Nematodes. The world is waking up to the beauty and mystery of dirt. This anthology celebrates the Earth's generous crust, bringing together essays by award-winning scientists, authors, artists, and dirt lovers to tell dirt's exuberant tales.

Today on the program we're discussing food, starting with the latest food movement here in the U.S., food trucks. Serving food from mobile kitchens has turned into a 800 million dollar industry, as the National Geographic recently reported, citing various economic perks of food trucks rather than brick and mortar restaurants.