Access Utah

UPR listeners are curious about everything. We're always wanting to learn something fascinating. That's why we're avid readers. Periodically we come together on Access Utah to build a UPR Book List, and we're going to do it again on Monday. So we're asking: What are you reading? We're looking for everything from fiction, non-fiction, and classic literature to young adult and children's books. It m...

After nine years of keeping his prostate cancer at bay, the drugs were no longer working. The doctors told him his time was nearly up. So Jeff Metcalf dove deep into writing, tasking himself with writing one essay each week for a year. His book "Requiem for the Living" features the best of the resulting fifty-two essays by an author who continues to defy his medical prognosis. The essays form a me...

It's an Earth Day tradition on Access Utah: we invite Utah writers to reflect on the environment. This year, Stephen Trimble, whose books include "Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America," says he's been thinking about climate change and the moral responsibility of the writer to speak up for our relationship with each other and with the earth.

Speaking to Neural magazine, artist Paul Vanouse said "I think in the next couple years there will be lots more scientific research that undermines DNA determinism. For instance, theorist Hanna Landecker...describe[s] varied large-scale "Relational Biology" research projects that examine things such as epigenetics, stem-cell differentiation, bidirectional signaling, etc. - things that I think may...

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, in his book “All The Wild That Remains,” nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these remarkable men from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, interweaving their stories and asking how they s...

A bookseller in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, Hubert Howe Bancroft rose to define the early history of California and the West. Creating what he called a “history factory,” he assembled a vast library of over sixty thousand books, maps, letters, and documents. In 1890 he published an eight-hundred-page autobiography, titled "Literary Industries." Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to his...

Should Spanking Children Be Forbidden in the U.S.? Renowned criminologist Christian Pfeiffer from University of Hannover, Germany will present the European experience on Thursday, as a part of the USU Provost's Series on Instructional Excellence, and will join us for Thursday's AU.Dr. Pfeiffer's research interests include the role of religion and child rearing practices in the production of violen...

In her song "Flawless," the singer Beyonce samples Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are." On Wednesday's AU we'll ask: Can the message of female empowerment co-exist with a sexualized image? Do advertising messages of companies like Carl's Jr. and Sports Illustrated promote the objectification of women? If so, how shou...

Ben Jones, is a single, 38-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his small trucking company. Ben's route takes him back and forth across one of the most desolate and beautiful regions of the Utah desert where he meets a mysterious cellist and the embittered owner of a small diner. That's the plot, in brief, of James Anderson's debut novel, "The Never-Open Desert Diner."

In 2014 the citizens of Idaho and Montana celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act – the law that secured protection for eight million acres of wild forests and mountains in these two states. In his new book (from University of Utah Press) “Where Roads Will Never Reach” environmental historian Frederick Swanson tells the story of how, decades before the Wilderness Act, ordinary citize...

What happens to a Mormon family in California when their teenage son tells them he's gay? How does the family navigate questions of faith and acceptance? The film "Families Are Forever" produced by the Family Acceptance Project and screened recently at Utah State University, tells the story of Tom and Wendy Montgomery and their five children, focusing on their son, Jordan. Participating in USU's R...

In 2005, David Roberts and two of his mountaineering friends caught sight of what appeared to be a granary beneath an overhanging cliff a thousand feet above a Utah ranch. After rappelling down the cliff, Roberts and his companions discovered a settlement--and a mystery. This enormous granary was large enough to hold fifty-seven bushels of corn, weighing a ton and a half. Yet Roberts and his frien...

USU Philosophy Professor Charlie Huenemann, writing for 3quarksdaily.com says that "we all seek to capture the world with a net of language. Yet it is in the nature of nets to capture some things and let others slip away, and that goes for languages too...What is left unsaid speaks volumes. We might resign ourselves to this fact - the inescapable limits of what's sayable - but in fact a great many...

In "Ongoingness: The End of a Diary" Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. She says she wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened. But she was terrified that she might forget something, she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice....

The recent excommunications of prominent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints got us wondering about the practice of excommunication, and related practices like shunning and ostracizing. Does excommunication have different meanings across various religions and cultures? Why are some individuals cut off and others not? How should religious institutions respond to unorthodox op...

In 2005, historian James Whiteside bought a Harley Davidson Heritage Softail, christened it "Old Blue," and set off on a series of motorcycle adventures. Over six years he traveled more than 15,000 miles. In his new book "Old Blue's Road" Whiteside recounts his travels to the Pacific Northwest, Yellowstone, Dodge City, Santa Fe, Wounded Knee, and many other places and considers the ongoing struggl...

LaDonna Redmond became a food justice advocate after her son developed food allergies and she found that the healthy food she wanted to feed him wasn't available in her Chicago neighborhood. She says that fair and equal access to healthy foods affects the health and well-being of the community and that food justice is tied to social justice, to issues of violence, poverty, and immigration. She adv...

Readers of physical books leave traces: marginalia, slips of paper, fingerprints, highlighting, inscriptions. All books have histories, and libraries are not just collections of books and databases, but a medium of long-distance communication with other writers and readers."Letter to a Future Lover" is a collection several dozen brief pieces written by Ander Monson in response to library ephemera-...

Nancy McHugh, 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 disorder, o...

Sociologist and Mormon scholar Armand Mauss says that as a relatively new religious movement, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has followed a developmental trajectory similar to many other such movements. In the next few years, however, as the church enters its third century it is likely to face many new and unprecedented challenges. Mauss will consider how the church and its member...

Kara Richardson Whitely knew she could reach the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. She had done it once before. But she failed in a second attempt, struggled with food addiction and looked for ways to cope with feelings of failure and shame. Her weight shot to more than 300 pounds. Deep in her personal gorge, Whitely decided the only way out was up. She resolved to climb the mountain again-and this time,...

Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla produced hundreds of inventions and ideas which have changed our lives in profound ways, ranging from alternating current to wireless communication to remote control. Tesla's AC defeated Thomas Edison's DC, but Edison is celebrated in America and Tesla is largely unknown. Where he is remembered, Tesla is known as the man who invented the twentieth century, but also as...

"The Arts and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) fields share a necessity for undertaking imaginative inquiry of what we perceive as truth and beauty...So many attempts to integrate art and science simply involve creating art at the end of a scientific breakthrough. With ARTsySTEM, we're merging the disciplines at the very inception of the process." That's USU Assistant Professor of A...

Last July 4 on an outing to Long Island, when shots were fired in the vicinity, ProPublica reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones says that "between the four adults [in the group] we hold six degrees. Three of us are journalists. And not one of us ... thought to call the police. We had not even considered it. We also are all black. And without realizing it, in that moment, each of us had made a set of calcu...

B. Lynn Ingram is Professor of Earth and Planetary Science and Geography at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of "The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow." She'll join us for Tuesday's AU to answer such questions as: What is "normal" climate in the West and how do we know what's normal? What do we learn from megafloods...