Access Utah

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...

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 the wake of U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell’s recent visit to the area being proposed by some for designation as Bear’s Ears National Monument, we’ll consider anew public lands issues in Utah. Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz have released their Public Lands Initiative legislation for consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Chris Stewart has introduced an amendment to t...

In December 2015, Paramount and CBS sued the producers of a proposed fan-supported feature length movie called "Axanar" which was to be set in the Star Trek universe. Included in the issues at dispute was the question: who owns the Klingon language and can a language, albeit an invented one, be copyrighted?

The banjo is emblematic of American country music. It is at the core of other important musical movements, including jazz and ragtime, and has played an important part in the development 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. Vi...

It’s been several months since we got together as a community and compiled a UPR book list. Public radio listeners are famous as avid readers. We want to know what you’re reading. What’s on your nightstand or on your device right now? Fellow listeners may not know about it and may love it.

In several cases this summer, efforts to fight wildfires have been hampered because of drones in the area. Utah lawmakers recently voted to allow authorities to disable or damage unauthorized drones near wildfires. The bill would also impose harsher penalties on people caught flying the aircraft. Tuesday on AU we’ll discuss this legislation, and talk about fighting wildfires in general. We’ll also...

Award-winning author Brad Watson is a native of Mississippi who now teaches at the University of Wyoming. In his new novel “Miss Jane,” drawing on the story of his own great-aunt, Watson explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early 20th-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central “uses” for a woman in that time and place—namely, sex an...

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...

Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow joins us for Tuesday’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 c...

NPR reporter Kirk Siegler recently visited UPR while in Logan working on a story for the NPR elections desk. He sat down with Tom Williams for a wide-ranging conversation including discussion of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s Mormon problem; the potential designation of a Bear’s Ears National Monument; Seigler’s interview with Cliven Bundy and reporting on the stand-off...

“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...

"Nine Mile Canyon's role in the Old West--a story of fur trappers and miners, ranchers and homesteaders, cattle barons and barkeeps, outlaws and bounty hunters Nine Mile Canyon is famous the world over for its prehistoric art images and remnants of ancient Fremont farmers. But it also teems with Old West history that is salted with iconic figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. La...

Two leaders in the Cache County Republican Party have resigned from the party over presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump. In a letter to members of the Cache County Republican Party Executive Committee, Andy Rasmussen and Jonathan Choate say, "The decision by the Executive Committee to take no public action disavowing our presidential nominee has left us in a difficult pos...

When Bloomberg Businessweek told him it was going to give him the whole magazine to write a single article about computer programming, Paul Ford, a soft-spoken programmer and writer, sat on his couch with a pillow over his head and just let out a long “aaaaaaahhhhh,” like he had just stuck his finger on the ‘A’ key. Ford’s piece started out as a 2,000-, then 4,000-word piece. It grew much longer f...

The acclaimed author of “Refuge” and “When Women Were Birds” and many others is one of the most thought provoking and articulate people you’ll meet and an hour with her is unfailingly interesting.

At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the LDS Church-owned department store in the Utah town where she'd grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents' house with her four-year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she had been born, and she was having an affair with...

With this episode we inaugurate a new series on AU: Our Favorite Books:

The monthly DOCUTAH@TheELECTRIC series presents a film of particular interest to the four state Southwestern community and the Native American reservations in the area. It tells the story of the haunting consequences of the invention of the atomic bomb and the man who led the development teams. "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer & The Atomic Bomb," will be presented Friday evening, June...

There exists a category of American cities in which the line between suburban and urban is almost impossible to locate. These suburban cities arose in the last half of twentieth-century America, based largely on the success of the single-family home, shopping centers, and the automobile. The low-density, auto-centric development of suburban cities, which are largely in the arid West, presents chal...

In his new book, Apocalyptic Anxiety: Religion, Science, and America’s Obsession with the End of the World” (University Press of Colorado), Anthony Aveni explores why Americans take millennial claims seriously, where and how end-of-the-world predictions emerge, how they develop within a broader historical framework, and what we can learn from doomsday predictions of the past.