Access Utah

“Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement” is a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry. Whether reflecting on their teenage selves or their modern-day workplaces, each writer approaches the subject with authenticity and strength. Together the pieces create a portrait of a cultural sea-change.

From Wikipedia: “Sylvia Mendez (born June 7, 1936) is an American civil rights activist of Mexican-Puerto Rican heritage. At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California[1] and paved the way for integration and the American civil rights movement.[2]

The holiday season is back, and so is the Access Utah holiday special. This season is time for special music old and new. It’s also time for wonderful stories humorous and poignant. We’ll hear music for the season performed by the Lightwood Duo (Mike Christiansen on guitar and Eric Nelson on clarinet). We’ll also hear readings for the season by the author of The Christmas Chronicles, playwright Tim Slover.

“Unselfish: Love Thy Neighbor as Thy Selfie” compiled by Paul Parkinson, features 99 inspiring stories of people putting others before themselves. Everyone is trying to get noticed. Selfies are taking over the internet. We live in a world where success and achievement seem to be determined by how many “likes” or “followers” one has on social media. Selfish behavior seems to be at an all–time high.

We’re answering your questions about Electric Vehicles today. Our guests include USU student and EV owner Samuel Bona; EV owner and early adopter John Loveless; EV and Electric Bicycle owner and USU Associate Professor of Computer Science Nicholas Flann; and Rep. Raymond Ward, who is working to develop an EV charging infrastructure in Utah.

Corey Flintoff is a former NPR foreign correspondent whose assignments included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Haiti, Ukraine and Russia. He was NPR Southeast Asia Bureau Chief and Moscow Bureau Chief. Born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, he now lives in Maryland. He’s now trying his hand at writing and his fiction has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review and other publications. Corey Flintoff was in Logan last week to help UPR raise money for our broadcast network and for student reporters. We’ll talk with him about his beginnings in Alaska, his reporting from hot spots like Iraq, and about the current news regarding Russia and Ukraine.

Linda Hirshman, acclaimed historian of social movements, delivers the sweeping story of the struggle leading up to #MeToo and beyond: from the first tales of workplace harassment percolating to the surface in the 1970s, to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal—when liberal women largely forgave Clinton, giving men a free pass for two decades. Many liberals even resisted the movement to end rape on campus.

There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty?

In CONFLUENCE: NAVIGATING THE PERSONAL & POLITICAL ON RIVERS OF THE NEW WEST, paddler and journalist Zak Podmore takes readers down Western rivers and deep into some of the most pressing environmental and social justice issues of our time, including uranium tailings on the Ute Mountain Ute lands near the San Juan River, the treatment of asylum-seekers crossing the Rio Grande, and one of the largest dam removal projects in history on Washington’s Elwha River. CONFLUENCE follows in the tradition of Thoreau or Edward Abbey — it takes us into the wild but always has one eye turned back toward the blessings and ills of civilization.

Over 70% of Americans—and two-thirds of Utahns—think that climate change is happening. Research led by Dr. Peter Howe reveals this statistic, along with much more detailed data about how Americans think about climate change from the national to the local level.

You’re riding in your self-driving car when suddenly the doors lock, the route changes and you have lost all control. Then, a mysterious voice tells you, “You are going to die.” Just as self-driving cars become the trusted, safer norm, eight people find themselves in this terrifying situation, including a faded TV star, a pregnant young woman, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife, and a suicidal man.

Today, a conversation with Jeff Metcalf about his new novel “Wacko’s City of Fun Carnival.”

Yoram Bauman is the world’s first and only stand-up economist. He is co-author of the “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change” and the two volume “Cartoon Introduction to Economics,” and the 1998 book “Tax Shift,” which helped inspire the revenue-neutral carbon tax in British Columbia. He is campaign co-chair for the new Clean the Darn Air initiative, which supporters are working to get on the ballot in Utah in 2020.

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.

Charlie Huenemann is professor of philosophy at Utah State University. He is the author of several books and essays on the history of philosophy, as well as some fun stuff, such as “How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft.” He was recently on the BBC talking about a thought expiriment, "When Capt. Jean-Luc Picard beams aboard the Enterprise, do the carbon atoms that make up his body make the leap, i.e., are the molecules compressed into a data stream? Or is he basically replicated aboard ship using his cellular coding, memories and other neural impulses — basically a blueprint of “him”?" That inquiry was made on BBC Radio4's “Naturebang.” On this episode of Access Utah, we discuss the inquiry and other philosophical questions about the self and continuity.

Today on Access Utah, we preview an event next week. Living historians Nathan Richardson and Renée-Noelle Felice will perform on the USU campus as Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott, honoring their amazing lives and legacies, which are as relevant today as they were one hundred years ago.

Skier and debut author Ayja Bounous explores threats to the winters and watershed in the face of climate change and the far–reaching impacts of a diminishing snowpack on the American West—not only from ecological and economic perspectives, but also in regard to emotional and psychological health, as she realizes how deeply her personal relationships are tied to the snow–covered mountains of Utah's Wasatch range.

Explorer, lawyer, art collector, publisher, and author, Erling Kagge is the first person to have completed the Three Poles Challenge on foot—the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. He has written six previous books on exploration, philosophy, and art collecting, and runs Kagge Forlag, a publishing company based in Oslo, where he lives.

H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. A New York Times-bestselling author, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography for The First American and Traitor to His Class. He lives in Austin, Texas.