Access Utah

Superhero stories have been called the myths of our day, helping us understand who we are and what unites us. Since Superman first leapt tall buildings with a single bound, the vast majority of the characters have been white, straight, men. Movies and television have consistently held to this standard, giving us Han Solo and Luke Skywalker to root for as they rescue Leia. However, in recent years we have seen new faces in popular franchises and behind the masks of our already beloved heroes.

The United States Marine Corps has a unique culture that ensures comradery, exacting standards, and readiness to be the first to every fight. Yet even in a group that is known for innovation, culture can push leaders to fall back on ingrained preferences. In her new book “The Marines, Counterinsurgency, and Strategic Culture: Lessons Learned and Lost in America's Wars,” USU Associate Professor of Political Science Jeannie L. Johnson takes a sympathetic but critical look at the Marine Corps's long experience with counterinsurgency warfare. Which counterinsurgency lessons have been learned and retained for next time and which have been abandoned to history is a story of battlefield trial and error―but also a story of cultural collisions.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says “I grew up in Ferguson, Mo. No one ever heard of it, unless you lived elsewhere in St. Louis County. Then my family moved to Palestine – my father’s first home. A friend says, ‘Your parents really picked the garden spots.’ In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.

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.

Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth.

Have you ever wondered where your dreams come from? Why they’re so hard to remember? Today on Access Utah, we explore the mysteries of the unconscious mind. We'll go over tips on how to get a good night’s sleep, remember more about what you dream, and conjure lucid dreams.

Writer Karin Anderson will launch her latest novel Before Us Like a Land of Dreams. Join Anderson for reading and conversation at The King's English.

“Anointed with Oil” places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation’s special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry’s leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics — boosting America’s ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today’s political and environmental debates.

Native American Culinary Association founder, Chef Nephi Craig, is visiting Utah State University to conduct a series of foods presentations and deliver a lecture on his work with the “Three Sisters” of Native American cuisine—beans, corn and squash—and to teach nutrition and share cultural heritage.

Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Pop Culture analyzes supernatural creatures in order to demonstrate how German fairy tales treat difference, alterity, and Otherness with terror, distance, and negativity, whereas contemporary North American popular culture adaptations navigate diversity by humanizing and redeeming such figures. This trend of transformation reflects a greater tolerance of other marginalized groups (in regard to race, ethnicity, ability, age, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion, etc.) and acceptance of diversity in society today. The fairy-tale adaptations examined here are more than just twists on old stories—they serve as the looking glasses of significant cultural trends, customs, and social challenges. Whereas the fairy-tale adaptations that Claudia Schwabe analyzes suggest that Otherness can and should be fully embraced, they also highlight the gap that still exists between the representation and the reality of embracing diversity wholehe

David Brown is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Utah State University. A while back he gave a talk in the Science Unwrapped series from the College of Science titled “Artificial Intelligence: Too Late to Stop the Robot Apocalypse?” Professor Brown says “Perhaps ironically, salient technology superstars, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and publicly known geniuses, like Stephen Hawking, have spoken out and warned us about the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). On the other hand, doing so won them the Luddite Award from CNET, and 'alarmist' labels from WIRED and E & T magazines. What's the truth? Is AI the next atomic bomb and are AI research labs the next Los Alamos? If Yes, are there nevertheless compelling reasons to pursue AI? What distinguishes AI from generic computer science or programming or robotics?” We’ll talk about it today on the next Access Utah.

John DeVilbiss writes in USU Magazine, "It flashes like a beacon to millions of birds on migratory marathons. It is a sea in the sand that shimmers lavender in one glance and pale turquoise in another. A place you can go for an entire day without seeing a single soul, yet where two million people live within an hour's drive. It is a lake of paradoxes, said historian Dale Morgan, a liquid lie, said Terry Tempest Williams. The salty truth, however, is that the Great Salt Lake, the largest saline lake in the Western hemisphere, is drying up."

In a rural Kenyan village, nineteen-year-old Hannah Blake labors alongside her American parents to provide healthcare for a tight-knit tribal community steeped in culture and tradition. But it is impossible for her to deny her true north—her spiritual connection to the wild creatures of the African savanna.When a lion cub is orphaned, Hannah instinctively comes to its rescue and the two form an unbreakable bond. Her unbridled passion to protect animals leads to a crossroads with a poacher, creating a dangerous enemy and unintentionally setting off a chain of events that leaves her life in shambles.Forced to flee to America, she faces an unknown future. Alone in a foreign land and surrounded by cold hearted strangers, she is certain she will never know happiness again, until she finds comfort in the companionship of a handsome young college professor. Hannah senses a powerful shared connection with Sam Daniels, but since he is both her teacher and a taken man, anything more than friendship seems unthinkable.In

Over the next several decades, as human populations grow and developing countries become more affluent, the demand for energy will soar. Parts of the energy sector are preparing to meet this demand by increasing renewable energy production, which is necessary to combat climate change. But many renewable energy sources have a large energy sprawl—the amount of land needed to produce energy—which can threaten biodiversity and conservation. Is it possible to meet this rise in energy demand, while still conserving natural places and species?

Today on Access Utah, we remember acclaimed folklorist Barre Toelken. Our guests include Randy Williams, folklore curator and oral history specialist with the Special Collections and Archives at the Merrill-Cazier Library, USU Assistant Professor of English Lynne McNeill, and Barre's daughter Kazuko Toelken.

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.

Until ten years ago, geneticist Don Tillman had never had a second date. Then he developed The Wife Project and met Rosie, 'the world's most incompatible woman'. Now, having survived 3,653 days of marriage, Don's life-contentment graph, recently at its highest point, is curving downwards.

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.

A recent article in the online magazine Yale Environment 360 is headlined “The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits: Will the Colorado Run Dry?” And the sub-headline: “As the Southwest faces rapid growth and unrelenting drought, the Colorado River is in crisis, with too many demands on its diminishing flow. Now those who depend on the river must confront the hard reality that their supply of Colorado water may be cut off.”