Access Utah

An eminent professor of History and Religious Studies at Utah State University, Dr. Norman Jones has spent a career learning what makes an "educated person."

Iconic Utah outfitter Ken Sleight began his river-guiding career in Glen Canyon during the mid-1950s, just as the Glen Canyon Dam blueprints jumped from the drawing board to remote desert terrain. The pulse of the Colorado River through the canyon would soon be halted by a cement wall and Glen Canyon backfilled with water. Sleight knew the condition of the canyon was terminal. He used every ray of daylight to memorize every detail of the canyon before inundation: to learn its 125 side canyons, to observe Native American ruins and mining relics, and to immerse himself in the lives of seminal guides who preceded him like Dave Rust, Bert Loper, and Moki Mac.

The Block Film and Art Festival is this weekend in Logan. Today, we're previewing the festival. Our guests include Michael Bingham, founder of Jump the Moon Art Studios, Jolynne Lyon, UPR feature correspondent for our Diagnosed series, Steve Smith, submission manager for the festival, and Brenda Hawley, the festival's art curator.

Our guest for the hour is Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and newly elected chair of the Global Assembly of Amnesty Interational. She gave the keynote speech for the Tanner Center for Human Rights lecture series on August 30th at the University of Utah. The title of her lecture was "Never Again is Now: Remembering and Reaffirming Our Collective Commitment to Protecting Civil Rights."

Once upon a time, Melissa believed a teacher who told her she would never amount to anything; a guy in high school who stood her up at the senior prom and made her feel unworthy of love; and a friend who said she was fat and an embarrassment.

This year’s Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture will be presented by Darius Gray. The lecture, titled “Redeeming a People: The Critical Role of Historical Examination in Moving Cultural and Moral Trajectories,” is 7 p.m. today at the Logan Tabernacle, 50 N. Main St. The evening’s events will also include performances by the Deborah Bonner Unity Gospel Choir.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is rare bookseller Ken Sanders. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear a segment from our conversation on the exhibit Glen Canyon: A River Guide Remembers. Then we’ll revisit a portion of our interview on poetry with Edward Hirsch and Michael Sowder. And finally, we'll hear from Anthony Doerr, author of "All the Light We Cannot See."

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Dean Craig Jessop of USU's Caine College of the Arts. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear a segment from our interview with composer John Luther Adams. Then we’ll revisit a portion of our conversation with GENTRI, the Gentlemen Trio. And finally, we'll hear from Ann Cannon, author of "I'll Tell You What," tell how her father LaVell Edwards and mother Patty Edwards met.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Dr. Lynne McNeill, assistant professor of English at Utah State University. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear a segment from our conversation on Slender Man, with Amanda Brennan, Dr. Elizabeth Tucker, and Dr. Trevor J. Blank. Then we’ll revisit a portion of our interview with Michael Poland and Jamie Farrell on the Yellowstone Supervolcano. And finally, we'll hear from commentor Gina Wickwar on dogs, Barbara Streisand, and cloning.

Historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was recently on the USU campus to give a talk presented by the USU History Department and sponsored by the Tanner Talks Series in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Dr. Jason Gilmore, assistant professor of Communication Studies at Utah State Unviersity. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear from Phillip Dray, author of "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America." Then we’ll hear part of my conversation with Sonia Nazario on the family separation and zero tolerance immigration crisis. Sonia Nazario is author of the book "Enrique's Journey." And we'll conclude with a segment from my interview with Gary Paul Nabhan who is working to use food to unite people across social and political divisions. We also discuss Chimamanda Adichie's TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story."

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the conditions, you get the result.'

Today, as a part of Utah State University’s Year of the Arts, we’ll focus on the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, which is looking forward to its grand reopening Saturday, September 15th. We talk about a new book, “Collecting on the Edge: Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.” We’ll talk with the museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, Katie Lee-Koven; writer, curator, and museum director Bolton Colburn, who edited the book; and independent curator and corresponding editor for Art in America, Michael Duncan, who wrote an introductory essay for the book.

Utah State University’s Mountain West Center for Regional Studies has announced the 2018 winners of the Evans Biography Awards for books published in 2017. Author and ethnographer Rodney Frey won the Evans Handcart Award for his book Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition (Washington State University Press, 2017).

If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough?Amos N. Guiora addresses these profound questions and the bystander-victim relationship from a deeply personal and legal perspective, focusing on the Holocaust and then exploring cases in contemporary society. He shares the experiences of his parents and grandparents during the Holocaust and examines sexual assault cases at Vanderbilt and Stanford and other crimes where bystanders chose not to intervene. Guiora recommends that we must make the obligation to intervene the law, and thus non-intervention a crime.

In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions.

Using minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist Patrick Dougherty creates works of art inseparable with nature and the landscape. With a dazzling variety of forms seamlesslyintertwined with their context, his sculptures evoke fantastical images of nests, cocoons, cones, castles, and beehives. Over the last twenty-five years, Dougherty has built more than two hundred works throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia that range from stand-alone structures to a kind of modern primitive architectureevery piece mesmerizing in its ability to fly through trees, overtake buildings, and virtually defy gravity. Stickwork, Dougherty's first monograph, features thirty-eight of his organic, dynamic works that twist the line between architecture, landscape, and art. Constructed on-site using locally sourced materials and local volunteer labor, Dougherty's sculptures are tangles of twigs and branches that have been transformed into something unexpected and wild,

“The Man Who Caught the Storm” is the saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring, and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon.

For nearly 2 decades, professional photographer Jim Herrington has been working on a portrait series of influential rock and mountain climbers. The resulting book, “The Climbers” documents these rugged individualists who, from roughly the 1930s to 1970s, used primitive gear along with their wits, talent, and fortitude to tackle unscaled peaks around the world. Today, these men and women are renowned for their accomplishments and, in many cases, are the last of the remaining practitioners from the so‐called “Golden Age” of 20th century climbing.

When Graham Cavanaugh divorced his first wife it was to marry his girlfriend, Audra, a woman as irrepressible as she is spontaneous and fun. But, Graham learns, life with Audra can also be exhausting, constantly interrupted by chatty phone calls, picky-eater houseguests, and invitations to weddings of people he’s never met. Audra firmly believes that through the sheer force of her personality she can overcome the most socially challenging interactions, shepherding her son through awkward playdates and origami club, and even deciding to establish a friendship with Graham’s first wife, Elspeth. Graham isn't sure he understands why Audra longs to be friends with the woman he divorced. After all, former spouses are hard to categorize—are they enemies, old flames, or just people you know really, really well? And as Graham and Audra share dinners, holidays, and late glasses of wine with his first wife he starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did I make the right choice? Is there a right ch