Access Utah

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has completed the review of national monuments mandated by President Trump. He has not released his recommendations. The New York Times is reporting that those recommendations include reducing the size of 4 national monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah. Reports are that Secretary Zinke may recommend a drastic reduction in size for Bears Ears.

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.” We’ll talk about white supremacists’ fascination with Nietzsche and ask if they are misreading the German philosopher. (Huenemann has written a book on Nietzsche).

Family history, usually destined or even designed for limited consumption, is a familiar genre within Mormon culture. Mostly written with little attention to standards of historical scholarship, such works are a distinctly hagiographic form of family memorabilia. But many family sagas in the right hands can prove widely engaging, owing to inherent drama and historical relevance. They can truthfully illuminate larger matters of history, humanity, and culture.

We'll discuss the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia. We’ll ask if there should be any limits to free speech and assembly. What provisions should be made if the protesters are armed? Should ideas repugnant to most people be allowed expression? When such ideas are expressed what should the push-back look like? Is President Trump right to see an equivalence between the protesters and counter-protesters in Charlottesville? Regarding controversial monuments and memorials: How should we make decisions on what stays and what gets removed? We’ll try to put the seemingly-escalating tensions over race in context, and look at where we go from here.

Quoting CNN: “More than 70% of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are for food production animals, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. The problem is that many experts believe this is an overuse of antibiotics, and they fear significant public health consequences.

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air... chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, confronting his own mortality.

Physics professor, bestselling author, and dynamic storyteller James Kakalios reveals the mind-bending science behind the seemingly basic things that keep our daily lives running, from our smart phones and digital “clouds” to x-ray machines and hybrid vehicles.

Hope, Heart, and the Humanities tells the story of how Venture, a free, interdisciplinary college humanities course inspired by the national Clemente Course, has helped open doors to improve the lives of people with low incomes who face barriers to attending college. For over a decade, this course has given hundreds of adults, some of them immigrants or refugees, the knowledge, confidence, and power to rechart their lives.

Using minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist PatrickDougherty 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, e

Timothy Hawkes and Warren Petersen join Tom Williams to discuss the governors proposed 50 year water plan.

In 2016, now President Donald Trump became the first major-party candidate in more than half a century to advocate a return to the gold standard for the U.S. dollar. In ONE NATION UNDER GOLD: How One Precious Metal Has Dominated the American Imagination for Four Centuries (Liveright: June 2017) INC Magazine editor and financial writer James Ledbetter explains how most mainstream economists argue the idea of returning to the gold standard is just not possible.

Monday's program is a window into the world of music therapy: an interesting intersection of arts and science.

Thursday, Tom Williams’ guest for the hour is journalist, author and public radio broadcaster David Baron. Baron is an avid umbraphile who has witnessed five total solar eclipses; he has crossed the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia to catch the shadow of the moon. On August 21, Baron will be in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to witness the first total solar eclipse to cross the country from coast to coast in 99 years. We talked about the history and science of eclipses and share some tips for the best way to experience the upcoming eclipse.

A new study by Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, co-authors of four New York Times bestsellers on interpersonal communication and influencing human behavior, reveals that more and more of us are losing connection with our lives in order to earn “likes” and social media praise. We have, in a sense, turned into social media “trophy hunters.”

In her memoir, "Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia,” Gerda Saunders writes: “When I was diagnosed with early- onset dementia just before my sixty- first birthday in 2010, I kept my hurt, anger, fear, and doubts under wraps. I had no choice. I had a job, a husband, children, grandchildren, friends. I had a life. However, there is nothing like a death sentence— in my case, the premature death of my mind— to provoke questions about life. What, actually, is memory, personality, identity? What is a self? Will I still be (have?) a self when my reason is gone? For me, the place to work out such questions has always been in writing. From that place of self- reckoning, then, came this book.”

Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, flies, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Roach visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, she discovers that diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Back in the US, fashion designers at U.S. Army Natick Labs explain why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never see our nation’s defenders in the same way again.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Christopher Smart reports that “News is spreading across the country on the state of homelessness in downtown Salt Lake City — and it isn't pretty.

Today’s program is by request. Aleq in Southern Utah emailed us to ask for more science on Access Utah and to suggest that we talk about the great work being done in Utah in paleontology.

To call these unsettling times is an understatement: our political leaders are less and less respectable; in the realm of business, cheating, lying, and stealing are hazily defined; and in daily life, rapidly changing technology offers permission to act in ways inconceivable without it. Yet somehow, this hasn’t quite led to a complete free-for-all—people still draw lines around what is acceptable and what is not. In her new book "Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business," Eden Collinsworth sets out to understand how and why. In her quest, she seeks out, among others, a prime minister, the editor of the Financial Times, a holocaust survivor, a pop star, and a former commander of the U.S. Air Force and grapples with the impracticality of applying morals to foreign policy; precisely when morality gets lost in the making of money; what happens to morality without free will; whether “immoral” women are just those having a better time; why celebrities have become the new moral standard-bearer

NYU professor Mitchell Stephens’ recent article in “Politico” is headlined “Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And Good Riddance.” Stephens says that “journalism in the United States was born partisan and remained, for much of its history, loud, boisterous and combative. He says that this changed in the 1930s and 40s beginning with influential radio newsman Lowell Thomas who “intuited that the best way to hold [his] large audience was to avoid excessively offending any major political group. He tried to play it, as he put it, ‘down the middle’ ... “And Thomas’ main successors in the role of national newsmen—David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw—aimed for somewhere around “the middle” too.