Access Utah

Margaret Atwood’s influential novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” was published in 1985. The new Hulu series based on the book is creating quite a bit of buzz and some are saying the book’s themes are prescient in our times. Others are pushing back on that idea. Wednesday on Access Utah we’ll talk about it with Erin Webster Garrett, Professor of English at Radford University; and Sarah Jones, Social Media Editor with The New Republic magazine. You can comment right now to upraccess@gmail.com on Twitter @upraccess and on our Access Utah Facebook page.

There are over 30 million birders in this country alone, according to the Cornell Institute of Ornithology. Why are so many people interested in birds and birdsong?

The words “Nixonian” and “Watergate territory” are being used increasingly in connection with the Trump Administration.

Las Vegas-based writer Laura McBride, is out with a new novel. “‘Round Midnight” spans the six decades when Las Vegas grew from a dusty gambling town into the melting pot metropolis it is today. It is the story of four women-- one who falls in love, one who gets lucky, one whose heart is broken, and one who has always wondered--whose lives change at the Midnight Room.

As of last year, suicide was the leading cause of death among 10- to 17-year-olds in Utah and the youth suicide rate had tripled since 2007. Teen suicide is a hot topic lately with the advent of the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why.” Several groups, including The Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide, have expressed concerns that the media tends to glamorize and sensationalize suicide. We’ll talk about it next time on Access Utah, when our guests will include a representative from the Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the American Health Care Act which, they say, fulfills their promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The bill now moves to the Senate.

David Sandum appeared to have it all: a beautiful young family and a promising career ahead as a business consultant. But his life started veering off course, and upon returning to his native Scandinavia, he fell into an inexplicable, deep depression.

President Trump has ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct a review of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments (along with many other other national monuments) and to report back with recommendations. Secretary Zinke is in Utah now, consulting with various stakeholders. We’re going to talk about this mandated review of national monuments today. Our guests include Josh Ewing, Executive Director of Friends of Cedar Mesa; Matt Anderson, Public Lands Policy Analyst with the Sutherland Institute; and Willie Grayeyes, Board Chairman with Utah Dine Bikeyah.

If you were lost on a mountain, who would come to your rescue? Mother Nature can be harsh, especially if you're unprepared or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately, hundreds of men and women are wiling to risk their lives to bring other to safety.

USU Marketing Professor Edwin Stafford and his family have been early adopters of various forms of green technology. They have solar panels and a ground sourced energy system, for example. The next step, they decided, was the purchase of a Tesla electric vehicle as the new family car. Professor Stafford recounts some of their experiences in his article “Bridging the Chasm: An Early Adopter’s Perspectives on how Electric Vehicles Can Go Mainstream,” to be published in June in Sustainability: The Journal of Record.

We have established an Access Utah tradition: On or near Earth Day each year we invite Utah writer Stephen Trimble and other guests to talk about the earth, the land, and the environment. Here is Trimble’s suggestion for this year: Why don’t we talk about young people’s responses to the land, especially young people who are writing about the land. We’ll talk about it with Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America;” naturalist, teacher, and activist, Jack Greene, and his students Josh Velazquez and Darrin Bingham and, from Capitol Reef NP, UVU Adjunct Instructor Kiri Manookin and some of her students.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S.—43.8 million, or 18.5%—experiences mental illness in a given year.1 Approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S.—9.8 million, or 4.0%—experiences a serious mental illness in a given year that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.2 Approximately 1 in 5 youth aged 13–18 (21.4%) experiences a severe mental disorder at some point during their life. For children aged 8–15, the estimate is 13%.3

Richard Bushman is professor of history emeritus at Columbia University and formerly the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He is author, among many other books, of a biography of Joseph Smith titled "Rough Stone Rolling." Professor Bushman came in to the UPR studios in March 2017 for conversation with Tom Williams following his appearance at a conference on the USU campus titled “New Perspectives on Joseph Smith and Translation.” The conference was sponsored by USU’s Religious Studies Program and the Faith Matters Foundation, a non-profit organization that encourages discussion about Mormon topics.

Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, a professor of Christian ethics, is the author of the 2013 book, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (Fortress Press). She gave a lecture yesterday at USU in the Tanner Talks series from the College of Humanites and Social Sciences. Dr. Moe-Lobeda joins us for Access Utah today, along with Rev. Scott Thalacker, Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Logan.

In his book, “Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS” (now out in paperback), Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick traces how the strain of militant Islam behind ISIS first arose in a remote Jordanian prison and spread with the unwitting aid of two American presidents. Drawing on high-level access to CIA and Jordanian sources, Warrick weaves moment-by-moment operational details with the perspectives of diplomats and spies, generals and heads of state, many of whom foresaw a menace worse than al Qaeda and tried desperately to stop it. Black Flags reveals the long arc of today’s most dangerous extremist threat.

Carrie Newcomer's songwriting has impressed the likes of Billboard, USA Today, and Rolling Stone, which wrote that she "asks all the right questions". Newcomer speaks and teaches about creativity, vocation, activism, and spirituality at colleges, conventions and retreats. She has shared the stage with performers like alison Krauss and writers like Parker J. Palmer, Jill Bolte Taylor, Philip Gully, Scott Russell Sanders, Rabbi Sandy Sasso and Barbara Kingsolver. Newcomer has written two collections of essays and poetry as companion pieces to recent albums: A Permeable Life: Poems and Essays, and The Beautiful Not Yet: Essays, Poems and Lyrics. In 2016, Goshen College awarded her with an honorary degree of Bachelor's of Music in Social Change during a ceremony in which she delivered the college's commencement speech. Newcomer lives in Indiana and joins Access Utah to talk about her album, The Beautiful Not Yet.

Lily Hoang’s latest book is “A Bestiary,” In this genre-transcending work, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum as the winner of the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection, Hoang teases apart mythology, familial memory, and investigative essay into searing fragments, then weaves them into a dazzling swarm. Hoang models her postcolonial bestiary on the Chinese zodiac—“A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats./ You desire the human equivalent”—and uses it to represent such concepts as fidelity, beauty, and “the disgust of desire.” In doing so, she confronts such topics as feminine subjection, familial suffering due to assimilation (“‘Vietnamese women suffer better than all other people,’ my mother used to tell me”), and a sister’s addiction and death with a precision that is by turns vulnerable and justly incensed. Hoang subverts the moralizing tendencies of folklore to form a new hybrid mythology that, like all belief systems, reassures the believer—and the reader—that human vu

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is Pulitzer Prize winners, and we have Utah Humanities' Cynthia Buckingham with us to revisit our discussions with Annette Gordon-Reed, John Luther Adams, Ken Armstrong, and Pat Bagely.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is fun and music, and we have Dr. Lynne McNeill with us to revisit our episodes on Sherlock Holmes, Mormon naming practices, and the band Evening in Brazil.