Access Utah

Alyson Hagy’s latest novel "Boleto," explores the themes of men and horses, the American West, and the dream of a ticket out. The protagonist Will Testerman is a young Wyoming horse trainer determined to make something of himself. Money is tight at the family ranch, where he's living again after a disastrous end to his job on the Texas show-horse circuit.

USU graduate student Andrew Durso thinks snakes get a bad wrap and is working hard to change their bad reputation with his online blog titled “Life is short but snakes are long.” He has garnered an online following including editors of the magazine “Scientific American.” This Monday, Dec. 9, he is co-hosting a Blog Carnival in recognition of the year of the snake. Sheri Quinn talks to Durso about his reptile research and online success.

Craig Anderson, a resident of St. George Utah and native of Cache Valley, had a long career with the United States Agency for International Development as an agricultural specialist.

Meet Don Tillman, hero of Graeme Simsion’s new novel “The Rosie Project.” Don Tillman is a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Rosie Jarman is all these things.

Sherri Mills has been a hairdresser for more than forty-five years. She has had her own salon long enough to see life happen before her very eyes. She has listened to real-life problems and followed real-life outcomes—successes and failures—and through several generations, longer and more extensively than marriage counselors can.

Generations of Ogdenites have grown up absorbing 25th Street’s legends of corruption, menace, and depravity. The rest of Utah has tended to judge Ogden—known in its first century as a “gambling hell” and tenderloin, and in recent years as a degraded skid row—by the street’s gaudy reputation. Present-day Ogden embraces the afterglow of 25th Street’s decadence and successfully promotes it to tourists. In the same preservationist spirit as Denver’s Larimer Square, today’s 25th Street is home to art galleries, fine dining, live theater, street festivals, mixed-use condominiums, and the Utah State Railroad Museum.

Australian fingerstyle guitarist Adam Miller included Logan among his stops on a recent American tour. He stopped by the UPR studios to talk about finding just the right sound in a guitar; to describe his travels--including to Afghanistan to play for the troops there; and, of course, to play us a few songs, including “Carpal Tunnel Blues,” (Miller has battled the malady,) and a tune written during his wedding speech. Logan-based guitar maker, Ryan Thorell, joins in the conversation to describe his craft.

StoryCorps promotes the day after Thanksgiving as a National Day of Listening, calling listening the least expensive but most meaningful gift you can give this holiday season.

Many of us remember where we were the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of that tragic event. We’re going to open up the phone lines to you on Thursday’s Access Utah from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. to express your memories, thoughts and feelings.

In “The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease,” Daniel E. Lieberman—chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University — explains how the human body evolved over millions of years and shows how the increasing disparity between the adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world has led to a paradox: we are living longer but are increasingly prone to chronic disease.

It’s been almost 20 years since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and parts of Idaho and placed on the endangered species list. At the time, advocates said wolves were a vital link in the natural ecosystem. Worried about the effect of wolves on their livelihoods, ranchers and hunters protested the reintroduction, some even filing lawsuits.

If the Colorado River stopped flowing, the water in its reservoirs might hold out for three or four years, but then it would be necessary to abandon most of southern California and Arizona, and much of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. For the entire American Southwest the Colorado is the river of life, which makes it all the more tragic and ironic that by the time it approaches its final destination, it has been reduced to a shadow upon the sand.

The Food Safety Modernization Act is the first major update of federal food safety laws since 1938. FSMA gives the FDA new abilities to prevent food safety problems, detect and respond to food safety issues, and improve the safety of imported foods. The act is geared to help prevent the outbreaks of food-borne illnesses that are on the rise-- though seldom traced back to small local producers.

Utah State University alumnus Lars Peter Hansen is one of three Americans recently named as a recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. Professor Hansen, a Cache Valley native who now teaches at the University of Chicago, will share his feelings on winning the Nobel Prize and discuss his research. He will also discuss the recent housing bubble, and government regulation of markets.

Today we revisit our conversation with Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Guns, Germs and Steel,” “Collapse,” and other books, joins Tom Williams to discuss his latest: “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?” which is now out in paperback.

A series of Tanner Talks continues at USU on Wednesday with a panel discussion called “Community and the Demise of Local Newspapers.” Media veterans will offer their insights, concerns, warnings and prognostications as local newspapers struggle and community news evolves. Organizer and Assistant Professor in the USU Department of Journalism and Communication Matthew LaPlante, quoted in USU Today, said “I love newspapers. That’s where I come from but we have to start opening up people to the idea that, yes, there are things that we are losing as local newspapers decline. But this also gives us an opportunity to redefine the ways we communicate in our communities.”

On Veterans Day we consider the problems of returning military veterans and how we can help.Joining us are Matthew LaPlante, USU Assistant Professor of Journalism, and U. S. Navy veteran, who covered veterans issues for the Salt Lake Tribune for 7 years; former Executive Director at the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs, and U. S. Army veteran, Terry Schow; Public Affairs Officer for the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and veteran, Jill Atwood; and former US Army Captain Stacy Bare, Director of Sierra Club Outdoors Mission, an initiative to reconnect Americans, veterans in particular, to the outdoors and to use nature to facilitate reintegration.

The Food and Drug Administration is accepting public comments for the proposed Food Safety Modernization Act, through November 15, 2013. In its current form the rule, if passed, could cost farmers thousands of dollars every week or month. Farmers will have to comply with new regulations such as mandatory weekly water testing and treatment, wildlife monitoring and rigorous manure and composting standards. It threatens the subsistence of small, local farms with small profits, at a time when they are on the rise across the U.S. In her continuing series called Farm Action, Sheri Quinn profiles a California sustainable farm in the Making. It is an agricultural recipe for growing your own farm from scratch.

During the period of October 1, 2000 to April 30, 2013 the remains of 2,541 migrants who had crossed the U.S./Mexico border illegally, were recovered from Cochise, Pima and Yuma counties in Arizona, according to the AZ Daily Star Recovered Human Remains Project. In order to store the bodies, Pima County installed a second morgue refrigerator. They call it the Second Cooler.

Nicholas Basbanes, author of a trilogy on all things book-related including “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books,” is out with a new book: “On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand Year History,” in which he considers everything from paper’s invention in China two thousand years ago, which revolutionized human civilization, to its crucial role in the unfolding of historical events, political scandals, and sensational trials: from the American Revolution to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate.