Access Utah

This lushly illustrated history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

Consider the $20 bill. It has no more value, as a simple slip of paper, than Monopoly money. Yet even children recognize that tearing one into small pieces is an act of inconceivable stupidity. What makes a $20 bill actually worth twenty dollars? In the third volume of his best-selling Naked series, Charles Wheelan uses this seemingly simple question to open the door to the surprisingly colorful world of money and banking.

The New York Times calls A Raisin in the Sun “the play that changed American theater forever.” In this play, Hansberry - a pioneering, female, African-American playwright - covers issues of racism, discrimination, generational clashes, civil rights, and the women’s movement through the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family. The Younger family’s heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration.

USA Today reports, "The firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel who risked their lives answering the call on Sept.11, 2001, may finally be getting the rescue they've been demanding. The Senate Tuesday is expected to pass a bill that would replenish a compensation fund set up shortly after the 2001 terror attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon to compensate first responders who suffered illnesses, injuries and other medical problems as a result of the attacks."

In late July 1776, fathers Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Francisco Vélez de Escalante set out from Santa Fe to chart a route to the new Spanish missions in California. The Fransiscans planned to scout the country for mineral wealth and locate the Ute and Navajo tribes for conversion. In present- day Utah, however, the dangers of starvation and hypothermia forced them to turn back. By November the friars were reduced to survival mode: stymied by the raging Colorado River, they had to kill their horses for food. At last they succeeded in fording the river at a place later known as “Crossing of the Fathers.”

Utah State University was awarded a $500,000 three-year Farmers Market Promotion Program grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The grant will fund a variety of capacity-building, outre

The Tribal and Rural Opioid Initiative was launched by Utah State University Extension in 2018 in an effort to provide effective resources to address opioid use among rural Utahns. The initiative team is working to combat the effects of opioid misuse through prevention, recovery and treatment, with a primary focus on stigma reduction education. Today on Access Utah we preview the summit.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America’s conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten—an omission that John Taliaferro’s commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair.

We’ve all heard the terms ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ agriculture, but what do those descriptions really mean?

Gary Paul Nabhan is an Agricultural Ecologist, Ethnobotanist, Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, and author whose work has focused primarily on the interaction of biodiversity and cultural diversity of the arid binational Southwest. He is considered a pioneer in the local food movement and the heirloom seed saving movement.

When we encounter conflict with another culture, we get confused, frustrated, offended, or even angry.

For those who go in search of the isolation, silence and adventure of wild places it is―perhaps ironically―to the man-made shelters that they need to head; the outposts: bothies, bivouacs, cabins and huts. In his new book “Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth,” Dan Richards says that part of their allure is their simplicity: enough architecture to shelter from the weather but not so much as to distract from the immediate environment around.

For 12,000 years, people have left a rich record of their experiences in Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. In The Capitol Reef Reader, award-winning author and photographer Stephen Trimble collects the best of this writing—160 years worth of words that capture the spirit of the park and its surrounding landscape in personal narratives, philosophical riffs, and historic and scientific records.

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.