Access Utah

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.

UPR listeners are avid readers, so our periodic question to you isn’t if you’re reading, but what are you reading? We hope you’ll share your booklist with us and we’ll compile a UPR list and post it on www.upr.org You can share your booklist by email to upraccess@gmail.com or on Twitter @upraccess. We’re also asking if you have any suggestions for beach or camping or summertime reading. And what do your children read during the summertime? Elaine Thatcher will join Tom Williams in studio for the hour and we’ll be talking with Betsy Burton from The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City and Andy Nettell from Back of Beyond Books in Moab.

With wildfires raging in Utah and other areas, we’ll turn to writer Gary Ferguson for a timely discussion about wildfires on Monday’s Access Utah. Wildfire season is burning longer and hotter, affecting more and more people, especially in the west. Ferguson’s book Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West explores the science behind this phenomenon and the ongoing research to find a solution and details how years of fire suppression and chronic drought have combined to make the situation so dire. Ferguson also brings to life the extraordinary efforts of those responsible for fighting wildfires, and explains how nature reacts in the aftermath of flames.

In The Evolution of Beauty, Richard O. Prum’s award-winning career as an ornithologist and his lifelong passion for bird-watching come together in a thrilling intellectual adventure. Scientific dogma holds that every detail of an animal’s mating displays—every spot on the peacock’s tail—is an advertisement of its genetic material superiority to potential mates. But thirty years of research and fieldwork around the world led Prum to question this idea. Deep in tropical jungles are birds with dizzying array of plumages, songs, and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, and Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. Many such traits struck Prum as out-landishly unlikely to provide practical information.

Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate have delayed a vote on their Obamacare repeal bill (the Better Care Reconciliation Act) until after the 4th of the July recess.

The 2017 Bennion Teacher Workshop and Literature of Protest: Civil Rights, Democracy, Social Justice is ongoing at USU. Sponsored by: The Mountain West Center for Regional Studies Utah State University.

Across Utah, nearly 70 mentally ill men and women who are supposed to be receiving mental health treatment are instead trapped in jail cells. They're getting sicker. They're being released without treatment. They're dying.

According to Colin Dickey, author of the forthcoming book about conspiracy theories called “The Unidentified,” such theories appear and spread at moments of upheaval and cultural anxiety. Dickey, writing recently in The New Republic magazine, examines the rise of conspiracy theories, long thought to be more the province of the right wing, on the left in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as president. We’ll ask what it means that the president himself has dabbled in conspiracy theories and has applauded such figures as Alex Jones. And we’ll investigate the what, why, where, when, and how of conspiracy theories with Colin Dickey, next time on Access Utah.

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny.

Craig Jessop, Dean of Utah State University’s Caine College of the Arts, Director of the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra, and former Music Director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, has led an interesting life in the arts. He’ll join us today to talk about USU’s Year of the Arts which begins this month.

Cory Christiansen is a recording artist, writer, educator and performer. He has played and taught around the globe for the last decade alongside the likes of Dr. Lonnie Smith, Vic Juris, Danny Gottlieb, Jeff Coffin, James Moody, Steve Houghton, Jeremy Allen and other jazz greats. His last recording, "Lone Prairie" received critical acclaim for its blending of jazz, rock, blues and music of the American Frontier.

It’s Summertime! The kids are out of school and life slows down for some of us and speeds up for others. Trips to favorite vacation spots and into the backcountry ramp up. Today on Access Utah, we came together as a UPR community to share ideas for summertime trips, activities, traditions and stories.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has released his interim report on Bears Ears National Monument.