Access Utah

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.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is current events, and we have Teri Guy and Candi Carter Olson with us to revisit our episodes on the designation of Bears Ears National Monument, fake news and journalism, and Donald Trump's first executive order on refugees.

This week, we are searching through the archives and bringing you the best of Access Utah. Today our theme is race relations, and we have Dr. Jason Gilmore with us to revisit our episode on the Colin Kaepernick controversy and our discussions with Angela Pulley Hudson and Paul Reeve.

Historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was recently on the USU campus to give a talk presented by the USU History Department and sponsored by the Tanner Talks Series in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Public radio’s Dr. Zorba Paster is in Logan for several events presented by UPR and he’ll join us for the hour today to talk about healthy living, the latest medical science, and to answer your questions.

We’ll celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, a day early, with folklorist Lisa Gabbert, who says “Over time, St. Patrick’s Day has become a very American holiday; today, it is largely a festive rite of spring—green being the appropriate spring color—characterized by the performance of “Irishness” through the use of (often stereotyped) symbols. Many people, not merely those with ancestral connections to Ireland, enjoy “being Irish” for the day, as it is a way to celebrate Irish music and culture, along with better weather.” We’ll ask why is this unofficial holiday so popular in the U.S. And we want to know your St. Patrick’s Day traditions. Do you wear green? Do you eat corned beef and cabbage? What else do you do?

Republicans in Congress are attempting to keep their long-standing promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They say the ACA is a disaster and likely to implode. Democrats warn that millions of people will lose access to affordable health care if the repeal passes. We’re going to talk about it on Access Utah today. What should our health care system look like? Is healthcare a right? Is the ACA a massive deficit-busting entitlement program? If you prefer a more market-based system how would that work? How do we promote a system that reduces costs and expands coverage?

Our guest for the hour is Kenneth Woodward, author of “Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama” Kenneth Woodward edited Newsweek’s Religion section from 1964 until his retirement in 2002. He remained a contributing editor at Newsweek until 2009. Altogether he has written more than a thousand essays, articles and reviews for a variety of magazines, newspapers and scholarly publications. Getting Religion is a culmination of that work and tells the story of how American religion, culture, and politics influenced one another in the second half of the twentieth century and offers portraits of many of the era’s major figures and their impact on religion in America. Beginning with a reassessment of the fifties, the narrative weaves through the Civil Rights era and the movements that followed in its wake.

Our guest for the hour on Monday’s Access Utah is Cheryl Strayed, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir “Wild,” the New York Times bestsellers “Tiny Beautiful Things” and “Brave Enough,” and the novel “Torch.”

Our guest for the hour today is Brooke Williams, author most recently of Open Midnight:

A Republican party official in Wasatch County recently criticized a bill that addresses a pay gap in the workforce. According to the Washington Post, James Green “said that men have traditionally earned more than women and, citing ‘simple economics,’ argued that things should stay that way.” Green’s letter to the editor, published in two Utah newspapers, produced a backlash and prompted him to write an apology and resign as vice chair of the Wasatch County Republican Party.

Jennifer Sinor is the author of Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe, a collection of essays inspired by the letters of the American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe and Ordinary Trauma, a memoir of her military childhood told through linked flash nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She is also the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, a book about the diary of her great, great, great aunt, a woman who homesteaded the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. All of her books work to reveal the extraordinary possibilities that arise in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

Natalie Andrews, a Wall Street Journal social media editor and reporter, will give a talk today at USU as a part of the Morris Media & Society Lecture Series, which is facilitated by Utah State’s Department of Journalism and Communication. Here’s how the department describes the talk: “It's now clear that we live in an era of fake news, troll tweets and email dumps. So what does that mean for media, our democracy and our future? Natalie Andrews will discuss the role of the press in the 2016 election — and what the results of that election portend for the intertwined futures of journalism and democracy. Andrews, who graduated from the Department of Journalism and Communication at Utah State University in 2006 and served as KSL's social media director from 2011 to 2014, will seek put the Donald Trump “phenomenon” into historical context en route a clearer understanding of the future.”