Access Utah

The Women’s March on Washington organization estimates that more than more than 1,300,000 people will participate in the Women’s March on Washington or in one of the estimated 600 sister marches happening on January 21 or in the days following. (The Women’s March on Utah State Capitol is January 23).

VidAngel is Provo-based streaming service that lets viewers set custom filters to screen out content they might not like or find objectionable. VidAngel CEO Neal Harmon says that VidAngel honors two sides of a libertarian coin. “We agree with Hollywood that the director should have the right to determine how their work is performed in a public setting. That’s free speech. That’s everything America’s about. [But] once you take something into your own home, it makes sense that nobody has the right to tell you how to consume something in your own home.” Several Hollywood studios have sued VidAngel and a judge has granted a preliminary injunction against the company. In the meantime there’s a petition http://savefiltering.nationbuilder.com/ going around to ‘#SaveFiltering’ and VidAngel has crowdsourced more than 10 million dollars to help pay for their lawsuit

In his new book “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World,” Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change, and that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

There are many needs in our communities, and there are dedicated individuals and nonprofits working to meet those needs. They sometimes don’t get the recognition they deserve, and you may want to help but don’t know where and how. On the next Access Utah we’re opening the phone lines, email and Twitter to give you the opportunity to spotlight a nonprofit or individual doing good in your community.

Join us for Tuesday’s Access Utah when our topic is Fake News & Journalism in the Age of Trump.

Today we revisit our conversation from October with Rita Moreno:

Nicholas Carr started his blog “Rough Type” in 2005, when MySpace was a fast-growing social networking site and Facebook was a Palo Alto startup. Now in his book “Utopia Is Creepy and Other Provocations,” he has collected the best of those posts and added influential essays such as “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Privacy,” which were published in such magazines and sites as The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and Politico. Carr’s favorite targets are zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools, he says, do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse.

When Michael Copperman left Stanford University for the Mississippi Delta in 2002 - recruited by Teach for America - he imagined he would lift underprivileged children from the narrow horizons of rural poverty. Well-meaning but naïve, the Asian-American from the West Coast says he soon lost his bearings in a world divided between black and white. Trying to help students, he often found he couldn’t afford to give what they required―sometimes with heartbreaking consequences.

In her TEDxUSU talk, folklorist Lynne McNeill says “When most people think of ‘folklore’ they think of the old, the rural, the rustic. They typically don’t think of the Internet, a technology that, if anything, is commonly judged to be dismantling our culture: destroying our interpersonal skills, squashing our cultural vitality, killing our individual creativity. Surprisingly, however, communications technologies like mobile phones, tablets, and computers have become the locus of a huge expanse of contemporary folk culture. Understanding the nature of folklore helps us identify the positive elements of digital culture.”

President Obama has used presidential power under the Antiquities Act to create a Bears Ears National Monument. Some are lauding this as a courageous decision which will protect vital lands. Others are calling it an arrogant act that ignores the wishes of a majority of Utahns. Today on the program we talked about this on a special two hour Access Utah. We were joined by John Kovash, Utah Public Radio's southern Utah correspondent, Chris Saeger, director of the Western Values Project, Scott Groene, Director of SUWA, John Ruple, University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law research associate professor, Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, former Ute. Tribal Councilwoman, Congressman Rob Bishop, Bob Keiter, University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law and director of the Stegner Center, and Stan Summers, Box Elder County commissioner.

We hope you'll join us for our Access Utah holiday special. Playwriter of Christmas Chronicles author Tim Slover will read poems of the season. The Lightwood Duo (Mike Christiansen and Eric Nelson) will also be in the UPR studio to play holiday music.

Today on Access Utah, we're joined by Utah State University Professor Candi Carter Olson, Hailey Hendricks, Madi Smith and Mary Kay Anderson for a panel discussion on Objectified: More than a Body, a UPR original series. In partnership with the Utah Women's Giving Circle, Utah Public Radio has presented the original radio series "Objectified: More Than A Body." This 11-episode radio program has played weekly on Utah Public Radio and has showcased the people and programs empowering Utah women and girls.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Arguably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and cost him his life.

T. J. Stiles won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America." In his biography, Stiles demolishes George Armstrong Custer’s historical caricature and says that the key to understanding Custer is that he lived on a frontier in time. In the Civil War, the West, and many areas, Custer helped to create modern America, but he could never adapt to it. He freed countless slaves, yet rejected new civil rights laws. He tried to make a fortune on Wall Street, yet never connected with the new corporate economy. Native Americans fascinated him, but he could not see them as fully human. A popular writer, he remained apart from Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and other rising intellectuals. During Custer’s lifetime, Americans saw their world remade. His admirers saw him as the embodiment of the nation’s gallant youth, of all that they were losing; his detractors despised him for resisting a more complex and promising future.

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 heroes, creating a more diverse universe.

Initially inspired by his own struggles with conflict, consultant and USU lecturer Clair Canfield is committed to changing the way people think and feel about conflict. He says, “Conflict holds up a mirror to our deepest needs and most cherished hopes and it is the doorway of opportunity for creating the change we want in our lives,” and “It is common to feel trapped and stuck when we experience conflict, but there is a way out!” His recent TEDxUSU talk is titled “The Beauty of Conflict.”

The publishers of Emma Marris’ book “Rambunctious Garden” say that “a paradigm shift is roiling the environmental world. For decades people have unquestioningly accepted the idea that our goal is to preserve nature in its pristine, pre-human state. But many scientists have come to see this as an outdated dream that thwarts bold new plans to save the environment and prevents us from having a fuller relationship with nature. Humans have changed the landscapes they inhabit since prehistory, and climate change means even the remotest places now bear the fingerprints of humanity. Emma Marris argues...that it is time to look forward and create the ‘rambunctious garden,’ a hybrid of wild nature and human management.”

Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow joins us for Thursday’s AU. In a recent column, Doctorow says that “all the data collected in giant databases today will breach someday, and when it does, it will ruin peoples’ lives. They will have their houses stolen from under them by identity thieves who forge their deeds (this is already happening); they will end up with criminal records because identity thieves will use their personal information to commit crimes (this is already happening); … they will have their devices compromised using passwords and personal data that leaked from old accounts, and the hackers will spy on them through their baby monitors, cars, set-top boxes, and medical implants (this is already happening)...” We’ll talk with Cory Doctorow about technology, privacy, and intellectual property.

UPR listeners are avid readers, so our periodic question to you isn’t if you’re reading, but what are you reading? We’re also asking if you have anything special you read for the holidays, and do you have suggestions for books to give as gifts?