Access Utah

“Oceans are a sonic symphony. Sound is essential to the survival and prosperity of marine life. But man-made ocean noise is threatening this fragile world.” So say the producers of a documentary film, “Sonic Sea,” which takes us beneath the ocean’s surface to uncover the consequences of increased ocean noise pollution, including the mass stranding of whales around the planet, and looks at what can be done to stop it.

"Nine Mile Canyon's role in the Old West--a story of fur trappers and miners, ranchers and homesteaders, cattle barons and barkeeps, outlaws and bounty hunters Nine Mile Canyon is famous the world over for its prehistoric art images and remnants of ancient Fremont farmers. But it also teems with Old West history that is salted with iconic figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Last Chance Byway lays out this newly told story of human endeavor and folly in a place historians have long ignored. The history of Nine Mile Canyon is not so much a story of those who lived and died there as it is of those whose came with dreams and left broke and disillusioned, although there were exceptions. Sam Gilson, the irascible U.S. marshal and famed polygamist hunter, became wealthy speculating in a hydrocarbon substance bearing his name, Gilsonite, a form of asphalt. The famed African American Buffalo Soldiers constructed a freight road through the canyon that for a time turned the Nine Mile Road into one o

Two leaders in the Cache County Republican Party have resigned from the party over presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump. In a letter to members of the Cache County Republican Party Executive Committee, Andy Rasmussen and Jonathan Choate say, "The decision by the Executive Committee to take no public action disavowing our presidential nominee has left us in a difficult position...Donald Trump is directly antithetical to nearly every traditional Republican value...His unapologetic racism, xenophobia, and misogyny disqualify him from consideration as a precinct chair, let alone the presidency.”

When Bloomberg Businessweek told him it was going to give him the whole magazine to write a single article about computer programming, Paul Ford, a soft-spoken programmer and writer, sat on his couch with a pillow over his head and just let out a long “aaaaaaahhhhh,” like he had just stuck his finger on the ‘A’ key. Ford’s piece started out as a 2,000-, then 4,000-word piece. It grew much longer from there, demanding the efforts of a team of editors, graphic artists and web developers to make it what it is now: An interactive primer that not only teaches how computers process code, but commits code as part of its narrative. This turned into “What Is Code?”

The acclaimed author of “Refuge” and “When Women Were Birds” and many others is one of the most thought provoking and articulate people you’ll meet and an hour with her is unfailingly interesting.

At twenty-two, Judith Freeman was working in the LDS Church-owned department store in the Utah town where she'd grown up. In the process of divorcing the man she had married at seventeen, she was living in her parents' house with her four-year old son, who had already endured two heart surgeries. She had abandoned Mormonism, the faith into which she had been born, and she was having an affair with her son's surgeon, a married man with three children of his own. It was at this fraught moment that she decided to become a writer.

With this episode we inaugurate a new series on AU: Our Favorite Books:

The monthly DOCUTAH@TheELECTRIC series presents a film of particular interest to the four state Southwestern community and the Native American reservations in the area. It tells the story of the haunting consequences of the invention of the atomic bomb and the man who led the development teams. "The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer & The Atomic Bomb," will be presented Friday evening, June 24th in St. George Utah.

There exists a category of American cities in which the line between suburban and urban is almost impossible to locate. These suburban cities arose in the last half of twentieth-century America, based largely on the success of the single-family home, shopping centers, and the automobile. The low-density, auto-centric development of suburban cities, which are largely in the arid West, presents challenges for urban sustainability as it is traditionally measured. Yet, some of these cities—Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake, Dallas, Tucson, San Bernardino, and San Diego—continue to be among the fastest growing places in the United States.

In his new book, Apocalyptic Anxiety: Religion, Science, and America’s Obsession with the End of the World” (University Press of Colorado), Anthony Aveni explores why Americans take millennial claims seriously, where and how end-of-the-world predictions emerge, how they develop within a broader historical framework, and what we can learn from doomsday predictions of the past.

It's an Access Utah tradition. Every year we gather with members of the band Evening in Brazil in UPR's studio C to enjoy some great Bossa Nova and Samba.

As a part of a new series of events called ARTLandish: Land Art, Landscape, and the Environment, presented by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, a Land Writers Panel will be held on June 16 at 7:00 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Public Library, Main Library. This moderated panel of scholars and Utah-based creative writers will explore the relationship between man and nature in the literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

According to NPR, a gunman opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida early Sunday morning, killing 49 people and leaving 53 more wounded, in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history before being shot dead by police. The case is being treated as a terrorist investigation.

It was a meme before meme was a thing. Pulitzer prize-winning author, Idaho native, and Harvard Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich observed in 1976 in her first scholarly paper (on funeral sermons for women) that “well-behaved women seldom make history.” The comment became a popular slogan appearing on t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, greeting cards, websites and blogs. In her book by the same title (2007), Ulrich explains how the phenomenon happened and what it means by looking back at women of the past who challenged the way history was written. The women she writes about range from the fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan, who wrote “The Book of the City of Ladies,” to the twentieth century’s Virginia Woolf, author of “A Room of One's Own.” Ulrich updates their attempts to reimagine female possibilities and looks at the women who didn't try to make history but did. And she concludes by showing how the 1970s activists who created "second-wave feminism" also created a renaissance in the study of history

Eileen Hallet Stone is out with a second collection from her popular Salt Lake Tribune “Living History” column. In “Historic Tales of Utah” (The History Press), Stone tells many of the stories of Utah: “Big Bill” Haywood, vilified by the New York Times as “the most feared figure in America,” women bruised on the front lines of suffrage battles, Chinese “paper sons and daughters,” heroic Northern Ute firefighters, downtown Salt Lake City’s “Wall Street of the West,” the off-road cyclist known as the “Bedouin of the Desert,” and Utah’s love affair with sweets.

In "Ongoingness: The End of a Diary" Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. She says she wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened. But she was terrified that she might forget something, she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now 800,000 words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time.

Sherman Alexie is a major voice in contemporary American literature. He is the author of twenty books including “Reservation Blues” and “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.” The award-winning, and widely banned, young adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” won him the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

For Meridian Wallace—and many other smart, driven women of the 1940s—being ambitious meant being an outlier. Ever since she was a young girl, Meridian had been obsessed with birds, and she was determined to get her PhD, become an ornithologist, and make her mother’s sacrifices to send her to college pay off. But she didn’t expect to fall in love with her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he’s recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him.

Let’s imagine a man called Captain Tom Barnes, aka BA5799, who’s leading British troops in the war zone. And two boys growing up together in that war zone, sharing a prized bicycle and flying kites before finding themselves estranged once foreign soldiers appear in their countryside. And then there’s the man who trains one of them to fight against the other’s father and all these infidel invaders. Then imagine the family and friends who radiate out from these lives, people on all sides of this conflict where virtually everyone is caught up in the middle of something unthinkable.

Eric Nuzum is afraid of the supernatural, and for good reason: As a high school oddball in Canton, Ohio, during the early 1980s, he became convinced that he was being haunted by the ghost of a little girl in a blue dress who lived in his parents’ attic. It began as a weird premonition during his dreams, something that his quickly diminishing circle of friends chalked up as a way to get attention. It ended with Nuzum in a mental ward, having apparently destroyed his life before it truly began. The only thing that kept him from the brink: his friendship with a girl named Laura, a classmate who was equal parts devoted friend and enigmatic crush. With the kind of strange connection you can only forge when you’re young, Laura walked Eric back to “normal”—only to become a ghost herself in a tragic twist of fate.