Access Utah

This campaign season has been extraordinary, and the show is coming to Utah, with caucuses on Tuesday and a Republican presidential debate that was scheduled for Salt Lake City and is now canceled.

How did early American writers think about the spaces around them? Today on Access Utah we’re talking about regions—imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively—and the roles these regions played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined.

In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians.

Pulitzer prize winning New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg joins Tom Williams for Access Utah. Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit” explored the science of habit formation in our lives, companies, and society. His new book “Smarter Faster Better” explores the science of productivity. Duhigg says that in today’s world, it’s more important to manage how you think, rather than what you think. This episode of Access Utah is a part of the Pulitzer Prize Centennial Campfires Initiative in partnership with Utah Humanities, the Salt Lake Tribune, and KCPW.

From the extra pounds and unrelenting bullies that left her eating lunch alone in a bathroom stall at school to the low self-esteem that left her both physically and emotionally vulnerable to abuse, Jasmin Singer’s struggle with weight defined her life.

Some people love it, some people hate it. Like it or not, on Sunday, daylight saving time (DST) begins in Utah. Tuesday on Access Utah we’re going to revisit an episode from December 2014.

Should Utah abolish the death penalty? Sen. Steve Urquhart, R-St. George, says yes. His SB 189 has passed the Utah Senate and now goes to the House as we head into the last week of the 2016 Utah Legislature. Gov. Gary Herbert is among those maintaining support for the death penalty.

In essays that combine memoir with biography of place, Kevin Holdsworth creates a public history of the land he calls home: Good Water, Utah. The high desert of south-central Utah is at the heart of the stories he tells - about the people, the “survivors and casualties” of the small, remote town - and is at the heart of his own story.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives. For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the grief and shame of that day.

“It’s a sight Utahns are all too familiar with -- gray, smoggy air filled with dangerous particulate matter. Officials say sensitive groups like children and the elderly should be especially cautious during times of inversion. During red air days the air is unhealthy for everyone. We know this. So why do we continue driving to work? Why do we idle our cars, contributing to the problem?”

In his new collection of essays “Sublime Physick,” Patrick Madden seeks what is common and ennobling among seemingly disparate, even divisive, subjects, ruminating on midlife, time, family, forgiveness, loss, originality, a Canadian rock band, and more, discerning the ways in which the natural world transcends and joins the realm of ideas (sublime) through the application of a meditative mind.

Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Holladay, is sponsoring HB221, which would preserve parents' rights to exempt their children from immunizations but would require those parents to watch an educational video to receive the exemption.

Great Old Broads for Wilderness began in 1989 on the 25th anniversary of the Wilderness Act by a feisty bunch of lady hikers who wanted to refute Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s notion that wilderness is inaccessible to elders. About that time, wilderness designation had been proposed for Escalante, and Senator Hatch opposed it, saying, “if for no other reason, we need roads for the aged and infirm.”

This episode originally aired in July, 2015.

Nancy Gonlin, Professor of Anthropology at Bellevue College says that “Without electrical lighting to guide the way, our ancestors in the ancient world experienced night very differently than we do today...As light pollution continues to dissipate the darkness for us modern humans—changing, for example, our perception of the stars—the urgency to document the history of human experience from dusk till dawn has never been greater.”

West Valley City Police Chief Lee Russo says that for a long time, police officers went to the scene of domestic violence calls and treated them in a "mechanical way." They would ask for the facts — the who, what, and where — and then move on. But, Russo says, that type of investigation wasn't doing much to help the victims and the officers oftentimes failed to recognize that behind a physically abused victim, there was a psychologically abused person, as well. In January, his officers began using the Lethality Assessment Protocol (LAP) program to help connect domestic violence victims to resources that can help them.

Journalist Judy Muller says that at a time when mainstream news media are hemorrhaging and doomsayers are predicting the death of journalism, we can take heart: the First Amendment is alive and well in small towns across America.

By the late 1800s, Native American culture was under attack from a variety of sectors. As westward expansion continued, the U.S. government adopted a policy to the eradicate culture, language and spirituality of America’s indigenous people by taking children from their families, isolating them, and forcing them to deny their heritage. The policy of assimilation transported the children to boarding schools for cultural transformation. Everything Native was to be stripped away. The goal was integration into Anglo society. Their language, as their culture, was to be “unspoken.”

John Palfrey, founding president of the Digital Public Library of America and a director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, recently told the Deseret News that he has “been struck by the number of times people tell [him] that they think libraries are less important than they were before, now that we have the Internet and Google. He says he thinks “just the opposite: Libraries are more important, not less important, and both as physical and virtual entities, than they’ve been in the past.” John Palfrey, author of the new book "BiblioTECH: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google," joins Tom Williams to discuss the future of the library on Thursday’s Access Utah.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, “in what they characterized as a sweeping gesture of compromise, Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz unveiled their plan to resolve decades of deadlock over how eastern Utah's public lands are managed even as environmental and tribal groups declared the proposal "dead on arrival" and a shameless giveaway to oil and gas interests.” The bill “would set aside special landscapes like Cedar Mesa, San Rafael Swell and Labyrinth Canyon, while expediting mineral development in areas deemed less worthy of protection.”