Access Utah

In his book, “The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society,” Notre Dame History Professor Brad Gregory shows how the unsolved doctrinal disagreements and religious and political conflicts of 16th- and 17th-century Europe continue to influence American political, social, intellectual, and economic life today. He asks what propelled the West into a trajectory of pluralism, polarization and consumerism, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past. Brad Gregory, a USU alumnus, returns to Logan to give a presentation in the Tanner Talks series from the USU College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The talk is Friday at noon in USU Library room 101.

On today's Encore presentation of Access Utah, Sheri Quinn meets with Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, a group of over 300 medical doctors, last year declared an air-pollution public health emergency on Capitol Hill. The problem has been so bad that it drew a crowd of about 5,000 citizens to the State Capitol in late January, now regarded as the largest air-pollution-specific protest in U.S. history. Today, Dr. Roger Coulombe, professor of Toxicology at Utah State University, talks to Sheri Quinn about the side effects of bad in Cache Valley.

Political satirist and “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” panelist, P.J. O’Rourke, trains his eye on his own generation in his new book, “THE BABY BOOM: How It Got That Way…And It Wasn’t My Fault…And I’ll Never Do It Again.” O’Rourke writes, “Yes, we’re spoiled rotten. We’re self-absorbed. And it seems like we’ll never shut up. But the boomers made a better world for everyone else. You’re welcome.” P.J. O'Rourke’s books include “Don’t Vote,” “Parliament of Whores,” “Give War a Chance,” “Eat the Rich,” “The CEO of the Sofa,” “Peace Kills” and “On the Wealth of Nation.”

U. S. House Republican Leaders recently outlined principles they believe should be followed in any overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws. This has raised hopes that immigration reform might move forward in Congress. What you think: Path to citizenship? Increased border security? What’s needed most? Or should this issue not be a priority? Do you have a personal experience or concern regarding immigration? We’ll be talking to members of the group: Bibles Badges and Business for Immigration Reform, Pastor of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church Steve Klemz and Immigration Attorney Timothy Wheelwright.

This is an encore presentation of Access Utah, originally broadcast in May 2013.

Dr. Vernon L. Smith was teaching at Purdue in 1955 when he decided to test out an approach he hoped would help his students better understand how the marketplace functions. He conducted a classroom experiment that had half his students selling fictitious goods to the other students who were acting as buyers. That led to his research in experimental economics which eventually won him the Nobel Prize in 2002.

For the first fourteen years of their marriage, Utah residents Curtis and Pauline Hansen had it all--laughter, babies, vacations, and ball games--but the nine years that follow define their future, and it all begins with a dream. Curtis believes his dream to be direct revelation that they will receive a very large sum of money, but to receive it, they must play and win what is revealed to Curtis as The Game, a test to prove their faithfulness to each other.

The title of a recent rally at the State Capitol aptly describes the feelings of many Utahns: “Clean Air, No Excuses.” We’re going to open the phones and email to you on Tuesday’s AU to tell us what your experience has been with this bad air. And: how do we solve the problem? What to do in the meantime? We’ll also be talking with rally organizer, Carl Ingwell; and with members of the newly-formed Clean Air Caucus of the Utah Legislature. We’ll talk with Representatives Ed Redd and Patrice Arent.

On the opening day of the 2014 Utah Legislature we’re at the State Capitol. We’ll speak with Utah Governor Gary Herbert; Senate Majority Leader Ralph Okerlund; Senate Minority Leader Gene Davis; House Majority Leader Brad Dee; and House Assistant Minority Whip Rebecca Chavez-Houck. We’ll discuss air quality, education, the economy, Medicaid expansion, the budget and more.

Welcome to Access Utah. The Utah State University Science Unwrapped series this winter and spring focuses on "SuperPower Scientists." Today on the program, Sheri Quinn talks to tonight's featured speaker astro-physicist Lucianne Walkowicz about NASA's Kepler Mission and the search for planets.

Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day; so designated because January 27, 1945 was the day that the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet troops. We’ll mark the occasion on Thursday by revisiting a conversation with Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor and victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Mengele was given the name “Angel of Death,” because of his position as a SS physician in charge of selecting which new prisoners of the camp would be killed or selected for forced labor. Kor and her sister launched a search for other twins who survived Mengele’s experiments and located 122 individual survivors.

M. B. McLatchey is recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award for “The Lame God,” a collection of powerful poems on a very sensitive subject: the kidnap and murder of a young girl. Using the art of poetry she gives voice to a suffering—and a love—that might otherwise go unheard. Philip Brady says of this collection, “in magisterial cadences, this powerful poetic sequence gives voice to the unspeakable and transposes profound grief into immortal song. McLatchey's poems are talismans and spells--not against loss but against forgetting.

Jared Farmer’s new book is “Trees in Paradise: A California History.” We’ll also talk about Utah history, and Farmer will offer his list of iconic Utah trees as well. California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It's the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built the lucrative "Orange Empire" on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel, an industrial fruit. They lined their streets with graceful palms to announce that they were not in the Midwest anymore.

In 2011, with U.S.–Iran relations at a thirty-year low, Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd decided to take his blonde, blue-eyed Midwestern wife Karri and his infant son Khash from their Brooklyn neighborhood to spend a year in the land of his birth. “The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay” traces their domestic adventures and tracks the political drama of a terrible year for Iran's government. The Green Movement had been crushed, but the regime was on edge, anxious lest democratic protests resurge. International sanctions were dragging down the economy while talk of war with the West grew. Hooman Majd was there for all of it. It was to be a year of discovery for Majd, too, who had only lived in Iran as a child.

It’s all there in “Latter-day Lore: Mormon Folklore Studies” (from University of Utah Press) -- The Three Nephites, The Beehive, Creative Date Invitations, BYU Coed Jokes, The Folklore of Mormon Missionaries, The Apocalypse, and more. “Latter-day Lore” explores society, symbols, and landscape of regional culture; formative customs and traditions; the sacred and the supernatural; pioneers, heroes, and the historical imagination; humor; and the international contexts of Mormon folklore.

Utah State University ecologist Daniel McGlinn was part of a research team that created the largest evolutionary "time-tree" of plants. This tree is helping scientists understand how plants evolved to tolerate frigid winter temperatures. Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to McGlinn about the project and his field of study macro-ecology.

It’s been an eventful few weeks: First, a federal judge struck down Utah’s laws against gay marriage, including Constitutional Amendment 3, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. More than a thousand gay and lesbian couples were married across the state. Then, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay as the ruling was appealed to the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now Governor Herbert has announced that Utah will not recognize marriages performed during that window.

A group called the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) says that In light of Utah’s growing air quality concerns and the real and potential effects of climate instability, the time to act is now. The purposes of Citizens Climate Lobby are: 1) to create the political will for a stable climate; and 2) to empower individuals to have breakthroughs in exercising their personal and political power They engage in non-partisan lobbying for a gradually increasing tax on carbon-based fuels with all revenues returned as a dividend to households, as a way to drive our economy away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy.

“The gap between rich and poor has never been wider . . . legislative stalemate paralyzes the country . . . corporations resist federal regulations . . . spectacular mergers produce giant companies . . . the influence of money in politics deepens . . . bombs explode in crowded streets . . . small wars proliferate far from our shores . . . a dizzying array of inventions speeds the pace of daily life.” Headlines like these were characteristic of America’s Progressive era, that tumultuous time in the early 1900s when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air.

Why is it so hard to define folklore? Lynne McNeill, in her new book from USU Press “Folklore Rules,” says “...well you try to explain what a creation myth, a jump-rope rhyme, a Fourth of July BBQ, & some bathroom graffiti have in common and you’ll find it’s not a terribly easy task either.”