Access Utah

Over the years, the Selfhelp Home in Chicago has brought together more than 1,000 refugees and Holocaust survivors under one roof. A new documentary film, "Refuge: Stories of the Selfhelp Home", features the stories of the eventual residents of Selfhelp, who spent the war years surviving by any means necessary – fleeing to the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai, hiding in the French countryside, taken in by English families as part of the Kindertransport, or as prisoners in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

The once quiet field of epigenetics is now making big waves in the biological sciences. Laboratories across the world are filling up with researchers studying the human epi-genome. It literally means above the genome. On the program, producer Sheri Quinn explores this paradigm shift in biology with German scientist Wolf Riek, recognized as a world leader in the field of epi-genetics.

A few months ago we explored the culture of hunting with Stephen Rinella author of “Meat Eater.” He asserts, as does Michael Pollan who wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma & Cooked,” that Americans are losing their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables. Hunting, Rinella argues, is intimately connected with our humanity; and assuming responsibility for acquiring the meat that we eat, rather than entrusting it to proxy executioners, processors, packagers and distributors, is one of the most respectful and exhilarating things a meat eater can do. Thursday we explored this idea from the other direction, talking about vegetarian and vegan culture with a panel of vegetarians & vegans and a former vegetarian.

The United States’ rate of incarceration is the highest in the world. Why and how did this happen? Marc Mauer’s “Race to Incarcerate,” first published in 1999, has become an important text for understanding the growth of the US prison system and a canonical work for those active in the US criminal justice reform movement. Now Sabrina Jones, a member of the World War 3 Illustrated collective and an author of politically engaged comics, has collaborated with Mauer to adapt and update the original book into a comics narrative designed to reach new audiences.

Aired: 5/10/13 We hear about the war in Afghanistan from the perspective of one of the nation's leading industrialists there until the 1980s. Author Nasser Shansab joins us to talk about his experience growing up in Afghanistan within one of the nation's most prominent families and how his forced exile influenced his unique role in the u.s us government.

The Utah Prairie Dog Recovery Implementation Program (UPDRIP) has two goals: “Recover the Utah prairie dog so that it no longer requires protection under the Endangered Species Act; and allow for existing land uses and continued growth and development within the historic range of the Utah prairie dog.” Some in the area want the process to move faster.

For decades, Walter Cronkite was known as "the most trusted man in America." Millions across the nation welcomed him into their homes, first as a print reporter for the United Press on the front lines of World War II, and later, in the emerging medium of television, as a host of numerous documentary programs and as anchor of the CBS Evening News, from 1962 until his retirement in 1981.

In the first test in the nation of an “Ag Gag” law, a Utah woman was recently charged for using her cell phone to film a slaughterhouse. Charges against Amy Meyer were subsequently dropped. Under Utah’s law (H.B. 187) passed in 2012, it is illegal to film an agricultural operation while trespassing or entering the premises on false pretenses. Meyer says that she became an animal rights activist and vegan after learning about the conditions in factory farms and that people deserve to know where their food is coming from. Supporters of the law say that these secret recordings do nothing to help the public and that if a person suspects wrongdoing at an agricultural operation the proper step is to contact law enforcement.

On Tuesday’s Access Utah we’ll revisit a conversation from January with journalist Ioan Grillo, who has written about Mexican narcotraffickers for the past decade, even interviewing members of the cartels and their death squads. He says that “El Narco is not a gang; it is a movement and an industry drawing in hundreds of thousands from bullet-ridden barrios to marijuana-growing mountains.”

As we head towards summer, we’re talking books on Monday’s Access Utah. What are you reading now? What’s on your summer reading list? We look forward to your suggestions for children, young adults and adults. Our guests will include Margaret Brennan Neville from The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Andy Nettell from Back of Beyond Books in Moab and Catherine Weller from Weller Book Works in Salt Lake City. They’ll talk about their current favorites and books being published soon that they’re excited about.

The Boy Scouts of America is proposing a compromise. They are prepared to allow gay youths to join, while continuing to bar gay leaders. BSA is preparing to vote on the proposal later this month. The plan has received the backing of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, BSA’s top sponsoring organization.

Hunter Lovins, President of Natural Capitalism Solutions, will make the business case for sustainability on Wednesday’s Access Utah. Trained as a sociologist and lawyer, Lovins is a professor of sustainable business management at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, Bard College, and Denver University. She gave the keynote address at the recent Intermountain Sustainability Summit in Ogden.

In the late 1940s Helmuth Hubener, a Mormon teenager, decided to leave Hitler’s Youth and confront the Nazi regime and his church leaders. Eventually, he was excommunicated from his church and became one of the youngest opponents of the Third Reich to be executed. We’ll examine the conflict of conscience occasioned among Mormons by the extreme circumstances of the Third Reich; and consider the question articulated by German novelist Gunther Grass: Why did [Hubener] know and I didn’t know?

One in three adults in the U. S., and one in five children, is clinically obese. In his new book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us” Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss argues that many of the big companies in the processed food industry are at least partly to blame.

A clean and abundant water supply is the most pressing issue facing our society today. Joining Sheri Quinn on the program is Utah State University water quality expert Nancy Mesner. She works with state agencies to ensure our watersheds remain healthy into the future.

Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, argues in his new book “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise” that the American traditions of entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and upward mobility have been weakened in recent years by an explosion in the size of government and a move towards redistributing wealth rather than rewarding merit. He argues that free enterprise requires a moral defense based on the ideals of earned success, equality of opportunity, charity, and basic fairness.

“The sound of parenthood is the sigh.” So writes Maximilian Werner in his new memoir “Gravity Hill” which is about growing up, getting older, looking back, and wondering what lies ahead—a process that becomes all the more complicated and intense when parenting is involved. Werner narrates his struggle growing up in suburban Utah as a non-Mormon and what it took for him, his siblings, and his friends to feel like they belonged. Bonding in separation, they indulged in each other, in natural and urban landscapes, and sometimes in the destructive behaviors that are the native resort of outsiders including promiscuous and occasionally violent sexual behavior—and for some, paths to death and suicide.

You spoke and UPR listened. Tuesday on Access Utah Jennifer Pemberton will be here to present some of your questions and comments on how air pollution has affected your health. If you haven’t told us your story, phone lines will be open for you. You can also share your story with us at our online form. In the second half: after a particularly bad winter, we’ll ask: what’s next in our search for solutions?

Amy Irvine McHarg, author of “Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land” and Stephen Trimble, author of “Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America” and other books will join Tom Williams for Access Utah on Earth Day 2013 to reflect on environmental issues and read from their works.

On the program, Sheri Quinn talks to author Caleb Daniloff about his new book called "Running Ransom Road," a vivid account of his 18-month-long experience running marathons in the cities he wrecked havoc in as an alcoholic. With each marathon, he confronted the past and paved his road to redemption.