Our guest for the hour today is Matthew Garrett, author of “Making Lamanites: Mormons, Native Americans, and the Indian Student Placement Program, 1947-2000” (University of Utah Press).

George Hirthler’s new historical novel, “The Idealist,” is the inspiring and tragic story of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the French visionary who founded the modern Olympic Games. When the novel opens in early 1937, Coubertin is 74, he's broke, his health is failing, and although he has created one of the most influential international movements of the 20th century, he is completely unknown outside a small circle of admirers, whose financial help he has repeatedly declined. His wife can hardly withhold her bitter animosity, his son is an insensate abyss of sadness, his daughter in and out of touch with reality, and his great creation is about to fall into the hands of a Nazi madman leading the world to war. But hope begins to rise again when a new ally appears.

This extraordinary campaign season got more so over the weekend. What is your reaction to Donald Trump’s comments from 2005? And Utah Republican’s and some national Republican’s repudiation of their presidential nominee? What did you think of the debate? What is on the top of your mind as you get ready to vote? Cache County Libertarian Party Chair, Jonathan Choate of SD7 Technologies in Logan joins us for the hour.

When San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem, he sparked a vigorous national conversation about Race, Police, Patriotism, Free Speech and other issues. We’re going to continue that conversation next time on Access Utah. We’ll be talking with Forrest Crawford, Professor of Teacher Education and former Assistant to the President for Institutional Diversity at Weber State University; and Jason Gilmore, Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Utah State University.

On April 20, 2010, a blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil platform killed 11 workers, critically injured others and caused a leak that spilled thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for more than three months. The Deepwater Horizon, one of worst environmental disasters in history, is now the subject of a pulse-pounding new movie. Historian and archaeologist, USU Professor of Environment and Society, Joseph Tainter will watch the film with special interest. He is author, with Tadeusz “Tad” Patzek of University of Texas-Austin, of “Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.” Tainter, also author of the influential book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” says “It takes energy to find and produce energy and the world’s remaining, untapped petroleum reserves are in deep, dark, cold, remote and dangerous locations...Energy is becoming very costly in terms of resources, safety and environmental health.”

Charles Bock's daughter was 5 months old when his wife was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His wife died two and a half years later, just before their daughter's third birthday. Charles Bock has written a new novel that's based on that experience. It’s titled "Alice & Oliver."

Mark Twain, the highest-paid writer in America in 1894, was also one of the nation’s worst investors. “There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate,” he wrote. “When he can’t afford it and when he can.” After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars back when a beer cost a nickel, he found himself neck-deep in debt. His heiress wife, Livy, took the setback hard. She wrote, “I cannot get away from the feeling that business failure means disgrace.” Twain vowed to Livy he would pay back every penny. So, just when he imagined he would be settling into literary lionhood, he forced himself to mount the “platform” again. He did what no author had ever done, he embarked on a round-the-world stand-up comedy tour. Richard Zacks’ book “Chasing the Last Laugh,” chronicles this poignant chapter in Mark Twain’s life.

We’re going to talk about I.Q. v. E.Q. USU professors Jacob Freeman and Jacopo Baggio, along with UT-San Antonio professor Thomas Coyle, are studying the dynamics of nerds and poets. They want to understand the best brew of nerdiness and sensitivity to create teams that get things done. How can people work better together and why do some groups work well under pressure and some groups don’t? Professors Freeman and Baggio will join us to discuss the differences between I.Q. and emotional and social intelligence. They say that researching how different intelligences work together is especially important in a high-stakes world where natural resources are diminishing rapidly.

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.

Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–1971) has been called the "forgotten father of television." He grew up in Utah and southern Idaho, and was described as a genius by those who knew and worked with him. With only a high school education, Farnsworth drew his first television schematic for his high school teacher in Rigby, Idaho. Subsequent claims and litigation notwithstanding, he was the first to transmit a television image.