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.”

Rep. Brian King, D-Salt Lake City says that the state should allow comprehensive sex education in its schools. Rep. King, who is House Minority Leader, says his HB246 is needed because the rates of sexually transmitted diseases are rising quickly, and youth need more education to protect themselves. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Gayle Ruzicka, President of the Utah Eagle Forum, says that "comprehensive sex education is all about teaching children that it's OK to have sex as long as they use a condom. It just doesn't work."

A 2014 report titled Finger Paint to Fingerprints: The School-to-Prison Pipeline in Utah from the Public Policy Clinic at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at University of Utah found that discipline handed down to some students was diverting them out of public schools and into the criminal justice system "through a combination of overly harsh zero-tolerance school policies and the increased involvement of law enforcement in schools."

Amy Choate says that her passion for a plant-based, whole food lifestyle is due to her complete recovery from debilitating depression and illness that occurred during her service as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She and Annie Miller have a book out called “Naked Nutrition: Whole Foods Revealed” which, they say, is a guide to why we should eat real food, why it matters, and how we can live with health and energy. Amy Choate and Annie MIller join Tom Williams in studio for Wednesday’s Access Utah.

On Tuesday’s Access Utah we’ll talk about the art and cultural impact of political cartoons with the Salt Lake Tribune’s Pat Bagley, Politico’s Matt Wuerker, and Jen Sorensen, whose comics appear nationally and locally, in the Salt Lake City Weekly.” Wuerker is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Bagley is a Pulitzer finalist. Sorensen is winner of several awards including the Herblock Prize. We’ll talk about Charlie Hebdo, Bagley’s cartoon legislators, Sorensen’s Trump girls try-outs cartoon, current events from a cartoonist's perspective, and much else. 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.