In her new book, “Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” historian Karen Jones uses the metaphor of the theater to argue that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual.

According to recent studies, 50% of us set New Year's resolutions and 78% of us fail to keep them. But there's something compelling in the idea of a new you in the new year. Should we set New Year's resolutions? How do we keep them past, say, February? We'll ask you what you do and what successes or failures you've had.

“The West was once seen as a beacon of opportunity, and it is still a place where many ways of life can flourish. But it is also a region that leaves some people isolated both culturally and geographically.” That’s David Kennedy, from his foreword to a collection of essays titled “Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West.”

Alex Thompson, writing in Politico Magazine, says “Political taboos, campaign dealbreakers and electoral glass ceilings are crumbling. Members of Congress are openly gay and bisexual, there’s a black man in the White House, and a woman may be next. Voters have accepted all sorts of behavioral warts and missteps in their political candidates, too. DUIs? A mistake of their youth. Draft dodgers? There’s a long list. Womanizers? A much longer list. Illegal drugs? In just a few short elections, we’ve gone from a president who “didn’t inhale” to one who openly admits using cocaine in his youth.

Join us for the Access Utah Holiday Special 2015. We’ll hear music for the season performed by the Lightwood Duo (Mike Christiansen on guitar and Eric Nelson on clarinet). We’ll also hear readings for the season by the author of The Christmas Chronicles, playwright Tim Slover.

Periodically we join together as a UPR community to share what we're reading. On Wednesday's Access Utah we're doing it again, but with a twist: We want your list of the best books of 2015.

On Today’s Access Utah we continue our series on Mass Shootings in America by asking how the media should respond. Our guests include Tom Teves, whose son Alex was killed in the mass shooting in Aurora Colorado. Teves is a founder of No Notoriety a campaign that urges news outlets to limit how much they use a gunman’s name and photograph. Tom Teves says the hope is to curb shootings by denying many perpetrators what they want: fame.

Writer Ceiridwen Terrill writes about how, at a particularly sad and frightening time in her life, a wolf dog was the kind of companion she was searching for. In her book, "Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and Dogs," she talks about an animal who's heart is divided between the woman she loves, and the desire to roam free. In the end, Terrill realized she must confront the reality of taming a half-wild animal. We spoke with Ceirdwen Terrill in 2012, and today on the program we revisit that conversation.

Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year for 2015 isn't a word at all; it's an emoji, one of those little faces that you see all over on social media. And I'm hearing extreme glottal stops (as in "the new football coach at USC is Clay Helhhh-uhhn (Helton)" and "strength" pronounced as "shtrength." It's enough to drive a language purist to distraction.

In response to the San Bernardino shootings, President Obama said, "We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world."