Access Utah

For a generation, some of the money we’ve spent at the gas station and the mall has gone to empower the authoritarians and the armed groups that have given us our worst foreign-born crises. How can we get ourselves out of business with hostile petrocrats and the violent extremists?

Moab resident Steph Davis is a superstar in the climbing community. But when her husband made a controversial climb of Delicate Arch, the media fallout and the toll on her marriage left her without a partner, a career, a source of income...or a purpose. Accompanied by her beloved dog, Fletch, she set off in search of a new identity and discovered skydiving.

The National Park Service turns 100 on August 25, 2016 and today we’re kicking off a series of programs focusing on America’s national parks.

“Cars, for Americans, more than anything else represent freedom.” So says Matt Hardigree, executive director of Jalopnik.com, who is featured in National Geographic Channel’s documentary film, “Driving America.” The film examines how car culture has changed the way we live, work, travel and socialize; and looks into the future, including potential game changers like Tesla’s electric cars.

My guest for the hour today is poet Rebecca Lindenberg. Clouds, mountains, flowering trees. Difficult things. Things lost by being photographed. Things that have lost their power. Things found in a rural grocery store. These are some of the lists, poems, prose poems, and lyric anecdotes compiled in “The Logan Notebooks,” a remix and a reimagining of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a collection of intimate and imaginative observations about place—a real place, an interior landscape—and identity, at the intersection of the human with the world, and the language we have (and do not yet have) for perceiving it.

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.