Access Utah

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that organizers of the Days of ’47 Parade have responded to the Salt Lake City Council, saying they will not reconsider a request by Mormons Building Bridges to participate. Parade organizers said they feared the entry would be too controversial for an event that honors Utah statehood as well as the Mormon pioneers.

We first met hardscrabble ranchers Renny and Ben Cross in Laura Pritchett’s debut collection, and now in in her novel Stars Go Blue, they are estranged, elderly spouses living on opposite ends of their sprawling ranch, faced with the particular decline of a fading farm and Ben’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

In her memoir ”Year of No Sugar,” Eve Schaub recounts her family’s attempt to eliminate sugar from their lives. We’ll talk with Eve Schaub on Monday’s AU and we’re going to talk about your attempts (successful or not) to change your eating habits, whatever your goal is.

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?

Recently, The League of American Bicyclists ranked Utah as the 8th most bike friendly state in the U.S., rising from the number 14 spot last year. With an increase in bike promotion, bike-related fundraising and commuting and an overall growth in bike culture across the state, biking advocates and anxious drivers alike are speaking up.

Utah State University biologist Zachariah Gompert asks questions about evolution that have been eluding scientists for decades and he and colleagues are using the flood of new genetic tools to find clues to one of their main questions - is evolution predictable and repeatable? Sheri Quinn talks to Professor Gompert about his study recently published in the journal Science.

This week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released proposed regulations which would cut carbon pollution from future and existing power plants. Since coal accounts for about 70 percent of Utah’s power generation (twice the national average) our state may be disproportionately affected.

The oil and gas industry has increased by 40 percent in the past seven years across the United States, leading to dramatic growth some areas. Duchesne County, for example, is the second fastest growing county in the U.S. compared to counties of similar size.

Last year, USU professors Alison Cook and Christy Glass tested the glass cliff phenomenon—the idea that women are more likely to get promoted to leadership positions when a firm is struggling, placing them in a precarious position from the start. The glass cliff is back in the news with the recent firing of Jill Abramson as executive editor of the New York Times. Cook and Glass found that merit alone doesn’t give women and minorities the key to the executive suite and that the composition of the board of directors can affect whether or not they succeed. Their analysis confirmed that the glass cliff theory also applies to minorities, a phenomenon they dubbed “the savior effect.”