Access Utah

Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day; so designated because January 27, 1945 was the day that the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet troops. We’ll mark the occasion on Thursday by revisiting a conversation with Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor and victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Mengele was given the name “Angel of Death,” because of his position as a SS physician in charge of selecting which new prisoners of the camp would be killed or selected for forced labor. Kor and her sister launched a search for other twins who survived Mengele’s experiments and located 122 individual survivors.

M. B. McLatchey is recipient of the May Swenson Poetry Award for “The Lame God,” a collection of powerful poems on a very sensitive subject: the kidnap and murder of a young girl. Using the art of poetry she gives voice to a suffering—and a love—that might otherwise go unheard. Philip Brady says of this collection, “in magisterial cadences, this powerful poetic sequence gives voice to the unspeakable and transposes profound grief into immortal song. McLatchey's poems are talismans and spells--not against loss but against forgetting.

Jared Farmer’s new book is “Trees in Paradise: A California History.” We’ll also talk about Utah history, and Farmer will offer his list of iconic Utah trees as well. California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It's the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities. They imported the blue-green eucalypts whose tangy fragrance was thought to cure malaria. They built the lucrative "Orange Empire" on the sweet juice and thick skin of the Washington navel, an industrial fruit. They lined their streets with graceful palms to announce that they were not in the Midwest anymore.

In 2011, with U.S.–Iran relations at a thirty-year low, Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd decided to take his blonde, blue-eyed Midwestern wife Karri and his infant son Khash from their Brooklyn neighborhood to spend a year in the land of his birth. “The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay” traces their domestic adventures and tracks the political drama of a terrible year for Iran's government. The Green Movement had been crushed, but the regime was on edge, anxious lest democratic protests resurge. International sanctions were dragging down the economy while talk of war with the West grew. Hooman Majd was there for all of it. It was to be a year of discovery for Majd, too, who had only lived in Iran as a child.

It’s all there in “Latter-day Lore: Mormon Folklore Studies” (from University of Utah Press) -- The Three Nephites, The Beehive, Creative Date Invitations, BYU Coed Jokes, The Folklore of Mormon Missionaries, The Apocalypse, and more. “Latter-day Lore” explores society, symbols, and landscape of regional culture; formative customs and traditions; the sacred and the supernatural; pioneers, heroes, and the historical imagination; humor; and the international contexts of Mormon folklore.

Utah State University ecologist Daniel McGlinn was part of a research team that created the largest evolutionary "time-tree" of plants. This tree is helping scientists understand how plants evolved to tolerate frigid winter temperatures. Today on the program Sheri Quinn talks to McGlinn about the project and his field of study macro-ecology.

It’s been an eventful few weeks: First, a federal judge struck down Utah’s laws against gay marriage, including Constitutional Amendment 3, which defined marriage as only between a man and a woman. More than a thousand gay and lesbian couples were married across the state. Then, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay as the ruling was appealed to the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Now Governor Herbert has announced that Utah will not recognize marriages performed during that window.

A group called the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL) says that In light of Utah’s growing air quality concerns and the real and potential effects of climate instability, the time to act is now. The purposes of Citizens Climate Lobby are: 1) to create the political will for a stable climate; and 2) to empower individuals to have breakthroughs in exercising their personal and political power They engage in non-partisan lobbying for a gradually increasing tax on carbon-based fuels with all revenues returned as a dividend to households, as a way to drive our economy away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy.

“The gap between rich and poor has never been wider . . . legislative stalemate paralyzes the country . . . corporations resist federal regulations . . . spectacular mergers produce giant companies . . . the influence of money in politics deepens . . . bombs explode in crowded streets . . . small wars proliferate far from our shores . . . a dizzying array of inventions speeds the pace of daily life.” Headlines like these were characteristic of America’s Progressive era, that tumultuous time in the early 1900s when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air.

Why is it so hard to define folklore? Lynne McNeill, in her new book from USU Press “Folklore Rules,” says “...well you try to explain what a creation myth, a jump-rope rhyme, a Fourth of July BBQ, & some bathroom graffiti have in common and you’ll find it’s not a terribly easy task either.”