"The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places," features William Atkins' travels across five continents over three years, visiting deserts both iconic and little-known to discover a realm as much internal as physical. His journey takes him to the Arabian Peninsula’s Empty Quarter and Australia’s nuclear-test grounds; the dry Aral Sea of Kazakhstan and ‘sand seas’ of China’s volatile north-west; the contested borderlands of Arizona and the riotous Burning Man festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert; and the ancient monasteries of Egypt’s Eastern Desert. Along the way, Atkins illuminates the people, history, topography, and symbolism of these remarkable but often troubled places.

With roots steeped in Nashville’s songwriting tradition, TrouBeliever Fest founders Monty Powell and Anna Wilson say they had a deep desire to create a festival where the songs themselves would be the stars. The 1st Annual Troubeliever Festival is happening at Snowbasin on August 3 & 4 featuring Americana legends Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell.

Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku says that moving human civilization to the stars, formerly the domain of fiction, is increasingly becoming a scientific possibility–and a necessity. Whether in the near future due to climate change and the depletion of finite resources, or in the distant future due to catastrophic cosmological events, we must face the reality that humans will one day need to leave planet Earth to survive as a species.

Jennifer Sinor is the author of Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O'Keeffe, a collection of essays inspired by the letters of the American modernist Georgia O'Keeffe and Ordinary Trauma, a memoir of her military childhood told through linked flash nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English. She is also the author of The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary, a book about the diary of her great, great, great aunt, a woman who homesteaded the Dakotas in the late nineteenth century. All of her books work to reveal the extraordinary possibilities that arise in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

Imagine being a boy forced to attend school dressed in a girls’ uniform. Imagine being a girl banned from the girls’ bathroom and too afraid to “go” in a stall surrounded by boys. Imagine being asked, again and again, by other kids, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Imagine having your deepest sense of self refuted by adults in authority. Imagine the routine stress of being a transgender kid.

David Leonhardt writes recently in the New York Times that “In the suburbs of Salt Lake City, there is a planned community called Suncrest that has turned out to be a good place to study voter turnout. Suncrest feels like one community, full of modern, single-family houses. But it straddles two different counties — Salt Lake and Utah. And in 2016, the two used different voting systems.

Philosophy professor Hugh LaFollette says that he was raised in a gun culture. Later, he was struck by the very different policy responses to the killing of children in Dunblane, Scotland and Newtown, Connecticut. He says “my dis-ease at having no settled view of the topic nagged at me for several years before I decided that agnosticism on this topic was neither intellectually tenable nor morally responsible. I was impelled to examine the arguments and the evidence to reach a fair and informed view.” In his book “In Defense of Gun Control” (from Oxford University Press) LaFollette says that “the public debate about the private ownership of guns is contentious, often nasty, and rarely insightful” and grotesquely oversimplified. In the book he reviews the various philosophical perspectives on gun control; explains why Americans have a culture of guns not found elsewhere in the developed world; discusses armchair arguments on both sides; and examines empirical evidence relating to guns and gun control.

Kip Stephen Thorne (born June 1, 1940) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate, known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he was the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2009 and is one of the world's leading experts on the astrophysical implications of Einstein's general theory of relativity. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, most notably for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar.

Coral reefs around the world are vanishing at an unprecedented rate. We’ve lost 50% of the world’s coral in the last 30 years. Scientists say that climate change is now their greatest threat and it is estimated that only 10% can survive past 2050. In a new documentary film, “Chasing Coral,” a team of divers, photographers and scientists set out on a thrilling ocean adventure to discover why coral are vanishing and to reveal the underwater mystery to the world.

Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man--a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels. Struggling to distinguish himself on his own terms, he hustles off to Marine Corps boot camp. He moves across the world, returning to the United States only to take a job as a manager-cum-barfly at his family's jazz club.