What do you get if you cross a cowboy singer, a Caribbean percussionist and a classical violinist? Well, if it happens in Virgin, Utah, folklorist and musician Hal Cannon says you get a new kind of Western music. He’s the cowboy singer and 1/3 of 3hattrio. They’ve just released their third album, and Monday, he joins us along with career musician Greg Istock and 19-year-old Eli Wrankle to explain why they say the West was ready for a new genre and how they began creating “desert music.”

To understand how our forebears lived, of course you’ll read period records, diaries and literature. There would still be things you wouldn’t fully grasp though, like how they smelled. So when historian Ruth Goodman wanted to understand 16th century English life, she “tudored.” She skipped bathing, brushed her teeth with soot, and slept on rushes. The result of her adventure is a new book called How to Be a Tudor, and she joins Doug for a dawn-to-dusk guide to Tudor life. (Rebroadcast)

Recently, KUER reported on an environmental activist with concerns about corporations like Kennecott Land being listed as “friends” of the University of Utah’s Environmental Humanities Program. Carl Ingwell says they don’t reflect environmental values, and shouldn’t be associated with the program. But as higher education faces continued cut-backs in public spending, what is the proper relationship between corporate donors and university researchers? And what do each get out of the bargain?

In January 1939, Unitarian minister Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha received a call: would they travel to Europe to help Jewish dissidents and refugees under threat of Nazi persecution? While few Americans were paying attention to Hitler’s growing power, the Sharps agreed to the dangerous mission. A new PBS film explores their incredible work, and Wednesday, filmmaker Artemis Joukowsky joins us to talk about how the Sharp’s actions saved hundreds and altered the course of their own lives.

Charles Foster wanted to know what it was like to be a beast. What it was really like. So he tried it out. He slept in a dirt hole and ate earthworms like a badger. He chased shrimp like an otter. He spent hours rooting in trashcans like an urban fox. A passionate naturalist, Foster came to realize that every creature creates a different world in its brain and lives in that world. He joins us Tuesday to talk about his experiment and the values of wildness, both outside us and within us.

Monday, we’re talking about Utah’s youth suicide problem. A recent report declared suicide the leading cause of death for the state’s 10- to 17-year-old kids. On top of that, the suicide rate here is more double the national average. Health officials, suicide prevention advocates, educators, and parents are struggling for answers, as are kids themselves. We’ll look at the many factors contributing to the problem and ask why suicide is such a problem here in Utah.

The journalist Sebastian Junger has noticed that for many veterans, and even some civilians, war feels better than peace, and he has a theory about why that might be. War, he says, compels us to band together and support one another in pursuit of a clear goal. But under the normal conditions of modern culture, we lose those connections, and we feel lonely and lost. Friday, Junger joins us to discuss why we’re stronger when we come together and what tribal societies can teach us about leading

Thursday, our guest is author Jeffrey Toobin, who’s written a book about the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Hearst was 19 and heir to her family’s fortune when the “Symbionese Liberation Army” took her, and it soon seemed that she had adopted their incoherent, revolutionary cause. We’ll explore the controversy over Hearst’s involvement in their crimes, the atmosphere that gave birth to the SLA, and why Toobin says the story sheds light on a time when America was on the brink of a nervous

In a run-down commercial block in Salt Lake City, Ralphael Plescia has spent some 50 years making art that tells the story of creation as he understands it. He’s hollowed out tunnels, built narrow bridges over bubbling groundwater, and his sculptures are embedded in the walls. Wednesday, we profile a new short film that asks why Ralphael has made this his life work and what will happen to it when he dies. We’ll also explore other “outsider” Utah artists who bring a unique view to our world.

Journalist Adam Cohen has said if you want to learn about an institution, you look at where it’s gone wrong. For Cohen, Buck v Bell is a moment when the US Supreme Court went terribly wrong. Its 1927 decision upheld eugenics laws, and led to the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck and some 70,000 “undesirables” declared “feebleminded.” Tuesday, Cohen joins us to explain how Americans - and some of our most revered legal minds - succumbed to racism and classism in the name of “uplifting” the