RadioWest

We are not letting a pandemic get in the way of our favorite bi-annual show, even though, this time around, we won’t have the pleasure of seeing our studio filled with books and book people.

The writer Bill Buford wanted to learn the secrets of French haute cuisine. So, he went native. Buford and his family moved to Lyon, France, where he undertook a rigorous, enlightening and delectable education.

Due in large part to her daily press briefings, Dr. Angela Dunn has emerged as the face of Utah’s efforts to manage the coronavirus pandemic in the state. But until a few months ago, our state epidemiologist was largely unknown to the public.

Asian Americans in the United States are no strangers to racism. Just think of the Japanese internment camps of WWII. And racial slurs and stereotypes have dogged Asian Americans for years, too.

Deep in the Arizona desert, there’s an enormous glass terrarium that houses a replica, in miniature, of the earth’s ecosystems. It’s called Biosphere 2.

Since departing the public radio air waves in 2016, Diane Rehm has been on a crusade: campaigning for terminally ill patients’ right to determine their time of death — also known as the right-to-die movement.

The news industry has been hard hit in recent years. The rise of online ads and then the Great Recession pushed newspapers into steep decline. Now, with the coronavirus crisis, industry observer Ken Doctor says news faces — gulp — “extinction.”

Jones County, North Carolina is one of the over two hundred U.S. counties with no local newspaper – what researchers call a news desert .

In 1906, an earthquake destroyed scientist David Starr Jordan’s collection of newly discovered fish. His life’s work was utterly ruined. But he tried, very literally, to put the pieces back together.

History is full of moments when humans as a group react to difficult events. Now that we are a month into the coronavirus quarantine, we’re taking stock of our own reactions to this time.