RadioWest

Have you ever heard of the Texas Dip? It’s a wild curtsy you might see performed—or botched—at a debutante ball. Kristen Richardson calls it a magic trick. And, yes, debutantes are still a thing. They’re the subject of her new book The Season .

Back in the early ’60s, Fred Adams had a dream. His dream was rooted in Cedar City, which at that time was home to more livestock than people, so the idea of starting a festival there devoted to the plays of William Shakespeare probably shouldn’t have worked. But Adams was a visionary. Through his persistence, tenacity, and his ability to inspire others, he built an annual event that grew and grew until eventually his dream became reality. Sadly, Adams died last week. As friends and family

How does a composer manipulate our feelings during a film scene? Edmund Stone, host of the radio program The Score , explains the magic of film scoring through this year’s Oscar nominated Best Original Musical Scores.

President Trump was acquitted by the Senate this week on the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The vote would have run straight along party lines if not for a lone outlier: Utah Senator Mitt Romney.

Director Brian Knappenberger’s Sundance documentary short Church and the Fourth Estate tells one man’s story–and the efforts to cover it up and silence him–of sexual abuse at the hands of his Scout leader when he was in middle school.

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.

Through the 1980s to the early 2000s, astrologer and TV personality Walter Mercado was a household name in Latinx homes–reaching, at his peak, an estimated 120 million people with his daily horoscopes. Then, in 2007, Mercado disappeared.

On Feb. 13, 2017, as he was walking through Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport, two young women approached North Korean royal family member Kim Jong-nam, smearing what proved to be VX nerve agent on his face. Within an hour, he was dead.

MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini was working with a facial recognition software when she encountered a problem: The robot she was programming could not detect her own face, and she had to wear a white mask in order to finish the project.

In the 2020 Sundance documentary Us Kids , director Kim A. Snyder chronicles how a group of high school students got thousands of young people all over the country talking about the impact of gun violence, and even made activism cool.