A recently published study has confirmed what a lot of people have long suspected: increasing social media use is correlated to suicidal thoughts among some adolescents. But before you go pull the plug, the nuances here are important. Researchers have identified specific patterns of use that may be dangerous. This week we’ll talk about who is at risk, and what can be done.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic there was a lot of misinformation about vaccines floating around on social media. Public health agencies have been trying to figure out what to do. It turns out that one of the most powerful remedies is also one of the simplest.

There is nothing more damaging to a nation’s economy than a war on its own soil. But the way we think about the long-term economic consequences of war is often tied up in political instability and reconstruction and the cost of care for veterans. That’s all correct, but my guest this week says we’ve overlooked something: The long-term damage to agriculture.

As a counselor and a researcher, Stacey Litam had focused her career on helping victims of sex trafficking to work through their trauma. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and while Litam’s previous work didn’t become less important, she began seeing a growing need for trauma counseling — just about everywhere.

Even if you’re a judge, a prosecutor or a police officer, you might not have given a lot of thought to the question of why we punish people. You might simply conclude that we punish people when they need to be punished. Developmental psychologist Julia Marshall isn’t satisfied with that sort of simplicity. We’ll talk to her about when and why we punish.

What is your responsibility when you see injustice being done? For Amos Guiora, this is a deeply personal question stemming from his family’s experiences in one of the greatest atrocities in human history. And now he’s sharing that story.

The last time the United States Capitol was breached was in 1814, when British troops burned the building using furniture and books from the Library of Congress as fuel. Last week, the capitol was breached again – and that’s raising a lot of questions about the state of our nation. We’re going to work through some of those questions with former CIA analyst Jeannie Johnson.

There are a lot of ways 2020 is going to be remembered and, to be honest, a lot of us will probably remember it as a pretty terrible year, for very obvious reasons. But here at Utah Public Radio, we’re also going to remember 2020 as a year in which we learned some amazing things about our world.

No human has ventured farther than 250,000 miles from earth. So what we know about what lies beyond us is limited to what we can see through data collection. But why limit the potential of understanding data to what we can see in images? Why not turn it into something we can touch or something we can hear?

In philosophy, the absurd refers to the conflict between the human desire to find meaning in life and the fact that the more you search, the harder it is to find. This is what makes universities such absurd places. And through the use of a fictional college called Payne University, author Julie Schumacher puts that absurdity on full display.