Tom Williams

For generations, the Wrights of southern Utah have raised cattle and world-champion saddle-bronc riders ― some call them the most successful rodeo family in history. 

Now, Bill and Evelyn Wright, parents to 13 children and grandparents to many more, find themselves struggling to hang on to the majestic landscape where they’ve been running cattle for 150 years as the West is transformed by urbanization, battered by drought and rearranged by public-land disputes.

Today we're speaking with Margaret Barker, Dr. David Haberman, and Anuttama Dasa, panelists at the conference God & Smog:  The Challenge of Preserving Our Planet. The conference is taking place today in the USU John M. Huntsman School of Business Perry Pavilion until 5 p.m.  The one-day symposium will consider the environment in relation to the perspectives and actions of five religious traditions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Mormonism, and Native American traditions.

  A coalition of faculty and students at USU have come together to organize a day-long discussion of sexual violence, in order to understand the issues that informed the Kavanaugh hearings and investigation. This teach-in will happen on Tuesday, October 9 from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the USU Anthropology Museum (Old Main 252) on the USU campus.

“Bridge of Clay” is the new sweeping family saga from Markus Zusak, author of the international bestseller “The Book Thief,” which swept the world and was made into a movie.

“Bridge of Clay” is the story of five brothers who bring each other up in a world run by their own rules. As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance.

In a remote corner of Oregon, James Pogue found himself at the heart of a rebellion. Granted unmatched access by Ammon Bundy to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Pogue met ranchers and militiamen ready to die fighting the federal government.

In the age of the Nano-second, folklore studies claim a perspective on the critical importance of the short-lived, as observed in numerous traditional forms such as memorial altars, henna-painted Yemen brides, and evaporative moments, such as the traces left by marginalized queer encounters or the reformulation in art of Mormon legend by local Provo artist Bryan Hutchison.

An eminent professor of History and Religious Studies at Utah State University, Dr. Norman Jones has spent a career learning what makes an "educated person."

In forty years at USU, Jones headed the History Department, founded Religious Studies and Classics, and taught thousands of students, who honored him as Teacher of the Year in 1982 and 2018. 

Iconic Utah outfitter Ken Sleight began his river-guiding career in Glen Canyon during the mid-1950s, just as the Glen Canyon Dam blueprints jumped from the drawing board to remote desert terrain. The pulse of the Colorado River through the canyon would soon be halted by a cement wall and Glen Canyon backfilled with water. Sleight knew the condition of the canyon was terminal.

The Block Film and Art Festival is this weekend in Logan. Today, we're previewing the festival. Our guests include Michael Bingham, founder of Jump the Moon Art Studios, Jolynne Lyon, UPR feature correspondent for our Diagnosed series, Steve Smith, submission manager for the festival, and Brenda Hawley, the festival's art curator. 

UPR will also have a presentation at the festival: Saturday, September 29th at 3 p.m. at Great Harvest.

Our guest for the hour is Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and newly elected chair of the Global Assembly of Amnesty Interational. She gave the keynote speech for the Tanner Center for Human Rights lecture series on August 30th at the University of Utah. The title of her lecture was "Never Again is Now: Remembering and Reaffirming Our Collective Commitment to Protecting Civil Rights."

This year’s Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture will be presented by Darius Gray. The lecture, titled “Redeeming a People: The Critical Role of Historical Examination in Moving Cultural and Moral Trajectories,” is 7 p.m. today at the Logan Tabernacle, 50 N. Main St. The evening’s events will also include performances by the Deborah Bonner Unity Gospel Choir.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is rare bookseller Ken Sanders. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear a segment from our conversation on the exhibit Glen Canyon: A River Guide Remembers. Then we’ll revisit a portion of our interview on poetry with Edward Hirsch and Michael Sowder.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Dr. Lynne McNeill, assistant professor of English at Utah State University. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program. We’ll hear a segment from our conversation on Slender Man, with Amanda Brennan, Dr. Elizabeth Tucker, and Dr. Trevor J.

Historian and Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was recently on the USU campus to give a talk presented by the USU History Department and sponsored by the Tanner Talks Series in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

It’s a pledge drive special edition of Access Utah today. My special guest for the hour is Dr. Jason Gilmore, assistant professor of Communication Studies at Utah State Unviersity. We’ll reach into the archives for parts of some of our favorite episodes of the program.

Witty, inspiring, and charismatic, Oscar Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world. But it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar's career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Set on two continents, it tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name and gain international acclaim. 'Success is a science,' Wilde believed, 'if you have the conditions, you get the result.'

Today, as a part of Utah State University’s Year of the Arts, we’ll focus on the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, which is looking forward to its grand reopening Saturday, September 15th.

Utah State University’s Mountain West Center for Regional Studies has announced the 2018 winners of the Evans Biography Awards for books published in 2017. Author and ethnographer Rodney Frey won the Evans Handcart Award for his book Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition (Washington State University Press, 2017).  

If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough?

In this fresh and introspective collection of essays, Julia Corbett examines nature in our lives with all of its ironies and contradictions.

Each story delves into an overlooked aspect of our relationship with nature—insects, garbage, backyards, noise, open doors, animals, and language—and how we cover our tracks. Corbett confronts the owner of a high-end market who insists on keeping his doors open in all temperatures, and takes us on a trip to a new mall with a replica of a trout stream that once flowed nearby.

Using minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist Patrick Dougherty creates works of art inseparable with nature and the landscape. With a dazzling variety of forms seamlesslyintertwined with their context, his sculptures evoke fantastical images of nests, cocoons, cones, castles, and beehives.

“The Man Who Caught the Storm” is the saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring, and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the tornado was one of the last true mysteries of the modern world. It was a monster that ravaged the American heartland a thousand times each year, yet science’s every effort to divine its inner workings had ended in failure. Researchers all but gave up, until the arrival of an outsider.

For nearly 2 decades, professional photographer Jim Herrington has been working on a portrait series of influential rock and mountain climbers. The resulting book, “The Climbers” documents these rugged individualists who, from roughly the 1930s to 1970s, used primitive gear along with their wits, talent, and fortitude to tackle unscaled peaks around the world.