Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

Guest: Quinn Mecham, PhD, Associate Professor, Political Science, Brigham Young University Every month, Quinn Mecham examines three international events worth paying attention to. Today we discuss the assassination of Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, President Trump’s decision about moving the US Embassy in Israel, and the leadership change in Zimbabwe.

Guest: Jacob Rawlins, PhD, Assistant Professor, Linguistics and English Language, Brigham Young University Does it seem a bit silly when you go to a restaurant or retail store where the staff are insistent on calling you a guest, rather than a customer? Or they have some special name for their coworkers – teammates, associates. Or they add some little rhetorical flourish when they answer the phone, like the receptionist at my dentist’s office who always says, “This is so-and-so. I can help you.” Not, “How can I help you?” Just the confident “I CAN help you.” These touches might seem like gimmicks, but BYU linguistics professor Jacob Rawlins says they come from the stories companies weave about themselves and they really do matter. These stories are powerful tools.

Guests: Bill Barrett, PhD, Professor, Computer Science, Brigham Young University; Curtis Wigington, Masters’ Student, Brigham Young University In just a few clicks online, Top of Mind producer Tennery Taylor discovered that she’s a third cousin (six times removed, that is) to Abraham Lincoln. She was starting to feel some familial pride about that when she also discovered that she had the same relationship to Benedict Arnold. Win some, lose some. She was using the Relative Finder app, which is made by The Family History Technology Lab here at BYU.  Find fun famiily history apps and games here.

Guest: Amy Emberling, MBA, Managing Partner, Zingerman’s Bakehouse Chocolate chess pie is a holiday favorite at Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It’s a rich chocolate custard filling – almost more like a flourless chocolate cake baked into a pie crust. You don’t have to choose between cake and pie! It’s a Christmas miracle! Thanks to Zingerman’s mail order service, people around the world enjoy the company’s baked delicacies. And now you can copy them at home with the new “Zingerman’s Bakehouse” cookbook.

Guest: Doug Julian, Mountain Safety Advocate It finally snowed here in Utah this week, so the winter adventure season has begun – snowshoeing, skiing, backcountry trekking are popular winter sports. Year-round, really, you’ll find people from all over the world exploring the Rocky Mountains. Any weekend of the year, there are Boy Scout troops and other youth groups out testing their wildlife survival skills. But this past summer, tragedy struck one of these groups when 17-year-old Douglas Julian died in the High Uinta mountains while on a backpacking trip with his Scout troop. His father, also Doug Julian, has become an advocate for mountain safety.