Apple Seed

Guest: Quinn Mecham, Professor of Political Science, BYU Each month, political scientist Quinn Mecham joins us with three world events worth a closer look. Today we discuss the recent IPCC report on climate change. We also look at the heated presidential election taking place in Brazil. And we’ll consider Nikki Haley’s foreign policy legacy and she resigns her post at US Ambassador to the UN.

Guest: David Soren, Professor of Anthropology, University of Arizona In central Italy between Rome and Florence there’s an ancient burial ground known as the “Cemetery of Babies.” It dates to the 5th Century AD and may hold the remains of children who died in a devastating malaria epidemic. Archaeologists and anthropologists working there are uncovering lots of unusual things – including recently a 10-year-old child buried with a rock jammed in its mouth. What can these discoveries tell us about how ancient Romans thought about life, death and disease?

Guest: Girija Kaimal, Assistant Professor of Creative Arts Therapies, Drexel University. Every bookstore you visit these days will have a section full of coloring books for grown-ups. Some of these books even crack best-seller lists. They’re trendy as a mode of self-help stress reduction for people not creative enough to just draw something from scratch. Do they work?

Guest: Phyllis Erdman, Dean for Academic Affairs, Washington State University College counseling centers are seeing more and more students with psychological problems. In response, those counseling centers have had to make adjustments in training and staffing. And now they also have to figure out what to do about the growing number of students with emotional support animals. It’s tricky for colleges because they’re required to make some accommodations for students with disabilities. But where do they draw the line?

Guest: Carl Sederholm, Department Chair, Comparative Arts and Letters, Professor of Comparative Arts and Letters, BYU When you binged Stranger Things on Netflix, you probably didn’t know that much of it was inspired by an obscure 1930s pulp fiction writer named H.P. Lovecraft. The writer was not at all successful during his life, but he’s since become an icon of all that’s weird and creepy. Stephen King has called HP Lovecraft the “twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”