It’s a question every parent worries about in the winter: How bad is the flu season going to be?

That question, and the different ways to find answers to it, are opening up a lively discussion among health experts about the value of old-school scientific data and high-tech crowd-sourcing — and whether the new technology may someday help state and federal agencies analyze the spread of infectious diseases.

According to Cindy Burnett, an epidemiologist for the Utah Department of Health, “this flu season is a much more mild season than last year so far, but we haven’t peaked yet.”

That observation counters an analysis issued last week by Kinsa, a San Francisco-based health technology company, which declared “Utah is currently the sickest state in the country this week, with 5.7 percent of the population (over 182,400 people) experiencing flu-like symptoms.”

The difference comes down to methodology.

For this flu season, said Burnett, UDOH has changed how it tracks influenza-like illnesses. The new Moving Epidemic Method measures three data points: The incidence of flu-like symptoms, as reported by health care providers; the number of hospitalized cases; and reports from laboratories.

State officials don’t count individual cases of the flu, Burnett said, but looks for spikes in flu activity — like more people visiting doctors or clinics — that are “an indication that things are getting worse,” Burnett said.

The department collects data daily through the flu season, she said, and issues a weekly report from it. The reports are sent to federal health officials, who incorporate them into a national FluView report the following week.

“A week behind is not terrible for flu surveillance,” Burnett said.

Kinsa’s assessment of Utah is based on a single source of data: the undisclosed number of consumers who have purchased or received its thermometers and submit readings via a free smartphone app. The data source is narrower — but, the company argues, it allows faster analysis.

It aims “to know, in real time, how and where people are getting ill,” said Lauren Davis, the company’s vice president for marketing.

The company collects data through the app from users around the country, and aggregates it to create a nationwide map of where flu-like symptoms are most prevalent. The company makes money from selling the thermometers and by selling the aggregated data to vaccine distributors and other businesses, Davis said.

The San Francisco-based company has sold, or given away through schools, more than a million of its thermometers in the United States, Davis said. She wouldn’t divulge how many of those thermometers are in the hands of Utahns, but said distribution is representative across the country.

An individual’s health information, Davis said, is kept confidential and anonymous. Kinsa, she said, follows the standards of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, designed to protect privacy of medical records.

Davis pointed to a study, by a pair of University of Iowa researchers, that found Kinsa’s national data on influenza-like illness to be as accurate as the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control’s figures — but in real time, rather than weeks after the fact, as CDC data is released.

Another study of crowd-sourced medical data, led by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, reported that “data from novel influenza surveillance systems can complement traditional healthcare-based systems” — if the crowd-sourcing draws from a large-enough sample of the population.

The Boston study evaluated the website Flu Near You, which is co-managed by Boston Children’s Hospital and relies on voluntary reporting of flu symptoms.

Internet-driven data for flu cases have had their ups and downs. Google launched a database, Google Flu Trends, in 2008, but it ceased publication in 2015. Google’s system relied on search results, which Davis said meant “there was just so much noise in that signal. People would type in ‘Bieber fever’ and Google would read that as ‘fever.’”

Officials at the Utah Department of Health have discussed such crowd-sourced data in connection with their own monitoring.

“Those types of surveillance are always on our radar,” Burnett said. Kinsa, she added, “is an interesting app. Time will tell if it’s something that’s really sustainable.”

Though Utah’s 2018-19 flu season has been milder than last year’s so far, it has produced two deaths among children — one in November and one earlier this month. UDOH does not release specific details of the cases, Burnett said, though in pediatric flu deaths, an underlying medical condition is often a factor.

In the past few years, Burnett said, the flu season in Utah peaked in late December or in January. (That is backed up by statistics kept by Columbia University.) This year’s season most closely matches the 2015-16 season, which didn’t peak until February.

“Only time will tell what will happen in the next few weeks,” Burnett said, adding that “it’s never too late to get a flu shot.”

As many a northern Utah mountain biker or cross-country skier knows from firsthand experience, moose often hang out on favorite trails and are not always in a hurry to let a rider pass, yet most cyclists can go a lifetime without ever seeing a cougar or a bobcat while touring.

Outdoor recreation and wildlife cohabit in a big way along the Central Wasatch Mountains and the foothills that tumble into Utah’s largest urban area, yet scientists have only a vague idea of how animals respond to all the athletes, picnickers and hikers traipsing through their living room.

Now biologist Austin Green hopes to find firm answers using dozens of trap cameras. But his research has generated more information than he and his team can handle: 50,000 critter images recorded during a 105-day study period last spring and summer.

“It will be a ton of data, which is very exciting. We are more excited than daunted,” said Green, a doctoral candidate with the University of Utah’s Biodiversity and Conservation Ecology Lab. "It opens an opportunity to the community. Anyone that’s interested can get involved and help us look through all these photos.”

The images are loaded onto a special website, where certified participants can access them. The Wasatch Wildlife Watch study is a classic “citizen science” project, enlisting dozens of volunteers to deploy monitoring equipment, then gather, organize and analyze the data. This is time-consuming, tedious work but vital for advancing field science.

“Leveraging Community Science to collect crucial information on ecological data gaps is a win-win for local stakeholders and land and wildlife management agencies alike,” Green co-wrote in an op-ed with Allison Jones, executive director of the Wild Utah Project. Without the assistance of lay scientists from the community, research like the Wasatch wildlife study would not happen, particularly when government and institutional support for field science is declining.

“The goal is to fill a huge data gap in terms of what we don’t know about medium-sized mammals, and how human activity and recreation are influencing those core habitats and the pathways between them,” Jones said in an interview. “We need the data more than ever because there is so much planning and development and proposals coming down the pike in the Central Wasatch.”

Wild Utah Project is helping coordinate Green’s research along with support from the Utah Natural History Museum and Salt Lake City’s parks and public lands division.

The images were recorded at 210 sites in a 367-square-mile areas stretching from the Wasatch peaks to the Jordan River, with an emphasis on the canyons from City Creek to Little Cottonwood.

Green’s research builds on four years of data already recorded in Red Butte Canyon, the research natural area that is closed to public access just east of the U. campus. That work netted images in a place that has been largely undisturbed for decades, while Green’s study targets spots like the Bonneville Shoreline Trail that see a steady, year-round stream of people.

“We have a good baseline data set for when animals should be active, so now we are going out into more trafficked areas,” Green said. “We had cameras on hiking and bike trails, campsites, any type of human recreation, from fully protected to massive use.”

Other Utah biologists have already documented what’s known as the Wasatch “weekend effect," when wildlife appear to have adjusted their routines in response to outdoor recreation. Salt Lake, Davis, Weber and Utah counties are bordered by public lands that teem with people on weekends.

The Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest sees about 9 million visitors a year, focused mostly in Little and Big Cottonwood canyons, which are also critical water sources for Salt Lake City.

“We are looking at how recreational traffic affects wildlife abundance, distribution and behavior,” Green said. “We want to identify key habitat areas that need to be protected or restored or subject to planning efforts. Whether you are climbing, hiking or biking, you are going to be affecting wildlife in various ways.”

Green’s study window ran from May 6 to Aug. 18, broken into three blocks. For each six-week block, volunteers set up 70 camera locations. The teams avoided rigging cameras on slopes greater than 45 degrees or facing sunrises and sunsets, usually strapping them to bushes or trees at knee height.

“This maximizes capture of anything from the size of a skunk to a moose,” Green said. “You might not get the whole body, but you can still tell it’s a moose.”

Commonly used by hunters to scout locations to stalk game, motion-triggered trail cameras have become a vital tool for studying wildlife. But their widespread use raises privacy concerns, especially in studies that focus on lands that see heavy human activity.

But trail cameras snap shots that few human photographers can ever get and do it on a shoestring. Green is running his study on $30,000 in grants from pubic and private sources. The 70 cameras he used cost about $250 a piece, or $400 total, including locks, security cases and batteries. The city and museum purchased many of these cameras and will retain ownership.

The critter cams record the date, time, geocoordinate and temperature when the animal was photographed.

“This does it automatically 24/7. That’s why it’s great for mammals,” Green said. “Mammals are usually nocturnal. They are wary of humans. ... It’s easy to count birds but hard to count mammals.”

The cameras automatically switch to infrared at night, but images can still get overexposed or underexposed at dawn and dusk.

So far, the most common species registering in the data is Canis lupus familiaris. That’s right, dogs. Not surprisingly, Homo sapiens also appear regularly, but those images are not studied. After people and their pets, mule deer are by far the most common animal seen in the data, along with squirrels, red foxes, raccoons, moose, turkeys and mountain lions.

“We can estimate abundance at each site. From that, we can identify where animals are most active. We can identify what habitat they use most, what areas in the Wasatch are most important for every species,” Green said. “We can overlay those heat maps on each other. We hope we can see areas where we have an important patch of habitat, and see if something is blocking connection between them.”

Green and his colleagues view the camera study as a “legacy” project that will continue year after year. The next step is a winter survey, but trap cameras are not practical when snow is piling on the ground. So this aspect of the study will gather data the old-fashioned way, examining tracks left in the snow.

Matt Minkevitch, executive director of The Road Home, was optimistic in a recent interview about the progress of the homeless shelter’s annual holiday fundraiser.

Donations amassed during the two-day telethon, he said, are critical to keeping The Road Home running smoothly through the end of June, when its fiscal year turns over.

“It’s not superstition,” Minkevitch said, “but I don’t count until we’re done.”

The looming summer months have additional weight this year, because The Road Home will relocate sometime in June or July to a new location. It will be one of three new homeless resource centers scheduled to open next year in Salt Lake County after years of planning, debate and occasional missteps by the various government agencies and private organizations that serve Utah’s indigent population.

State leaders and service providers see the potential start of a new era in Utah’s approach to homelessness, one that emphasizes collaboration between public and private entities. And the three centers — two in Salt Lake City and one in South Salt Lake — are designed with that approach in mind, with on-site services in addition to shelter space and the aim of getting individuals and families the help they need as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“You can really triage that in a more measurable way,” said Preston Cochrane, executive director of Shelter the Homeless, “and then be able to return them to stable housing.”

A legislative audit released earlier this month dinged the state’s network of homeless services for a scattershot collection of record keeping. That report followed a period in which the state boasted of its successes, walked back from those boasts and ultimately launched Operation Rio Grande, a multipronged law enforcement and rehabilitation effort initially aimed at breaking up what had become an open-air drug market in downtown Salt Lake City.

In the background, thousands of Utahns continue to lack access to stable housing. Federal data released this month showed that Utah was one of five states to see its number of homeless veterans increase between 2009 and 2018, and community members gathered recently at a vigil to honor the 121 Utahns who died this year while, or after, experiencing homelessness.

“When communities come together, when we light those candles, when we think and we read the names of the people, when we say their names, they are not forgotten. And that is powerful," Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox said during that event. "And it gives us hope to the world that we can improve, that we can come together, and we can make a difference.”

Looking back

In 2015, Utah’s Division of Housing and Community Development earned local and national headlines after a bold claim of success — that chronic homelessness in the state had been reduced by 91 percent over 10 years and was nearing a “functional zero.”

Gordon Walker, outgoing director of the division, had championed an approach called “housing first,” which focused on getting the chronically homeless into a stable housing solution quickly to better address factors like employment or disability.

“We’re excited,” Walker said at the time, “because we see lives changing.”

Three years later, the housing-first policy remains, but Walker and the “91 percent” figure are gone. He went on to become CEO of the San Diego Regional Task Force — and is currently on leave for an assignment with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

His successor at the Utah Division of Housing and Community Development says the touted decline in the chronic homeless population was somewhat exaggerated by changes in how that group of individuals is calculated and defined.

“We did reduce chronic homelessness; it just wasn’t 91 percent," said division Director Jonathan Hardy. “We know we made some inroads there. But as far as reporting what happened over the last 10 years, it’s really difficult to pin down a number on that.”

Hardy said the state now has a precise list of individuals who classify as chronically homeless — a relatively small subset of the broader homeless population. And the size of that group was estimated in the past, Hardy said, while the transition to a more accurate count contributed to the perceived decline in 2015.

“We knew who all of them were,” Hardy said. “We didn’t have to do an estimation any more.”

That type of inconsistent number crunching was flagged by this month’s audit, in which researchers set out to identify which of the state’s housing and homeless services programs had the best rates of success.

“After finding significant problems with the data," the auditors wrote, “we lost confidence in the accuracy of our results.”

Hardy said the state has already made progress toward consistent record keeping with the development of its Homeless Management Information System, of HMIS, a shared database of service records used by the various entities involved with homelessness. And he said there is broad agreement with the audit’s recommendations for increased consistency, accuracy and goal setting, with the new resource centers offering an organic baseline to measure improvement going forward.

“We just haven’t set the bar for what we want to achieve as a community, formally,” Hardy said. “It’s not like we’ve been floating out there with no goals. But we haven’t had a structured plan in place.”

Moving forward

In the wake of Operation Rio Grande, residents throughout Salt Lake City have reported upticks in homeless activity as a concentration in the downtown area has disbursed elsewhere in response to a heavy law-enforcement presence.

That dynamic has led to instances of tension, such as the pushback from some neighbors against The INN Between, a hospice and medical center for the homeless that recently relocated to Salt Lake City’s east side.

Cochrane, whose Shelter the Homeless group owns the new resource center properties, said organizers are working in advance to engage with and build relationships with their new neighbors. But after a controversial site-selection process, he acknowledged that some critics will likely object to the presence of homeless shelters in their communities when they open this summer.

“We’re confident we’ll be able to work through it,” he said. “The more people we have that are involved, the better outcomes and the better overall feeling people are going to have about how we’re addressing homelessness.”

Cochrane said the attention paid to the issue of homelessness in recent years, positive and negative, has generated discussion around an important issue in the state. And from that attention, he said, comes a shared interest in making improvements.

“It really takes a community to address homelessness,” he said. “We see folks stepping up and wanting to get involved, wanting to be a part of the conversation, wanting to help in whatever way they can.”

Asked about the recent audit, Minkevitch said he sees it as a road map for the future, not an indictment of the present. The numbers can be overwhelming when the individual experiences of struggling Utahns are lumped together, he said, but made more manageable as select services can be targeted to specific groups.

He said the various partners are all at the table working on the shared goal of addressing the needs of people who are currently or have recently been homeless, and the availability of affordable housing to minimize homelessness going forward.

“There’s a tremendous amount of collaboration going on,” Minkevitch said.

In response to Josh Nelson’s “It’s time to make medical school free” (Tribune, Dec. 22), I agree with a lot Nelson said in his commentary, but not all.

Medical school is expensive, but I do not believe money is or should be the biggest deterrent for attending medical school.

I am about to finish my second year of medical school. I spent $56,000 this year on tuition and recently another $1,200 registering for board exams in June. I have never regretted my decision to start this crazy journey into medicine once, even when the bills come.

My friends are buying housing, making six-figure incomes and starting their families. I see my wife for an hour at dinner and then am back with my nose in the books. While I sacrifice family time now, I know that one day my dedication will save someone’s life. I will play a key part in making someone feel better. Someone’s father, mother, son, daughter, brother or sister will live because of the sacrifice I am making now. That is why I went into medicine, and if I can save one life, I don’t mind the quarter-million-dollar price tag that will come with it.

Of course, free medical school might attract more students and future doctors. But will all these students go into primary care where we need them, or will they opt for higher-paying subspecialties? The government already subsidizes tuition for students committed to going into primary care or serving the members of our nation’s military.

Free medical school would be amazing but, honestly, if the government had to choose where to allocate an extra $5 billion lying around, I would hope that would go toward expanding Medicaid and closing coverage gaps.

And, please, let’s all pray it doesn’t go toward a wall.

Bobby Cannon, Lebanon, Ore.

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The derangement of the current White House has affected the wider society over the past two years: increased hate crimes, loss of civility, amazing ethical lapses of government department secretaries. In recent weeks, derangement has broken through its few confinements, bringing the government shutdown, chaos in our foreign military/political involvements, and the likely worst stock market performance since 2008.

In response, our “Outstanding Leader” is seeking targets to blame: the Democrats for the shutdown, the Fed for the stock market, and Gen. James Mattis for cooperating with other countries.

He is missing the real culprit: Mexico.

Its culpability is seen most clearly in the government shutdown. Recall that Mexico was going to pay for the wall. To quote: “I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”

Despite Trump’s great negotiating ability, Mexico refuses to pay. He and Fox News should place blame appropriately, perhaps then encouraging boycotts of Mexican food, the likely Oscar-nominated movie “Roma,” and the Mexican actress Salma Hayek.

Mexico is also calling into question the “America First” foreign policy. While our “old lunatic” (according to Kim Jong-un) sends troops to waste their time on the border resisting the long-forgotten “caravan,” Mexico has started an effort to improve the lives of people in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

Maybe we can’t blame Mexico for the stock market “correction.” Then again, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador came into office on Dec. 1 and, unless there is a quick reversal, this month will have been the worst December in living memory. Case made?

Ken Jameson, Salt Lake City

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“There but for the grace of God go I,” I thought, as I read about The INN Between in the Tribune Dec. 16.

That thought comes to mind frequently. I know I could have ended up on the street, and still could if I lose my medical insurance.

I’m not religious, but my parents sent me to Sunday school for Bible lessons, and I still remember a few snatches. As I try to survive this season of the national potlatch, with its profligate glorification of consumerism — a graven image if there ever was one — sometimes I hear talk about a child who was born in a shed. I seem to recall that, as an adult, he chose a life of homelessness. There was something else, something about lepers, I think. Whatever.

It seems to me that he was not the sort of guy to cast out poor people who were sick and dying, not the sort to insist, “Not in my neighborhood!” (If he’d had a neighborhood, that is.) I think he was more the type of guy who would give his last shekel to The INN Between.

Robert Argenbright, Salt Lake City

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If outgoing Sen. Orrin Hatch is as concerned about raising “the bar of decency” in Washington as he says he is, he could start by calling out the immoral, illegal and indecent behavior of his guy in the Oval Office.

As the old saying goes, “a fish rots from the head down.”

Rob Greene, Salt Lake City

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The 2018 Sen. Orrin G. Hatch Apology Tour continues, as he reverses himself regarding statements that our president is not subject to the rule of law.

This follows expressions of regret to the former wives of White House staff secretary Rob Porter for knee-jerk denials of spouse abuse, to Sen. John McCain for telling the senator who should attend his funeral, and to Affordable Care Act supporters who are, in the senator’s words, stupid dumb-asses.

If Hatch really wants to get right with the world, these apologies will need to continue, and go back several years. He could start in October 1991 and his smugly patriarchal interrogation of Anita Hill. That spectacle is a milestone in the gender discrimination and sexual harassment that men like Hatch have institutionalized in Washington’s halls of power.

And why, one must wonder, are the powers that be in Utah, including the University of Utah, planning a monument to the senator with a focus on “civility” and “bipartisanship”? A library and think tank devoted to hypocrisy is what, in reality, it will be.

Terry Orme, Sandy

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Sunday’s storm, which brought an inch or two of snow to the Salt Lake Valley, is the last significant precipitation expected along the Wasatch Front this week. But, boy, it’s going to be cold.

The possibility of light, lake-effect snow, with little to no accumulation, will taper off in northern Utah by mid-day on Monday. According to the National Weather Service, “the main story will be the arrival of some of the coldest air of the season.”

If you’re planning on attending an outdoor celebration on New Year’s Eve, bundle up. Temperatures at midnight will be as low as 10 degrees — 22 degrees colder than at the same time last year — and they’ll continue to drop overnight. The forecast low on New Year’s Day morning is 7 in Salt Lake City — which will be considerably warmer than Park City, where temperatures are expected to plummet to -8, according to the NWS forecast.

Even St. George is going to start out frigid, at just 18 degrees. It will, at least, be above freezing in that southern Utah City, with a high near 40.

The forecast highs for the Wasatch front for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are in the low- to mid-20s, with lows in the single digits. On New Year's Day, the high is expected to be 20, which is about 20 degrees below normal.

It’s not just the low temperatures that will be problematic. The NWS warns that a high pressure will build in the region through the end of the week, creating an inversion and bad air quality.

Temperatures are not expected to go above freezing in Salt Lake City until Friday. The next storm, which could clear out the inversion, isn’t expected until Saturday night into Sunday.

People across the country are making New Year’s resolutions, and four out of five of us — maybe even nine out of 10 of us — are going to fail to keep them.

So, while the bar isn’t set particularly high, Salt Lake City is No. 7 when it comes to keeping New Year’s resolutions, and West Valley is No. 65 on the same list.

That’s according to WalletHub, which ranked 182 American cities based on “their conduciveness to self-improvement,” looking at 56 “key metrics, ranging from gyms per capita to income growth to employment outlook.”

Salt Lake City ranked 21st for health resolutions; 24th for financial resolutions; 25th for school and work resolutions; and 35th for bad habit resolutions

West Valley City ranked 68th for health resolutions; 19th for financial resolutions; 44th for school and work resolutions; and 60th for bad habit resolutions — coming in 65th, right between Mesa, Ariz., and Henderson, Nev.

San Francisco was No. 1, by the way, and Gulfport, Miss., was dead last in 182nd place.

The top 10 cities for keeping New Year's resolutions are:

1. San Francisco
2. Scottsdale, Ariz.
3. San Diego
4. Seattle
5. Irvine, Calif.
6. San Jose, Calif.
7. <i><b>Salt Lake City</b></i>
8. Austin, Texas
9. Portland, Ore.
10. Orlando, Fla.

Vatican City • Vatican spokesman Greg Burke and his deputy resigned suddenly Monday amid an overhaul of the Vatican’s communications operations that coincides with a troubled period in Pope Francis’ papacy.

In a tweet, Burke said he and his deputy, Paloma Garcia Ovejero, had resigned effective Jan. 1. Francis accepted the resignation Monday, the Vatican said in a statement.

“At this time of transition in Vatican communications, we think it’s best the Holy Father is completely free to assemble a new team,” Burke wrote.

He and Garcia thanked the pope. “A stage is ending. Thank you for these two and a half years,” Garcia tweeted.

Francis named a longtime member of the Vatican’s communications operations, Alessandro Gisotti, as an interim replacement.

The pope has recently overhauled the Vatican’s media operations for the second time by ousting the longtime editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano and naming a new director of editorial content for all Vatican media, Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli.

The resignations clearly took the new team by surprise.

The head of Vatican communications, Paolo Ruffini, said he had learned of the decision by Burke and Garcia and respected it. He praised their professionalism and said he had full confidence in Gisotti, who had been a longtime journalist with Vatican Radio and more recently had been head of social media for the Vatican.

“The year ahead is full of important appointments that will require maximum communications efforts,” Ruffini said in a statement.

It was perhaps a reference to Francis’ high-stakes summit on preventing clergy sex abuse in February, as well as his multiple foreign trips planned for 2019: Panama, United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bulgaria and Macedonia in the first half of the year, and rumored trips to Madagascar and Japan in the second half.

Francis also has to deal with continued fallout from the clergy abuse scandal, in Chile, the U.S. and beyond. The next year will likely see the outcome of a canonical investigation into ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, accused of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians, as well as the results of a Vatican investigation into McCarrick’s rise through church ranks.

Burke, then a Fox TV correspondent in Rome, was hired as a communications adviser for the Vatican’s secretariat of state in 2012. At the time, the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI had suffered a series of communications blunders, and it was thought that Burke could provide guidance.

In 2015, Burke was named deputy spokesman under the Rev. Federico Lombardi, an Italian Jesuit.

When Lombardi retired in 2016, Burke became main spokesman and was joined by Garcia, the first woman to ever hold the position of deputy. Garcia had been the Vatican correspondent for the Cadena Cope, the Spanish broadcaster.

Pope Francis did not have the year he thought he was going to have.

It began this way: marked by sniping about his reform tendencies, especially where Catholic Church teaching on the family is concerned. As the Vatican geared up for its 2018 synod assembly — a meeting of bishops from around the world who gather in Rome to advise the pope on different issues, this year on youths and vocations — talk that the 2014 and 2015 synod meetings on the family had been rigged in favor of a reformist agenda circulated among anti-Francis factions. Perhaps the Francis skeptics assumed they would get to press their case against the pope again when the October synod on youths came to pass. But even they couldn’t have predicted what sort of opportunities would present themselves in the meantime.

There have been plenty of those. Today, Francis’ pontificate wavers in the wake of the explosive re-emergence of the sex abuse crisis. His popularity has dropped sharply among Americans at large. And though Catholics’ views of the pope are steadier, the faithful are suffering. The pope has been called upon to resign and likewise advised strongly against it.

Pope Francis has — for the most part, though with notable exceptions — said the right things about the crisis. But saying the right things about it is easy, and despite all the encouraging remarks, Francis has taken little action so far. In February, he will convene a worldwide meeting of key bishops in Rome to generate actionable solutions to the disaster facing the church. Will it change anything?

A brief recap: After an investigation led by the Archdiocese of New York found accusations of minor sexual abuse against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to be credible, McCarrick resigned from the College of Cardinals and Francis ordered him into a life of prayer and penance, effectively banishing him from public life. A few weeks later, an explosive grand jury report from Pennsylvania revealed the disgusting, almost unthinkable extent of clergy sexual abuse and its cover-up in the state, implicating several prelates, including the then-archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Roughly a week later, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano released a long testimonial accusing Francis himself of having known of McCarrick’s abuses and permitting him to continue in public ministry anyhow, loosening restrictions placed on him by Pope Benedict XVI in the process.

And so all hell had broken loose. Francis chose to remain silent on Vigano’s accusations. As for Pennsylvania, Francis released a letter “to the people of God,” vowing to take a zero-tolerance approach to abuse against “the integrity of children and of vulnerable adults, as well as implementing zero tolerance and ways of making all those who perpetrate or cover up these crimes accountable.” And, on the McCarrick scandal itself, Francis agreed to open the Vatican’s archives to permit a “thorough study” of his career of sexual abuse but declined to pursue a Vatican-led probe into that history. In October, Wuerl resigned as archbishop of Washington, a delayed aftershock of the Pennsylvania report. Francis accepted Wuerl’s resignation but praised his performance in an apparent rebuttal to survivors and lay Catholics who had called for Wuerl to step down.

Since then, Francis has called for abusive clergy members to turn themselves over to civil authorities and prepare themselves for divine justice, declaring that the church will not protect them. Like most of his handling of the crisis so far, it was a puzzling, unsettling remark. Of course, rapists and sexual abusers should be prosecuted by civil authorities. But so should superiors who’ve aided and abetted them over the years. Francis seems prepared, in other words, to expose abusive priests to the full extent of civil justice. But the problem won’t end until complicit members of the hierarchy are similarly exposed, and that still seems like a distant prospect.

Restoring the moral credibility of the church on the world stage after the mishandling of the 2002 revelations of the sex abuse crisis always seemed to be part of Francis’ mandate. For a period after news of the crisis broke in the early aughts, the church still behaved as though it could rely on hardball legal tactics and brazen dismissal to weather it — victims were smeared and shamed in lawsuit proceedings, and church higher-ups blamed the entire disaster on sexual liberalism and anti-Catholic bigotry. But Francis was different: He instituted the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. He listened to survivors. He was compassionate. He cared.

But now the Pontifical Commission has withered, according to victim advocates and members of the panel itself, McCarrick sits silently in Kansas, and the February meeting of bishop-leaders remains a weak hook on which to hang hopes. If Francis fails in handling the crisis going forward, the damage will be incalculable — first to the victims who are and the ones who will be, then to the struggling Catholics who have prayed for some honest action in this ongoing catastrophe since 2002, and then to the cohesion of the church stretching into the future.

This year was only a brief glimpse into what lies ahead. Now that multiple states are conducting investigations into the church inside their borders, there will be more Pennsylvania-like reports, more media coverage and more insight into which highly ranked prelates did what. Francis seemed caught off guard in 2018 and unprepared to play a decisive role in the crisis. Let us pray 2019 is different.

Since President Donald Trump's inauguration, The Washington Post's fact-checkers have tracked more than 7,600 lies from the president. He's repeated some of them so frequently that they had to create a whole new Pinocchio category - the "Bottomless Pinocchio" - to do justice to his refusal to relinquish provable falsehoods.

Trump’s ability to maintain his parallel universe in which he is responsible for nothing and yet has achieved everything now defines his presidency. Only in that universe is the Islamic State vanquished, climate change a hoax and a wall needed to stop a horde of immigrants.

Trump is getting worse and more dishonest with time. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler writes:

"The fusillade of tweets was the start of a year of unprecedented deception during which Trump became increasingly unmoored from the truth. When 2018 began, the president had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker's database, which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. By the end of the year, Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency - averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before."

The New York Times tries to categorize his lies, which include "repeating and inflating falsehoods, shifting his statements, embellishing or omitting details and offering misleading attacks."

Trump's lies are not inconsequential. They are a necessary foundation for his political survival (in an investigation that has indicted more than 30 people, he still screams "Witch hunt!") and for an agenda that is based on ignorance and deception. And because of the centrality of lying to his survival and agenda, Republicans who continue to support him increasingly must live alongside him in his alternative universe. (When Republicans do refuse to accept his lies, they inevitably reject his policy positions, as they did when he denied Mohammed bin Salman's responsibility for Jamal Khashoggi's murder.) Let's look at a few examples.

Trump's immediate pullout from Syria despite the unanimous opposition of his military commanders makes sense only if one accepts the lie that the Islamic State has been defeated. If not, he's not merely betraying the Kurds and aiding his Russian pals but also endangering the United States and its closest allies. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said as much on CNN on Sunday:

GRAHAM: As to Syria, there are three things important this country. Number one, make sure that ISIS never comes back in Syria. That's why we need to keep some of our troops there. They're inside the 10-yard line in defeating ISIS. But we're not there yet. If we leave now, the Kurds are going to get slaughtered.

BASH: How are you going to convince President Trump of that?

GRAHAM: I'm going to talk to him at lunch. He has talked to General Dunford. I got a call from General Dunford. The president is reconsidering how we do this. He's frustrated. I get it. People should pay more. They should fight more. But we're not the policemen of the world here. We're fighting a war against ISIS. They're still not defeated in Syria. I'm asking the president to make sure that we have troops there to protect us. Don't outsource our national security to some foreign power. If we leave now, the Kurds will get in a fight with Turkey. They could get slaughtered. Who would help you in the future? And if we leave now, there will be a land bridge from Tehran to Beirut in terms of supp

In other words, Graham has to try pleading with Trump to accept reality; otherwise, Trump's dangerous policy based on his uniformed or intentionally false assertions will harm our national security. That's the view of a Trump defender.

Likewise, on Syria, retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal explained on ABC's "This Week": "Iran has increased influence across the region now. If you pull American influence out, you're likely to have greater instability. And, of course, it will be much more difficult for the United States to try to push events in any direction. ... I don't believe ISIS is defeated." As for the decision prompting Defense Secretary Jim Mattis's resignation, McChrystal said: "If we have someone who is as selfless and as committed as Jim Mattis resigns his position, walking away from all the responsibility he feels for every service member in our forces, and he does so in a public way like that, we ought to stop and say, Okay, why did he do it?"

Likewise, Trump's holiday from reality has caused a government shutdown. That move is based on two lies - first, that a wall is a security benefit, and second, that we have an immigration crisis. As to the latter, Republican Linda Chavez correctly noted on CNN's "State of the Union": "Well, you know what the real problem is? Is that there is a big lie going on. We are not in the middle of an immigration crisis in the United States. In the year 2000, 1.6 million people were apprehended trying to get into the United States." She continued: "In fiscal year 2017, it was about 300,000. Now it did tick up in 2018, and there has been a shift. We are no longer seeing single men coming to work in the United States. We're seeing families who are fleeing violence in their countries. We do need to do something about the asylum system." (Of course a wall won't solve the asylum problem because refugees will keep presenting themselves, just as they do now.)

As for the wall, Trump’s reason for shutting down the government, even his departing Chief of Staff John Kelly lets on, “To be honest, it’s not a wall.” (It would have been nice if Kelly had admitted as such before the government shut down.) He adds, “The president still says ‘wall’ - oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”

So we are having a shutdown over a non-solution the president doesn't even want to a problem that doesn't actually exist. That's the tower of lies one has to accept to defend Trump's actions.

Then there is climate change, a problem so serious and far-reaching that the latest National Climate Assessment, issued by his own administration, provided no comfort to climate-change deniers and minimizers. "Earth's climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities," it stated. "The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future - but the severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur. Americans increasingly recognize the risks climate change poses to their everyday lives and livelihoods and are beginning to respond."

Most Americans now accept these indisputable facts. But Trump says he doesn't believe in climate change, which is equivalent to saying he doesn't believe in gravity or doesn't believe that smoking causes cancer. He does not demonstrate the intellectual capacity of a mature adult, let alone a world leader - or he doesn't want to.

In sum, it's worth repeating how dangerous Trump's lies are and how they translate to counterproductive and stupid decisions once accepted. That elected Republicans, Fox News entertainers and even "respectable" conservative outlets echo Trump's lies does not mean Trump isn't lying; it means the right has fallen into a modern Dark Ages in which superstition, ignorance and cultism replace rationality.

When the GOP decides it has had enough of justifying Trump’s lies and the ridiculous policy actions that flow from his untruths, it can rejoin the debate on critical policy issues; for now, Democrats, independents and assorted political orphans - including the community of heretical, reality-based Republicans (many of whom are retiring, for good reason) - must address the real world.

Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post.

@JRubinBlogger

Here are the 117 movies, announced Nov. 28 by the Sundance Institute (and updated Dec. 20) that will screen at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The festival runs Jan. 24-Feb. 3 in Park City and at venues in Salt Lake City and the Sundance resort.

Some passes are still on sale at sundance.org. So are 10-ticket packages for the festival’s second half (Jan. 30-Feb. 3), for Salt Lake City screenings, and for Utah students. The schedule of when and where movies will screen will be posted soon on sundance.org.

People who have bought ticket packages will be assigned time slots for ticket selection on Dec. 20, and selections will happen from Jan. 7 to 11. Utah ticket-package buyers will make their selections on Jan. 10 and 11.

Pre-sale of individual tickets for Sundance Institute members starts on Jan. 15. Individual tickets for Utah locals go on sale on Jan. 17. Individual tickets for everyone else go on sale Jan. 22. Individual tickets are $25 each; tickets for the electronic wait-list are $20; tickets for Kids division screenings are $10 each.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

“Before You Know It” • The makers of the web series “Disengaged” created this comedy about adult sisters (played by director/writer Hannah Pearl Utt and writer Jen Tullock) who learn their believed-to-be-deceased mom (Judith Light) is alive and starring in a soap opera. Also starring Mandy Patinkin, Mike Colter and Alec Baldwin.

“Big Time Adolescence” • Jason Orley wrote and directed this coming-of-age comedy about a teen (Griffin Gluck) and the bad influence of his best friend (“Saturday Night Live’s” Pete Davidson), a charismatic college dropout. Also starring Jon Cryer and Machine Gun Kelly.

“Brittany Runs a Marathon” • Comic actor Jillian Bell (“22 Jump Street,” “Idiotsitter”) stars in Paul Downs Colazzo’s comedy as an underachiever who “takes control of her life, one city block at a time.” Also starring Michaela Watkins and Lil Rel Howery (“Get Out,” “Uncle Drew”).

“Clemency” • Alfre Woodard stars in this drama, written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu, as a job-weary prison warden who connects with a death row inmate (Aldis Hodge). Also stars Richard Schiff and Wendell Pierce.

“The Farewell” • Comedian/rapper Awkwafina (“Crazy Rich Asians”) stars in this comedy-drama, written and directed by Lulu Wang, who told the same true story in 2016 on public radio’s “This American Life.” It’s about a Chinese-American woman who returns to China to see her grandmother, whose family sets up an elaborate plan to hide the news that she has a terminal illness.

“Hala” • Writer-director Minhal Baig adapts her 2016 short into a feature, a coming-of-age comedy-drama about a Muslim teenager (Geraldine Viswanathan, from “Blockers”) coming into her own while her family is falling apart.

“Honey Boy” • Lucas Hedges (“Boy Erased”) and Shia LaBeouf star as a child TV star and his father, a hard-drinking ex-rodeo clown, in this drama. LaBeouf wrote the screenplay; the director is documentarian Alma Har’el. Also starring Laura San Giacomo, Maika Monroe, Natasha Lyonne, Martin Starr and FKA Twigs.

“Imaginary Order” • Wendy McLendon-Covey (“The Goldbergs”) stars in writer-director Debra Eisenstadt’s psychological drama about an obsessive-compulsive suburban mom.

“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” • Jimmie Falls plays himself, a man who dreams of restoring the Victorian home his grandfather (Danny Glover) built in the heart of San Francisco — a city rapidly changing and leaving Jimmie behind. Director Joe Talbot co-wrote the screenplay with Rob Richert.

“Luce” • A high-school teacher (Octavia Spencer) makes an alarming discovery about one of her students, Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a star track athlete adopted by suburban parents (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth) from war-torn Eritrea, in this drama about race and identity. Director Julius Onah (“The Cloverfield Paradox”) and writer J.C. Lee adapted the script from Lee’s play.

“Ms. Purple” • Kasie (Tiffany Chu), a karaoke hostess in L.A.’s Koreatown, reconnects with her estranged brother Carey (Teddy Chu) when their father’s hospice nurse quits. Director Justin Chon (“Gook,” SFF ’17) co-wrote with Chris Dinh.

“Native Son” • Richard Wright’s landmark 1940 novel gets a movie adaptation, with Ashton Sanders (“Moonlight”) starring as Bigger Thomas, a young African-American man coming of age on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. The cast includes Sanaa Lathan, Nick Robinson, Margaret Qualley and Bill Camp. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks wrote the screenplay; artist Rashid Johnson makes his directing debut. (This is a “Day One” film, which screens on the festival’s opening night.)

“Share” • Mandy (Rhianne Barreto), 16, discovers a disturbing video of herself from a night she doesn’t remember, and furiously tries to learn what happened and how to contain the damage. Writer-director Pippa Bianco expanded her 2015 short film, an award winner at Cannes and SXSW, for this thriller.

“The Sound of Silence” • Director-writer Michael Tyburski and co-writer Ben Nabors adapt their short “Palimpsest” (SFF ’13) for this drama about a New York City “house tuner” (Peter Skarsgaard), who calibrates the sound in people’s homes to adjust their moods, as he meets a client (Rashida Jones) with an unsolvable problem. Also starring Tony Revolori (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) and Austin Pendleton (“The Muppet Movie”).

“Them That Follow” • Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage wrote and directed this drama set in a snake-handling Pentecostal church in Appalachia, focusing on a pastor’s daughter (Alice Englert) whose secret could tear her community apart. Also starring Olivia Colman, Walton Goggins, Kaitlyn Dever and Jim Gaffigan.

“To the Stars” • A shy farmer’s daughter (Kara Hayward, from “Moonlight Kingdom”) begins an intimate friendship with a worldly new girl (Liana Liberato) under the gaze of her small-town neighbors in 1960s Oklahoma. The cast includes Jordana Spiro, Tony Hale, Shea Whigham and Malin Akerman. Directed by Martha Stephens (“Land Ho!”, SFF ’14), written by Shannon Bradley-Colleary.

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U.S. Documentary Competition

“Always in Season” • Director Jacqueline Olive examines a century of lynching in America, focusing on the 2014 hanging death of a North Carolina teen and his mother’s search for justice and reconciliation.

“American Factory” • Chinese billionaire Cho Tak Wong aims to turn a shuttered GM plant in Ohio into a new auto-glass factory, promising 2,000 new jobs, but clashes between high-tech China and working-class America bring setbacks. Directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert (“A Lion in the House,” SFF ’06) got an Oscar nomination for their 2009 documentary short “The Last Truck,” which chronicled the same GM plant’s closure.

“Apollo 11” • “First Man” as a documentary, as director Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13,” SFF ’14) uses never-before-published 70mm footage and audio to reconstruct humanity’s first trip to the moon.

“Bedlam” • Psychiatrist and filmmaker Kenneth Paul Rosenberg visits emergency rooms, jails and homeless camps to chronicle the lives of the seriously mentally ill.

“David Crosby: Remember My Name” • An intensely intimate portrait of musician David Crosby, from his days in Crosby Stills & Nash to today. Directed by A.J. Eaton.

“Hail Satan?” • A look at The Satanic Temple, which has grown in only six years into one of the most controversial religious movements in American history. Directed by Penny Lane, whose animated documentary “Nuts!” played Sundance in 2016.

“Jawline” • Director Liza Mandelup profiles social-media star Austyn Tester, who uses his internet fame to escape a dead-end life in rural Tennessee.

“Knock Down the House” • Director Rachel Lears follows four insurgent woman candidates challenging incumbents for congressional seats. Spoiler alert: One of them is former Bronx bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

“Midnight Family” (Mexico/U.S.) • Director Luke Lorentzen follows the Ochoa family, who operate a private ambulance in Mexico City’s wealthiest neighborhoods in a cutthroat competition with rival EMTs and try to make ends meet without sacrificing patient care.

“Mike Wallace Is Here” • TV journalist Mike Wallace’s long and controversial career as the bulldog investigative reporter on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” and how it influences today’s news coverage, is examined entirely through archival footage. Directed by Avi Belkin.

“Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements” • Director Irene Taylor Brodsky (“Hear and Now,” Audience Award winner, SFF ’07) paints portraits of a deaf boy growing up, his deaf grandfather, and Ludwig von Beethoven the year he went deaf and wrote his famed sonata.

“One Child Nation” (China/U.S.) • Exploring China’s one-child-per-couple policy, Nanfu Wang — who was herself an only child and is now a mother — and Jialing Zhang examine how the social experiment forever affected generations of parents and children.

“Pahokee” • In Pahokee, Fla., a small town in the Everglades, four teens experience heartbreak and more in their senior year. Directors Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan expand on their short doc “The Send-Off” (SFF ’16).

“Tigerland” • Director Ross Kauffman (“E-Team,” SFF ’14; “Born Into Brothels,” SFF ’04) captures footage of tigers in the wild from India to Siberia and profiles the people working to save them from extinction.

“Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary” • Director Ben Berman tries to separate truth from illusion in this look at John Edward Szeles, better known as the comedy magician The Amazing Johnathan, who went on what he said would be his final tour in 2013 — because, he said, he had a year to live.

“Where’s My Roy Cohn?” • Attorney Roy Cohn, the dark manipulator who guided Joseph McCarthy and the young Donald Trump, is revealed in this thriller-like exposé by director Matt Tyrnauer (“Studio 54,” SFF ’18).

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World Cinema Dramatic Competition

“Dirty God” (Netherlands/United Kingdom/Belgium/Ireland) • A young mother (Vicky Knight) finds her life spiraling out of control after an acid attack leaves her severely burned, and she takes drastic action to reclaim control. Directed by Sacha Polak, who co-wrote with Susanne Farrell.

“Divine Love” (Brazil/Uruguay/Denmark/Norway) • In Brazil, 2027, a religious woman (Dira Praes) uses her position in a notary’s office to keep struggling couples from divorce — until she has a problem in her own marriage. Director Gabriel Mascaro co-wrote the script with Rachel Daisy Ellis and Esdras Bezerra.

“Dolce Fine Giornata” (Poland) • The setting is Tuscany, amid terrorism and eroding democracy, as Maria (Krystyna Janda) finds her stable family life crumbling when she begins a relationship with a young immigrant (Lorenzo de Moor). Director Jacek Borcuch co-wrote the script with Szczepan Twardoch.

“Judy & Punch” (Australia) • In writer-director Mirrah Foulkes’ drama, two puppeteers try to resurrect their marionette show, which is a success thanks to Judy (Mia Wasikowska) and her superior puppetry skills — but is endangered by Punch (Damon Herriman) and his ambition and his drinking.

“Koko-di Koko-da” (Sweden/Denmark) • A couple, mourning the loss of their daughter, take a road trip and become terrorized by a sideshow artist and his entourage in writer-director Johannes Nyholm’s psychological thriller.

“The Last Tree” (United Kingdom) • In writer-director Shola Amoo’s coming-of-age drama, Femi (Sam Adewunmi), a British teen of Nigerian heritage, struggles with culture shock when he must leave his happy rural childhood to live in London with his mum.

“Monos” (Colombia/Argentina/Netherlands/Germany/Sweden/Uruguay) • Eight kids with guns watch over a hostage (Julianne Nicholson) and a milk cow on a mountaintop in this drama directed by Alejandro Landes and written by Landes and Alexis Dos Santos.

“Queen of Hearts” (Denmark) • A woman (Trine Dyrholm) seduces her 17-year-old stepson (Gustav Lindh), putting her family and career in jeopardy, in this drama directed by May El-Toukhy, who co-wrote with Maren Louise Käehne.

“The Sharks” (Uruguay/Argentina/Spain) • Writer-director Lucía Garibaldi’s drama centers on 14-year-old Rosina (Romina Bentancur), the only person in her small beach town not panicked by news that sharks are swimming around.

“The Souvenir” (United Kingdom) • A film student (Honor Swinton Byrne) starts a courtship with an untrustworthy man (Tom Burke), defying her mother (played by the actress’s mum, Tilda Swinton) and worrying her friends, in writer-director Joanna Hogg’s romantic drama.

“This Is Not Berlin” (Mexico) • A misfit teen (Xabiani Ponce de León) is invited to a mythical nightclub, where he finds an underground nightlife scene of punk, drugs and sexual liberty. Director Haro Sana co-wrote with Rodrigo Ordóñez and Max Zunino.

“We Are Little Zombies” (Japan) • Writer-director Makoto Nagahisa — who won Sundance’s 2017 Grand Jury Prize for short films with “And So We Put Goldfish in the Pool” — makes his feature debut with this story of four 13-year-olds who form a band to cope with their emotions after the deaths of their parents.

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World Cinema Documentary Competition

“Advocate” (Israel/Canada/Switzerland) • Filmmakers Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche profile Lea Tsemel, a Jewish-Israeli lawyer who has defended Palestinians of all stripes — feminists to fundamentalists, nonviolent demonstrators and armed militants — for nearly 50 years.

“Cold Case Hammarskjold” (Denmark) • Filmmaker Mads Brügger, who went undercover as a corruptible diplomat in “The Ambassador” (SFF ’12), teams with private eye Göran Bjorkdahl to investigate the still-unsolved death of U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, whose plane went down in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1961.

“The Disappearance of My Mother” (Italy) • Filmmaker Benjamin Baresse turns the camera on his mother, once-iconic fashion model Benedetta Barzini, 73, as she plans to leave Milan for a solitary life on a faraway island.

“The Edge of Democracy” (Brazil) • Director Petra Costa gets insider access to tell a tale of two presidents — Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, aka Lula, the charismatic and now jailed leader of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, and Dilma Rousseff, his chief-of-staff and successor, impeached and removed from office in 2016 — and what their story means for democracy in the South American country.

“Gaza” (Ireland) • Filmmakers Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell aim to get past the headlines and look at the people living in Gaza, leading their lives amid the rubble of never-ending conflict.

“Honeyland” (Macedonia) • Europe’s last female bee hunter is on a mission: to save the bees taken by nomadic beekeepers and restore the natural balance. Directed by Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska.

“Lapü” (Colombia) • In the Guajira Desert, Doris, a member of the indigenous Wayuu people, exhumes her cousin’s remains for a ritual in which Doris confronts death and blends the worlds of dreams and the living. Directed by Juan Pablo Polanco and César Alejandro Jaimes.

“The Magic Life of V” (Finland/Denmark/Bulgaria) • Director Tonislav Hristov follows Veera, who uses live role-playing to become more independent, help her mentally challenged brother and confront the legacy of their abusive father.

“Midnight Traveler” (U.S./Qatar/United Kingdom/Canada) • Afghan filmmaker Hassan Fazili chronicles his own journey, fleeing the Taliban with his wife and two young daughters, and shows firsthand what refugees face when they seek asylum.

“Sea of Shadows” (Austria) • Environmentalists, the Mexican navy and undercover investigators work to protect the vaquita, the smallest species of whale, which is being destroyed by Mexican cartels and Chinese mobsters harvesting swim bladders of the totoaba fish — called “the cocaine of the sea.” Director Richard Ladkani goes along for the ride.

“Shooting the Mafia” (Ireland) • Documentarian Kim Longinotto (“Dreamcatcher,” SFF ’15) profiles photographer Letizia Battaglia, who for 40 years has captured images of her home in Sicily — in particular, the brutality of the Mafia.

“Stieg Larsson: The Man Who Played With Fire” • Filmmaker Henrik Georgsson uses re-enactments to create a portrait of Stieg Larsson, the author of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and his battles with right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis.

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Next

“Adam” • Director Rhys Ernst and screenwriter Ariel Schrag adapt Schrag’s coming-of-age novel about an awkward teen boy (Nicholas Alexander) who follows his sister (Margaret Qualley) into New York’s lesbian and trans activist scene.

“The Death of Dick Long” • Two guys try to keep private the details of how their friend Dick died, a tough task in a small Alabama town where news travels fast. Directed by Daniel Scheinert (“Swiss Army Man,” SFF ’16), written by Billy Chew.

“Give Me Liberty” • A medical transport driver has to choose between transporting a group of elderly Russians and helping a young black woman with ALS, all while a riot breaks out in America’s most segregated city, Milwaukee. Kirill Mikhanovsky directed this comedy-drama about immigrants and the American dream, which he co-wrote with Alice Austen.

“The Infiltrators” • A group of undocumented Dreamers deliberately gets detained by U.S. Border Patrol to get inside a mysterious for-profit detention center. Directed by Alex Rivera (“Sleep Dealer,” SFF ’08) and Cristina Ibarra; written by Rivera and Aldo Velasco.

“Light From Light” • Shelia (Marin Ireland), a single mom and part-time paranormal investigator, looks into a possible “haunting” at a widower’s farmhouse in Tennessee in this ghost story written and directed by Paul Harris.

“Paradise Hills” (Spain/U.S.) • Spanish filmmaker/photographer Alice Waddington makes her feature debut with this science-fiction thriller, starring Emma Roberts as a woman who is sent to a high-class reform facility with a dark secret. The cast includes Danielle Macdonald (“Patti Cake$,” SFF ’17), Awkwafina, Eiza González, Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Irvine. Written by Nacho Vigalondo (“Colossal,” SFF ’17) and Brian DeLeeuw.

“Premature” • Ayanna (Zora Howard) is preparing to leave Harlem for college when she meets Isaiah (Joshua Boone), a mysterious outsider, in this coming-of-age drama directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green (“Gun Hill Road,” SFF ’11) and written by Green and Howard.

“Selah and the Spades” • Writer-director Tayarisha Poe dissects the power politics of a prestigious boarding school, where Selah Summers (Lovie Simone) is feared and loved as leader of the most powerful faction, The Spades.

“Sister Aimee” • Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann wrote and directed this fictionalized look at the life of Aimee Semple McPherson (Anna Margaret Hollyman), the famed evangelist who in 1926 is looking for a way out of the spotlight — and ends up on a wild road trip toward Mexico.

“The Wolf Hour” • Naomi Watts stars as June E. Leigh, a former counterculture figure who in 1977 — the “Summer of Sam” — is living alone in the South Bronx, tormented by someone who knows how to find her weaknesses. Written and directed by Alistair Banks Griffin; the cast includes Emory Cohen, Jennifer Ehle and Kelvin Harrison Jr.

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Premieres

“After the Wedding” • Michelle Williams stars as Isabel, who courts a New York benefactor, Theresa (Julianne Moore), to donate to her orphanage in India. An invitation to a wedding causes Isabel’s past and present to collide. This drama by writer-director Bart Freundlich (“The Myth of Fingerprints,” SFF ’97) is remake of a 2006 Danish Oscar nominee by writer-director Susanne Bier (“In a Better World,” SFF ’11). (This is a “Day One” film, screening on the festival’s opening night.)

“Animals” (United Kingdom/Ireland/Australia) • Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) have been hard-partying pals for a decade, but Laura’s new romance and her focus on her novel are straining that friendship. Sophie Hyde (“52 Tuesdays,” SFF ’14) directs a screenplay by Emma Jane Unsworth.

“Blinded by the Light” (United Kingdom) • Bend it like the Boss? “Bend It Like Beckham” director Gurinder Chadha (“What’s Cooking?” SFF ’00) returns with this coming-of-age comedy set in Thatcher-era England, about a teen (Viveik Kalra) who tries to understand his world through the music of Bruce Springsteen. Chadha co-wrote with Sarfraz Manzoor and Paul Mayeda Berges. The cast includes Hayley Atwell and Rob Brydon.

“The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” (United Kingdom) • Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”) makes his feature debut as a writer and director in this true story of William Kamkwamba (Maxwell Simba), a 13-year-old Malawi boy who sought to save his family and village from famine by building a wind turbine. Ejiofor also stars as William’s father.

“Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” • Zac Efron plays serial killer Ted Bundy, whose exploits through Washington state and Utah are seen from the vantage point of his girlfriend Liz Kloepfer (Lily Collins), who refused to believe the truth for years. Documentarian Joe Berlinger (“Brother’s Keeper,” SFF ’92; “Paradise Lost,” SFF ’96, among others) directs a script by Michael Werwie. The cast includes Haley Joel Osment, Kaya Scodelario, John Malkovich, Jim Parsons and Metallica’s James Hetfield.

“I Am Mother” (Australia) • In this dystopian science-fiction drama, a teen girl (Clara Rugaard) is raised by a robot, Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne), designed to repopulate Planet Earth — until a stranger (Hilary Swank) arrives with alarming news. Directed by Grant Sputore, written by Michael Lloyd Green.

“Late Night” • Mindy Kaling wrote and stars in this comedy as the first female staff writer for a legendary late-night talk show host (Emma Thompson), whose differences are bridged by their shared love of a sharp joke. Directed by Nisha Ganatra, a veteran TV director, the movie also stars John Lithgow, Paul Walter Hauser, Reid Scott and Amy Ryan.

“The Mustang” • Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts), a violent convict, is given a chance at redemption in a rehabilitation program to train wild mustangs. Directed by French actor Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, who wrote with Mona Fastvold and Brock Norman Brock. The cast includes Connie Britton, Bruce Dern, Jason Mitchell, Gideon Adlon and Josh Stewart.

“Official Secrets” (U.S./United Kingdom) • Keira Knightley stars in this true-life drama as British Intelligence whistleblower Katharine Gun, who before the 2003 Iraq invasion leaked a top-secret NSA memo exposing a U.S./U.K. spying operation against members of the U.N. Security Council — with the intent of blackmailing countries into supporting the war. Gavin Hood (“Ender’s Game”) directed, and co-wrote the screenplay with husband-and-wife writers Sara and Gregory Bernstein. The cast includes Matt Smith, Ralph Fiennes, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans.

“Paddleton” • In writer-director Alex Lehmann’s comedy-drama, Mark Duplass and Ray Romano play misfit neighbors who become unlikely friends when the younger man is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Also starring Christine Woods.

“Photograph” (India) • Director-writer Ritesh Batra (“Our Souls at Night,” “The Lunchbox”) returns to his native Mumbai for this romance about a street photographer (Nawazuddin Siddiqi) who asks a shy stranger (Sanya Malhotra) to pose as his fiancée to get his family off his back.

“Relive” • After a man’s family dies in an apparent homicide case, he (David Oyelowo) gets a phone call from his niece (Storm Reid, from “A Wrinkle in Time”) — one of those killed. Is she a ghost? Is he going mad? Or will her calls help him rewrite history? Director Jacob Estes (“The Details,” SFF ’11) co-wrote with Drew Daywalt. The cast includes Mykelti Williamson, Alfred Molina and Bryan Tyree Henry.

“The Report” • Adam Driver stars in writer-director Scott Z. Burns’ true-life political drama as Daniel Jones, lead investigator of the U.S. Senate’s study of the CIA program to detain, interrogate and torture detainees during the Iraq War. Also starring Annette Bening, Jon Hamm, Ted Levine, Maura Tierney, Tim Blake Nelson, Jennifer Morrison and Michael C. Hall.

“Sonja: The White Swan” (Norway) • A biopic of Sonja Henie, the 1930s Olympian who invented modern figure skating and who sacrificed everything to become a Hollywood star. Ine Marie Wilmann plays Henie, reteaming with director Anne Sewitsky (“Homesick,” SFF ’15). Written by Mette Marit Bølstad and Andreaas Markusson.

“The Sunlit Night” (Germany/Norway) • An American painter (Jenny Slate) and a Russian émigré (Alex Sharp) meet under the midnight sun north of the Arctic Circle in this romantic drama directed by David Wnendt and written by Rebecca Dinerstein, based on her novel. The cast includes Zach Galifianakis, Gillian Anderson, Fridjov Sáheim and David Paymer.

“The Tomorrow Man” • Music-video director Noble Jones wrote and directed this love story between two people with a lot of stuff: Ed (John Lithgow), preparing for a disaster that may never come, and Ronnie (Blythe Danner), who shops for things she may never use.

“Top End Wedding” (Australia) • Lauren (Miranda Tapsell) and Ned (Gwylim Lee, from “Bohemian Rhapsody”) are getting married in 10 days — if they can find Lauren’s missing mom (Kerry Fox) in northern Australia, reunite her parents and pull off their dream wedding. Wayne Blair directs this comedy, written by Tapsell and Joshua Tyler.

“Troupe Zero” • A misfit girl (McKenna Grace) in rural Georgia in 1977 dreams of outer space, and a national competition to be included on NASA’s Golden Record gives her a chance to make that dream come true — with the help of a makeshift group of Birdie Scouts. The female directing duo Bert & Bertie makes its feature debut, with a script by Lucy Alibar (“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” SFF ’12). The cast includes Viola Davis, Jim Gaffigan, Mike Epps, Charlie Shotwell and Allison Janney.

“Velvet Buzzsaw” • Artists and collectors collide in Los Angeles' contemporary art scene in this Netflix-produced horror-thriller, which reunites star Jake Gyllenhaal with “Nightcrawler” writer-director Dan Gilroy. Also starring Rene Russo, Toni Collette, Zawe Ashton, Tom Sturridge and Natalia Dyer (“Stranger Things”).

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Documentary Premieres

“Ask Dr. Ruth” • Director Ryan White (“The Case Against 8,” SFF ’14) gets Dr. Ruth Westheimer, at 90 years old, to look back on her past as a Holocaust survivor and as America’s best-known sex therapist.

“The Great Hack” • The team behind the Arab Spring documentary “The Square” (SFF ’13), Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, examines the Cambridge Analytica Facebook hack — and how control of one’s data is becoming the newest human right.

“Halston” • French director Frédéric Tcheng continues his chronicles of the fashion world (after documentaries on Diana Vreeland and the house of Dior) with this rags-to-riches story of America’s first superstar designer, who saw his name become a tradable commodity that he could not control.

“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” • Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” SFF ’05) looks at the rise and fall of Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes and her too-good-to-be-true invention that promised to change the way blood is tested.

“Love, Antosha” • The too-short but extraordinary life of actor Anton Yelchin — from indie glory (such as “Like Crazy,” Grand Jury Prize winner, SFF ’11) to mainstream success (Chekov in the “Star Trek” reboot) — is examined by director Garret Price.

“Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love” • Director Nick Broomfield (whose “Kurt & Courtney” almost screened at Sundance in 1998) chronicles the unconventional love story of singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and his Norwegian muse, Marianne Ihlen.

“Merata: How Mum Decolonised the Screen” (New Zealand) • Director Merata Mita, a pioneer in bringing Maori stories to the screen and inspiring indigenous filmmakers around the world, is shown in archival footage from the perspective of her children. Her youngest, Heperi Mita, is the film’s director.

“Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool” • Sundance regular Stanley Nelson (“Tell Them We Are Rising,” SFF ’17, among others) presents a portrait of jazz innovator and icon Miles Davis.

“Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins” • Texas journalist, political columnist and social critic Molly Ivins — who took on Reagan, Clinton and two Bushes in defense of the Bill of Rights — gets the documentary treatment from director Janice Engel.

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” • Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (“The Black List,” “The Trans List”) looks at the life and career of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, author of “Beloved,” “God Help the Child” and other novels.

“Untouchable” • Harvey Weinstein isn’t buying movies at Sundance anymore, but he is featured in one: Ursula Macfarlane’s examination of how the movie mogul acquired and protected his power as charges of sexual assault became too loud for even Hollywood to ignore.

“Words From a Bear” • Jeffrey Palmer’s documentary — produced for PBS’ “American Masters” series — connects the words of Kiowa author and Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday to his American Indian experience.

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Midnight

“Corporate Animals” • A team-building trip in New Mexico turns into an underground test of survival for an egotistical CEO (Demi Moore), her long-suffering assistants (Jessica Williams and Karan Soni), their clueless guide (Ed Helms) and others. The horror-comedy is directed by Patrick Brice (“The Overnight,” SFF ’15) and written by Sam Bain.

“Greener Grass” • In this dark comedy by writer-director-stars Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, soccer moms compete in their personal lives while their kids battle on the field.

“The Hole in the Ground” (Ireland) • A troubled mom (Seána Kerslake) panics when her son (James Quinn Markey) disappears in the woods behind their rural house — and becomes more distraught when he returns seemingly OK, but somehow different. Director Lee Cronin co-wrote this horror tale with Stephen Shields.

“Little Monsters” (Australia) • In writer-director Abe Forsythe’s horror-comedy, a down-on-his-luck musician (Alexander England) chaperones his nephew’s kindergarten field trip and must team up with the teacher (Lupita Nyong’o) and a kids-show personality (Josh Gad) to protect the children from a sudden zombie outbreak.

“The Lodge” (U.S./United Kingdom) • A bride-to-be (Riley Keough) is snowed in with her future stepchildren (Jaden Martell, Lia McHugh) when demons from her strict religious childhood come out to torment them. Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala share screenwriting credit with Sergio Casci. Alicia Silverstone and Richard Armitage also star.

“Memory: The Origins of ‘Alien’ ” • Documentarian Alexandre O. Phillippe, who dissected the “Psycho” shower scene in “78/52” (SFF ’17), ties together the threads of mythology and art that inspired Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror/science-fiction classic “Alien.”

“Mope” • A “mope,” the synopsis for director Lucas Heyne’s comedy-drama explains, is the lowest-level male performer in the porn industry. The question the film asks is whether two “mopes” can become porn “stars.” Heyne co-wrote with Zack Newkirk.

“Sweetheart” • In this horror-thriller, Kiersey Clemons stars as a woman who washes up on a tropical island and must battle the elements, loneliness and the malevolent force that comes out at night. Director J.D. Dillard (“Sleight,” SFF ’16) co-wrote with Alex Theurer and Alex Hyner.

“Wounds” • A bartender (Armie Hammer) in New Orleans picks up a phone left behind at his bar, and then disturbing and mysterious things start to happen. Dakota Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Karl Glusman and Brad William Henke co-star in this horror thriller written and directed by Babak Anvari (“Under the Shadow,” SFF ’16).

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Spotlight

“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” (Canada) • From concrete seawalls in China to giant machines in Germany, from psychedelic potash mines in the Ural Mountains to conservation sanctuaries in Kenya, filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky — the team behind “Manufactured Landscapes” (SFF ’07) — travel to 20 countries on six continents to document how humans dominate the planet. Alicia Vikander narrates.

“The Biggest Little Farm” • John Chester, the film’s director, chronicles eight years in which he and his wife, Molly, attempted to start a 200-acre farm in Ventura County, on land depleted of nutrients as California suffered a major drought.

“Birds of Passage” (Colombia) • This drama chronicles the growth of Colombia’s drug trade in the 1970s though the prism of Rapayet (José Acosta), a member of the indigenous Wayuu tribe that is caught in the middle of the violence. Directed by Ciro Guerra (“Embrace of the Serpent,” SFF ’16) and Christina Gallego; written by Maria Camila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde.

“Maiden” (United Kingdom) • Documentarian Alex Holmes tells the story of Tracy Edwards, the 24-year-old who skippered the first all-woman international crew in the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race.

“The Mountain” • Andy (Tye Sheridan), a young man whose mother is committed to an institution in the 1950s, takes a job as photographer for a doctor (Jeff Goldblum) touring asylums to advocate for his controversial lobotomy procedure. Director Rick Alverson (“The Comedy,” SFF ’12) co-wrote with Colm O’Leary and Salt Lake City native Dustin Defa.

“The Nightingale” (Australia) • Writer-director Jennifer Kent, who brought forth “The Babadook” (SFF ’14), returns with this thriller set in 1825, where an imprisoned Irishwoman (Aisling Franciosi), aided by an Aboriginal tracker (Baykali Ganambarr), chases a British officer (Sam Claflin) through Tasmania, seeking revenge for what he did to her family.

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Kids

“Abe” (Brazil) • One 12-year-old Brooklyn kid (Noah Schnapp, from “Stranger Things”), mentored by an Afro-Brazilian chef (singer Seu Jorge), tries to use cooking to settle the long-simmering fight between the Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Muslim sides of his family. Directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade; written by Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader.

“The Elephant Queen” (United Kingdom/Kenya) • Athena, a mother elephant, must lead her herd across the African savannah to find a new watering hole. This documentary is directed by husband-and-wife nature filmmakers Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, and narrated by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

“The Witch Hunters” (Serbia/Macedonia) • Jovan (Mihajlo Milavic), a shy 10-year-old with mild cerebral palsy, is enlisted by a new classmate, Milica (Silma Mahmuti), for a mission: to prove that Milica’s dad’s new girlfriend is a witch. Rasko Miljkovic directs this adventure-drama, with screenwriters Milos Kreckovic and Marko Manjlovic adapting Jasminka Petrovic’s novel.

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From the Collection

“The Blair Witch Project” • A 20th anniversary screening of directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez' 1999 horror thriller — about three college students (Heather Donohue, Joshua Leonard, Michael Williams) who get lost in the woods while shooting a documentary — that broke ground for do-it-yourself filmmaking and spawned a generation of “found footage” imitators.

“The Hours and Times” • Christopher Munch’s landmark 1992 film, which imagines what might have happened when a young John Lennon (Ian Hart) and the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein (David Angus), took a trip to Spain in spring 1963, as the band was on the brink of stardom.

Instead of complaining about how bad TV is … which TV critics tend to do a lot … how about talking about some pleasant surprises? Some shows that are better than I thought they’d be when I previewed the fall season back in September?

There are several. Which is great news. I’m disappointed when a great pilot episode turns into a not-so-great series; I’m never disappointed when a series turns out to be better than the pilot indicated.

Here are eight fall shows that you ought to give a chance if you’re not already watching them:

1. “Charmed” (Sundays, 8 p.m., CW/Ch. 30) • I did not expect to be watching this reboot. I wasn’t a fan of the original. But the supernatural drama about three sisters who are witches is kind of fun. (Returns with new episodes on Jan. 20.)

2. “FBI” (Tuesdays, 8 p.m., CBS/Ch. 2) • If you like crime procedurals, this is a good one. The addition of Sela Ward to the cast (as the woman in charge) in the second episode was smart, and casting Egyptian-American Zeeko Zaki as a Muslim FBI agent at the center of the stories was smarter still. I had reservations because of a dumb plot twist in the pilot, but that has not been repeated. (Returns Jan. 8.)

3. “The Kids Are Alright” (Tuesdays, 7:30 p.m., ABC/Ch. 4) • The pilot was good, albeit uneven, and the rough spots are being evened out. This is a consistently funny comedy, and mother-of-eight Peggy (Mary McCormack) is one of the best TV moms to come along in years. (Returns Jan. 8.)

4. “Legacies” (Thursdays, 8 p.m., CW/Ch. 30) • There is not a show on TV I expected to be watching less than this spinoff of “The Vampire Diaries” (which I gave up on about a year into its eight-season run) and “The Originals” (which I barely paid attention to). And yet I’m watching this show about a school for teenage vampires, werewolves and witches as they deal with dragons, gargoyles and giant spiders. I’m not going to argue that it’s smart, but it is dumb fun. (Returns Jan. 24.)

5. “The Neighborhood” (Mondays, 7 p.m., CBS/Ch. 2) • The pilot of this sitcom was just OK, and it seemed more than a bit contrived and derivative — white family moves into black neighborhood, and African-American next-door neighbor isn’t happy about it. But this is developing into a surprisingly funny show that has taken that rather simplistic format and turned it into something more. It’s not perfect, by any means; the female leads tend toward histrionics too often. But it’s getting there. (Returns Feb. 4.)

6. “New Amsterdam” (Tuesdays, 9 p.m., NBC/Ch. 5) • Did we need another medical drama? Of course not. Not only were there four already on network TV coming into this season (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “The Good Doctor,” “Chicago Med” and “The Resident”), but there have been, oh, about 11 million of them over the years. And yet this one has, to my surprise, caught my attention. I like the characters. I’m intrigued by the medical cases. I’m getting caught up in the soap-opera drama of the doctors’ lives. Who would’ve guessed? (Returns Jan. 8.)

7. “Single Parents” (Wednesdays, 8 p.m., ABC) • The pilot episode was good, and the show has only gotten better. Great cast, sharp writing and wonderful characters — both the adults and the children, which is not all that common in TV. This should run for a long time. I certainly hope it does. (Returns Jan. 9.)

And one more that didn't debut in the fall:

8. “9-1-1” (Mondays, 8 p.m., Fox) • When this show premiered in January, I was unimpressed. And had zero expectations. But, honestly, I’m a huge fan. I’ve talked my daughters into watching it, and they’re fans, too. It’s not edgy. It’s not on trend. It’s just hugely entertaining. (Returns March 18.)

As fans of “Mythbusters” are well aware, a good portion of the entertainment value in that show comes from blowing stuff up.

Things explode on cue. And, sometimes, just to have some fun at the end of a segment, the Mythbusters use explosives to make things go boom in a more spectacular way.

None of that changes in “MythBusters Jr.,” which premieres Wednesday at 7 p.m. on the Science Channel. It features six youngsters between ages 12 and 15 doing exactly the same sort of thing that Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman did in the 251 episodes that aired from 2003 to 2016 — test urban legends and assorted crazy ideas using scientific methods.

“Our parents letting us blow things up really helped in the process,” said 15-year-old Valerie Castillo.

Jesse Lawless, also 15, said his favorite memory from production on the first season of “MythBusters Jr.” is “a car blowing up. That was pretty fun.”

Savage — who returns to the “MythBusters” fold as the host and an executive producer of “Jr.” — said, with obvious delight, that he has a picture of three of the youngsters on the set “holding chunks of C-4. … Children holding C-4.”

(That's a plastic explosive also familiar to “Mythbusters” fans.)

“I’ve learned explosives,” 14-year-old Rachel Pizzolato confirmed. “Handle them safely, kids, please.”

(The show opens with a don't-try-this-at-home warning, and the crew is staffed with multiple safety experts who oversee everything the kids do.)

Make no mistake about it, “Mythbusters Jr.” is not a dumbed-down version of the original show, and these are not just the kids next door.

Castillo is a builder and robotics whiz from California; Elijah Horland, 12, is an electronics maker, programmer and circuit whiz from New York; Cannan Huey-You, 12, is a college sophomore studying astrophysics at Texas Christian University; Lawless builds custom hot rods at home in Louisiana; Pizzolato, 14, is a three-time science fair champion from Louisiana; and Allie Weber, 13, is a builder and inventor from South Dakota.

“It’s not a show about teaching these guys how to do stuff. It’s not a kids’ show,” said Savage. “These are the new MythBusters and I’m their camp counselor and their adviser and sometimes their test subject.”

It doesn’t bother him that none of these kids was born when the original “MythBusters” premiered in January 2003. He immediately signed on, after saying no to any involvement in the “Mythbusters” revival hosted by Jon Lung and Brian Loudon that premiered on the Science Channel in November 2017.

“I was sort of happy to take some time off from making the show,” he said. But since he left, he’s had his 50th and 51st birthdays and become an empty-nester, “and all of that is part of realizing that it’s time for me to start passing on everything to the next generation.”

And add to the more than 900 explosions set off during the run of the original “MythBusters.”

But, according to Savage, the “best part about making the show” is “the pure delight” on the kids’ faces. “They can’t hide it.”

In the first of 10 episodes of “Mythbusters Jr.,” Savage is as enthusiastic as ever. He’s clearly having a great time as the kids test two duct-tape myths — that you can make car tires and a working parachute out of it.

As the test dummy, Buster, is strapped to the duct-tape parachute and dropped from a helicopter, Savage tells the kids, “if there’s some reason we have to run, follow me.”

“That’s not scary at all,” Castillo jokes.

The big explosions don’t come until future episodes. But they are coming.

“You’re going to watch them blowing up stuff just as big as we did,” Savage said.

On Christmas Eve, I got a delightful book in the mail titled “Utah Politics: Principles, Theories and Rules of the Game” by Jon Cox. It could just as easily have been titled “Utah Politics: An Insider’s Guide to Behind-the-Scenes Campaign Strategies and Insider Baseball.”

Former member of the Utah House of Representatives, former county commissioner, former communication director for Gov. Gary Herbert, current vice president of government affairs at Rocky Mountain Power and rumored to be the campaign manager for Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox’s gubernatorial run, Cox knows whereof he speaks.

The book has dozens of mini-chapters — most are only a page or two — with lessons learned from Utah campaigns, both won and lost. In the chapter titled “The Hallelujah Chorus Theory,” he cautions: “It is quite common for friends, lobbyists, and others to privately encourage [an] aspiring politico to consider running for … office. Equally common is how quickly those same friends disappear when that person actually announces their candidacy.”

In the footnotes for that chapter, he adds: “Beware the political insider who assures you privately that they are behind your candidacy but are hesitant to do anything to support you,” an all-too-common occurrence. As my husband reminded me when I was in office, lobbyists (nice as they might be) were paid to be my friends.

There are shout-outs to many of Utah’s politicians — Herbert, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Gov. Scott Matheson, House Speaker Becky Lockhart and more — but there are also shout-outs to some of the people behind the scenes. Kitty Dunn gets props for her boots-on-the-ground strategies, while Michelle Quist gets a shout-out as an excellent speaker and contender in the political arena. Among many others, he mentions Bud Scruggs, Mike Mower and even a couple of reporters: Bob Bernick and Ben Winslow, who are brought up as examples of media doing things well by showing up and paying attention to detail.

I laughed out loud at a couple of his stories. He reminds us of a former legislator who brought his legislative awards to court with him and suggests that pulling rank with “Don’t you know who I am?!” antics is — ahem — inadvisable. And it will end up in the press.

I was duly impressed as well by his inclusion of 2018 election results. That was just last month! He even includes new leadership positions on Utah’s Capitol Hill. Talk about timely.

There are lots of sports analogies, most of which I am unfamiliar with, but then again, if I wrote a political campaign book, it would probably have references to childbirth (from being a midwife) and parenting. I mean really — parents who can handle unruly toddlers are totally prepared for a life in politics, especially political leadership. So are cat herders. But I digress. Plenty here for Utah Jazz fans and some of the college teams as well.

This is largely a feel-good book and some of the happy assertions seem a bit overly optimistic to me, but the book does include some cautionary tales for candidates with oversized egos and more especially for out-of-state consultants who smell money on the table and talk their way onto Utah campaigns. For those folks, nothing pegs you as more of an outsider than misspelling Utahn. (There is no extra A, no matter what spell-check says.) Other no-nos are campaigning on Sunday and Monday nights and hitting too hard. Utah does passive-aggressive really well, but we’re not very tolerant of just plain aggressive. Too many fly-over consultants don’t even try to make sure background photos are of the state where they are campaigning. Plus, Utah has plenty of campaign talent right here.

“Utah Politics” is a quick, easy read. I don’t know who sent it to me, but I do know I enjoyed it. I’m also not sure why Cox wrote it, but I wonder if he is pre-emptively disarming those so-called experts who might have their eyes on the prize of being Spencer Cox’s campaign manager and who might wrangle for it by throwing Jon (who replaced Spencer, his fourth cousin, in the Utah House when the latter was appointed lieutenant governor) under the bus.

In any case, it’s a fun read. And it’s educational. I think it should be required reading for any serious political science major in Utah. Two thumbs up.

Holly Richardson, a regular contributor to The Salt Lake Tribune, enjoys politics some of the time. This was one of them.

In Utah, 2018 had its share of sorrow, from funerals for a fallen soldier, firefighter and police officer to the loss of a Latter-day Saint prophet and a benevolent businessman.

But there were also bright moments of humanity, touches of triumph and instances of sheer beauty. This state is unlike any other, and throughout this year, the photographers at The Salt Lake Tribune took great care to bring you stories that illuminated what it means to be a Utahn.

See the best photographs of 2018 here.

A Utah lawmaker influential on housing issues is proposing a major financial boost for the state’s top source of low-interest lending to affordable residential construction, the Olene Walker Housing Loan Fund.

SB34 — filed in advance of the 2019 Utah legislative session that begins Jan. 28 — would pump an initial $20 million into the fund in 2020, followed by another $4 million each year thereafter, according to sponsoring Sen. Jake Anderegg, R-Lehi.

On top of expanding the fund’s budget, SB34 also adds allowing mother-in-law apartments, encouraging construction of high-density housing near transit lines and other steps to the state-approved list of strategies Utah’s cities and towns can use to promote housing affordability.

The bill also seeks to tie moderate-income housing developments more closely with transportation corridors, while providing new penalties for municipalities that make no plan for future housing.

But one thing SB34 wouldn’t do is mandate construction of new affordable housing units.

In an interview, Anderegg said SB34 is an outgrowth of meetings by the Commission on Housing Affordability, created in early 2018 in light of escalating home prices and a lack of housing across the state affordable to those making average wages or below.

That group — made up of city representatives, real estate executives, developers and housing advocates — met eight times over the summer to help craft these ideas.

“In my mind, this is totally a nonpartisan issue,” Anderegg said Monday.

As Utah’s population grows and companies in communities such as Anderegg’s hometown of Lehi continue to recruit well-paid workers from out of state, the senator said, “high school seniors graduating from Lehi High School can’t even afford to rent an apartment once they’re out on their own and stay in Lehi. So this is a serious issue we’ve got to deal with.

“I don’t think the government can solve this problem,” he said. “But I do think government could be a huge catalyst in helping solve the problem, in partnership with good developers and lending institutions.”

The Olene Walker Housing Loan Fund, which typically offers so-called “gap financing” to low-income housing developers with other primary lending sources, loaned $8.8 million in fiscal 2018 to projects worth a total of $132.7 million, according to state documents.

Gov. Gary Herbert’s budget proposal also calls for a boost in spending on the fund, with $15 million one time and $2 million yearly.

State law requires cities — but only encourages towns — to adopt at least two or more strategies to foster housing construction. SB34 would refine that to call on housing policies that serve “residents of various income levels.”

Under the bill, housing plans submitted by cities must include an analysis of “how the municipality will provide a realistic opportunity for the development of moderate income housing within the next five years.”

A lobbyist for the Utah League of Cities and Towns said Monday the group supported provisions of SB34, which he praised for giving municipalities flexibility in how they approach the issue and for more closely linking transportation planning with the cities’ processes of finding land eligible for moderate-income housing.

“The good news is that cities take their role on this issue seriously and are already moving ahead with many of these tools,” said the league’s executive director, Cameron Diehl.

Anderegg called SB34’s promotion of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, also known as mother-in-law apartments, “low-hanging fruit” in terms of the potential to generate new housing, especially in largely built-out cities. Cities typically encourage ADUs by loosening zoning restrictions in existing residential areas, letting homeowners build new dwellings in their homes, garages or as stand-alone backyard units.

Salt Lake City adopted a new ADU ordinance this year, after more than eight years of study.

SB34 also would let cities encourage affordable housing by allowing it in commercial and mixed-use zones and by eliminating or reducing requirements for parking spaces in areas where residents are less likely to rely on a car, such as apartment complexes near TRAX or senior living facilities.

The bill incentivizes cities to offer programs for preserving existing moderate-income housing and to encourage building of single-room occupancy housing, known as SROs. SB34 nudges cities to coordinate their own land-use and housing plans with the work of regional planning agencies and long-range projections by the Utah Department of Transportation to better match housing projects with road and transit construction.

While state law had already required cities to submit their moderate-income housing plans biennially to the state Department or Workforce Services, SB34 would legally require them to do it yearly — and open them up to penalties including being left out of state highway spending if they fail to comply.

Anderegg said key provisions in SB34 were still under negotiation and that a revised version of the bill would probably be offered shortly after the Utah Legislature convenes later this month.

One of the core assumptions about Netflix is that, thanks to its popularity and ubiquity, the service can blur boundaries. From Nashua, N.H., to Newport Beach, Calif., Seattle to Sarasota, Fla., we’re all watching the same thing. (And that thing, it seems, is “The Crown.”)

Except it turns out we're not.

A researcher in Salt Lake City named Victoria Merinda has compiled the most searched-for Netflix shows in the country over this past year and proceeded to break them down by state. And it turns out, Americans are interested in very different shows depending on where they live.

To wit: No single series captured the top ranking in even one-fifth of states.

Equally surprising, 12 states — essentially a quarter of the country — had a favorite show that no other state had. Whether it was “Gilmore Girls: A Year In the Life” (North Dakota) or “Disenchantment” (Oregon), “House of Cards” (Tennessee) or “Mindhunter” (Pennsylvanians, those dark souls), these states all went their own way.

“I was interested to see whether certain regions liked one show and other regions liked a different show,” said Merinda, who helped conduct the research for the tech-comparison site HighSpeedInternet.com. “But it turned out that so many states had different results.”

Merinda and her colleagues took about 40 of the most high-profile shows available on the service, both licensed series and Netflix originals, keeping them mainly to those that generated new episodes within the past few years. Then she examined Google Trends in each state for 2018 to see which of the 40 ranked highest. (She admits 40 is a selective group, and that there are many lower-profile shows not included in the study. Also worth noting: Google Trends is but one marker of a show's digital heat.)

The highest trending of these Netflix series? “13 Reasons Why.” The Bakerian teen drama polarized viewers this past season but still was the most talked-about in seven states, including Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina and Mississippi.

Right behind it with wins in six states — including places as far apart as Maine, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina — was “The End of The F***ing World,” a drama about a pair of disaffected teens traveling across England. (If nothing else, the survey shows how much teens are driving this streaming conversation. That should make Netflix happy, if not its equally youth-seeking competitors.)

Those two shows aren't major surprises: They each saw the buzzy release of new seasons in 2018. And their broad popularity makes the individual states that chose them not especially meaningful.

But a number of states went for more geographically specific choices.

Some of those easily compute. You'd expect "Making a Murderer" to be popular in Wisconsin, where the story took place. "Ozark" for Missouri isn't a stretch. And the most sought-after shows in New Mexico were "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul," both of which are very clearly set there.

But others may require more creative explanations.

Like "Iron Fist," the Marvel series about a social outlier. Two of the three states in which it was most-popular? Alaska and Hawaii, the two states not on the U.S. mainland. (It was also popular in Delaware. Draw your own conclusions.)

Meanwhile, "Stranger Things" was popular in four states. But all of them were within a particular westerly bloc (Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Nebraska).

“Maybe there’s something to the idea that with all this space out here, people are more likely to turn to creepy mysteries and conspiracy theories like ‘Stranger Things,’” said Merinda, a Utah resident and a confessed devotee of the series. (The show’s popularity, it should be noted, might have been higher if it had come out with a new season this year.)

Population might play a role in the selection of another show out West. Wyoming went with "Lost In Space," the reboot of the classic 1960s TV series about a family fighting to survive in a frequently empty place. Wyoming, incidentally, is the least populous state by density in the Lower 48.

Then there's "Orange Is The New Black." Among the five states in which it was most popular were Oklahoma and Louisiana, states that have the country's two highest prison populations.

The results are surprisingly telling all around. Americans may stream shows they like. But what they like is often that which hits close to home.

There may be little way to explain "Jane The Virgin," a show so little viewed on network television it is sometimes watched by as few as 500,000 people. Yet the series finished above all others in California and Texas, the two most populous states in the country (total number of people: nearly 70 million). That validates the CW's argument, at least, that people are watching the series somewhere, somehow.

You'd have less trouble guessing which state chose a handcrafted, off-kilter series like "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" (it's Vermont) or lining up Massachusetts, state of British influence and a long history of police squaring off with crime syndicates, with its choice. "Peaky Blinders" contains both.

But maybe the least surprising result was Washington, D.C. The District saw a tie — 16 shows finished with the same top score on Google Trends. The jokes about gridlock write themselves.