The Colin McEnroe Show

Consider America from 1985 to 2000. You wouldn't say nothing happened in those 15 years but America was a fairly calm place to be most of the time. Now consider the period that came next. It began with a presidential election s o riddled with such uncertainties that the effort to confirm the result dragged on for days and went to the Supreme Court. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See...

Our SuperGuest on today's Scramble is Jen Doll, who has three topics that she wants to discuss: The first is the return of "Mad Men," a show in its final season and perhaps more than any other TV show, a driver of the phenomenon that utilizes the talents of many, many cultural commentators to analyze and debate the underlying themes in each episode. If you visited a site like Slate or Salon on cer...

Scientists say the papyrus that mentions a wife of Jesus is not a forgery. Stephen Colbert will take over when Letterman leaves. I'm not saying the two things are connected, but maybe our weekly culture roundtable The Nose will find a common thread. It might seem like a small thing - the departure of Stephen Colbert from his late night role in which he depicts a strutting, preening, right-wing med...

If you are a person of a certain age, you probably remember the moment when you were first seized by Karen Carpenter's voice. For me, it was getting into my mother's Pontiac LeMans after a commencement ceremony at Kingswood School in 1970. I was a sophomore at an all-boys school, and nobody wanted to be "Close To" me. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for pri...

Thomas Moore was, for 13 years, a Servite monk. In 1992, he burst onto the national scene with " Care of the Soul ", which combined the psychotherapeutic of Jung and James Hillman with ancient and contemporary religious and spiritual ideas. It was number 1 on the New York Times best seller list, and stayed on the list for a year. Moore's central premise is that part of ourselves cannot be fully no...

Spite is everywhere. It's as fresh as today's sports headlines as UConn readies to play Notre Dame for the women's basketball championship. Fighting Irish coach Muffet McGraw has acknowledged that there is hate between the two teams. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on the Scramble, we get to spend some time with Frank Rich. Frank wears a lot of hats these days as both editor-at-large at New York Magazine and Executive Producer of VEEP on HBO. We're going to chat with him in both capacities and there is an interesting bridge between the two realms. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The original Carl Sagan "Cosmos" was at least  partly a response to the Cold War. Its message: "We're such little specks, can we embrace our common destiny and get along?" You could look at the movie "Noah" and the remake of "Cosmos" as two manifestations of an odd phenomenon.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When I say "hip hop," do you think about an art form the exalts bling, consumption, excess, decadence, and vulgarity? What about all the other hip hop artists, exploring other kinds of truths? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scientists made an announcement on July 4, 2012 to little fanfare outside the world of scholarly physicists that ended a 50-year search to explain the existence of life as we know it.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'll be honest: I hate April Fools' Day, and I'm not a big fan of practical jokes. I hate it the way that some people hate Valentine's Day or New Year's Eve. I think merriment and foolishness should be spread across the year. That's why most of our shows, even pretty serious ones, start with a comedy sketch, because life is so much better when you think of it as a comedy. Support the show: http://...

The Scramble, our Monday episode, is a wrap-up of the weekend's news, and a look at the week ahead. This hour, we have a conversation with Charla Nash, who is seeking the right to sue the state of Connecticut over the chimpanzee attack in 2009 that left her badly mutilated. We also feature our SuperGuest, Slate Political Gabfest panelist, David Plotz. He's been thinking a lot about the high-budget...

A hilariously fussy hotel manager with a taste for the high life is wrenched from his gay surroundings by the specter of war and a false murder charge. That doesn't sound terribly funny, but it's the premise for " The Grand Budapest Hotel ," the latest Wes Anderson movie. Our Nose panelists all went to see it, and it will be one of our topics on this show. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/don...

I'll tell you one of the big thrills of my writing career: I was a contributing editor to Mirabella Magazine in the 80's. I'd written an essay about getting bitten (sort of) by a dog in New Hampshire. The magazine had a huge art budget in those days, and I had already had one of my pieces illustrated by Ed Koren. But they told me this one was being illustrated by George Booth. George Booth! I wors...

   I get way too much of my information from movies and  this year large container ships played a role in two major films. The first was Captain Phillips , an account of piracy in the Indian Ocean. The problem with that movie is that it didn't ask any fundamental questions about the method of moving stuff around. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/l...

Teresa of Avila very unambiguously reported hearing voices. She's a saint. John Forbes Nash heard voices. He won a Nobel prize. Robert Schumann heard voices that spurred him to write great music. Philip K. Dick was guided by one inner voice, specifically female, that he would hear for much of his life. He probably holds the record for most film adaptations for words written of any author ever. Mah...

Today on The Scramble, we'll talk about a system run by the Navy that keeps track of, among other things, parking tickets and field information cards filled out by police, even when no crime has occurred - is this data collection crossing a line? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

here are the topics for the Nose today: Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once upon a time, comic books were a niche for kids and nerds. Now they are mainstream culture. "The Avengers" is the number three all-time worldwide grossing movie. I would like to pause, and say that I owned, as a kid, issue number one of The Avengers . I remember distinctly where I got it, and how I felt about it. I do not remember distinctly what happened to it. Support the show: http://www.wn...

The musician Christy Moore said Ireland could never have the equivalent of a folk revival because it never let its traditions lapse. And that's very true. The are probably other places in the world as deeply attached to their traditional music, but I don't know where they are. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Where is Wofford College ? What is a shock of wheat, and what does it have to do with Wichita State's scary mascot ? For that matter, what's a Chanticleer? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Oppenheimer  writes about religion and a whole bunch of other things. Today, he'll be talking about the difficulty  Orthodox Jewish women  face in obtaining a certain form of cooperation from their husbands and how that difficulty spawned a black market in coercion and violence. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Obama has consistently refused to be a panelist on The Nose, but his appearance this week on "Between Two Ferns"  with Zach Galifianakis has given us new hope! Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the second season of the Netflix series, House of Cards , the protagonist Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, pulls out an old family typewriter, an Underwood of course, to write a pseudo-heartfelt letter to the President. Frank's father gave him the typewriter saying this Underwood built an empire. Now you go build another. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/l...

Amanda Hess is one of our favorite social critics. She writes for Slate and lately, well always, she's thinking about the depiction of women in mass media, including a statistical disparity between the performances of men and women on Jeopardy .  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.