The Colin McEnroe Show

Can great television be as satisfying as great literature? On today's Nose, we'll apply that question to HBO's True Detective.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the space of a lifetime, the status of gay and lesbian people in the United States and Western Europe has been transformed. So to watch a play like "A Song at Twilight," written by Noel Coward in 1966, is to journey back in time and then wonder how far, really one has traveled. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Minimum wage in Connecticut is higher than the federal minimum, $8.70 an hour instead of $7.25. In fact, the federal minimum is so ridiculously low that not many people are earning it. Maybe as few as 1.5 million, according to one study.  So, what happens if it goes up to $10.10 an hour here, or less likely, nationally. Some minimum wage workers will tell you that is still ridiculously low, $...

It's National Grammar Day, a time to take stock of the current status of the English language, and possibly get into bitter fights. I'm old school. I'm the kind of person who will only use "not only" if I intend to follow it with "but also." That's probably a convention that died the quiet death of a feverish sloth many years ago. But I know what's right, and sometimes it feels like I'm helping to...

Today on The Scramble, one of our favorite writers, A.J. Jacobs takes us deep inside the world of modern ancestry research where websites are all  too happy to tell you that you're distantly related to Gwynyth Paltrow, Michael Bloomberg, Quincy Jones, and King David.  Those are all actual examples of people A.J. was told are his relatives.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org...

We have a question: Where does Adam Sandler watch the Oscars? Does he sit there with all the people who are actually up for awards, or is he home alone, with his baseball cap on backwards? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Somehow, kale has become trendy in the last few years, although its moment in the sun seems to be almost over. How did a thing like that happen? Would it be possible to infuse an old standby like broccoli with a similar hip panache? Broccoli is the warmest vegetable, and the coolest. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Remakes are easy. Money-makers are hard. We live in a sloshing sea of those movie remakes but it's rare for one of them to out gross the original. An exception, oddly enough, was the remake of "Clash of the Titans, " which significantly outperformed its 80s predecessor.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Four women join us to talk about sports, mostly football. Two of them are sports journalists. A third is a journalist specializing in legal issues, and a fourth is a scientist and engineer. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's something exciting about a critic who challenges your perceptions in a compelling way. I love the movie American Hustle but when I read Willa Paskin's take-down of it in Slate , she really got me thinking.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last Sunday, we took a road trip into New York City, but before we left, I read Beth Boyle Machlan's New York Times essay about the joys she sometimes gets driving with her kids, and surrendering their collective eardrums to the serendipities of commercial radio. She learns some of their songs, they learn some of hers... Everybody gives up some of the fierce control we all maintain these days over...

The debate over animal rights is as old as Voltaire, as old as Aristotle. But as you'll hear today, it turned some kind of modern corner in 1975 with the publication of " Animal Liberation: Towards an End to Man's Inhumanity to Animals " by the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here's a little bit of Civil War history that seems to have started here in Connecticut. It was in this month of February in 1860 that Cassius Clay, a Kentucky planter turned anti-slavery crusader spoke in Hartford not far from where we're doing this show today. He was accompanied by a torch-bearing honor guard in capes and caps. The Hartford Courant called these young men "wide-awakes."  Sup...

We're starting out today with a segment about "Generation-Like," the media term media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses for the generation of Millennials  who live huge chunks of their lives on social media where they subsist on a form of metered approval.   Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I was still digesting some of the lessons of the play "Freud's Last Session" -- a 90 minute conversation between Freud and C.S. Lewis -- when I stumbled upon Adam Gopnik's New Yorker essay about rise of polemical atheism -- that is atheism that takes an openly contemptuous tone toward faith. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's hard to improve on the poet, Rilke, who wrote, "Love consists of this, that two solitudes meet, protect, and greet each other." But did Rilke have to deal with Angry Birds and Snap Chat? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The actresses Teri Garr and Annette Funicello, the television hosts Montel Williams and Neil Cavuto, the writer Joan Didion, Ann Romney, the wife of the presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the comedian Richard Pryor. These are some of the people that you quote-unquote know that have, or in Pryor's case had, Multiple Sclerosis. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listene...

In 2030 B.C., somebody brought cucumbers from India to the Tigris Valley, and they said, "We can pickle that!" And so it began, from the first stirrings of civilization, to modern-day Brooklyn artisan pickles: we've found ourselves up to our eyes in brine, looking for the next object we can pickle. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While visitors watching the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, enjoy spectacular feats of athletic ability from the world's most accomplished athletes, those in Russia's LGBT community anticipate laws that punish Russians for even suggesting that it's okay to be gay, let alone live openly as a gay adult. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...

While tying together all the stories for today's session of the Nose, I keep hearing (in my mind) Charlie Seen say, "Winning!" We have a lot of stories about how people who try to win, often by following the logic of a game out to its extremes. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The first secret society, according to Theodore Ziolkowski, a Princeton-based scholar on the literature of cults and conspiracies, "consisted of Eve and the serpent and then it just kept going," Ziokowski writes. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In February of 1964, the Beatles appeared not once, but on three consecutive Sunday nights on "The Ed Sullivan Show," attracting what was the the largest audience in television history, and still might be the largest percentage of all possible viewers. To some of us, the whole thing is still kind of exciting 50 years later. But why? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/l...

Last fall, the New York City Opera -- what Mayor LaGuardia called "the People's Opera" -- declared bankruptcy. This is/was the opera that introduced Americans to Placido Domingo and Beverly Sills.  Make what you will of the fact that the bankruptcy announcement coincided with the presentation of a new opera about Anna Nicole Smith. This is either a problem very specific to the New York Opera,...

On Sunday, two people named Dylan made news. So much so that you had to be careful on Twitter. If you tweeted "Dylan sold out" about Bob Dylan's Super Bowl commercials, you might offend people who thought you meant Dylan Farrow who broke 20 years of silence to talk about her memory of childhood molestation by Woody Allen.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listen...

Today on the Nose, we'll discuss one of those eruptions that happen in the digital world -- a frenzy of discussion and expressions of outrage over an essay on the site xojane, by a writer who tried to describe her reactions, as a skinny white woman, to the way she thought a heavyset back woman was reacting to her in yoga class. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listen...