The Colin McEnroe Show

Taylor Swift’s newest album,  The Tortured Poets Department , comes out Friday. So this hour, we are taking a look at the idea of the actual tortured poet. We talk about where the idea of tortured poets came from, learn about the nature of creativity, and hear from a poet about where their inspiration comes from. GUESTS:  Roland Greene:  Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director...

We imagine pirates to be the quintessential rule-breakers — but really, they had their own strictly-followed codes.   How did 18th-century pirates dictate their own community standards? How did they create social mobility in an age when changing one's social status was nearly impossible?   This hour, we join pirate historian Rebecca Simon to find out!   GUEST: Rebecca Simon : Pirate historian with...

We’ve been doing these shows a couple times a month where we don’t book any guests, where we fill the hour with your calls. And your calls have been interesting and surprising and amusing. This hour, the conversation winds around to an essay about NPR in The Free Press , NPR’s response to the essay, (our friend) David Folkenflik’s reporting on the essay and NPR’s response and such … Oh, and Scrabb...

Ripley  is an eight-episode limited series adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. It is the first serialized screen version of those stories following five feature film adaptations, including the 1999 film  The Talented Mr. Ripley , starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law. The Netflix series stars Adam Scott, Dakota Fanning, and Johnny Flynn. It is created, written, and direc...

If I say “cult classic,” what do you think of? Probably an underground movie that built up an intense following over time, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room , right? Or maybe even something a bit more mainstream like The Big Lebowski ? But where’s the limit here, if there is one? Is Blade Runner a cult movie? Or Pulp Fiction ? Monty Python and the Holy Grail ? Office Space ? Slap Shot...

This hour, Yale Dean Tamar Gendler joins us to discuss her course “Public Plato: Ancient Wisdom in the Digital Age.” We'll talk about how to make ancient philosophy relevant for a modern audience, questions of framing and form, and what we can all learn from concepts like alief, phronesis, and eudaimonia. GUEST:  Tamar Gendler: Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science, and the Dea...

This hour, we’re talking about lotteries. How did this massive money redistribution game come to be? And we know that lotteries can randomly allocate cash prizes to ticket buyers – but could they also pick our political officials? Or the victims of our human sacrifice rituals to ensure that “corn be heavy soon”? GUESTS: Jonathan D. Cohen: Historian and author of For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lot...

This legislative session, local students lobbied Connecticut lawmakers to change our state insect, which is currently the praying mantis. This hour we are focused on the praying mantis. We'll learn about the insect, why students think it should not represent the state, and what praying mantises of the future could look like. GUESTS:  Katherine Dugas:  Entomologist and research technician at The Co...

Larry David’s  Curb Your Enthusiasm  has been on HBO for going on 24 years. As the show comes to a close, we take a Nose-ish look at it and its impact on cringe comedy and the role of cringiness and awkwardness in our lives. GUESTS:  Katie Baker:  Senior Staff Writer at  The Ringer   Shawn Murray:  A stand-up comedian, writer, and the host of the  Nobody Asked Shawn  podcast Carolyn Paine:  Actres...

On Monday, the contiguous U.S. will see a total solar eclipse for the last time until 2044. Online, the excitement is also giving way to fears — will communities in the eclipse’s path have enough food and gas to support all the travelers? Will it interrupt our power grid? This hour, we’re talking about the dark side of the eclipse — from doomsday predictions to ancient omens. GUESTS:  Vahé Peroomi...

Bestselling author Don Winslow joins us to discuss his new novel,  City in Ruins , which he says is the last of his career. GUEST:  Don Winslow:  Bestselling author, whose new book,  City in Ruins , is out this week Join the conversation on  Facebook  and  Twitter . Subscribe to The Noseletter , an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show....

Today “Luddite” is used as a derogatory term for someone who doesn’t understand technology. But the original Luddites weren’t behind. They were technical workers who were concerned about the impact that technology would have on people. This hour, we look at the history of Luddites, how their philosophy applies today, and ask what our present would look like if they had won. Could we all gain somet...

We’ve been doing these shows a couple times a month where we don’t book any guests, where we fill the hour with your calls. And your calls have been interesting and surprising and amusing — calls about grammar, gardening, long-distance dialing, autotune. Anything. Everything. These shows are fun for us, and they seem to be fun for you, too. So we’re doing another one. In other words: Give us a cal...

This week’s Nose has crazy substitute teacher energy. 3 Body Problem  is a Netflix series created by David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo and loosely based on the 2008 novel  The Three-Body Problem  by Liu Cixin, the first novel in the  Remembrance of Earth’s Past  trilogy.  3 Body Problem  is the first television series created by Benioff and Weiss since  Game of Thrones . And:  More Fee...

It's tax season. How did this quintessentially frustrating thing come to be so frustrating? And must it be so? This hour, we’re learning about why taxes are so complicated to file in the U.S. Then, we’ll talk about how some of the richest people in America end up paying next to no taxes on the wealth they grow every year. Finally: a conversation with someone who doesn’t pay a chunk of his taxes —...

Constructed languages have existed in popular culture for a long time, but they've reached a new level of ubiquity today. This hour, we talk with professional conlangers who have created languages for  Game of Thrones ,  Dune , and many other worlds. We'll learn about the art of constructing languages, and the appeal of learning one of them. GUESTS:  David and Jessie Peterson:  Professional conlan...

This hour, we grapple with the impact our ancestors have on our lives and what our responsibility is if they did something we disagree with. GUESTS: Maud Newton: Author of  Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation Jenny Strauss: Great-granddaughter of Lewis Strauss The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Amazon Music , TuneIn , Listen Notes , or whe...

Plastic is everywhere in our world, and scientists are increasingly discovering the negative health and environmental impacts of the material. This hour, we take a look at our relationship to plastic. We talk about the material, its evolution, and its symbolism in our culture. Plus, we look at the use of single use plastic in television and why it matters. GUESTS:  Susan Freinkel: Author of Plasti...

The Nose is off. In its place this hour, a look at the current controversies swirling around certain celebrities: Catherine, Princess of Wales hasn’t made a scheduled public appearance since last year. Kensington Palace announced in January that she was having “planned abdominal surgery.” The internet was dissatisfied with that explanation. And then some photos this month, including one that the P...

March Madness is here! And so the only logical thing to do is to get improv comedian Julia Pistell and the actual Bill Curry together to talk basketball for an hour on the radio. That may not be the only logical thing to do. It may be that that’s not actually a logical thing to do at all. But we’re doing it anyway. *It’s our 14th one of these unless it isn’t. We’re pretty sure we’ve done this show...

We all strive to be right about things — we do our research, we listen to people who seem smarter than us, we make compelling arguments over dinner tables. But is there an underappreciated art to being wrong? This hour, lessons on changing your mind and admitting mistakes, from newspaper corrections to public intellectual pivots. GUESTS:  Eranda Jayawickreme: Professor of psychology at Wake Forest...

You’re probably familiar with the panicked rush that comes when you’re running around your house, looking for keys or a wallet you’ve misplaced. It’s an awful feeling. But maybe there’s some value in the process of searching for lost things — beyond the prize you may (or may not) find at the end. This hour, we talk to some professional “lookers” to find out: Is there joy, or hidden value, to be fo...

This hour we take your calls about anything you want to talk about. The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts , Amazon Music , TuneIn , Listen Notes , or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter , an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEn...

Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein. These, along with many others, are the sorts of songwriters we associate with the Great American Songbook, the amorphous canon of important 20th-century pop songs, jazz standards, and show tunes from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, and movie musicals. But there’s another important det...

Today, the sea chantey is something people listen to while having a good time in bars or at festivals, but its roots are more complex, stretching into the hard labor performed by sailors on 19th century merchant vessels and having ties to Black work songs. During the first year of the pandemic, there was a sea chantey craze on TikTok as people found joy and connection in the songs. This hour, we t...