The Colin McEnroe Show

This hour, we’re celebrating things that are so bad, they’re good — the underdog ideas that fail so hard, they become successes. We’ll talk about contests that give awards for bad writing, perfumes that smell like animal butts, and a happy marriage that started with a comically awful first date. Plus: a chance to vote on what "bad" show idea we should produce next! To enter our contest or vote on...

Has everything original been done? It’s a question that’s been asked about storytelling, music, fine art, movies, and so much more. This hour, we attempt to answer that question and discover if everything has already been done. Along the way, we explore the idea of originality and our tolerance for novelty and talk to artists who are reckoning with these questions. GUESTS: Martha Buskirk: Professo...

Ethics and the Supreme Court are back (still?) in the news and in question. This hour, we are revisiting a show we did just over a year ago around the leaked draft of the Dobbs decision. In it we look at how the Supreme Court got so much power, why we have nine justices, how journalists cover the court, and the viability of proposed potential reforms. GUESTS: Akhil Reed Amar : Sterling Professor o...

This hour: spelling — what it is, why it matters, and why some of us actually find it fun. There will be a test. GUESTS: Deb Amlen: Crossword columnist and senior staff editor of the crossword column Wordplay for The New York Times Richard Gentry: Education consultant and the author, most recently, of the Spelling Connections series Peter Sokolowski: Editor at large at Merriam-Webster and a member...

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse  is the second movie in the Spider-Verse film series and the 14th ( not a typo ) Spider-Man feature film. It has made more than half a billion dollars worldwide, and it is the fourth-highest grossing movie of 2023 so far. A third Spider-Verse movie,  Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse , is expected to come out next year, and a Spider-Woman spinoff film is in de...

Before Covid,   Most Americans couldn’t imagine the staggering loss of life that earlier generations experienced during epidemics of smallpox, diphtheria, polio and other fatal infectious diseases. We’ve been living in a golden age since WWII, when widespread use of vaccines and antibiotics eradicated the biggest killers and doubled life expectancy. But the catch-22 of medical discovery is that ov...

This hour we take your calls about anything you want to talk about. You can reach us by calling 888-720-9677. Join the conversation on  Facebook  and  Twitter . The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on  Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify ,  Google Podcasts ,  Stitcher , or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Cat Pastor contrib...

The botched Watergate break-in happened 51 years ago today, on June 17, 1972. Over the decades since, the whole Watergate story has been processed through our popular culture over and over again, from Alan J. Pakula’s classic movie of All the President’s Men through HBO’s recent limited series White House Plumbers . This hour, a look at both of those versions, plus we talk to writer Thomas Mallon...

This week’s Nose thinks that a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb  is a 2022 documentary directed by Lizzie Gottlieb. We decided late Monday or early Tuesday — kind of randomly, to be honest — that we wanted to talk about this movie this week. And then  Robert Gottlieb died on Wednesday . The Nose feels vaguely, cosmica...

We have so much on our minds that we couldn’t pick one topic for today — we’re going with three! Strap in. First: a failed bill from the 1900s that proposed hippopotamus ranching in the U.S. Then: an initiative to save humanity by storing poop in a vault And finally: orcas teaching each other to sink boats. GUESTS: Dr. Shoshi Parks:  freelance writer Dr. Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello:  Professor at...

We’ve   done   this   show   every   year  ( except   2012 )  since   2011 . (We maybe even did it in 2010. We probably did. I just can’t prove it.) So it’s a bit of a tradition. It’s a tradition that… makes some people angry, we realize. And that has a lot to do with how we define the term ‘song of the summer.’ We use  the Amanda Dobbins definition : Let’s be clear about how this works: There is...

Countless books, movies, and TV shows explore time travel. This hour, a look at the hold that time travel has on pop culture and the philosophy, ethics, and science of time travel. Plus, we hear from an author about how to create and utilize rules of time travel in fiction and the idea of memory as time travel. GUESTS: Sara Bernstein: The R.L. Canala College Professor of Philosophy at The Universi...

This hour we take your calls about anything you want to talk about. Join the conversation on  Facebook  and  Twitter . The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on  Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify ,  Google Podcasts ,  Stitcher , 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 broug...

Colin is off this week, so we decided to do a Nose without him — and a Nose all about stuff Colin doesn’t care about: video games and things video games-adjacent. Comedian Shawn Murray guest hosts. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest-grossing movie of 2023, the highest-grossing video game adaptation ever made, and the third-highest-grossing animated movie of all-time. None of that, of cours...

You must have heard the term “vibe” by now, right? We’ve heard about the vibe of the economy, the vibe of a music playlist, the vibe of a season, the vibe of a party … Plus there are vibe shifts and vibe checks. This hour: vibes. We learn what the word really means, where it comes from, and how the internet has given it new life. GUESTS: Kyle Chayka: Contributing writer for The New Yorker covering...

From San Francisco’s iconic fog and COVID-related brain fog to a location-tracking program called Fog Reveal, this hour, we lift the fog on all kinds of fog. GUESTS: Travis O’Brien: Professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University Javeed Sukhera: Chair of psychiatry at the Institute of Living and chief of psychiatry at Hartford Hospital Anne Toomey McKenna: Visiting professor of l...

Mysteries have been popular for centuries. This hour we ask: Why are we drawn to this genre? Plus, a look at television detectives and true crime podcasts. GUESTS: Martin Edwards: Author of  The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators Alexandra Petri: Columnist for The Washington Post and the author of  Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made...

This hour, humorist and The New Yorker columnist Andy Borowitz on his book Profiles in Ignorance , which explains how our nation’s elected leaders have grown dumb — and dumber. GUEST: Andy Borowitz: Writes  The Borowitz Report ; his latest book is Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Goog...

There’s been a changing of the guard, a succession, if you will, in prestige TV (or whatever). In the span of five days,  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel  ended after five seasons,  Succession   ended  after four seasons,  Barry  ended after four seasons, and  Ted Lasso  (maybe? probably? seemingly?) ended after three seasons. Those four shows have been nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy or D...

Romance novels have long had a reputation for being flimsy, sexist, trashy bodice-rippers. But there’s lots more to the genre than meets the eye. This hour, we look at what makes romance novels work – and why so many of us are devouring them. GUESTS:  Olivia Waite:  The New York Times Book Review ’s romance fiction columnist  who  writes  queer and historical romance, fantasy, and critical essays...

This hour: invisibility. We learn about the science of invisibility and whether we’re getting close to having the technology to turn invisible. We also talk about invisibility in pop culture and science fiction and debate questions we all have about what would happen if someone could turn invisible. GUESTS:  Gregory Gbur:  Author of  Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not To Be Seen , an...

This hour, an invention that transformed care for traumatic injuries. Charles Barber’s new book,  In The Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Mystery and Took on the US Army , details how Frank Hursey discovered that a mineral called zeolite could help stop excessive bleeding, and the challenge he and his partner, Bart Gullong, faced in getting the invention to take hold in trau...

For this week’s Nose, the straightness is the difficulty of the lack of a bend. Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against the Andy Warhol Foundation , saying that Warhol could not use a photographer’s portrait of Prince as the basis of his own image of Prince. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan writes that the ruling, “will impede new art and music and literature. It will th...

There’s currently a debate in America about what students should be learning about U.S. history. Some say we don’t revere American exceptionalism enough. Others say we're giving ourselves an A+ by excluding the tests we failed. Humorist   Alexandra Petri says both sides are wrong. We just don’t know enough about the things we need to know, such as how inventor Nikola Tesla fell in love with his pi...

The writer and public intellectual Martin Amis died May 19 . He was 73. Amis broke into the literary scene in the 1970s, and by the time his London trilogy — Money , London Fields , and The Information — came out in the 1980s and 1990s, people had started to think of him as “ the  author” and “the standard for  authorhood .” This hour, an appreciation of Martin Amis and a look back at his 2018 app...