The Colin McEnroe Show

Stickiness. We know it when we see it — or when we feel it under our feet at the movie theater. But what is stickiness, scientifically speaking? How do geckos climb? Why don’t Post-it Notes ruin our books? This hour, we talk to scientist Laurie Winkless about her book, Sticky , and figure out what holds it all together. GUESTS: Laurie Winkless: A science writer and physicist and the author of  Sti...

Think about it: When’s the last time you saw a brand-new instrument in a marching band? New instruments don’t come around too often — but it’s not for lack of trying. Getting a new sound off the ground involves design, production, music expertise, composition, and fans. It’s no easy task to invent the next best thing, but this hour we talk to inventors, composers, teachers, and the Guthman Musical...

Humans have been trying for, well, forever to predict the future. But how helpful is predicting the future, really? And what factors determine whether someone is successful at doing it, or not? This hour, we try to predict whether predicting the future is useful, and understand why we’re so interested in doing so. GUESTS: Amanda Rees: A historian of science based at the University of York who work...

Former Senator Joe Lieberman believes the center of Congress is the best place from which to legislate. It’s the sweet spot for negotiation and compromise and making the deals that move the country forward. He thinks Congress would get more done if members would shift closer to the center and away from the fringe. But how do you bring legislators in today’s Congress together when they don’t all sh...

This week’s Nose poured gasoline on the tapes and lit them on fire. Armageddon and Deep Impact and Antz and A Bug’s Life in 1998. The Illusionist and The Prestige in 2006. Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down in 2013. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Everything Everywhere All at Once this year. What is the deal with Hollywood sometimes putting out multiple movies about the same t...

Jane Austen completed six full-length novels. And, more than two centuries later, those novels are still present in our culture today. This hour, a look at Austen’s life and work, the world of Janeites, and the many film and television adaptations of her work. GUESTS: Devoney Looser: Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of  The Making of Jane Austen Deborah Yaffe: Author...

Joni Mitchell is a singer-songwriter from Alberta, Canada. In 1968, her debut album,  Song to a Seagull , was released and since then, Mitchell has become one of the most influential and greatest recording artists. Mitchell has won nine Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, and countless music awards, and her albums are considered among the best ever made. We're big fans. It turns out w...

We’ve all heard the generational stereotypes, and rolled our eyes at them. This hour: we investigate generational groupings to discover why we’re interested in separating people into generations, when it is useful, and when it is not. GUESTS: Ziad Ahmed: CEO and co-founder of JUV Consulting Justin Charity: Senior staff writer for The Ringer , where he published “ It’s Time to Accept That Millennia...

Snacking on snacks, savory or sweet, has become a way of life. This hour, a look at our snack-food obsessions. GUESTS:  Andrea Hernández: Founder of SnaxShot Julia Pistell : Freelance writer and co-founder of SeaTea Improv in Hartford, Connecticut Chris Prosperi: Chef and owner of Metro Bis restaurant in Simsbury, Connecticut Mark Schatzker: Writer in residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Re...

The Nose is off this week. In its place, a look at movie trailers. Maybe you wonder what a movie critic thinks of trailers. Actually, critics don’t see as many as you do because they often go to special screenings. Colin asked America’s Greatest Living Film Critic, David Edelstein, about trailers. Here’s what AGLFC said: “Actually, I avoid them like the plague. I don’t watch them online, and when...

Malls are an important gathering place for people of all ages to shop, eat, be entertained, walk, and enjoy the controlled temperature. This hour, the history of malls in America, their unique design, and a look ahead to the future of those spaces, now that there are dead malls all over the country. Plus: the art of curating mall music. GUESTS: Michael Bise: A former Gap employee who runs  a blog...

Baseball’s All-Star Game was Tuesday night. (The American League won for the ninth year in a row , which doesn’t matter at all.) As such, the sports calendar is basically empty today. So why not spend the hour talking about sports? And why not start with baseball? It’s how our conversation about this show started sometime last week. Me, a Yankees fan: “I do think the Yankees being historically gre...

Conspirituality is a convergence of right-wing conspiracy, New Age spirituality, and grift. The throughline from a left-leaning yoga instructor to a right-wing QAnon conspiracist is skepticism of institutional authority and Western medicine. Skepticism within both groups accelerated during the pandemic, making wellness communities more vulnerable to the anti-vax, anti-COVID messaging QAnon package...

Elvis left two legacies. Musically, he pulled several American musical traditions out of the shadows, braided them together, and made them mainstream. Personally, he created a far darker template for the way a musical celebrity could be devoured by the very fame he avidly sought. Recorded live in front of an audience — long before the pandemic — as part of Colin’s Freshly Squeezed series at Watkin...

This week’s Nose shows no hails from the surface or sub-space chatter. No interplanetary traffic. Not one orbital dock. This week, NASA released the first images sent back from the James Webb Space Telescope. They are mind-boggling . They are meme inducing . They are … mouth watering ? Sort of relatedly: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is the 11th Star Trek television series and the fifth series in...

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...

Homer’s The Iliad is a literary classic. This hour, we look at some of the many ways the epic applies to life today, from our understanding of plague, death, politics, and anger. We discuss the value of returning to the story over and over again and learn about how it can be used as a framework for other stories. GUESTS:  Emily Katz Anhalt : Professor of classical languages and literature at Sarah...

What counts as a robot? This hour, a look at what robots are and the latest in robot technology. Plus, how robots were used and thought about in medieval times and Ancient Greece and the role of robots in science fiction. GUESTS: Chris Atkeson: Professor at the Robotics Institute and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University Adrienne Mayor: Author of  Gods and Robots:...

Recent scientific discoveries have shown just how much we’ve previously underestimated Neanderthals. It turns out that their lives were very similar to those of our ancestors. This hour, a look at Neanderthals and at why humans have dismissed them for decades. GUESTS: Ella Al-Shamahi: A National Geographic Explorer, TV presenter, palaeo-anthropologist, evolutionary biologist, and standup comic Cla...

This week’s Nose wants Sollozzo. If not, it’s all out war. James Caan was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Sonny in The Godfather . Early in his career, he worked with Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks and Olivia de Havilland, and he went on to star in movies like Brian’s Song , The Gambler , Freebie and the Bean , Funny Lady , Rollerball , Thief , Misery , and Elf . Caan died on Wednesday....

This hour we look at the landscape of monuments across the United States and explore how new monuments are created and how old ones are decommissioned. Plus, we discuss what a COVID-19 memorial could look like and represent. GUESTS:  Sue Mobley: Director of research at Monument Lab Erin Thompson: Professor of art crime at John Jay College and the author of Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of Am...

The hearings put on by the  Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol  have been produced and presented less like congressional hearings and more like an episodic HBO docuseries, with committee members — mostly Republican Rep. Liz Cheney — as the narrators, with witness testimony as the expert talking heads, with footage of depositions and speeches and the...

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 the Jorō spider , the now-retired fartrepreneur , the last linotype newspaper , a poetry recitation. Anything. (Seemingly) everything. These shows are fun for us, and...

This week’s Nose is more just like a regular, chill-archy. The Bear is a new half-hour foodie dramedy series from FX and Hulu. Here’s some of FX’s synopsis: “ The Bear follows Carmen ‘Carmy’ Berzatto, a young chef from the fine dining world, who comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop — The Original Beef of Chicagoland — after a heartbreaking death in his family. A world away from wh...

The concept of the hero’s journey was popularized by Joseph Campbell and outlined in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Campbell based the hero’s journey framework off of myths from around the world. Since then, the idea of the hero’s journey has been used in popular books and movies from Star Wars through Harry Potter to The Hunger Games and beyond. But, despite its popularity, Campb...