The Colin McEnroe Show

Criminal Minds .  Mindhunter  and  Manhunt .  Cracker  and  Profiler . Nearly the whole of the Hannibal Lecter universe:  Manhunter ,  The Silence of the Lambs ,  Hannibal  (the movie and the TV series),  Red Dragon … It goes on. It seems we’re fascinated by forensic psychology, by mindhunting, by criminal profiling. This hour, we...

On the one hand, obituaries are an amalgam of a bunch of different kinds of journalism: they’re feature stories, they’re profile pieces, they cover history, and they’re hard news too. On the other hand, the subject is always… dead. This hour, a look at the art of obituaries and obituarists. GUESTS: Kate Cimini  - A reporter for  The Salinas Californian  and&...

The 2020 Olympics began late last week in Tokyo, Japan. This hour: we look back at the opening weekend, and ahead at the rest of the games. GUESTS: Ben Waterworth  - Australian journalist and radio host, and host of many podcasts, including "Off The Podium," a podcast about the Olympics Rebecca Schuman  - Writer who is covering Olympic gymnastics for  Slate Emily VanDerWerff  -...

The disclosure that a new documentary about Anthony Bourdain uses an artificial intelligence-generated version of his voice for three lines of its dialogue has raised a number of questions of ethics.  Are documentaries journalism in the first place? And:  A profile of the Black Rifle Coffee Company in  The New York Times Magazine  has started some new conversations about consum...

There’s  a theory that ours isn’t the only universe . That there are, actually, infinitely many universes. That there are, then, infinitely many yous. That there are infinitely many different yous reading infinitely many different versions of this show synopsis. That there are infinitely many universes that don’t even bother to include you. Or this show synopsis. Or even rea...

For many, meetings at work can feel like they get in the way of actual work. This hour, we talk about the history of meetings, why we meet, and how to meet better. Plus, how our meeting culture might change due to the pandemic. GUESTS: Liana Kreamer  - PhD Student in Organizational Science at the University of North Carolina Caitlin Rosenthal  - Associate Professor of History at the Univ...

How far would you go? How far would you go, for instance, to convince people to get vaccinated? Vaccination is, in a way, a test run. It’s a test run for some of the other big challenges we face. Like, for instance, climate change. How far would you go? Give us a call during the 1 p.m. EDT hour at 860-275-7266, or join the conversation on  Facebook  and  Twitter . Colin McEnro...

For decades, Christian evangelicals were the fastest-growing religious group in this country. Now,  some young evangelicals are abandoning the faith . And: There’s a new competitive edge in pro sports —  the COVID vaccines . And finally: Tomorrow, July 20,  Wally Funk will become the oldest person ever to fly to space . So today, our conversation with Funk on her last da...

Black Widow  is the 24th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is the ninth, and final, one to feature Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff, and it’s the first film in Phase Four of the M.C.U. I don’t know what a lot of that stuff means, but  Black Widow  has already set a number of pandemic box office records. It has grossed more than $200 million worldwide so fa...

When we think of unicorns, many of us picture idyllic white horses with a single horn, surrounded by rainbows. But that’s not how unicorns have always been depicted. This hour, we discuss the history of unicorns, and their enduring popularity. GUESTS: Martha Bayless  - The Director of Folklore and Public Culture and a professor of English at the University of Oregon Adam Gidwitz  -...

Plum Island sits less than 7 miles off the coast of Connecticut in Long Island Sound. It is completely owned by the federal government and controlled by the Department of Homeland Security. Since 1954, it has been the site of the  soon-to-be-decommissioned Plum Island Animal Disease Center . “All islands carry a certain mystery, but Plum Island has more than its share of stories and sec...

On the one hand, it kind of feels like the pandemic is winding down, right? On the other hand,  the daily caseload in the U.S. is 23,000 , up 94% versus two weeks ago. At the same time,  the Teletubbies are all vaccinated , so that’s a welcome relief. How are you handling this strange gray area in which we find ourselves? Give us a call during the 1 p.m. EDT hour: 860–275&nda...

Most of the Western world is organized by  alphabetical order , which is so much more than the 26 letters that make up the alphabet. Alphabetical order is an organizing principle that allows us to save, order, and access thousands of years of humankind's most precious documents and ideas. Without it, we'd never know what came before us or how to pass on what's with us. It's ubiquitous, yet in...

The Nose is all TV all the time this week. First: Is the era of the unifying television hit  already over ? And: Has Netflix  already lost its cool ? And then:  Kevin Can F**k Himself  is both a multi-camera sitcom and a single-camera drama at the same time. It airs on AMC and stars  Annie Murphy . Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: Richard Donner, Dir...

At 10 years old, M. Leona Godin began losing her vision. Her experience with sight and blindness is detailed in her new book,  There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness.  In it she also explores blindness throughout literature, and through key figures and inventions throughout history. This hour, we’re joined by Godin to discuss "the vast, dappled regions betwe...

John McPhee is a writer's writer. He's thought of as one of the progenitors of the New Journalism, of creative nonfiction or narrative nonfiction, along with people like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. But his style is... quiter than those folks'. His writing is transparent. He tends to keep himself out of the narrative. He doesn't even, in fact, have an author photo. McPhee has w...

The impending doom of an asteroid (or comet or whatever) colliding with the Earth is the premise of any number of movies and books and such. But what would we really do to stop such a thing from happening, if we had to? One solution might be to try to nudge the asteroid off its collision course with us, and  NASA is about to test a way to do just that . And: A few points about baseball's two-...

Bo Burnham: Inside  is a Netflix standup comedy concert play documentary thing written, shot, edited, directed, and performed by Bo Burnham. Burnham made it by himself, with no audience and no crew, during pandemic lockdowns. And:  No Sudden Move  is Steven Soderbergh's sixth movie in the four years since he returned from retirement, and his second for HBOMax. It's a neo-noir crime...

Scrolling through online real estate listings, a practice known as "Zillow surfing,"  has become a popular pastime this past year . And it's not just for people who are actually looking to buy houses... It's also for snooping on the value of other people's homes, imagining different lives for yourself, or just finding unusual houses to make fun of and share with friends. This hour, a look at...

The Thighmaster, the Chop-O-Matic, the George Foreman Grill, and the Clapper... products which are all part of American consumer culture and which were all introduced through infomercials. But as online shopping increases and traditional television watching decreases, are we beginning to see the end of these high-energy, late-night shows? What will become of iconic pitchmen like Ron Popeil, Tony L...

Dragons have captured our imagination going back to the Greek and Roman Empires when the skeletal bones of dinosaurs fed the myths we still believe today. And those myths show up in our most popular popular culture today -- in the  Harry Potter  books and movies, in Tolkien's Middle-earth books and movies, in George R. R. Martin's Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion. This hour, a look at drago...

Why is there something rather than nothing? This has been described as perhaps the most sublime philosophical question of all. This our, we try to answer it. But as we do, we realize that it's not just a philosophical quandary; it's a scientific, cultural, and theological one as well. Indeed, to the extent that "nothing" is even understood, it is understood so differently across different domains...

In March,  Lou Ottens died  in Duizel in the Netherlands. He was 94. I don't think I had ever heard of Ottens before, but the news of his death quickly filled my social media feeds. Ottens, you see, invented the compact cassette in the 1960s. There's a certain romance to the cassette tape, right? They're  more fun than mp3s , for sure. And it turns out they're  having a little...

From ancient scrolls to modern toner cartridges, ink (in one form or another) has been around for millennia. And while we may take it for granted now, for much of that time, it was a precious and coveted substance. Ink makers closely guarded their recipes; spy agencies developed secret, invisible ink formulations; and even now, billions are spent to create the perfect printer inks. This hour, we l...

Rust is all around us. It's in our cars, our homes, our infrastructure. It's also the subject of Jonathan Waldman's book  Rust: The Longest War , which introduces us to the people who fight it. This hour, Waldman joins us, and we hear from a visual artist who has found a way to incorporate rust into her work. GUESTS: Esther Solondz  - A Rhode Island-based  visual artist Jonathan Wal...