The Colin McEnroe Show

Radiation is everywhere. It's emitted by our sun, by cat litter, by bananas, and occasionally by nuclear bombs. It's even emitted by you and by me and by every living (and dead) person in the world. So why are we so scared of something so prevalent in our everyday lives? While certain types of radiation can be very harmful in high doses, our fears may have more to do with how radiation is portraye...

Fire imagery abounds in music, literature, art, and scripture. It thrives at the center of ceremony and ritual around the world. We associate fire with sentiments of passion, anger, transformation, purity, and even evil itself. Some say our fascination with fire is owed to the fact that, of all creatures, we alone possess the ability to create and control it. They say at its center, fire burns hot...

It's a special, Juneteenth (observed)-observing, Thursday edition of The Nose. First: The lack of Afro-Latinx actors in the movie version of  In the Heights   has caused some controversy . Lin-Manuel Miranda  has apologized . And:  High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America  is a four-part docuseries hosted by Stephen Satterfield. All four episodes h...

We don't do grief very well in this country. We don't talk about, we get uncomfortable around it, and in some mind-twisting way, we hope grief will leave us alone if we pretend it doesn't exist. But that's not how grief works. Even professionals trained in grief tend to pathologize it when the grieving don't 'get over it' or 'recover ' from it fast enough.  Today, a hard look at what is grief...

Betsy Kaplan has been producing episodes of  The Colin McEnroe Show  for a decade. Today is her last day. (Ostensibly, anyway. She's producing our show next Monday, which isn't really how last days are supposed to work. But it's very much how Betsy Kaplan works.) The Nose is crestfallen. And:  In the Heights  is the big (and/or small) screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's m...

Many people are  reassessing how they view their work  after a year of Covid. The pandemic magnified everything we don’t like about modern work - too many hours for too little pay in the context of a loosely woven national safety net. Some people are switching jobs, others are dropping out of the workforce entirely. The  reasons why people are leaving work  vary, but it g...

We've done this show every year since 2013. We almost certainly didn't do it 2012. But we did in 2011. And there's good circumstantial evidence that we did it in 2010 too, but no actual record of that possibly inaugural episode survives. Point is: Our song of the summer show is a bit of a tradition. It's a tradition that... makes some people angry, we realize. It's a tradition that we're not sure...

Everybody loves a bulldozer. In fact, we all grew up loving bulldozers, didn't we? From  Benny the Bulldozer  to Katy and her big snow, from all the Tonka toys to all the die cast model Caterpillars, the bulldozer is more of an icon in American popular culture than we maybe realize. But  the first scholarly "biography of the bulldozer"  argues that there's a darker side to the...

Nat Love was born a slave, but died a free cowboy and a legend of the Old West. After the Civil War freed Love from slavery, he walked to Dodge City, Kansas, and got a job breaking horses - after he could prove that he could rope a bucking horse, climb on its back without a saddle, and ride him without falling off. He got the job. Thus began Nat's life as a cowboy. We don't typically include Black...

Over just six years, from 1954 to 1960, Alfred Hitchcock made four movies --  Rear Window  (1954),  Vertigo  (1958),  North by Northwest  (1959), and  Psycho  (1960) -- that are routinely mentioned among the very best movies ever made. It's maybe an unparalleled run in the history of cinema. And that's just those four movies. Hitchcock's filmography is full...

Dust is everywhere, but we rarely see it. We shed it from our skin, hair, and nails, leaving little bits of DNA wherever we roam.  More than 100 tons of cosmic dust fall to Earth each day, leaving an archive of every "geochemical" substance that has fallen - at least some of it into our homes. All of history is recorded in the dust we create: the pollution we make, the fires we start, the che...

The word "bastard" hasn't always been meant to offend. Used simply as an indication of illegitimate birth at first, the label "bastard" didn't bring with it shame or stigma until long after it first appeared in the Middle Ages. Today, while its original meaning has not been forgotten, its use is largely reserved for insult. Yet, ironically, the underdog status once associated with a person of ille...

Beavers build sophisticated dams and deep-water ponds that slow erosion of riverbanks, create cooler deep-water pools for temperature-sensitive plant and fish species, and increase the water table, a big deal for Western states coping with drought. And they're social animals who have mates, kits, and an active social life.  But centuries-old myths and fables about the beaver have led to their...

Adrian Lopez is a high school kid from East Vale, California. He had planned a high school kid's birthday party at some fire pits for last weekend. But then the TikTok flyer for the party went viral, thousands of people showed up to two different locations, and  the whole thing has been described as a "zombie apocalypse" of "17 to 19 year olds." And:  Hacks  is a half-hour sitcom fr...

Francisco Goldman made a big choice as a young man. He chose to spend a year in Guatemala living with his uncle instead of pursuing the master’s degree he could have had from a prestigious school offering him a full scholarship. It turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions of his early life. This hour, Colin talks with Goldman about his new novel, Monkey Boy , a story about th...

"Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution." That's the so-called "NASA definition of life." Or there's Russian-born geneticist Edward Trifonov's take: Life is "self-reproduction with variations." Or there's "Life is an expected, collectively self-organized property of catalytic polymers." Or "Life is a metabolic network within a boundary." It's said that,...

Thornton Wilder's  Our Town  debuted more than 80 years ago. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and, over the decades since, it has continuously been one of the most produced of American plays. It is known for its spare set -- just some chairs and tables, perhaps some ladders -- and lack of props and sometimes even costumes. It's known for its metatheatricality and its Stage Manager ch...

'Cancel culture' has become a phrase that means so much that it means nothing at all. It  originated in Black culture  as a way to hold the powerful accountable, but was eventually appropriated as a political weapon for (mostly White) conservatives and liberal progressives, each group using it in  very different ways. Cancel culture  has brought much-needed attention to societa...

After a long absence from Twitter, Donald Glover last week, in a series of since-deleted tweets,  blamed boring culture on cancel culture . After a long absence from the popular culture,  Sinéad O'Connor has a memoir coming out . And:  The Underground Railroad  is a 10-part limited series on Amazon Prime. It's Barry Jenkins's adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel....

Bob Dylan turns 80 years old on May 24. His first album, 1962's  Bob Dylan , is in its 60th year on record store shelves. We're at a point where, for most of us, there has simply never been a popular culture in which Dylan wasn't a towering figure whose influence seems to touch, well, everything. This hour, a look at Bob Dylan at 80. GUESTS: Noah Baerman  - A pianist, composer, and educa...

Using our private bathrooms while working from home opened our eyes to  how uncomfortable  it can be to use public bathrooms at the office - especially when you have a digestive issue. Also this hour:  "Familect"  are the invented nicknames, references, and jokes shared by people who live together. For example, my husband calls me "diller," because I remind him of the hard-head...

Who's afraid of the Bix bad Beiderbecke? Hartford has an amazing jazz history, and Colin has a lot of jazz musician friends. This hour, a little onstage jazz party recorded in front of a live audience long before the pandemic put a pause on live audiences as a thing. Colin and the panel look to make jazz accessible to mere mortals. They talk about what makes jazz jazz, invite the audience to sing,...

The 2021 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees  have been announced . Artists like Foo Fighters, Jay-Z, Todd Rundgren, Tina Turner, LL Cool J, Kraftwerk, and Gil Scott-Heron got in. Folks like Iron Maiden, Chaka Kahn, Rage Against the Machine, Devo, and Dionne Warwick did not. And:  Mare of Easttown  is a seven-episode HBO limited series starring Kate Winslet. The fifth episode air...

Profanity  used to be about someone swearing insincerely to God. Then the Reformation came along and made profanity about sex and the body.  Today, our most  unspeakable  words are slurs against other groups at a time when BLM, #MeToo, and cancel culture are driving our cultural narrative. We talk about the past, present, and future of profanity.  GUEST: John McWhorter&nbs...

In 2017,  The New York Times  uncovered  a program at the Defense Department  which  investigated unidentified flying objects . This year, the former chair of Harvard's astronomy department  published a book  arguing that we may recently have been "visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star." This week,  The New Yorker  has  a long pi...