The Colin McEnroe Show

Bob Woodward is 77 years old. He's in his 50th year at  The Washington Post . And he just yesterday published his 20th book. Rage  is Woodward's second book about the Trump presidency. Two years ago, on the day after the first one came out,  we did a show about it . So we've gotten that band mostly back together again, and we've spent the last 30 or so hours cramming. This hour, a l...

Black Americans are more likely to  be infected  from COVID-19,  be incarcerated ,  live in poverty , and/or  be killed by the police  than white Americans. It took a pandemic and the killing of George Floyd to crystallize those facts. Historian and  New Yorker  writer Jelani Cobb looks at race, policing, and the difficulty of holding police departments acco...

It's been a week of ending things, really.  Keeping Up with the Kardashians   is ending after 20 seasons . Diana Rigg -- Emma Peel on  The Avengers  and Lady Olenna on  Game of Thrones , among many other things --  died at 82 . And, of course, people are trying to end the whole world  with their gender reveal parties . And then there's  I'm Thinking of Endin...

In the wake of resistance to Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice in cities like  Portland , Oregon;  Kenosha , Wisconsin; and others, we decided to take a look at race relations in the small towns and suburbs of Connecticut. What we found was disturbing.  In some ways, the show feels inadequate. I wish we could have included more of the many people who have experien...

Tracking, rewinding, ejecting, collecting -- VHS broke ground in home entertainment like never before. The culture of VHS and its enormous best friend, the VCR, were kings of consumer media for decades. Despite the last VCR and VHS being manufactured just  four years ago , videotapes are still  consumed ,  collected , and in some cases,  sold (!) across the country. But why? Wi...

In November, 2016, we did a show about all the problems presented by, well,  a-holes . And so it seems only logical to expand our scope a bit and do a show about all the problems presented by, well,  a hole . For instance:  How many holes are there in a straw?  Did you say one? Okay, cool. Then how many holes are there in a sock? (A relatively new sock, I mean.) You said one ag...

Carole Baskin is going to appear on  Dancing with the Stars .  And with that, I've typed the least surprising opening sentence in the history of Nose posts. And: When  Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure  came out in 1989, Alex Winter (Bill) was 23 and Keanu Reeves (Ted) was 24. Winter and Reeves are now 55 and 56, respectively, but that seems to be no reason not to put out a...

Hillary Clinton has spent a lot of time in the spotlight. We know her as a First Lady, a U.S. Senator from New York, President Obama's Secretary of State, a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, and as the wife of former President Bill Clinton.  Yet most everything we know about Hillary as an individual separate from Bill  has been filtered  through the media, through Preside...

2001: A Space Odyssey .  Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb .  A Clockwork Orange .  The Shining .  Full Metal Jacket .  Spartacus .  Eyes Wide Shut . This hour, a careful consideration of the filmmaker Steven Spielberg called "the best in history": Stanley Kubrick. GUESTS: James Hanley  - Co-founder of Cinestudio at Trinity Coll...

Officials in the Trump Administration last week videotaped both  a naturalization ceremony  held at the White House and an  HUD official's interview  with four New York City tenants on housing conditions. They then  played selected parts from each video at the Republican National Convention without the knowledge of the participants.  The CDC  updated testing guid...

Placebo treatments have been making people feel better for a long time. They've been working since long before  Franz Mesmer  was run out of 18th-century Vienna for "mesmerizing" a young pianist into regaining her eyesight, after all hope for a medical cure had been lost.   Doctors have long dismissed the placebo effect  as inferior to conventional medical treatments that...

This week,  the NBA, the WBNA, MLB, MLS,   tennis , and  eventually the NHL  all postponed games and matches in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And: A Tweet listing the " Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf " -- including "Too Much Hemingway," you see -- caused a bit of a fuss on the Twitter. And finally:  Atlantics  is the director...

America has long been attracted to  charismatic demagogues  who master the media of their time to tap into America’s insecurities. Long before Donald Trump  descended a golden escalator in 2015  to announce he was running for president, anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy took America by storm. The parallels many  writers see  between President Trump and Senat...

In May, I discovered ( along with   the rest   of   the   internet ) a video on YouTube of a guy in his loft in Surrey, England... solving a Sudoku puzzle . It was intense, a rollercoaster ride, and, ultimately, sublime. Those are not words you might expect someone to use to describe watching a stranger solve a little number puzzle, but here we are. Since I found that video, I'...

Numbers are so fundamental to our understanding of the world around us that we maybe tend to think of them as an intrinsic  part  of the world around us. But they aren't. Humans invented numbers just as much as we invented all of language. This hour, we look at the anthropological, psychological, and linguistical ramifications of the concept of numbers. And we look at one philosophical q...

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday  authorized the emergency use of convalescent blood  to treat people hospitalized with Covid-19. Sunday's decision comes on the heels of a  presidential tweet  that may have put pressure on the FDA to authorize it prematurely. We talk about this and more news on Covid.  Also this hour:  The Republican National Convention&nbsp...

The No. 1 song in the country --  "WAP" by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion  -- seems to make just one concession to commercial decorum: its acronym title, which I won't be spelling out for you here. It's being called the " gloriously filthy song of the summer " and subversive " in almost every way, even as it plays with the limits of explicit expression ." Speaking of troublesome s...

The pandemic has led to national shortages in testing supplies, PPE, and now,  coins.  We've been predicting a  cashless society  and the  demise of the penny  for so long that we may be underestimating how much people still use coins in places like laundromats and coffeeshops, and the occasional parking meter.  And about eight million households are " unbanked,...

The FDA on Saturday authorized emergency use of a rapid and inexpensive  saliva test  that could increase testing capacity. It’s quick, less expensive, and doesn't need the chemical reagents that are in short supply. It's also less sensitive than PCR tests. But public health experts believe the  tradeoff  will save lives. We talk about that and more Covid-related new...

The Nose is worried about movie theaters. The pandemic has done such damage to the industry that  Hollywood has started treating the U.S. as a second-run market . And now  the Paramount Consent Decrees have ended . (We're not exactly sure what that means, but it's not good.) Is the future of movie theaters...  Walmart drive-ins ? And:  She Dies Tomorrow  is a horror-comedy...

As President Trump talks about draining the swamp in Washington D.C., we turn our attention to actual swamps. Associated with death and decay, while also celebrated for their beauty and biodiversity, few landscapes evoke such contradictory sentiments as swamps. This hour we speak with experts about the surprising history, culture, nature, and politics associated with America's wetlands. We'll...

" It is the rare person who doesn't own a pair of sweatpants. " I am, it turns out, that rare person. Sweatpants are just too warm, is my take. But I do own a number of pairs of cotton pajama pants. They're my sweatpants proxy. Back before the pandemic became the central preoccupation of our existence, back when we made our radio show in, ya know, a radio studio, I would always get a little dresse...

It's been 25 years since Bob Ross died and 26 years since his  The Joy of Painting  went off the air. But there are 52 episodes of the show available to stream on Netflix.  Bob Ross and Chill  is a thing. The  403 full episodes available on YouTube  have accumulated something approaching 250 million views. And last summer,  The New York Times  did  a bi...

As of this weekend, the number of people in the U.S. infected with SARS-CoV-2 topped five million, just sixteen days after passing the four million mark on July 23. This weekend's  motorcycle rally  in Sturgis, South Dakota portends that those numbers will continue to rise.  Three  potential vaccines  against the virus have entered phase III clinical trials, in which safet...

The Federal Communications Commission requires that The Nose cover each and every new Taylor Swift release*.  Folklore  is Swift's seventh number-one album, and it's become, in just two weeks, the highest-selling album of 2020 so far. But rather than just spending a segment talking about the album... We came across a term that's new to us:  cottagecore .  Folklore  is, app...