The Colin McEnroe Show

Jimmy Webb was possibly the most successful songwriter of the 1960s and 1970s. Classics like "Galveston," "Wichita Lineman," "Up, Up, and Away," and "MacArthur Park" were recorded by hundreds of artists from Glen Campbell to Donna Summer. Webb wrote the songs that others made famous. Our team made the trek to Glen Cove, New York, in the summer of 2019 to meet Jimmy Webb and his wife, Laura Savini,...

Laura Nyro's most famous compositions -- "Stoned Soul Picnic," "Stoney End," "When I Die," "Wedding Bell Blues," "Eli's Coming" -- are jewels of mainstream music, and her covers of songs like "Jimmy Mack" and "Gonna Take a Miracle" are legendary. But she was uncomfortable under the spotlight and withdrew from it to become the Belle of Danbury. This hour: a night of singing, reflecting, and celebra...

We're reairing this show from September, 2019, when our team traveled to Glen Cove, New York, to interview legendary songwriter  Jimmy Webb .  We waited a long time for this interview and it was worth every minute of the wait. It was a special day. We broke bread together, met kind people, and enjoyed a day of music and stories from Jimmy Webb's decades of making music.  The day was...

Sports! There are sports! Baseball's back.  At least for now.  With almost all of the teams playing games. And only, ya know,  two of them  having  big COVID outbreaks . The NBA exists in a Disney World "bubble,"  and it hasn't had a single test come back positive yet. The NHL is doing two different kinds of tournaments at once  in two different "bubbles" in Cana...

This  New  or  Second  or  Third  Golden Age of Television has been going on for 20 or 25 or 30 years now.  Peak TV  just won't stop peaking. For decades,  there's just been no way to keep up . But then… suddenly we've all got a lot more time on our hands in our houses. And instead of finally watching  The Wire  and  The Ameri...

Native Americans have been getting forced off their land for a long time. Although Thomas Jefferson promised they shall know the United States as only "friends and benefactors," he forced them from their ancestral home in 1804 after he signed the Louisiana Purchase.   Assured by the government that Kansas territory would be theirs forever, they were soon forced from their new home by whi...

Colin McEnroe Show  alum Chion Wolf has a new show:  Audacious . Hear this guest episode from her series! Last year,  a 28-year-old guy in Mumbai tried to sue his parents -- who are both lawyers -- for having brought him into the world. He claims his parents didn’t get his consent to live. In addition to being a very bold person, he is an anti-natalist. That is, he believes th...

How we define what it means to be a hero depends a lot on the values shared by the group that's in power at any given time. We're seeing it today in the push and pull over the statues of men whose values no longer reflect the values of a changing community. And time tends to wash away the nuance and complexity of heroes that stand as a symbol of a prior generation. Yet, America loves its heroes, e...

Race is a myth; racism is not. I'm stealing this line from Gene Seymour, one of our guests on our show today.  We're reairing a show with three people who discuss what it's like to be Black in America. The show was originally in 2017. We chose to reair it today to coincide with the memorials this week for Congressman John Lewis, who will be the first Black congressman to lie in state in the C...

My son, Simon, is a year old. His mother and his grandmother are both librarians. His father is, well, me. Simon is, predictably, obsessed with books. Back before everything changed, we'd gotten into a pretty good reading routine. Every morning before Simon went to his grandparents', we'd read a big pile of books. Every evening when I got home from work, we'd read a big pile of books. We'd read&nb...

It took two years for the word AIDS to get from coinage to dictionary. It took COVID-19 thirty-four days. The pandemic has inspired a thousand new or repurposed words, slang, nicknames, and neologisms. It has changed the way we speak.   We made technical medical language part of everyday conversation. We created new words to describe  emotions that had no words. We repurposed old wo...

Historian Christine Sismondo says that "America, as we know it, was born in a bar." Taverns were where the Boston Tea Party was planned. They were where court cases were carried out, where land was bought and sold, where immigrants came to congregate. Over the centuries since, bars have fostered so much social change. And today, they're where we go to meet people, to catch the game, to talk about...

Religious scholar  Elaine Pagels  trusted the Gospel of Thomas to get her through the almost unbearably painful years after the death of her six-year-old son -- born with a congenital heart defect -- followed one year later by the unexpected death of her husband.  Thomas was one of many hidden texts discovered in a cave in Egypt in 1945, written around the time of Jesus but omitted...

The number of people testing positive for coronavirus continues to rise in many parts of the U.S., with  sharp rises in places like Florida, Nevada, Alabama, Texas, and Puerto Rico. Yet, President Trump continues to attribute  the rise to more testing -- despite the rise in hospitalizations and deaths -- and  he wants to reduce federal aid  for more testing, tracing, and for th...

Four years ago, over the course of three days, film crews documented the musical  Hamilton  as performed by nearly its entire original Broadway cast. Eventually, Disney bought the distribution rights to the movie and planned to release it in theaters next fall. But then there was a pandemic, and people were stuck in their houses, and  the film dropped on Disney+ earlier this month ....

Our ancestors viewed sleep as a highly sensual and transcendent experience. Today, about a third of adults have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep or feeling rested. We're becoming a nation of insomniacs. We live in what Rubin Naiman calls, a " wake-centric era ,” where sleeping and dreaming are viewed as less important than being awake and on the go. It's hard to come down from the hype...

For decades, we didn't take television seriously. We saw it as ephemeral, as " chewing gum for the eyes ," as, literally, furniture. And then, around the turn of the century, things started to change. There was  The Sopranos .  The Wire . And, at the same time, shows like  Big Brother  and  The Amazing Race . For Emily Nussbaum, it was  Buffy the Vampire Slayer  ...

The number of people being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus is rising in 48 states. We're testing more, but  the rate of positive tests, hospitalizations, and in some states, deaths , is also rising. On Sunday, Florida recorded  15,300 new cases , the highest single-day total to date. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported  60,000 new cases  in the U.S.&...

"Dante's Inferno" is the most famous section of Dante Aligheri's 14,000 line epic poem,  The Divine Comedy. B ut it's only the first part of Dante's long pilgrimage through the afterlife. He first enters the circles of hell, filled with beasts and sinners doomed to the Inferno for crimes like gluttony, lust, and treason.  Dante slowly recognizes a glimmer of each sinner's fault in h...

Sand is the most abundant material on Earth. And, other than water and air, sand is the natural resource we consume more than any other -- more, even, than oil. The pyramids are made of sand. Our roads and driveways and sidewalks are made of sand. Concrete buildings and their concrete foundations are made of sand. From computer chips to computer screens, window panes to lightbulbs, breast implants...

Over the past weeks, cities across the country have implemented curfews in response to George Floyd protests and to enforce stay-at-home orders during COVID-19. This hour, we discuss whether emergency curfews really keep people safer or become another way to intimidate and discriminate. Also, the history and wisdom of juvenile curfews and what it's like to protest after curfew. And we learn about...

Is it safe to say that we're not yet ready to kiss and make up with the banks whose reckless behavior led to the 2008 financial crisis? A little contrition would go a long way to helping us forgive and forget. That's not happening, at least not with Deutsche Bank, the preferred bank of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Deutsche Bank lent money to rogue states that funded terrorist activities that...

The Argus Pheasant is a lifelong bachelor. He mates with multiple females but has no further contact with his mates or the baby pheasants he sires. By human terms, not much of a feminist. Yet, he stages a chivalrous courtship on moonlit nights on a forest stage he clears with meticulous care. He sings and dances and pecks. He encompasses his 'date' in a cape of intricately-colored four-foot-long f...

You're Not Dying. But Panic Attacks Can Make You Think You Are." width="100%">You're shopping for groceries. Out of the blue your heart starts to race, your knees feel week, you feel like you can't breathe, like you might be having a heart attack. You wonder if you're losing your mind -- but you're not. You're having a panic attack.  About 1 in 4 people have had at least one panic attack d...

The raft of renaming going on right now obviously hasn't spared popular culture. The Dixie Chicks and Lady Antebellum are now  The Chicks  and  Lady A , respectively.  Björk's record label  changed its name. Democrats want to  rename John Wayne Airport . FedEx has  formally asked the Washington Redskins  to change their name, and Guilford's board of edu...