The Colin McEnroe Show

Though country music is considered the most popular genre of music in America , its influence is profoundly regional. The style is known for appealing to the white working class, and is largely sequestered in southern and midwestern pockets of the country . Meanwhile, coastal elites tend to regard the genre with disdain. "I like everything but country" is a popular refrain . This hour, we unpack o...

What if you just don't really enjoy food very much ? What if you're totally fine eating the same thing every single day ? What if you think food is an inefficient way to get what you need to survive ? What if, rather than eating "food," you just mixed a white powder (that is definitely not made of people because it's made of soy protein isolate instead) with water and drank that in food's place? T...

Ocean Vuong emigrated to Hartford from Vietnam when he was two years old. His family brought with them the trauma of an American-led war that ravaged their people and their culture. How do they retain their culture and assimilate into one that doesn't want them? His family struggled in a Hartford very different from the city that many of us experience. It's a place that still exists in the shadows...

Fear of sharks spiked last summer after a great white fatally bit a 26-year-old surfer off the coast of Cape Cod. The fever still runs high as reports of great white sightings coincide with people heading to the beach. Yet, we have a higher risk of getting hit by lightning than killed by a great white shark. The myth of the great white, exacerbated by the 1975 megahit Jaws , is false. Great whites...

Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, John Belushi, John Candy, Rick Moranis. Animal House , The Blues Brothers , Beverly Hills Cop , Caddyshack , Ghostbusters , ¡Three Amigos! , Funny Farm , Spaceballs , Stripes . We maybe didn't properly appreciate it at the time, but the 1980s were one of the most fertile periods ever for screen comedies and screen comedians. This hour, a...

A photo of people inching their way up a snaking line to the peak of Mount Everest last month has drawn attention to a number of problems, one of which was the jostling at the top of the mountain to take social media-ready selfies and photos. That got us wondering if other people were risking their lives for that perfect photo. It turns out that more than 250 people worldwide have died while takin...

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 during their lives, yet few like to admit it. Because panic manifests through phys...

In early 2017,  The New York Times uncovered a program at the Defense Department which investigated unidentified flying objects. Then, at the end of May, the reporters published another article , getting navy pilots to talk on the record about their encounters with unidentified flying objects.  In November 2018, the chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department, Avi Loeb,  co-wrote a pape...

We want to hear your thoughts on what it's like to be "living in a Trump salad," on this all-call Monday. (Colin coined the term.) First, there's #sharpiegate. Last week, President Trump unleashed on the media for reporting his error tweeting   a warning about Hurricane Dorian that included the state of Alabama. To prevent mass evacuation, the National Weather Service corrected his error...

It's hard to believe, but The Matrix is 20 years old this year. And its influence is all over the culture with bullet time and red pills and the "woah" meme and so much more. We take the question of whether we're living in a simulation much more seriously than we did 20 years ago. We're much more attuned to the allegory for the trans experience that The Matrix might well have been. And with John W...

This week, we've started our second decade on the air. Over the first ten years, we did some number north of 2,000 shows. And every one of those shows was intended, more or less, to be about some... thing. Towels or Trump or toast or television or whatever. This hour we do the opposite thing: a show  not  about a specific something -- tapirs. Note:  Today's show features Chion Wolf'...

The American criminal justice system has become less 'just' over recent decades and prosecutors bear much of the responsibility. The tough-on-crime culture of the 1980's and 90's shifted power away from judges and juries and toward prosecutors who embraced their new power to wield mandatory sentencing laws to rack up the convictions demanded by the constituents who elected them.  The problem...

We've got no guests today. It's you and Colin and whatever is on your mind. There's a lot we could talk about. There's the 2020 election, why President Trump isn't sure what a Category 5 hurricane is, whether gun control measures beyond the introduction of the death penalty will come from this weekend's shootings in Texas, both top seeds are out of the US Open, and why a Tennessee school wants to...

Sticks & Stones is Dave Chappelle's fifth standup comedy special for Netflix in three years. All four previous specials won the Grammy for Best Comedy Album, and one of them won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special. The critical response to this latest special, though, has been a bit more muted . The Last Black Man in San Francisco (out this week on DVD/Blu-ray/iTunes/Amazon/etc.) tells th...

Last year, there was a movie about Charles Manson . This year, there was another movie about Charles Manson . Charles Manson is a character in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and in the second season of David Fincher's Mindhunter . The Manson Family murders were fifty years ago this summer, and Manson still seems to fascinate us and our popular culture . This hour, we wonder why....

Chuck Klosterman is a man for all seasons. He's a pop culture icon. He's a sports geek. He's interviewed Jimmy Page. He appears as himself in other people's movies. He was part of a rock band. He's an author of fiction, non-fiction, and fictional nonfiction. Top that! Today, an hour with someone at least one person would call, the smartest man on earth.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/...

As Barbie Millicent Roberts -- yes, that's her name -- turns 60 we, as a plastic loving nation, celebrate! For six decades the impossibly proportioned fashion doll has been delighting children and adults around the world. But the road to 60 hasn't always been easy. Critiqued by feminists, diversity advocates, and even child psychologists for her role in perpetuating harmful sterotypes, eating diso...

You responded so enthusiastically to our all-call show last Monday, we decided to try it again this week. What's on your mind? The world is you oyster, at least from 1-2 pm this afternoon. Not sure what you want to talk about? Worried about the  economy ? Trump's  'loyalty'  test for Jewish Democrats? Who's in and who's out of the next Democratic debate?  No debate on climate c...

The Nose has this odd habit of covering basically every new Taylor Swift single/video. And so there's a new Taylor Swift single/video . And so The Nose is covering it. And: As this is the way the world works now, a Facebook post has started a backlash against Frank Pepe Pizzeria over... politics . Sigh. And finally: In the great tradition of A Bug's Life / Antz , Deep Impact / Armageddon , and The...

If there's one thing we know about the public radio audience, it's that you love... sports. You crave sports coverage. You live for sportstalk radio. And so this hour, we talk sports... on the radio. And there's plenty to talk about: There's the fallout over Jay-Z's new partnership with the NFL (and impending ownership with in the NFL ?). There's the hot take question, " Do running backs even matt...

Today we speak with actor and human-rights activist George Takei, not about his role as Liutenant Sulu on the original Star Trek , but about a far more troubling chapter in his life. In his new graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy , George writes in detail about his childhood spent in an internment camp for Japanese-American citizens. It's a vivid account of one of the darkest times in America&rsqu...

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 three years ago , videotapes are still  consumed , collected , and in some cases,  sold (!) across the country. But why? With streaming...

We've got no guests today. So much of the burden of making today's show any good at all rests with, well: you. We can talk about pretty much whatever you want. The economy . Plastic bags . Greenland . The Little League Classic . 2020 . Or 2020 . Or 2020 . Or 2020 . Oh! And we've got a brand new (and toll-free) call-in line that we're pretty excited about: 888-720-WNPR . That's 888-720-9677 . Call...

Everything's canceled, more or less. The movie  The Hunt   was canceled before anybody got to see it . People talked about  canceling the movie  Adam  before anybody got to see it .  Sarah Silverman was canceled, from a movie anyway , for something she did -- on television -- 12 years ago.  The OA  was canceled,  but people maybe don't  believe &nb...

Shakespeare in the Park  starts tonight in New Haven . Shakespeare & Company in the Berkshires has  a new workshop production of  Coriolanus  opening next week . Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens  didn't think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's works . The BBC has  a multi-camera, filmed-in-front-of-a-live-studio-audience Shakespeare sitcom . This hour: lots of...