The Colin McEnroe Show

In 2016, a Swedish brewery offered for sale artisanally-prepared potato chips. $59 for five chips in what looks like a jeweler's box. They sold out. Crazy, right?But be honest: Have you gone to more than one place looking for just the right coffee bean or golden beet or ...something? Meanwhile, behind all this posturing, what do Americans really cook and eat?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Having babies is something we're supposed to do - even though few of us know anything about parenting until we're deep in the game. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Conservative media giant Sinclair Broadcast Group will reach 72 percent of American homes with televisions if they're allowed to acquire Tribune Media. The president likes the idea - even as it breaks current FCC rules that no TV station owners should reach beyond 39 percent of homes. No wonder he likes it. A new analysis shows President Trump does better in areas lacking a trusted news outlet. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One is a futuristic nostalgia bomb that lovingly apes Spielbergian 1970s and '80s pop culture. Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of Ready Player One could have been a self-aware, winking paean to the current Urban Outfitters kitsch for which Spielberg's somewhat responsible. Instead -- and perhaps not surprisingly -- it's a bigger, nostalgia bombier futuristic adventure filled with more decades' worth of pop culture references even than the book is. For better or worse. The Nose has thoughts.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For an American Sign Language-interpreted version click here.Since 1989, more than 2,000 people have been identified as victims of wrongful convictions in the U.S. In 2015 and 2016, the wrongfully convicted were exonerated at a rate of about three per week.This hour, a look at the reality of, psychology behind, and institutionalized pressures toward wrongful convictions in America.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

They smell better, they're better at sensing temperature changes and they can handle more pain. These are just a few of the actual differences between redheads and the rest of us. But while having red hair does come with certain advantages, there are more than a few disadvantages as well.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

H.M. is one of the most important and studied human research subjects of all time. He revolutionized what we know about memory today because of the amnesia he developed after a lobotomy in 1953 to treat the severe epilepsy he developed after a head injury sustained earlier in life. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

U.S. Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty apologized​ Thursday​ ​for failing to dismiss​ Tony Baker, her former Chief of Staff, after learning that Anna Kain, a former aide who once dated Baker, filed serious allegations against him for sexual harassment and death threats.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Armando Iannucci is the creator of Veep and The Thick of It and the writer and director of In the Loop. Those, you'll note, are all contemporary political satires. Iannucci's new movie, The Death of Stalin, is set in 1953 Moscow and tells a true-to-some-degree version of the story of, logically, Joseph Stalin's death. Historical period piece or no, The Death of Stalin is still utterly recognizable Iannucci: it's funny, it's filthy -- it's mostly about the incompetence of the powerful. And, at the same time, stories about Russian authoritarianism have a certain contemporary vibe too, ya know?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As secular attitudes increase around the world and beliefs in the supernatural decline, how is it that the demand for exorcisms has never been higher?In America and across Europe, the Catholic Church is struggling to keep up. And as the Vatican is busy teaching courses to train new exorcists, the question remains: Why now?This hour we speak with a historian, a psychiatrist, and an officially sanctioned exorcist to unravel the mystery behind the twenty-first-century resurgence of this age-old Catholic practice.GUESTS:Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At President Trump's first full cabinet meeting in June 2017, we watched with some amusement while each member expressed over-the-top gratitude for the president's giving them the privilege to serve him and/or the American people. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Compassionate release" of our sickest and oldest prisoners is a way to reduce the federal prison population. It's also meant to save on the high cost of health care for aging inmates, and show some -  well, compassion, to prisoners closing in on the end of their lives. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot has happened in the recent days. The news is fast, complicated, disturbing and in some cases, hopeful.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No one likes a cloudy sky. A cloud on the horizon is seen as a harbinger of doom. We feel like clouds need to have silver linings.But here's our thesis: Clouds are unfairly maligned.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For most of time, microbes ruled the planet alone. Microbes have been around for billions of years - long before people ever began to inhabit the earth.  Am I giving you a good picture of how small humans are in this grander view of life? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here are some songs from your life, "Backstreet Girl" by the Rolling Stones, "Joey" by Bob Dylan, "Road to Nowhere" by the Talking Heads, "Boy In The Bubble" by Paul Simon, "July Fourth, Asbury Park", better known as "Sandy" by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by the Beach Boys. They all rely heavily on the accordion. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cambridge Analytica, a data company backed by Republican donor Robert Mercer and headed by Steve Bannon, harvested private information from almost 50 million Facebook users without their permission to develop and exploit psychological profiles in the 2016 U.S. election.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There was a lot of pressure on Ava Duvernay to bring Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 classic book, A Wrinkle In Time, to the screen. This is the first $100-million movie directed by an African-American woman with a diverse cast chosen to fill the roles written for whites in 1962.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How did a figure like Hitler emerge so quickly and so forcefully onto the world stage? How, in what was thought to be an enlightened and civilized society, did such demagoguery manage to incite an army to commit one of history's greatest atrocities?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every year at this time, we invite an improv comic and an ex-politician-turned-political-pundit on to break down the NCAA tournament brackets and battle for sports analyst supremacy. Logically.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you ever think about the people who make sure the medicine you're taking is safe for you to take? If your like most of us, probably not. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

According to mytho-historical accounts, the ancient Amazons wore pants while riding into battle. But the trend this tribe of warrior women set was short lived. For nearly two millennia after their demise, the notion of women wearing pants was steeped in controversy.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's Ridiculous Moments in Late-Stage Capitalism: Pizza Hut's new shoes -- because there are Pizza Hut shoes, apparently; they're, of course, called "Pie Tops" -- will pause live TV when your pizza delivery arrives. Amazon's Echo devices have started spontaneously laughing at people, which might really be scarier than it is funny. And, to celebrate International Women's Day, KFC is introducing the world to Colonel Sanders's wife, Mrs. Claudia Sanders.And: Netflix's Seven Seconds is not, it turns out, the prequel to a Luke Perry vehicle, rodeo movie it sounds like. It is instead "the contrived, misery-riddled show" that you maybe won't be able to stop watching. And it is also maybe the coldest Netflix show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Times of London has said that Martin Amis "is as talented a journalist as he is a novelist." His latest collection of essays and reportage covers 1994 through 2017, Travolta through Trump.Amis joins us for the hour.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Populism is on the rise from Europe to India to the United States.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Voodoo is more than just a misunderstood religion, its practice draws on age-old beliefs, cultural elements, and folk traditions from a multitude of nations and ethnic groups.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Like the Alexander of children's literature, President Trump had a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad" week.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's The Nose's annual Academy Awards special, and this year we're doing it live at night.The Nose has covered 15 of this year's Oscar-nominated movies. The only Best Picture nom we missed was Darkest Hour, so we're doing this show at the, uh, darkest hour of the day that we're on.Or... something.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Slime is not something we often think about. But there are plenty of reasons why that should probably change: From the theory that life on Earth may have have first emerged from a primordial ooze, to the current slime-making craze that's sweeping the internet.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Consciousness has been an elusive enigma for philosophers and scientists alike for about as long as there've been philosophers and scientists.And, while it's long been thought that artificial intelligence would bring us the next big breakthroughs in our understanding of consciousness, A.I. authority David Gelernter has a different idea entirely.He looks for answers to these fundamental questions in, instead... literature.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Grading on the post-2016 scale, it was a relatively earth shattering revelation-free weekend. And so we have some time to regroup and take a look at more iterative developments in Mueller investigation- and Parkland-adjacent news.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ryan Coogler's Black Panther is the eighteenth feature film entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is the sixth movie in Phase Three, and it's most directly a sequel to Captain America: Civil War, the first film of the phase.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Take a look at at any early 20th century photograph and you'll see them: Hats! From Beavers and Bowlers to bonnets and baseball caps, for hundreds of years hats were the essential accessory for any fashionable and upstanding citizen.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

humor = tragedy + timeOkay, but then the logical next question is: How much time?If it's okay, at this point, to joke about, say, The Spanish Inquisition... what about, for instance, the Holocaust? Or AIDS? September 11th? The #MeToo movement?...Parkland?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Robert Mueller on Friday indicted 13 Russian nationals and three organizations on charges related to interference in the 2016 U.S. electoral process. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Legend holds that years after the the Hartford Convention, a visitor from the South was touring the Old State House and asked to be shown the room where the Convention met. Ushered into the Senate chamber, the southerner looked at the crimson in the face of George Washington in the Gilbert Stuart portrait hanging here and said, "I'll be damned if he's got the blush off yet." Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's expensive to die in America. We spend upwards of $3 trillion on medical care, a large percentage of those dollars concentrated in the last year of a person's life.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From ancient mixtures of boiled goat fats and ashes to modern artisanal soaps with calendula and coffee grinds, humans have been inventing clever ways of cleaning themselves since the very beginning.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

During last week's Super Bowl, Netflix announced the surprise release of the third installment in the already-super-unconvential Cloverfield film franchise... that night. Was it a genius, disruptive publicity stunt? Or was it an unceremonious, direct-to-streaming dumping of a subpar sequel? Or maybe it was both?And speaking of unconventional: The official presidential portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama were unveiled this week. The likenesses are being heralded as a milestone in black portraiture. But, predictably, not everyone agrees.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 stigmatization until long after it first appeared in the Middle Ages.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has already charged several people associated with the Trump campaign with crimes uncovered in his investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election. Yet, some some believe there's a good chance he won't indict President Trump - even if he finds wrongdoing. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are nine movies nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards. And, as of this week, The Nose has seen eight of them. We saw Get Out way back in last March. We saw Dunkirk over the summer. We went to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri at night. And this awards season, we've gone to Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird and Steven Spielberg's The Post and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.Colin and the panel look to make jazz accessible to mere mortals. They talk about what makes jazz jazz, invite the audience to sing, and teach the audience to scat.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you remember where you were on April 1, 2010? That's the last time the U.S. Census Bureau counted you as one of the 323.1 million people who live in the U.S. Don't remember? No problem. It's time for the 2020 Census. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In looking to our past, a curious trend appears. A vast amount of mankind's great accomplishments in art, music, science, technology and language seem to emerge from a relatively small number of cities:  Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Rome, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley-- just to name a few.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There have been some really great Super Bowl ads over the last 35 years. They changed the way we spoke and the way ads were created and consumed.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I, Tonya is a big, brash, brightly-colored, quirky comedy that happens to be telling a story that's ultimately kind of super sad. It's that mixture of tones -- a cinematic style seemingly at odds with the film's content -- and its Oscar-nominated performances by Margot Robbie and Allison Janney that have earned the movie a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Nose picks it apart.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The history of mazes and labyrinths spans thousands of years. From Bronze Age stone carvings, to Medieval gardens, to modern-day laboratories, these elaborate designs continue to be used for a variety of reasons and in some surprising places.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.