The Colin McEnroe Show

This week, the universe chirped... and we heard it! Samantha Bee's new politics-lampooning late-night show debuted to a ton of buzz. The primary debates continued, and debate Twitter was watching.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Paula Poundstone and I started out with a plan for a short chat about her upcoming appearance in Connecticut, and then the conversation sprawled all over the place: from the comedy records of our nerdy youths, to the time she lived in Timothy Leary's guest room.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sherlock Holmes is the most recognizable character in the world. According to the Sherlock Holmes Society, the famous detective has been portrayed by seventy-five actors in more than 260 films, making him the most portrayed character on film. This could explain why a significant percentage of the British think Sherlock Holmes was a real person who lived at 221B Baker Street - a view supported by the Sherlockians, a loyal group of scholars dedicated to keeping his memory alive.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ficre Ghebreyesus and Elizabeth Alexander were born two months apart in 1962, he in Eritrea, she in Harlem. They didn’t meet until 1996. He was an artist and a chef at a New Haven Eritrean restaurant he owned with his brothers. She was a poet and professor. She had been teaching at the University of Chicago, where she had also met a senior lecturer named Barack Obama. She married Ghebreyesus. She delivered Obama’s 2009 inaugural poem. In 2012, a few days after her husband’s 50th birthday, he died abruptly. Her new book, “The Light of The World,” tells that story.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You may have heard there was some big football game on Sunday. You may have heard that the Denver Broncos won, 24 to 10. You may have heard that Beyoncé upstaged Coldplay's halftime show or that Lady Gaga’s national anthem was "fabulous."But our guess is you've also probably now heard of something called a, um, puppymonkeybaby.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The CDC this week recommended women between the ages of 15 and 44 not drink alcohol unless they're on birth control. Why run the risk to the baby if there's a chance you could be pregnant and not yet know it? Some question whether the caution against any alcohol instills a fear that outweighs the risk, while others chafe at the condescension that targets only women, and not the men who get them pregnant. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While basketball didn’t take up residence in the White House in January 2009, the game nonetheless played an outsized role in forming the man who did, according to Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff, author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our deepest convictions shape how we see the world from a very young age. Our parents, community, and religion deeply influence our beliefs and ultimately, the political identity we choose to adopt.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Recently, a group of us gathered on stage at Watkinson School for a conversation about humor and comedy. The conversation had two fields on inquiry. The first was the very strange business of trying to be funny as a way of putting food on the table. It's a weird job. It's not so much a matter of trying to be funny as it is of trying to figure out what's funny about the thing sitting in front of you. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The eyes of the nation turn to Iowa. But, why? The caucus process doesn't really resemble voting as we do it the rest of the time in this nation. And, the Iowa caucuses aren't really binding in terms of national delegate selection.  Iowa doesn't look like the rest of the nation, by which I mean, way whiter, but this in the words of Bruce Hornsby, is "just the way it is."We also talk about the New York Times endorsement of Hillary Clinton and reactions to her candidacy. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joseph Fiennes will play Michael Jackson in a new British made-for-TV movie about a fictional road trip taken by Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and Marlon Brando from New York to California after 9/11. We might applaud the casting of a white actor to play one of the most iconic black entertainers in American culture if we lived in a post-racial society. But that's fiction, too.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We once did a show about beer jingles, which is a great example of how a product becomes a culture. Cereal as a culture, is off the charts. There's the box, there's the prize, there's the character, there's the jingles, there's the commercials. Most of us can probably sing some jingles and discuss favorite cereal personae from our childhoods, which makes it kind of weird when marketing experts tell us that cereal consumption is in decline.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Bill Petit spent Sunday, July 23, 2007 playing golf with his father. The day was sunny and hot and a great day to be outside. His wife and two daughters spent the day at the beach. Life was good - until it wasn't.Within 24 hours, his wife and daughters would be murdered, his home burned, his belongings gone. The trauma would render him unable to return to his medical practice. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At this year's Golden Globes, the top TV honor, Best Television Series -- Drama, went to USA's hacker technothriller series "Mr. Robot." Last year, the trophy went to Showtime's "The Affair."Between those two new shows, there are three point-of-view characters, three narrators. And you can’t really trust, you can't fully believe a one of them.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Republican establishment is wringing its hands over the rise of Donald Trump. On Friday, National Review, one of the leading and oldest voices for conservatism, dedicated its latest issue to the war "Against Trump." But it didn't have the effect they were hoping for. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Warning to listeners: the audio contains some information about "The Revenant" that slipped out of one of the guests during the discussion. It could be considered "a spoiler." It seems only natural that Sarah Palin and Donald Trump would find one another. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Quick! Name a living philosopher. Chances are if you can do it at all, you're going to say Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Shelly Kagan, or Daniel Dennett. Dennett is probably the best bet because he plays the game at several different levels. He was known until the death of Christopher Hitchins as one of the four horseman of the atheist apocalypse. But his work on free will and consciousness have conferred a kind of celebrity on him. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One thing we can all agree on regarding Barbra Streisand; she provokes strong reactions. Or, she used to. I don't think Millennials or Generation X and Y completely understand what Streisand was like when she was a central part of the American cultural conversation. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This all started with a scratchy phone message from a guy named Bobby Duley. He had been making regular visits to his mother convalescing at a rehab facility in Old Saybrook. Down the hall in one of the public rooms, he discovered a woman who was intimately involved in the civil rights marches that began in 1966 in the south.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Academy is supposed to nominate the best actors, directors and writers for Hollywood's most prestigious Oscar awards; instead, they see only whites worthy of these lofty levels of achievement this year.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr. Joseph Cyr, a surgeon with the Royal Canadian Navy, had to think quick when his ship came upon a rickety boat with mangled and bloody bodies. at the height of the Korean War in 1951. As the only doctor on board, he quickly moved to operate on 19 men, all of them his enemies in this war. All survived, making the young doctor a hero.Except he wasn't really a doctor. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How disgraceful was last weekend's Cincinnati Bengals/Pittsburgh Steelers game? Well, Boomer Esiason, a former Bengals quarterback, used that word - disgraceful - to describe his old team and its fans. Rush Limbaugh, not a noted opponent of violence, used the word "disgrace" twice to describe the flagrant thuggery on the field. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life changed dramatically for Illeana Douglas in 1969 when her parents fell in love with the two Harley-riding hippies in the Dennis Hopper - Peter Fonda classic, "Easy Rider." They decided to trade in their middle-class life for a wild ride filled with free spirits, free love and Hollywood.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In "A Knight's Tale," Heath Ledger is invited to a dance among the nobles. He is a peasant, impersonating a noble and is anxious because he doesn't really know how to dance. His rival sneeringly asks him to show everybody a dance from Heath's homeland. What happens next is a breath-taking dance sequence in which pre-Renaissance music morphs into Golden Years by David Bowie .Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

People can't get enough of the new Netflix story "Making a Murderer," a depressing story about Steven Avery, the son of troublesome auto-salvage dealers in the heart of an eastern Wisconsin farming community. He was erroneously sent to prison for 18 years for a crime he didn't commit. Upon his release after a long legal battle, he was put back in jail for a murder --  you guessed it -- he may not have commit. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Okay, this show comes with a trigger warning.We're going to talk about things people eat, and some of those things are not for the squeamish. This is a conversation about disgust, and specifically, how our reflexive response of disgust may get in the way of things we probably need to think about doing.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe were exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in 1989, there were protesters on the street and lines around the block as thousands queued up to pay an extra fee to look at these pictures, which lay at the heart of a heated debate about public funding for the arts.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What does it mean to say that someone, or something is ugly? For a label that gets tossed around so often, its meaning is hard to pin down. Perhaps that's because, throughout history and around the world, our notions of ugliness have shifted considerably.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Natalie Cole struggled to step out of the shadows of R&B icon Aretha Franklin and the longer shadow of her father, singer Nat King Cole. But she did it with her stellar voice and lasting, if under-appreciated, contributions to R&B, soul, and jazz. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I assembled seven Nose panelists and asked them to pick a topic we used during 2015 from my list of twelve.  Of the five left over, four of them were connected to the modern cycle of internet shame: Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP official who was pretending to be black, the drunk profane kid demanding jalapeno bacon mac and cheese at UConn, the aunt who sued her nephew for jumping on her, and the dentist who sued Cecil the lion.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many of our ideas about history are drawn from historical fiction. Who, for example, is Thomas More? Is he the tragic hero of the play and movie, "A Man For All Seasons"?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It goes by many names: the sharing economy, the collaborative economy, the peer economy, just to name a few. Whatever you want to call it, one thing's for sure: this new way of doing business -- where idle assets equal big profits, and the hard-earned currency of trust comes through user reviews -- is changing the economic landscape of our country.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the surface of things, there would seem to be little connection among the following: two small daily newspapers in central Connecticut, the wealthy owner of a multinational casino and resort chain, the Chinese crime gangs known as triads, and the sale of the largest newspaper in Nevada to an undisclosed owner. But they do all fit together somehow. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coincidences happen to everyon, wwhether it's hearing a song you've been thinking about all day on the radio, or running into an old acquaintance whose name recently came up in conversation. For events so seemingly unlikely, coincidences certainly have a way of happening quite often. And now, after much study, psychologists and mathematicians think they know why.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To the list of things you can't avoid -- death and taxes -- we now add losing your job to a machine. A worry typically reserved for those in manufacturing, automation in the workplace is now a reality of nearly all occupations, and it's only getting worse... or is it?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's a yearly tradition: Jazz critic Gene Seymour releases his list of the best jazz albums of the year, and musicians Jen Allen and Noah Baerman gather 'round the table with their own picks. If you're buying a last-minute gift for a finger-poppin' hep cat, this episode will solve your problem.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For the second year, we welcome singer/songwriter extraordinaire "Big Al" Anderson and Emmy Award-winning producer and musician Jim Chapdelaine in studio for songs and stories.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fans are flocking to J.J. Abrams's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" in droves. The film is set to break box office records. It drew $14.1 million in Europe when it opened this week, and is expected to post world record sales of $600 million this opening weekend. Is there anyone out there who doesn't love "Star Wars"? You might be surprised. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vin Baker was an Olympic basketball player and four-time NBA All Star. The journey from University of Hartford to professional basketball got him rich quick, but it was a lifestyle he couldn't keep up with. Baker's struggle with alcoholism is well-documented, as is the fact he blew through $100 million. He lost his home and restaurant.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For most shows, I’d use these first paragraphs to explain why we’ve chosen to spend an hour on its particular topic. I’d remind you of events in the news. I’d site a publication date. I’d point out a trend that we’ve maybe noticed that you maybe haven’t.For today’s show, for instance, I could type a list of towns here — international towns, domestic towns, Connecticut towns — and you’d recognize them all as spots on a map that share a wound, as place names that represent a raw, unhealed sore in our shared memory.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bill Murray has been involved with some of our favorite movies of all time: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Moonrise Kingdom. He doesn't like managers or agents and rumor has it, once agreed to play Garfield because he thought it was a Coen Brothers film.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the University of Texas at Austin can consider race when deciding who can come to their school. It's the second time the high court will decide this case. But like the rest of the country, the court is having a hard time talking about race without shouting at each other. Justice Scalia is making what some say are racist comments.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The New York Times  and Washington Post are adding new forms of address and pronouns for people who haven't chosen a single gender. Research indicates that ending a text with a period seems insincere. Dictionaries are throwing open their doors and letting in all kinds of slangy words that have been living on the internet. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, before Jon Stewart and Conan O’Brien, before "The Simpsons," before David Letterman, before "Saturday Night Live," before The National Lampoon… before all the great subversive American satirists that we’ve all grown… used to — before all that, there was MAD magazine.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Dante's Inferno" is the most famous section of "The Divine Comedy," poet Dante Aligheri's, 14,000 line epic poem. It's where Dante must face his sins before moving beyond an eternity in hell, where the doomed can still find redemption in the acceptance of their humanity. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Justin Lifflander wanted nothing more than to become a spy for the CIA. Growing up during the Cold War, he practiced spying on friends, family, and schoolmates in preparation for what he thought would be a career full of high-tech gadgetry and secret rendezvous. When Lifflander was finally assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1987, he thought his dream was coming true.What followed was something Lifflander could never have predicted. He was a mechanic at the embassy, then an inspector of Soviet missile sights, and then a suspected American agent followed at every turn by the KGB. Lifflander found himself living in a world which very much resembled his childhood dream -- but he was never a spy.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dozens of reporters rushed the apartment of the San Bernardino shooters on Friday. They live-streamed their tour through the home for 15 minutes, holding up everyday items that included personal photographs and private documents. They were roundly condemned on social media and by neighbors concerned by the frenzy. Where is the line between what people need to know and voyeurism? How does the drive for speed and ratings affect journalistic integrity?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two married shooters with a six-month-old baby rushed a social service agency this week in San Bernardino, California. They killed 14 people and injured another 21.  It's an all-too familiar scene, including the heartfelt prayers that followed. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I first met cartoonist Bill Griffith back in the 1980s. I arranged for us to tour a Boston-area Hostess Twinkie plant, which sounds like a weird first date but makes perfect sense if you're familiar with his creation "Zippy the Pinhead," an unwitting surrealist who swims happily through a sea of taco sauce, processed cheese and, well, Twinkies. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Long before evangelicalism became associated with the mostly white, conservative followers aligned with the Republican Party, a long line of progressive evangelicals led reforms to abolish slavery, give women the vote and improve public schools.But the history of evangelicalism is complicated. It has a rich history of social activism on behalf of the marginalized, mixed with deep discomfort with the very people it seeks to help.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.