The Colin McEnroe Show

Think back to a time you felt wronged by someone. Does the memory of the injury still make you upset or cause you stress? Considering the amount of minor and major trauma we sustain throughout our lives, we are given surprisingly little information about how to process these unpleasant experiences to help minimize long-term negative effects.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, you think it's easy to write a Broadway song? I say not so fast. The four aspiring writing teams that attended Goodspeed's Festival of New Musicals this past January say it's plenty hard. They spend a lot of time kicking around ideas, most of which never see the light of day. But, really, they have no choice. "If you can do anything else, you do do anything else," says Marcy Heisler, one half of one of our amazing teams. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all know that the days of punching our clock for exactly forty hours is over. One of the alternatives that has risen in its place is what's called the "gig economy": Americans are casting off the traditional full-time job to freelance, moonlight, and temp their way to financial success.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When was the last time you enjoyed a sugary soft drink? If it's been a while, it may be because health movements have begun to turn consumers away from sodas. But the sugar content in juices, iced teas, and energy drinks is also very high. It begs the question: why are some connoisseurs now trying to break only their soda habits, and what makes others remain dedicated to their favorite carbonated drink?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Which side are you on?In the mammoth PEN Awards kerfuffle, that is. Table captains have walked out over the award being given to the survivors from Charlie Hebdo. And now 145 writers, including six table captains and such notables as Junot Díaz, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Eric Bogosian and Michael Cunningham, have signed a letter protesting the award to Hebdo. As LBJ  apparently never said regarding Vietnam and Walter Cronkite (but we'll come to that): Once you've lost Joyce Carol Oates, you've lost America. Francine Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Twain has many literary sites; yet Henry James has none. You can visit Edith Wharton's house but not Shirley Jackson's. You can walk where Wallace Stevens walked but you can't buy a ticket to go through his front door. And can you believe there's no single museum devoted to all American writers-- yet?New England is about to get two great new writers’ museums: The Dr. Seuss museum in Springfield, Massachusetts and-- if we're lucky-- the Maurice Sendak Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Today we look at who gets a writer's house and why-- and what sort of experience we’re looking for when we make pilgrimages to the desks of our literary heroes. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

University of Kentucky Biology professor James Krupa is frustrated with the resistance of his non-biology students to accept the theory of evolution as established fact, despite what he calls an "avalanche of evidence" supporting its validity.Krupa says that evolution is the foundation of our science, and just as we accept germ theory, cell theory, quantum theory, and even game theory, we must understand the significance of evolution even if it challenges long-held religious beliefs.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once upon a time Nancy Butler lived in the Beltway and used her MBA to secure a high paying job with a defense contractor.  But Butler had considered herself a devout Christian since the age of 9, and something about a job with a company that made torpedoes started to bother her. So she left and embarked on a journey that included mission work in Asia and enrollment at Yale Divinity School. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Former general and CIA director David Petraeus will not go to jail for leaking classified information to his biographer and mistress. Last week, he was sentenced to two years probation and a fine. Meanwhile, other leakers without the stars or stature are spending years behind bars. There are other discrepancies in military justice too. This hour, we talk to journalist Peter Maass from The Intercept.Also we check in on local Nepalese residents who are grappling with this weekend's earthquake in their home country.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the unwritten rulers of a weekly culture show like The Nose is that, if you're willing to "go low," as they say, you could probably alternate between Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck every week. They're both wonderfully talented, but they're also kind of useful idiots, reliably causing some kind of spectacle we can go after. And they used to be a couple.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There was a time when almost everyone wore a watch. There was a time when almost everyone had a mechanical clock in their home. There was a time when almost no one had any kind of timepiece at all.There was also a time when pretty much everyone had a VCR that blinked 12:00 AM twenty-four hours a day.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We like to think of health care as an exact science: established guidelines, uniform practices, rigorously tested treatments vetted through extensive lab trials. Unfortunately this was neither the case  in the early days of medicine, nor is it the case today. It's shame that nearly 2500 years after the writing of Hippocrates' famous oath we'd still be wrestling with the ethics of best practice.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.

Patriots' Day is a time for celebration in Boston and across the nation. The biggest event held on this day every year is the Boston Marathon, which has turned it into a day for remembrance as well. The second race since the 2013 bombings is underway and this hour, we check-in with a public radio reporter at the finish line.Also, the UConn Foundation has been under increased scrutiny both in the media and at the state capitol where a bill that would open up the non-profit to the state's Freedom of Information laws, was defeated.Finally, we talk Star Wars with someone who actually took a ride in a X-Wing! Really. Ok - kind of really.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We don't usually talk politics  on The Nose, but that's OK, because Hillary Clinton isn't really talking politics (much) yet either. Instead, she's just trying to, you know, hang out with all 235 million voting age Americans at once. How does one do that? That's the kind of thing that interests the Nose. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Forty-five years ago, the attention of the nation and much of the world swung toward New Haven, where the murder trial of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins had made the city a magnet for Black Panther outrage and pushed New Haven to the brink of anarchy.It's an amazing story with a cast of characters that includes not only the Panthers, but future black leaders like Kurt Schmoke, a Yale student who would become mayor of Baltimore, and J. Edgar Hoover, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Archibald Cox, Spiro Agnew, Kingman Brewster and Tom Hayden.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everybody's a film critic, right? I mean, who walks out of a theater with no opinion about it? Also, nobody's a film critic. By that, I mean that most people resist deep analysis of a film. A frequent refrain is "Hey! It's just a movie."For a film critic like David Edelstein, the key word is engagement.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

To mark the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, we look back the event and how it changed America with two local historians who are experts on the 16th President of the United States. As part of this look back, we hear from actors who will commemorate the anniversary with a staged reading to recreate the final days of the Civil War, the assassination, and the search for and death of John Wilkes Booth.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Governor Dannel Malloy last month announced he'll bring together  a panel of community leaders and experts for the first time today to take a look at ways to reduce the urban violence that takes the lives of young men, mostly minority and poor, in often random and senseless acts of violence. While those numbers are decreasing in some urban areas around the nation, including in Connecticut,  they remain higher than would be tolerated in more affluent communities.A focus on the numbers ignores the lives behind the statistics, including the families that love victims. Nor do numbers get to the root of the problems behind the violence. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Let me just come right out and say it: I am fat.”We're not even sure when it started, but Candice Bergen, who was always perfect and who is still perfect, really went there  in her current memoir and book tour.“Let me just come right out and say it: I am fat.”Mostly, it feels like someone opening the window and letting the fresh air in, right? And it lets us know that everybody eats and some of us eat too much. I mean, it turns out that the FBI -- which is being held to new fitness standards -- is full of stress-eaters.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The United States has a long and complex relationship with Puerto Rico that changes dramatically depending on who is telling the tale. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We fool people all the time. Whether with bad intent or not, deception has become a common practice in today's society. While modern tools such as texting, social media and the internet at large have all made the practice easier, deception in its most basic form goes back to Man's beginning.  Some believe it to be an assertion of power while others claim it's in our blood- a practice born out of our species' need to cooperate in order to survive.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cheating can be found everywhere these days. Whether in school, sports, business, politics or taxes, cheating it seems, is as much a part of our culture as baseball or apple pie. But it's not just in our culture that cheating abounds. Around the world, the practice appears to be reaching epidemic levels.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The stage is set for the national championship in men's Division I college basketball. Sure, your team might not be there, but you know who to root against in Monday night's game: Duke. Why? This hour, we ask that question of a filmmaker who produced a film on one of Duke's biggest villains.Also, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy is everywhere on the cable news circuit lately. Is his national star rising, or does it just seem that way in Connecticut?Finally, what are the takeaways from a review of a retracted Rolling Stone report on campus sexual assault?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The only people who might have had a wilder roller coaster ride than Trevor Noah this week were the owners of  Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana. (That's the place that announced Wednesday morning they would not be willing to service the burgeoning market for breadsticks and nacho cheese dip at gay weddings.  By Friday, they had been forced to close temporarily because of all the harassment and had seen half a million dollars raised for them on the site gofundme.com.)Anyway, we're not talking about Indiana on The Nose today. We promise.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's official: owning a dog or a cat is just not as cool as it used to be. Nowadays, anybody who's anybody owns a monkey, or a leopard, or a slow loris... Whatever that is. Indeed in today's age, with the desire to stand out leading us to make ever more questionable decisions, owning a creature everyone else is smart enough (or ethical enough) not to own is a true mark of distinction.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the series "NewsRadio," the character played by Phil Hartman once said, "Experience once taught me that behind every toothy grin lies a second row of teeth."Smiling is a universal way to show happiness. But not all smiles are happy. In reality, we smile less for happiness than for social reasons that have nothing to do with happiness. That said,  few things are more ingratiating and calming as another person's genuinely warm smile. But, maybe it's because a genuine smile is such a great thing that we're always looking for the false one. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're probably no stranger to the Morning Zoo if you were in your teens or twenties in the 1980's. Developed after the death of disco left  Top 40 stations with a big hole to fill, the Morning Zoo revitalized early morning radio with a fast-paced improvisational style that for the first time broke down barriers between news and entertainment.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This weekend, HBO premiered a documentary about the Church of Scientology that has been generating headlines and controversy for months. What new information was learned from the film? This hour, we talk with someone who has written extensively about the church.Also, a "religious freedoms" bill was signed into law by Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Some businesses in the state are already receiving backlash from customers who won't do business in the state because of the law. Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy is expected to announce an executive order that will ban state-funded travel to Indiana. However, Connecticut is one of 19 other states with similar religious freedom laws on the books.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our topics today involve censorship, transgression, and reconciliation. Earlier in the week, The Nose panelists started talking about China's "dancing grannies" problem. This sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but it's real. In China's public squares, droves of people --most of them women and most of them with a little snow on their roofs -- assemble and dance, in various styles, to various kinds of music. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Author Michael Erard is interested in how and why we name things - especially non-human objects and animals - and how naming affects our perceptions and behaviors toward those objects.He spent a lot of time researching how different subcultures name things - including rock musicians, scientists and Maine lobstermen, because naming tells you a lot about what's going on in a particular culture.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rust is all around us. It's in our cars, our homes, our infrastructure. It's also the subject of Jonathan Waldman's first book, Rust, which introduces us to the people who fight it.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Doctors have been treating the symptoms of their patients, often before they know the cause, for centuries. But as medicine has gained sophistication and precision, we've slowly demanded more of our doctors. We want them to treat us, but also to know what we have, and why we have it, and how to treat and cure it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before cyber-bullying was even a term, one person was experiencing it from the internet world mercilessly: Monica Lewinsky. Nearly 20 years after her affair with President Bill Clinton was discovered and she became the internet's target, she is returning to public life. Last week, she gave a TED Talk and addressed the scandal and its aftermath directly.Also, the City of Hartford is restoring damage to a well-known sculpture that was unknowingly marked by work crews with orange paint.Finally this hour, a look at the new album by Kendrick Lamar, which has been the talk of the town among rap fans and critics alike.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Starbucks is trying to start conversation about race relations in America, led by baristas across the nation. The effort has had mixed reviews.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here in America we're taught to celebrate ideas, to think outside the box and to fan the flames of innovation whenever possible. But what do we do when an idea becomes destructive? And even worse; when that idea becomes an ideology?This is the prospect we're facing with extremism around the world. Now America, a nation well adapted to win wars by conventional means, is being forced onto a battlefield it's less accustomed to-- one where social media, propaganda and targeted messaging are the weapons of choice.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shade tobacco came to Connecticut in 1900 from the island of Sumatra, which was beginning to dominate the world of cigar wrappers. The leaf had a light color, delicate texture, and mild flavor that cigar lovers love. So it seemed like a good idea to grow it somewhere besides Sumatra and the artificial shade concept developed in Florida in the 1890s. Connecticut growers tried it on one-third of an acre in Windsor in 1900, and the result was so good that farmers, in an un-Yankee-ish burst of headlong passion, planted 50 acres in 1901. The industry grew like shade tobacco -- that is, fitfully -- and woven into its life were the stories of the latest set of immigrants willing to work in cheap and concentrated bursts. We tell you as many of their stories as we can. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's that time of year again when productivity slides, sleep is lost and frustration runs high. No, there's not another financial crisis - just March Madness! Join our favorite bracket watching team of Julia Pistell and Bill Curry, as they share their top-secret strategies to pick the winning NCAA bracket, the logic of which stuns even seasoned sports reporter Mike Pesca.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sixty years ago, patients rarely questioned the authority of their doctors. Like the doctors portrayed on television, these older, wiser, and usually white male doctors would dispense sage advice to trusting parents desperate to make their children well in an age of polio and measles.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Oppenheimer hosts an All-Star New-Haven Nose Panel from New Haven.For as long as fraternities have acted poorly,  adults have quietly tolerated and even gloried in it. Who can forget John Belushi and Animal House? Too often, parents and college administrators have excused the all-night parties, destruction of property, and drunken brawls as the rude, yet benign acts of those on the brink of entering adulthood, the last gasp of carefree youth. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, we take a deeper look at the beaver.Beavers are sophisticated eco-engineers, one of few animals capable of broadening biodiversity and currently considered of the keys to reversing climate change. They build sophisticated dams and deep-water ponds that stem erosion of riverbanks, create cooler deep-water pools that support temperature-sensitive plant and fish species, and increase the water table, a big deal for Western states suffering the impact of worsening drought.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For centuries, female composers have often found themselves overshadowed by their male counterparts. Take Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Anna Magdalena Bach, and Alma Mahler, for example. Their names don't roll off the tongue quite as easily as Felix Mendelssohn, J.S. Bach, and Gustav Mahler's do. But why?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The dream to live forever has captivated mankind since the beginning. We see this in religion, literature, art, and present day pop-culture in a myriad of ways. But all along, the possibility that we'd actually achieve such a thing never quite seemed real. Now science, through a variety of medical and technological advances the likes of which seem as far fetched as immortality itself, is close to turning that dream into a reality.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new HBO series raises new questions about murder suspect Robert Durst. He was found not guilty of one murder but remains on law enforcement's radar for others. The HBO series "The Jinx" is not helping his case. We speak with a New York Times reporter about the latest on evidence presented against Durst on the show.Also, there is a new push to replace Andrew Jackson with a woman on the face of the $20 bill. The executive director of "Women on 20s" joins us to discuss the process and some of the candidates to replace Jackson.And finally, this weekend President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Selma, AL to mark the 50th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday." We'll speak to a local professor who was there with her family.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a couple of weeks the nation will be transfixed by a competition in which basketball teams advance through a tournament laid out as a series of brackets.Can the same process get people more interested in literary fiction? For a decade, the Morning News has been testing that theory. They year we decided to attach ourselves, like remoras, to their enterprise. We asked three super-readers to blow through as many of thoe 16 novels as they could; and today, on a special edition of the Nose, they'll talk their way through the brackets. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's cold, snowy winters like this that make us question why we choose to live in a place where snow, sleet, and wind define one-third of the year.  It's a great excuse to complain, but does it also make us stronger and better people?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Wednesday we find out the finalists for Hartford's new minor league baseball team. Will it be the Hartford Blue Frogs? How about the Hartford Honey Badgers? Do you like the Hartford Yard Goats better? I got it! How about the Hartford Huckleberries! What do you mean it's not on the list? This hour, lots of people call and tweet with their favorites. Take a listen. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This hour, we sink our teeth into, well, teeth! We find out why oral hygiene is so important to our health, and why Americans are so obsessed with straight, white smiles.A little later, Canadian writer Michael Hingston tells us the fascinating history of the tooth fairy. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arthur Chu argues that Andrew Jackson is the worst president we've ever had, and his face should be removed from the $20 bill. For starters, Andrew Jackson removed about 46,000 Native Americans from their established homelands to make way for White settlement leaving a "Trail of Tears" of starvation, disease, and death. That's just the beginning of a long line of horrors: he annexed Florida, executed militia members after the War of 1812, and dismantled the central bank to push wildcat banks. Maybe America has never been a paragon of the ideals we hold dear, and maybe America would rather forget our past than deal with it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What did we talk about before there was the dress?  The dress was made for the Nose and vice versa. The Nose is our Friday session when we get smart, funny people together for a fast-moving conversation about culture. The dress -- an otherwise unremarkable striped number that popped up on the internet Thursday afternoon -- took over social media and people’s lives simply because people who were otherwise similarly rooted in reality could not agree on what color(s) it was.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.