The Colin McEnroe Show

Today on the Scramble, we get to spend some time with Frank Rich. Frank wears a lot of hats these days as both editor-at-large at New York Magazine and Executive Producer of VEEP on HBO. We're going to chat with him in both capacities and there is an interesting bridge between the two realms.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The original Carl Sagan "Cosmos" was at least  partly a response to the Cold War. Its message: "We're such little specks, can we embrace our common destiny and get along?"You could look at the movie "Noah" and the remake of "Cosmos" as two manifestations of an odd phenomenon. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scientists made an announcement on July 4, 2012 to little fanfare outside the world of scholarly physicists that ended a 50-year search to explain the existence of life as we know it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When I say "hip hop," do you think about an art form the exalts bling, consumption, excess, decadence, and vulgarity? What about all the other hip hop artists, exploring other kinds of truths?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'll be honest: I hate April Fools' Day, and I'm not a big fan of practical jokes. I hate it the way that some people hate Valentine's Day or New Year's Eve. I think merriment and foolishness should be spread across the year. That's why most of our shows, even pretty serious ones, start with a comedy sketch, because life is so much better when you think of it as a comedy.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Scramble, our Monday episode, is a wrap-up of the weekend's news, and a look at the week ahead. This hour, we have a conversation with Charla Nash, who is seeking the right to sue the state of Connecticut over the chimpanzee attack in 2009 that left her badly mutilated.We also feature our SuperGuest, Slate Political Gabfest panelist, David Plotz. He's been thinking a lot about the high-budget involved in anti-technology films like the upcoming movie, Noah, and whether or not Hillary Clinton is too old to run for president.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A hilariously fussy hotel manager with a taste for the high life is wrenched from his gay surroundings by the specter of war and a false murder charge. That doesn't sound terribly funny, but it's the premise for "The Grand Budapest Hotel," the latest Wes Anderson movie. Our Nose panelists all went to see it, and it will be one of our topics on this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'll tell you one of the big thrills of my writing career: I was a contributing editor to Mirabella Magazine in the 80's. I'd written an essay about getting bitten (sort of) by a dog in New Hampshire. The magazine had a huge art budget in those days, and I had already had one of my pieces illustrated by Ed Koren. But they told me this one was being illustrated by George Booth. George Booth! I worship George Booth! And so it came to pass that my article ran with a classing Booth dog cartoon.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

   I get way too much of my information from movies and  this year large container ships played a role in two major films.The first was Captain Phillips, an account of piracy in the Indian Ocean. The problem with that movie is that it didn't ask any fundamental questions about the method of moving stuff around.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Teresa of Avila very unambiguously reported hearing voices. She's a saint. John Forbes Nash heard voices. He won a Nobel prize. Robert Schumann heard voices that spurred him to write great music.Philip K. Dick was guided by one inner voice, specifically female, that he would hear for much of his life. He probably holds the record for most film adaptations for words written of any author ever.Mahatma Gandhi described a voice he could hear; not a metaphorical inner conversation, but a voice.I could go on. Hearing voices is not that unusual. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Scramble, we'll talk about a system run by the Navy that keeps track of, among other things, parking tickets and field information cards filled out by police, even when no crime has occurred - is this data collection crossing a line?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

here are the topics for the Nose today:Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once upon a time, comic books were a niche for kids and nerds. Now they are mainstream culture. "The Avengers" is the number three all-time worldwide grossing movie.I would like to pause, and say that I owned, as a kid, issue number one of The Avengers. I remember distinctly where I got it, and how I felt about it. I do not remember distinctly what happened to it.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The musician Christy Moore said Ireland could never have the equivalent of a folk revival because it never let its traditions lapse. And that's very true. The are probably other places in the world as deeply attached to their traditional music, but I don't know where they are. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Where is Wofford College? What is a shock of wheat, and what does it have to do with Wichita State's scary mascot? For that matter, what's a Chanticleer?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Oppenheimer writes about religion and a whole bunch of other things. Today, he'll be talking about the difficulty Orthodox Jewish women face in obtaining a certain form of cooperation from their husbands and how that difficulty spawned a black market in coercion and violence.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

President Obama has consistently refused to be a panelist on The Nose, but his appearance this week on "Between Two Ferns" with Zach Galifianakis has given us new hope!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the second season of the Netflix series, House of Cards, the protagonist Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, pulls out an old family typewriter, an Underwood of course, to write a pseudo-heartfelt letter to the President.Frank's father gave him the typewriter saying this Underwood built an empire. Now you go build another.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amanda Hess is one of our favorite social critics. She writes for Slate and lately, well always, she's thinking about the depiction of women in mass media, including a statistical disparity between the performances of men and women on Jeopardy. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can great television be as satisfying as great literature? On today's Nose, we'll apply that question to HBO's True Detective. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the space of a lifetime, the status of gay and lesbian people in the United States and Western Europe has been transformed. So to watch a play like "A Song at Twilight," written by Noel Coward in 1966, is to journey back in time and then wonder how far, really one has traveled.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Minimum wage in Connecticut is higher than the federal minimum, $8.70 an hour instead of $7.25. In fact, the federal minimum is so ridiculously low that not many people are earning it. Maybe as few as 1.5 million, according to one study. So, what happens if it goes up to $10.10 an hour here, or less likely, nationally. Some minimum wage workers will tell you that is still ridiculously low, $15 an hour is more like it. And, there are movements to help fast food workers bargain collectively for that kind of raise.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's National Grammar Day, a time to take stock of the current status of the English language, and possibly get into bitter fights.I'm old school. I'm the kind of person who will only use "not only" if I intend to follow it with "but also." That's probably a convention that died the quiet death of a feverish sloth many years ago. But I know what's right, and sometimes it feels like I'm helping to hold the language together even as it drifts into chaos.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Scramble, one of our favorite writers, A.J. Jacobs takes us deep inside the world of modern ancestry research where websites are all  too happy to tell you that you're distantly related to Gwynyth Paltrow, Michael Bloomberg, Quincy Jones, and King David.  Those are all actual examples of people A.J. was told are his relatives. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We have a question: Where does Adam Sandler watch the Oscars? Does he sit there with all the people who are actually up for awards, or is he home alone, with his baseball cap on backwards? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Remakes are easy. Money-makers are hard. We live in a sloshing sea of those movie remakes but it's rare for one of them to out gross the original. An exception, oddly enough, was the remake of "Clash of the Titans," which significantly outperformed its 80s predecessor. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Somehow, kale has become trendy in the last few years, although its moment in the sun seems to be almost over. How did a thing like that happen? Would it be possible to infuse an old standby like broccoli with a similar hip panache? Broccoli is the warmest vegetable, and the coolest.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Four women join us to talk about sports, mostly football. Two of them are sports journalists. A third is a journalist specializing in legal issues, and a fourth is a scientist and engineer.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's something exciting about a critic who challenges your perceptions in a compelling way. I love the movie American Hustle but when I read Willa Paskin's take-down of it in Slate, she really got me thinking. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last Sunday, we took a road trip into New York City, but before we left, I read Beth Boyle Machlan's New York Times essay about the joys she sometimes gets driving with her kids, and surrendering their collective eardrums to the serendipities of commercial radio. She learns some of their songs, they learn some of hers... Everybody gives up some of the fierce control we all maintain these days over what we call our "playlists."Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The debate over animal rights is as old as Voltaire, as old as Aristotle. But as you'll hear today, it turned some kind of modern corner in 1975 with the publication of "Animal Liberation: Towards an End to Man's Inhumanity to Animals" by the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here's a little bit of Civil War history that seems to have started here in Connecticut. It was in this month of February in 1860 that Cassius Clay, a Kentucky planter turned anti-slavery crusader spoke in Hartford not far from where we're doing this show today. He was accompanied by a torch-bearing honor guard in capes and caps. The Hartford Courant called these young men "wide-awakes." Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're starting out today with a segment about "Generation-Like," the media term media theorist Douglas Rushkoff uses for the generation of Millennials  who live huge chunks of their lives on social media where they subsist on a form of metered approval.  Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I was still digesting some of the lessons of the play "Freud's Last Session" -- a 90 minute conversation between Freud and C.S. Lewis -- when I stumbled upon Adam Gopnik's New Yorker essay about rise of polemical atheism -- that is atheism that takes an openly contemptuous tone toward faith. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's hard to improve on the poet, Rilke, who wrote, "Love consists of this, that two solitudes meet, protect, and greet each other." But did Rilke have to deal with Angry Birds and Snap Chat? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The actresses Teri Garr and Annette Funicello, the television hosts Montel Williams and Neil Cavuto, the writer Joan Didion, Ann Romney, the wife of the presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the comedian Richard Pryor. These are some of the people that you quote-unquote know that have, or in Pryor's case had, Multiple Sclerosis.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2030 B.C., somebody brought cucumbers from India to the Tigris Valley, and they said, "We can pickle that!" And so it began, from the first stirrings of civilization, to modern-day Brooklyn artisan pickles: we've found ourselves up to our eyes in brine, looking for the next object we can pickle.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While visitors watching the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, enjoy spectacular feats of athletic ability from the world's most accomplished athletes, those in Russia's LGBT community anticipate laws that punish Russians for even suggesting that it's okay to be gay, let alone live openly as a gay adult.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While tying together all the stories for today's session of the Nose, I keep hearing (in my mind) Charlie Seen say, "Winning!" We have a lot of stories about how people who try to win, often by following the logic of a game out to its extremes.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The first secret society, according to Theodore Ziolkowski, a Princeton-based scholar on the literature of cults and conspiracies, "consisted of Eve and the serpent and then it just kept going," Ziokowski writes.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In February of 1964, the Beatles appeared not once, but on three consecutive Sunday nights on "The Ed Sullivan Show," attracting what was the the largest audience in television history, and still might be the largest percentage of all possible viewers. To some of us, the whole thing is still kind of exciting 50 years later. But why?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last fall, the New York City Opera -- what Mayor LaGuardia called "the People's Opera" -- declared bankruptcy. This is/was the opera that introduced Americans to Placido Domingo and Beverly Sills.  Make what you will of the fact that the bankruptcy announcement coincided with the presentation of a new opera about Anna Nicole Smith.This is either a problem very specific to the New York Opera, or part of a virus that has been taking down opera companies all over the U.S. and maybe all over the world. In Italy, where opera receives much more public and government support, one fourth of all major opera companies were in a version of bankruptcy as of 2008.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Sunday, two people named Dylan made news. So much so that you had to be careful on Twitter. If you tweeted "Dylan sold out" about Bob Dylan's Super Bowl commercials, you might offend people who thought you meant Dylan Farrow who broke 20 years of silence to talk about her memory of childhood molestation by Woody Allen. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on the Nose, we'll discuss one of those eruptions that happen in the digital world -- a frenzy of discussion and expressions of outrage over an essay on the site xojane, by a writer who tried to describe her reactions, as a skinny white woman, to the way she thought a heavyset back woman was reacting to her in yoga class.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Imagine a day without adjunct faculty. Many colleges and universities would effectively shut down.  Somewhere between 70-75% of the academic workforce in higher education is not tenured or on track for tenure. Most of those people fall into the category of adjunct. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot of interconnected things were happening in the 1990s, an oncologist and hematologist  named Mitchell Gaynor discovered trough a Tibetan monk, the so-called singing bowls and began incorporating them into the guided meditation and breathing work he did with his patients. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Led by Harry Potter, the last 20 years have unleashed a new wave of enthusiasm for the fantasy side  of magic. But, we've also seen an undeniable re-engagement with stage magic. In 2006 alone, there were two movies about magicians, "The  Prestige" and "The Illusionist." Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's Monday. That means our show is The Scramble, where we make a lot of decisions on a last minute basis. We asked our super guest, Marc Tracy of The New Republic, to pick three topics about which Colin would quickly get up to speed. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was a fertile week for topics, but here at The Nose, we've boiled them down to four.First, the decision by NBC to capitalize on its live Sound of Music ratings hit with a revival of the live TV Peter Pan. No cast has been announced yet, so that allows us to do some "dreamcasting. "Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Dallas Buyer's Club" covers a lot of the same ground as an Oscar-nominated documentary about AIDS from last year, "How To Survive A Plague." Each film covers the time from mid-to-late 1980s when the disease struck, when there was no accepted or effective medical treatment, when the patients themselves had to push for better research and faster tracks to bring drugs to market. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.