The Colin McEnroe Show

Scientists say that the asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia this past February was a rare event, unlikely to happen more than every 100 -200 years. But a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature said the earth should expect and plan to get hit by Chelyabinsk-sized asteroids more often-- maybe every decade or two.This news sparked a flurry of talk about what that means for us on earth. How vulnerable are we and are we doing enough to detect and deflect asteroids?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Through no act of overarching planning, all three of our segments today will deal directly, or otherwise, with sports.In our first segment, we talk with Linda Holmes from the NPR culture blog, Monkey See. We also delve into the controversy over a recent New York Times column by former executive editor, Bill Keller. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I spent one night in the company of James Carville and Mary Matalin, in the course of being their onstage moderator at the Bushnell. My lasting impression was that these were two people whose primary loyalty was to each other. To an unusual degree, when there was down time, they wanted to be alone, together, door closed. I don't know how they sort out their extreme political differences, but I think the answer lies somewhere in what I just said.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Nose panel went to the movies this week to see the critically-acclaimed Spike Jonze film, "Her," about a future world in which it's not unusual for a man to fall in love with his artificially-intelligent operating system. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. But, why is comedy so hard, especially on the stage, and what makes something funny?The premise for a famously funny plot could easily sound like a tragedy.  An out of work actor is so desperate for employment that he dresses up like a woman and then falls in love with a beautiful co-star whom he deceives and betrays on several levels. That doesn't sound that hilarious. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You may think that composting all your kitchen waste sounds like a good idea, but you probably don't realize how many things really can be composted, what services are available if you can't get yourself organized to do it, and if you do have a compost pile, which animals visit it at night, and for what purpose?This hour, a heap of information about compost!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When I first started writing about politics in Connecticut, I can honestly say that there were many more Republicans who excited my admiration than there were Democrats. It was 1979, the wave of interesting new progressive Democrats was coming, including that Bill Curry guy you hear so much about, but the entrenched Democratic leadership was anything but progressive. It was calcified, blinkered, and in too many cases, dirty. They'd had too much power for too long. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today is Monday. That's when we do the show on the fly. We call it The Scramble and one of the twists we're trying is the reverse of ordinary public radio guest booking. Usually, we start with a topic and try to find the best possible guests. But, for one segment of The Scramble each week, we pick a guest we want to talk to and then ask him or her what the topic should be. The idea is to pick an interesting person and then find out what's on that person's mind right now. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Governor Chris Christie's administration is under fire for ordering  lane closures  that blocked access to the George Washington Bridge for four days last September, indulging in an egomaniacal fantasy of vengeance against a political foe who refused to recognize the Christie administration's self-professed superiority.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My two favorite film critics, A.O. Scott and David Edelstein, appear on the show today, and we've got a longer list of topics than we can possibly get to. I'm interested in the way a lot of the recent hit movies take little bites of our recent past: "Inside Llewyn Davis" tackles 1961. "American Hustle" bestrides the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. "The Wolf of Wall Street" started with the Crash of '87 and pans forward into the 1990s. Suddenly, for Baby Boomers, the stretch of our living memory is a series of period pieces and costume dramas.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Identical twins are just like us - and then they're not! From Ann Landers and Dear Abbey, from the Castro brothers, one of whom might be our first identical twin president one day, carbon-copy twins live lives that the rest of us cannot fathom.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For many years, Ralph Nader has pushed the idea of an American Museum of Tort History which would be located somewhere in Connecticut, probably Winsted. The exhibits would concern tort cases from all over the U.S. but you have to think the Hartford Civic Center roof collapse would merit a special diorama.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Scramble we lead off with some reporting that will be featured this week on a PBS' "Frontline" story, To Catch a Trader. It's the story of a federal probe into insider trading and the specific role of Connecticut's Steve Cohen, and his SAC hedge fund. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Nose, we'll talk about this relatively insignificant bit of Rush Limbaugh peevishness, and the degree to which each of us thinks he or she has (informally speaking) patented something: a word, a phrase, a style we've made our own.Also, Adam Platt's decision to dispense with the fiction that he, as a restaurant critic, is anonymous. It's not exactly the same as claiming to create, but Platt is talking about the anxiety of influence in a different way. How can one do "pure" work? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Wandering the vast labyrinth of useless information, you might encounter some people having a debate about the last person who knew everything. This is a great, and also pretty hopeless debate, because it requires a judgment about what all the useful information in the world might have been and who was capable of knowing it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are a lot of people who, for understandable reasons, would like the story of the Sandy Hook shootings to fade away. But, of course it never will. It's part of our molecular structure, especially here in Connecticut. This hour, we touch on some of the questions answered  by the release of the state's so called final report on the murders. We also talk about some of the questions that haven't been answered and the peculiar, to some of us, reluctance by the state to release this report. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Nose panelists explore the hidden mysteries of the Coen Brothers' new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, based  on the early folk movement of 1960's Greenwich Village and one of its early pioneers, Dave Van Ronk. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You loved jazz in college, but these days, do you really have time to follow it? Maybe I'm only talking about myself. The jazz scene I loved so much in my early twenties begins to recede unless I make an affirmative effort to go charging toward it. So at this time of year, every year, we consult with jazz savants and musicians and ask them about the best music they heard all year.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are some holiday songs that should banned. I'm sorry, Burl Ives, but there's really no reason for anybody to have to hear "Holly Jolly Christmas" ever again.And Little Drummer Boy? There's almost no way to describe the sinking feeling that tune gives me. Except, well, to call it a sinking feeling. On the other hand, I don't mind Mariah Carey singing "All I Want for Christmas Is You," but my producers are pretty much coming though the glass of the control booth at me for saying that.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A couple of weeks ago, we did a whole show about blood pressure only to have an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association blow a lot of the current thinking about blood pressure right out of the water. We talk to UConn's hypertension expert, Dr. Billy White, about new guidelines saying people over 60 may not need to keep their blood pressure as low as previously thought. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here are the topics for The Nose today -- and this week we had to throw out a lot of perfectly good ones because there were so many:We pretty much have to tackle the controversy around Duck Dynasty. One of the real life characters in the reality TV show gave an interview in which he aired his strong religious views, which included multiple denunciations of homosexuality as a sin.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Behold! The unique dilemma of the pig: There is nothing that smart that tastes that good. Is it true they're as smart as dogs? Why do some religions require people abstain from eating pork? What's it like raising pigs, and what parts of the pig are overlooked when it comes to eating them?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you read magazines and live on the North half of the East Coast there is a good chance that you believe that The New Yorker is the ne plus ultra of magazine writing and if you believe that there's a good chance you run around using phrases like ne plus ultra.With The New Yorker's Olympian status goes a certain preciousness One of the reasons there's nothing else quite like The New Yorker is The New Yorker deeply believes that to be true and communicates it to us in subtle ways. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Francis Bacon triptych, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" sells for $142.4 million.Jeff Koons work sells for $58.4 million, making it the most expensive art by a living artist to sell at auction.Is any art really worth this much or do a few wealthy investors artificially drive up the market to divert the rest of us from the reality of overall declining sales. If art is not worth as much as certain vested interests want us to believe, how do we determine the real worth of art?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the Monday Scramble, the show we assemble on very short notice to challenge ourselves and keep things fresh.Two film icons died over the weekend, Peter O'Toole and Joan Fontaine. Attention gravitated to O'Toole because of his larger than life roles and his larger than life off-screen behavior. We'll be talking about O'Toole with one of his co-stars and with a director but we didn't want to ignore Fontaine, famous for her Oscar-winning role and for her decades-long feud with her sister, Olivia DeHaviland. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After a two-week hiatus, The Nose, our weekly cultural panel, is back on with discussions of a controversial New York Times essay about who does housework, a contemplation of smarm versus snark, a nod to all the messiness around Nelson Mandela's funeral, and some second-guessing of Time's Person of the Year, Pope Francis or Ed Snowden.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we're talking about the afterlife of characters from classic Christmas stories. What happened, in later years, to Ralphie from "A Christmas Story" or Susan Walker from "Miracle of 34th Street" or Charlie Brown or Clara from "The Nutcracker?"Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I suppose you could say that today's show is about a fairly obvious truth--singing with other people feels good. But, it's a little bit more complicated than that. When you go to a church and pick up a hymnal and sing what everybody else sings, it feels okay. And, a fairly complex set of activities takes place in your brain, and that's nice, but it pales in comparison to really singing with others. That is, getting together with other people and rehearsing and working toward a truly successful blend of voices.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Connecticut town of Trumbull, and especially its thespian society, has become a familiar name in the theater world, but maybe for the wrong reasons. When the high school principal decided to cancel the thespian society's production of "Rent," the story went national. It has bubbled along for weeks and as of today, we may have news about a compromise that would allow it to be staged.Meanwhile, former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez has been awarded not one, but two new trials. We'll have an expert here to explain how that's likely to play out. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"Reality TV" is perhaps the biggest misnomer in the entertainment industry today. A better name would probably be "scripted unscripted television." It's not catchy, but at least it's accurate.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Monkees were the first group to exhibit all or most of the qualities we now associate with the term "boy band." They were assembled through auditions. They had a set of visual styles imposed on them. They were incredibly popular with tween-aged girls. They were plagued by the accusation that there was less to them than meets the eye. That last accusation was false, by the way.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon, but the first man to urinate there was Buzz Aldrin, just a little ahead of Neil. The two astronauts relieved themselves into bags within their suits, then removed those bags and left them on the lunar surface. When you gotta go, you gotta go. It was time to go. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Long before we knew how the cardiovascular worked, ancient doctors may have recognized what we call hypertension. It seemed like maybe there was too much blood, so they treated it with leeches. Even today, high blood pressure is a little bit mysterious. The way it's typically measured may be the wrong way. And, it's not caused by one single factor so no single drug treats all the things that cause high blood pressure. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Metro-North has had a tough year. Yesterday's derailment in the Bronx follows the May derailment in Bridgeport that injured more than 70 people, the death of a rail worker repairing tracks in West Haven one week later, the July derailment of a freight train that occurred about 1,700 feet from Sunday's derailment, and a nearly two-week power outage in September that severely disrupted rail traffic.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There aren't that many jokes in the US Constitution. Either that, or there are too many, and they're all on us. Comedian Colin Quinn says most of you have never even read it. Who's gonna read something four pages long in this day and age?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Norman Rockwell. It's the day before Thanksgiving. Who else are we gonna talk about? Deborah Solomon (the same one who invented the "Questions for" format in the New York Times magazine) will spend the whole show talking about her new comprehensive biography of Rockwell.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here in the West, Zen Buddhism is often where you go when you've concluded the religion you grew up with is marred by venality, hypocrisy, misogyny, patriarchal structure, and an insufficient commitment to peace and love. Buddhism seems to have less hierarchy and more commitment to pure enlightenment and oneness. So, what do Buddhists do when Buddhism falls down on the job?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why should sex feel bad? It shouldn't, and Bill Gates is offering $100,000 to the inventor of a condom that puts the pleasure back in sex. And, it isn't just about pleasure. Scientists at the University of Manchester's National Graphene Institute say a "redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling, or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty."Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, on The Nose, well we can't entirely ignore the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, but the subject is so vast we can only break off one little part. We're going to focus on an essay by Adam Gopnik and published in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. Gopnik probes the question of exactly what changed as a result of the crime and its murky aftermath. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are there countries where harmonica players are BIG stars? Why don't more women play it? How many different musical styles can you squeeze out of one of these things? Guests include a lot of the pros: Howard Levy, Don DeStefano and Chris DePino whose odd career arc has taken him from railroad conductor to chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party to professional harmonica player. Also, Wolfie gets an on-air harmonica lesson from these gods of the harp.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why do we visit historical sites? Commentator Mike Pesca wants to talk  about the value of seeing a place, especially one like Dallas' Dealey Plaza about which arguments have raged for decades. Mike says there's a difference between watching a NOVA special and walking through the place with your own eyes open.Paul Bass, from the New Haven Independent, will bring us up to speed on three stories, including one from the weekend about a stretch limo that transported women to and from a drug and alcohol treatment center so they could vote on Election Day.  You can link to it here.And, we'll connect with Susan Polgar, the chess Grandmaster who broke the game's gender barrier. She's in Chennai, India, covering the match between Carlsen and Anand, the first chess championship in decades to cross-over and ignite the players. You can leave your comments below, email us at [email protected], or tweet us @wnprcolin.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here's the plan for The Nose today. We'll begin with a widely discussed column by Richard Cohen of The Washington Post who took an odd detour from a discussion of Chris Christie's national electoral profile and suggested that conventionally-minded people have to repress a gag reflex when confronted with the sight of an inter-racial couple, specifically the new first family of New York City. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1965, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, spread stamped and addressed but un-mailed letters around public locations in New Haven. Most of the letters were picked up and mailed by strangers who could not possibly derive any material reward for doing the right thing. The strangers also lived out their values based on the address.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

B.F. Skinner thought pigeons were so smart they could be used to guide missiles during WWII. He proposed a system in which pigeons would essentially pilot the missile. Skinner said pigeons could be trained to peck at a screen to adjust the trajectory of a missile toward its target. Project pigeon was funded but never used. It's one of the many reasons I could talk about pigeons all day. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Once again we start the week with a show that we planned on the fly based on stories that grabbed us over the weekend. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As my friend Alex Beam said today, 12 Years a Slave has a way of taking things that were abstractions and making them real. It's one thing to talk about abolition, another to see the essential need for it. Even a figure like John Brown, says Alex, looks different when you see the true carnage of slavery. We're talking about this astonishing new Steve McQueen movie today on The Nose and we'll find it pretty easy I predict. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This show originally aired on July 2nd, 2013. When considering what show we wanted to re-run, we found this recent article from the New York Times, As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry. The debate is still being discussed and on this show, it gets heated!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Okay, this is sad. Like a lot of people, I have trouble achieving the deep focus needed to enjoy long fiction. And, like a lot of people, I have trouble finding time to read novels.Recently, I came up with a solution. I go to the gym, get on a recumbent bike, and I read while I pedal for an hour, so yes,  I kill two birds with one Robert Stone. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is one of our new Monday shows where right up to show time, I'm not 100% sure what we're talking about. I know for sure we'll discuss the time change you experienced over the weekend and the ever-swelling choir of voices suggesting that its harms outweigh its advantages, assuming there are any real advantages.I'm also dying to discuss the attempt by Saturday Night Live to address on this weekend's episode another ever-swelling choir, the voices of people who say the show is not diverse enough. It's not, and the show pretty successfully made a joke out of that this weekend without really committing to doing anything about it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.