The Colin McEnroe Show

In case you haven't heard, our planet is as flat as a pancake. Sound crazy? Perhaps. But around the globe (disc?) a flat Earth movement is steadily on the rise. More and more people, educated and not, from all walks of life, are posting videos, attending conferences, and publishing books embracing this seemingly radical notion. NBA all-stars like Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O'Neal have publicly supported the idea. Rapper B.o.B is funding a satellite launch to prove it. And if that's not enough to convince you, know that social media and television star Tia Tequila is also a believer! Is this just some strange new celebrity fad like Scientology, or is it a larger symptom of the post-truth, alternative facts era we're living in? This hour we look inside the flat Earth movement with believers and non-believers alike to find out.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Colin was diagnosed with melanoma last year. He had a few scary weeks between diagnosis and removal of the cancer. He's told he's clean but, what happens next?  Fewer Americans diagnosed with cancer this year will die from their disease than at any other time in the last two decades. Medical advances in detection and treatment and a population more aware of the habits that can lead to cancer are helping more people live with cancer. The good news is that more people survive a diagnosis of cancer. The bad news is that regardless of the medical advances, the word "cancer" can still trigger mental images that terrify us and the medical treatment can leave us ill-prepared to live with  the fear and emotional upheaval that take center stage after the cancer is treated.  Today, Colin talks with friends who have been living with cancer for a very long time.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're outraged that wealthy parents illegally paid to get their kids into elite colleges they would otherwise not qualify to enter. Despite evidence to the contrary, we still want to believe that America is a meritocracy. It's not. And believing that it is might be bad for you. The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined as a satirical slur by Michael Young, a British sociologist and politician, in his 1958 dystopic novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033. The idea that luck, socioeconomic status, and environment were neutralized by grit and hard work made it easy to absolve ourselves of discriminatory policy and rising inequality -- until now.   Also this hour: the global threat of white nationalism and the NCAA brackets. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp suffered major worldwide outages, and Twitter previewed some possible new changes. And people took to (what else?) social media to (what else?) complain. And: The Ringer asks the age-old question, if a TV show falls in the woods, and no one talks about it, can it be certified fresh? Or something like that. And finally: Captain Marvel is the 21st feature film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is the ninth movie in the MCU's Phase Three. It is, chronologically, a sequel to 2011's Captain America: The First Avenger and a prequel to 2008's Iron Man. I didn't follow much of that, but I get this part: After 11 years and all those previous movies, it's the first one with a female lead.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jessica Harper has starred in movies like Suspiria, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. And now she's publishing a memoir as a podcast. Winnetka tells the story of growing up in a big family -- six kids, including two sets of twins -- in the 1950s and '60s in the midwest -- in Winnetka, Ill., you see -- and later in Connecticut. Plus: An update on the podcast industry more generally. The "Netflix of podcasts" is here. A big new study on podcasting has just come out. And... is "podcaster burnout" becoming a thing?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are you one of the millions inspired by Marie Kondo and her KonMari Method to get rid of your clutter? Kondo's books, such as The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, have sparked an intense and prolonged fervor where other self-help gurus have failed.  What is it about this phenom who advocates tidying as the path to the self-actualization? Is it her respect for our stuff as animated and alive? Is it because she doesn't shame us for our consumption, even as she encourages us to consider why we consume? Do our things 'spark joy' or hold us back? Yet, she's not without her critics. The backlash has been fierce, and occasionally misconstrued  Kondo's words. What's so threatening about questioning what we value? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sunday morning news shows were abuzz about the Democratic National Committee's decision to deselect Fox News as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates. But you may have missed it if you didn't reset your clocks to Daylight Savings Time, or like a lot of us, spent your weekend fixated on that hour of lost sleep. On this week's Scramble, we take on the weary rants over both topics. Is the DNC wasting an opportunity to pull in Republicans or independents dissatisfied with President Donald Trump by ruling out Fox News as a debate host? Or is it a justified response to the cable network's uncomfortably close ties to the occupant in the White House, as meticulously detailed in a recent examination in The New Yorker? As for that lost hour of sleep, should we readjust our clocks permanently ahead one hour so we capture that extra sunlight when we get out of work? Many say yes. But what about those children waiting for the morning school bus when it's still dark outside?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's been rough going here for the famous for a little while. This week, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek announced his stage four cancer diagnosis. Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver retired from public life because of his dementia diagnosis. And then there are the deaths: Actor Luke Perry at 52. The Prodigy frontman Keith Flint at 49. Actress Katherine Helmond at 89. Also this hour: a look at Netflix's new not-exactly-the-X-Men, but-still-adapted-from-a-comic-book series, The Umbrella Academy.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know all the reasons Trump won, right? Economic anxiety. Racial anxiety. The forgotten working class. The forgotten rustbelt... But what if the real cause were something much simpler and much more pervasive: our popular culture. This hour, a conversation with Peter Biskind, the author of The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Laszlo Ratesic is a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. He lives in the Golden State, the only place left in what was once America. Laszlo's job is to bring the worst criminals to justice, those who tell lies. In his new novel, Ben Winters creates a world which might sound Eden-esque in our era of misinformation. It's getting more difficult to distinguish real from fake news, AI-assisted technology allows a bad actor to splice celebrity heads onto the faces of actors in a pornographic video, and major news organizations need to keep track of how often America's president lies.  Yet, we should be careful what we wish for. Philosophers like Derrida have long questioned the nature of truth; can there be one truth? If so, whose truth is it? While few of us want to return to the pre-internet days when everyone got their news from Walter Cronkite, we need to understand how to recognize when information is false and how it is spread. It's too easy to blame ignorance or a willful repudiation of the truth for the spread of misinformation. It's a lot more about who we trust.  For those who fear a Golden State could be our future, there's hope on the horizon if we're willing to pay attention.  GUESTS: Ben Winters - Author of ten novels including Underground Airlines, the award-winning Last Policeman trilogy, and most recently Golden State: A Novel James Owen Weatherall  - Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine and the author of three books. His most recent is The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, co-authored with Cailin O’Connor  Aviv Ovadya - Founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project, set to launch soon, and a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democrac (@metaviv) Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter Colin McEnroe and Jonathan McNicol contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.