The Colin McEnroe Show

When I hear the word "diorama," the first thing I think of is Mr. Mack’s fifth grade class and painting hills and grass and clouds and a fence into a shoebox and making little cardboard cut outs of Lassie and the boy she loved. God, I hated that stuff.The second thing I think of is a place like the Peabody Museum in New Haven and their incredibly, obsessively, over-the-toply detailed dioramas of the plant and wildlife of Connecticut.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flags have been in the news a lot lately. South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its Statehouse and one Missouri county threatened to lower the flags at their courthouse for one full year to mourn the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. I'm in awe of the emotions a simple flag can evoke. On the surface, it's a piece of cloth with pretty colors and designs. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's just a dance, right?Actually, maybe that's the last thing the prom is. Maybe the photo is even more important, because it freezes you. It's your chance, as high school trickles away, to say "This is who I am. This will be who I was."We've been looking at prom photos by Mary Ellen Mark, who will be on our show today, and they're striking in the range of emotional states they convey. We see joy, hesitation, confidence, detachment and some flat-out haunted looks.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You remember the dress, right? In case you don't: Three years ago, a poorly-lit photograph of a dress pretty much tore the internet to pieces. Some people saw a black-and-blue dress; some people saw a white-and-gold dress. The black-and-blue-dress people couldn't understand how the white-and-gold-dress people were living their lives; the white-and-gold-dress people called the black-and-blue-dress people "fake news" (no they didn't).Well, this week there's a new the dress. Except it's a the dress for your ears, not your eyes. It's an audio file. Some people hear the word "laurel." Some people hear the non-word "yanny." And the dispute over which word is right and which word is wrong is very important (no it isn't).Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sarah Kendzior predicted that the conditions she witnessed in 2013 from her home in America's overlooked heartland would lead to the rise of a candidate like Donald Trump. She was one of the few that saw it coming.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Singer/songwriter Jill Sobule is back in our Hartford studios to sing and play and talk and who knows what else!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If there's one thing that unites us all (literally, ALL of us) it's gravity. Gravity attracts every bit of matter in the universe to every other bit of matter in the universe, no exceptions! But for something (a warping of space-time, to be precise) so universally present, it remains one of the least understood forces in physics.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Connecticut's political parties are in the midst of choosing who they will endorse in this November's elections. How much do you trust that they've endorsed the candidate most likely to represent your interests? On the other hand, how much do you want or need to know to cast your vote? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Donald Glover can do anything. He's an actor and a comedian, he's a singer and a songwriter, he's a rapper and a DJ. Mainstream audiences know him from Community and maybe the FX series he created, Atlanta. Nerdy audiences know him as the voice of Spider-Man, and they're about to know him as a young Lando Calrissian.But Glover's music -- he sings and raps as Childish Gambino and DJs as mcDJ -- has never quite punched through into the wider popular consciousness, despite some chart success. Until this week, maybe. The new Childish Gambino video, "This Is America," which dropped last Saturday in concert with Glover's hosting Saturday Night Live, has just about 75 million views on YouTube. It is "a milestone" and "a media phenomenon," and it has finally made Glover "a superstar."Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lauren Bacall probably does have the most famous line about smoking in all of cinema. But there are other good ones too. "What are you gonna do? Charge me with smoking?" "Smoke if ya got 'em." And many more.Cigarettes have been such an integral part of movies for so long that one big concern in the lead up to Disney and Fox's planned merger is -- seriously -- all the smoking in Fox movies.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.