The Colin McEnroe Show

This week’s Nose traded one fatted goose for ten radishes. The Diplomat is an eight-episode political thriller romantic-comedy (sort of?) Netflix limited series created by Debora Cahn. It stars Keri Russell as the title character and Rufus Sewell as her husband, who is also a diplomat, though a somewhat less diplomatic diplomat. Here’s Netflix’s logline: “In the midst of an international crisis, a career diplomat lands in a high-profile job she’s unsuited for, with tectonic implications for her marriage and her political future.” The Diplomat is currently No. 2 in TV Shows Today on Netflix. And: Baby J is John Mulaney’s fifth comedy special, his fourth for Netflix, and his fourth standup special. It’s also his first special since his divorce, his time in rehab, and the birth of his son. As Mulaney says early on in Baby J, he has “kind of a different vibe now.” Baby J is currently No. 10 in TV Shows Today on Netflix. Sam Hadelman’s endorsement: Hung Up by Hunter Harris Shawn Murray’s endorsements: John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch on Netflix Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks Carolyn Paine’s endorsements: Celeste Barber: Fine, Thanks on Netflix Wellmania on Netflix Colin’s endorsement: financial literacy Scott Galloway’s podcasts The Pivot and The Prof G Pod Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist In the 1950s, when segregation was still widespread, his ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. But his primary focus was civil rights. Jerry Springer, Host of a Raucous TV Talk Show, Is Dead at 79 The confrontational “Jerry Springer Show” ran for nearly three decades and became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Springer also had a career in politics. The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social Facebook, TikTok and Twitter seem to be increasingly connecting users with brands and influencers. To restore a sense of community, some users are trying smaller social networks. It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People Art transcends the artist. The best television of 2023 so far ‘Mrs. Davis,’ ‘Barry,’ ‘Yellowjackets,’ ‘Succession,’ ‘The Mandalorian’ and ‘Poker Face’ all make our evolving critics’ list of 2023’s best TV shows This Babysitter Sparked A Huge Debate After Asking Parents To Pay Half Of Their $840 Bill After They Canceled Last Minute “When I told Claudia, she definitely had sticker shock. But when I broke down the price and she shopped around, she realized I was the cheaper option.” Sylvester Stallone’s Best Sci-Fi Movie Is Smart Enough to Know Just How Stupid It Is Grab some Taco Bell and settle in. The Succession Timeline Kind of Makes Sense Now Where to rent DVDs and Blu-rays as Netflix ends disc rentals ‘Convicting A Murderer’ Series Acquired By DailyWire+ With Candace Owens Set To Front Response To Netflix True-Crime Hit 19 Movie Moments From The ’90s That Aged Like Cow’s Milk Why was every ’90s movie transphobic as heck? In Praise of the Long Movie In the right hands, a three-hour-plus film expands the boundaries of cinematic possibilities. GUESTS: Sam Hadelman: Works in music public relations and hosts The Sam Hadelman Show at Radio Free Brooklyn Shawn Murray: A stand-up comedian, writer, and the host of the Nobody Asked Shawn podcast Carolyn Paine: An actress, comedian, and dancer; she is founder, director, and choreographer of CONNetic Dance The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What else besides an egg can give us human life, culinary delight, life-saving vaccines, jarping, the Clowns International Egg Registry, and a satisfying bit of schadenfreude, all wrapped in one small package? Making a great omelet is the tip of the eggshell for the versatility of the egg. This hour, a hard-boiled look at the ubiquitous, yet overlooked egg. GUESTS: John Portmann: Taught moral philosophy and ethics at the University of Virginia for several decades; he’s the author of When Bad Things Happen To Other People Chris Prosperi: Chef and co-owner of Metro Bis in Simsbury, Connecticut, and a former recipe columnist for the Hartford Courant Lizzie Stark: The author of Egg: A Dozen Ovatures The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, Cat Pastor, Dylan Reyes, and Lily Tyson contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all do some bad thinking sometimes, whether in relatively minor ways or relatively major ones. This hour, we look at why bad thinking happens, how reasoning errors are embedded in the way we think, and how we can all learn how to think better, through lessons from philosophy and psychology. GUESTS: Woo-kyoung Ahn: Director of The Thinking Lab at Yale University and the author of Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better Steven Nadler: Co-author of When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves and a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Larry Shapiro: Co-author of When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves and a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired September 21, 2022.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most of us have books that we just can’t finish, no matter how many times we try. This hour, a look at those books that we find unreadable, whether they’re too long, too difficult, too confusing, or too dated. What makes a book unreadable? Plus: The Voynich Manuscript, an unreadable and undeciphered book housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. We asked our listeners for their list of unreadable books. Here are those responses: The Bible Mansfield Park by Jane Austen Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt Rim by Alexander Besher The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins Collapse by Jared Diamond Great Expectations by Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald anything by William Faulkner Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter Les Misérables by Victor Hugo A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James The Dubliners by James Joyce Ulysses by James Joyce Wicked by Gregory Maguire One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Moby Dick by Herman Melville Faithful by Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon How to Write by Gertrude Stein Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace GUESTS: Ray Clemens: Curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Rand Richards Cooper: Fiction writer, contributing editor at Commonweal, and restaurant critic for The Hartford Courant Dennis Duncan: Lecturer in English at University College London and the author of Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age Juliet Lapidos: Ideas editor for The Atlantic and the author of Talent The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired September 14, 2022.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ve been doing these shows a couple times a month where we don’t book any guests, where we fill the hour with your calls. And your calls have been interesting and surprising and amusing. This hour, the conversation winds around to the inflation in our language, the Mario Pavone track “Colin Mac,” Tucker Carlson … Anything. (Seemingly) everything. These shows are fun for us, and they seem to be fun for you, too. So we did another one. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week’s Nose is gonna make three 10X trades: 1K to 10K, 10K to a hundred, hundred to a million. Boom. On April 20, Twitter stripped its blue check marks from the accounts of public figures and others who weren’t paying for them. Including many celebrities, who then went on to drag Twitter about how much they don’t care. At the same time, there seems to be a growing feeling (again) that Twitter might be dying. And: Beef is a Netflix comedy-drama limited series created by Lee Sung Jin and starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong. It “follows the aftermath of a road rage incident between two strangers.” Beef is currently the most popular TV series on Rotten Tomatoes and #2 in TV Shows Today on Netflix. Jacques Lamarre’s endorsement: Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers by Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green Tracy Wu Fastenberg’s endorsements: The Charles in Wethersfield, Connecticut Comstock, Ferre & Co. in Wethersfield, Connecticut Bill Yousman’s endorsements Parks, Recreation, and Leisure Services in Bloomfield, Connecticut Keep Your Courage by Natalie Merchant the music of Prince Colin’s endorsements: apple blossoms poetry sleep Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: Ahmad Jamal, Whose Spare Style Redefined Jazz Piano, Dies at 92 He was known for his laid-back style and for his influence on, among others, Miles Davis, who once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal.” Netflix Will End Its DVD Service, 5.2 Billion Discs Later Sending movies through the mail, in recognizable red-and-white envelopes, helped the company become a behemoth in Hollywood. Yes, People Will Pay $27,500 for an Old ‘Rocky’ Tape. Here’s Why. Collectors are finding that their childhood has a price — and it’s going up. When the future is frightening, it’s boom times at the nostalgia factory. Netflix’s Love Is Blind Live Failure Had Big ‘Game Servers Are Down’ Energy The streaming service tried its second-ever live broadcast for the highly anticipated Love Is Blind reunion Hollywood Writers Approve of Strike as Shutdown Looms The writers have not gone on strike in 15 years, and the vote gives their unions the right to call for a walkout when their contract expires on May 1. What the death of a literary magazine says about our cultural decay BuzzFeed Shuts Down Its News Division BuzzFeed News, which won a Pulitzer Prize but never made money, is “beginning the process of closing,” the company’s founder, Jonah Peretti, said in a memo to employees. ‘Air’ and the Argument for Letting the Talent Share in the Profits The movie’s focus (how Michael Jordan got a cut from Nike) reflects what its filmmakers, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, are trying to do in their new venture. Fringe’s Finest Hour Is Sci-Fi’s Most Profound Exploration of Faith and Science “I’ve asked God for a sign of forgiveness. A specific one, a white tulip.” Scientists discovered a new ‘quasi-moon’ orbiting Earth McDonald’s is upgrading its burgers The Myth of the Broke Millennial After a rough start, the generation is thriving. Why doesn’t it feel that way? After he sold his company for over $1 billion, Ryan Reynolds’ investing spree continues with a fintech company that has ties to Binance and DraftKings Hot 100 First-Timers: Jack Black Scores First Solo Hit With ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Ballad ‘Peaches’ The song debuts at No. 83. An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World A track like “Heart on My Sleeve,” which went viral before being taken down by streaming services this week, may be a novelty for now. But the legal and creative questions it raises are here to stay. GUESTS: Jacques Lamarre: A playwright and chief communications officer at Buzz Engine Tracy Wu Fastenberg: Development officer at Connecticut Children’s Bill Yousman: Professor of media studies at Sacred Heart University The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show. Our programming is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Please consider supporting this show and Connecticut Public with a donation today.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In April, 2010 — 13 years ago this month — we did a segment on the concept of the “mesofact,” a certain kind of data point that feels fixed even though it’s actually always slowly changing. (I’d add a link to that show, but our archive doesn’t actually go back that far.) And we’ve gone back to the idea every now and again ever since. Think about things like the world population or the Periodic Table of the Elements. Or think about our understanding of the health and nutritional value of red wine. Or coffee. Or how Brussels sprouts are supposed to taste. Or what dinosaurs are supposed to look like. This hour, an update on a bunch of mesofacts that we’d probably all lost track of, including the myth of the alpha wolf and the misconceptions around white gloves and antique books. GUESTS: Samuel Arbesman: A scientist and writer; he is the author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension and The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date Jennifer Schuessler: A culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas for The New York Times Maddy Witt: An educator at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We have a complicated relationship with our food. We need food to live, yet we’ve become removed from the food we eat and how it’s grown and processed. Even with the best intentions, today’s ultra-processed foods make it hard for us to know exactly what we’re eating or how the methods used to mass produce our food affect our environment and health. And I haven’t even touched on how food has led to war, famine, poverty, and enslavement. This hour, we talk about the history of agriculture, where it went wrong, and how we might begin to cultivate food that is kinder to our bodies, our earth, and our fellow humans. GUEST: Mark Bittman: Author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food From Sustainable To Suicidal, among many other books The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired February 3, 2021. Our programming is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Please consider supporting this show and Connecticut Public with a donation today.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This hour, our new favorite way to communicate: emoji. We look at how emoji are created and how they change meaning and talk to the creator of Emojiland: The Musical. GUESTS: Keith Broni: Editor-in-chief of Emojipedia Keith Harrison Dworkin: Composer and creator of Emojiland: The Musical Alex King: Associate professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University and editor-in-chief of Aesthetics for Birds The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired June 9, 2022. Our programming is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Please consider supporting this show and Connecticut Public with a donation today.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This hour, a conversation about handling life’s hardships with philosopher Kieran Setiya, the author of Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. GUESTS: Kieran Setiya: Professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show. Our programming is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Please consider supporting this show and Connecticut Public with a donation today.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.