The Colin McEnroe Show

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. A Clockwork Orange. The Shining. Full Metal Jacket. Spartacus. Eyes Wide Shut. This hour, a careful consideration of the filmmaker Steven Spielberg called "the best in history": Stanley Kubrick. GUESTS: James Hanley - Co-founder of Cinestudio at Trinity College David Mikics - Author of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker Lila Shapiro - Senior reporter at New York magazine and Vulture, where she published "What I Learned After Watching Eyes Wide Shut 100 Times" Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Officials in the Trump Administration last week videotaped both a naturalization ceremony held at the White House and an HUD official's interview with four New York City tenants on housing conditions. They then  played selected parts from each video at the Republican National Convention without the knowledge of the participants.  The CDC updated testing guidelines last week to say that people who have been exposed to the virus but who don’t have symptoms or underlying risk factors, don't necessarily need to be tested. After public health officials complained that asymptomatic carriers are more likely to spread the virus, we learned that the recommendations came from the White House Coronavirus Task Force.   Today, politics and Covid.  Guests: Saskia Popescu is an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Arizona (@SaskiaPopescu) Gail Collins is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and the author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present and most recently, No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (@gailcollins) Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, the NBA, the WBNA, MLB, MLS, tennis, and eventually the NHL all postponed games and matches in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And: A Tweet listing the "Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf" -- including "Too Much Hemingway," you see -- caused a bit of a fuss on the Twitter. And finally: Atlantics is the directorial debut of actress and writer Mati Diop. It premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where it was the first movie directed by a Black woman ever to compete at the festival. It won the Grand Prix. It is available to stream on Netflix, and The Guardian wrote about it this week in their "My Streaming Gem" column. Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: Justin Townes Earle, Americana Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 38Nashville native, known for his mix of old-timey roots music and modern folk-rock, was the son of Steve Earle Riley Gale, Power Trip Vocalist, Dead At 34One of metal's true rising stars has left us too early Danbury Mayor Names Sewage Plant After John Oliver Following 'Last Week Tonight's Story On Jury Selection In Connecticut Jerry Seinfeld: So You Think New York Is 'Dead'(It's not.) The Batman: is Robert Pattinson set to play the superhero as an emo?In the latest film version of the vigilante's adventures, Batman/Bruce Wayne unexpectedly brings back the eyeliner and My Chemical Romance fringe of early 00s youth culture Fans Already Solved The Riddler's Cryptic Puzzle In 'The Batman' TeaserThe bigger question is why Batman doesn't just check the internet. How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American DirectorsThe prestigious line is coveted by cinephiles and taught in film schools. The company's president blames his "blind spots" for largely shutting out Black Americans. 'Tenet' May Not Be Playing at Your Local Drive-In Theater 'Drunk History' Canceled After Six Seasons at Comedy Central Bleacher Report Shuttering B/R Mag Long-form Storytelling Unit Chris Evans Responds To Backlash Over That Ted Cruz PhotoThe "Avengers" actor explained things on "The Daily Show." Live Comedy Is Back in New York! But Outdoors. Is This a Good Thing?The club Stand Up NY is staging 40 shows a week across the city. Performing in parks raises the stakes for comedians and audiences alike. Steven Soderbergh Reedited Three of His Movies in Quarantine While Producing 'Bill and Ted Face the Music'The filmmaker discussed how he's been spending quarantine, exploring safety guidelines for film productions, and why he helped get a long-dormant sequel finally get made. GUESTS: Jim Chapdelaine - An Emmy-winning musician, producer, composer, and recording engineer, and a patient advocate for people with rare cancers Taneisha Duggan - Producing associate at TheaterWorks Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Placebo treatments have been making people feel better for a long time. They've been working since long before Franz Mesmer was run out of 18th-century Vienna for "mesmerizing" a young pianist into regaining her eyesight, after all hope for a medical cure had been lost.   Doctors have long dismissed the placebo effect as inferior to conventional medical treatments that sometimes fail where placebo works well, including in surgical procedures like arthroscopy, a popular procedure that relieves the pain of arthritic knees.  The placebo effect is triggered not by a magic pill, but through a combination of expectation, hope, and the strength of the doctor-patient relationship. Placebo is real; it's on the rise in America, and technology is allowing researchers to link placebo with physiological and psychological changes and genetic predisposition that could change the way we treat illness. GUESTS: Gary Greenberg - Psychotherapist and the author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmasking of Psychiatry Ted Kaptchuk - Professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Director, Program of Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital   Bruce Moseley - Orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist, former team physician to the Houston Rockets, first to perform placebo surgery Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

America has long been attracted to charismatic demagogues who master the media of their time to tap into America’s insecurities. Long before Donald Trump descended a golden escalator in 2015 to announce he was running for president, anti-communist zealot Joseph McCarthy took America by storm. The parallels many writers see between President Trump and Senator Joe McCarthy are not coincidental. There's a flesh-and-blood throughline that connects the two. President Trump's former attorney Roy Cohn taught him everything he learned from McCarthy's playbook when the served as McCarthy's chief council during his second term as a Wisconsin senator.   Demagogues are often charasmatic men of limited ability who bully their way to the top and threaten reluctant enablers to go along. The good news is that they fall faster than they rise once people see that the emperor wears no clothes.   What can we learn from McCarthyism as we consider our upcoming election?  GUEST: Larry Tye is the author of eight books. His latest is Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. He’s also a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a former award-winning reporter for The Boston Globe. His next book will be, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In May, I discovered (along with the rest of the internet) a video on YouTube of a guy in his loft in Surrey, England... solving a Sudoku puzzle. It was intense, a rollercoaster ride, and, ultimately, sublime. Those are not words you might expect someone to use to describe watching a stranger solve a little number puzzle, but here we are. Since I found that video, I've watched that YouTube channel, Cracking the Cryptic, practically every day. Sometimes the videos are riveting. The rest of the time, they're soothing. The channel's 250,000 subscribers and 40 million cumulative views would seem to indicate that I'm not alone in using it as a way to both exercise and relax my mind during this pandemic period. This hour, a look at Sudoku, specifically, and logic puzzles more generally. GUESTS: Simon Anthony - A former U.K. team member in the World Sudoku and World Puzzle Championships and a host of Cracking the Cryptic Jason Rosenhouse - Professor of mathematics at James Madison University and the author of a number of books about math and related topics, including the forthcoming Games for Your Mind: The History and Future of Logic Puzzles Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Numbers are so fundamental to our understanding of the world around us that we maybe tend to think of them as an intrinsic part of the world around us. But they aren't. Humans invented numbers just as much as we invented all of language. This hour, we look at the anthropological, psychological, and linguistical ramifications of the concept of numbers. And we look at one philosophical question too: Are numbers even real in the first place? GUESTS: Brian Clegg - Author of Are Numbers Real? The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World Caleb Everett - Professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Miami and the author of Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired October 12, 2017.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Food and Drug Administration on Sunday authorized the emergency use of convalescent blood to treat people hospitalized with Covid-19. Sunday's decision comes on the heels of a presidential tweet that may have put pressure on the FDA to authorize it prematurely. We talk about this and more news on Covid.  Also this hour:  The Republican National Convention begins this week, a few days after former Vice-President Joe Biden accepted the nomination to represent Democrats in November's election. We talk about last week's convention, how this week's convention might play out, and other political news from the weekend.   GUESTS:  Angela Rasmussen is a virologist and associate research scientist at the Center of Infection and Immunity at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She is a contributing writer to Forbes magazine. (@angie_rasmussen) Annie Linskey is a national political reporter focused on the 2020 presidential campaign for The Washington Post. (@AnnieLinskey) Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The No. 1 song in the country -- "WAP" by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion -- seems to make just one concession to commercial decorum: its acronym title, which I won't be spelling out for you here. It's being called the "gloriously filthy song of the summer" and subversive "in almost every way, even as it plays with the limits of explicit expression." Speaking of troublesome songs: Does The Band's classic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" belong in the same category as bits of culture like Song of the South and Gone with the Wind? And finally: Has it turned out that Kevin Costner's 1997 box office bomb, The Postman, is "the most accurate dystopian movie?" Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: CAROLE BASKIN Debunks Facebook Group's Theory ... MISSING HUBBY'S NOT IN SEPTIC TANK!!! Second City Is Trying Not To Be Racist. Will It Work This Time?For more than 60 years, the premier home for improv was a bastion of whiteness where performers of color were consistently demeaned. Now it is trying to remake itself entirely. An Airline Employee On TikTok Is Calling Out All The Celebs Who Were Rude (And Nice) To Her, And It's Wild"She wouldn't get off the aircraft until everybody else got off." Two men charged with the 2002 killing of Run-DMC legend Jam Master Jay On Percival Everett's Almost Secret Experiment in a Novel in ThreesDavid Lerner Schwartz on the Tripartite Puzzle That is Telephone How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American DirectorsThe prestigious line is coveted by cinephiles and taught in film schools. The company's president blames his "blind spots" for largely shutting out Black Americans. GUESTS: Cara McDonough - A freelance writer; you can read her blog at caramcduna.com Brian Slattery - Arts editor for the New Haven Independent and a producer at WNHH radio Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The pandemic has led to national shortages in testing supplies, PPE, and now, coins.  We've been predicting a cashless society and the demise of the penny for so long that we may be underestimating how much people still use coins in places like laundromats and coffeeshops, and the occasional parking meter.  And about eight million households are "unbanked," and rely on money orders, pawn shops, or payday loans, instead of banks. So, where are all the coins? Also this hour: The world's earliest coins date back to ancient Greek and Roman culture. And each coin contains information often not found anywhere else in surviving relics of the ancient world. Some numismatists consider ancient coins one of the most important discoveries to fuel the renaissance.  Lastly, how a North Carolina aquarium used coins from their waterfall to care for thousands of their animals during the pandemic.   GUESTS: Molly Olmstead is a staff writer at Slate Brian Wallace is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Coin Laundry Association  David Vagi is Director, Ancient Coins at the Numismatic Guaranty Corporation and the author of Coinage and History of the Roman Empire   Liz Baird is the director of the North Carolina Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores Join the conversation on Facebook and TwitterSupport the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.