The Colin McEnroe Show

Sports! There are sports! Baseball's back. At least for now. With almost all of the teams playing games. And only, ya know, two of them having big COVID outbreaks. The NBA exists in a Disney World "bubble," and it hasn't had a single test come back positive yet. The NHL is doing two different kinds of tournaments at once in two different "bubbles" in Canada. The arenas and stadiums are empty and quiet, but for the cardboard cutout fans and the piped-in crowd sounds. And the whole thing may well be a bad idea anyway... But there are sports! At least for now. GUESTS: Ben Cohen - Sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks Jeff Tracy - Sports reporter for Axios 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.

This New or Second or Third Golden Age of Television has been going on for 20 or 25 or 30 years now. Peak TV just won't stop peaking. For decades, there's just been no way to keep up. But then… suddenly we've all got a lot more time on our hands in our houses. And instead of finally watching The Wire and The Americans and Homeland and whatever else, we're all just rewatching Parks and Rec for the eleventeenth time. And, hey, whoa: The New York Times bought Serial productions. And finally: I May Destroy You is a BBC One and HBO show starring and written and created by Michaela Coel. Set in London, the series is a comedy-drama about consent and, ultimately, trauma. Some other stuff that happened in the last couple weeks, give or take: Alan Parker, British Director of 'Fame', 'Midnight Express' and 'Mississippi Burning,' Dies at 76 Malik B., Founding Member of the Roots, Dead at 47The rapper departed the group following the the release of Things Fall Apart in 1999 Regis Philbin, TV's Enduring Everyman, Dies at 88With patience, determination and folksy, spontaneous wit, Mr. Philbin climbed to pre-eminence relatively late in life on talk and game shows. David Letterman On Regis Philbin's Death: "Best Guest We Ever Had" As a Teenager, I Hated Johnny Carson. Then Came the Pandemic.As a teenager, I thought his 'Tonight Show' was a bland, uncool relic. Now I appreciate his deadpan humor and the loose weirdness of his interviews. 'Saturday Night Live' Wants to Resume Filming in Person Olivia de Havilland, a Star of 'Gone With the Wind,' Dies at 104She built an illustrious Hollywood career punctuated by a successful fight to loosen the studios' grip on actors. Billy Eichner To Play Paul Lynde In 'Man In The Box,' About Gifted Actor Stigmatized For Being Gay: Why Eichner Feels Things Haven't Changed, Gay Actors Still Excluded From Straight Roles & Even Playing Gay Icons The Force Is Still Strong with John Williams Washington NFL team to use 'Washington Football Team' for 2020 season Mulan falls off Disney's schedule, takes Avatar and Star Wars with it "The Far Side" Returns to a Weird World Best Cinematography Oscar Winners of the 21st Century, Ranked Tom Hanks lending voice as vendor at Oakland A's games 'Metal Gear Solid V' Players Achieve the Impossible: Nuclear Disarmament'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain' players briefly got rid of all nuclear weapons and triggered a secret cutscene. Wild Star Wars Rumor Claims Disney Will Erase the Sequel Trilogy and Reset CanonAn unsubstantiated Star Wars rumor claims that Disney is ready to junk everything that happened in The Force Awakens and its sequels. Breonna Taylor Is On The Cover Of O Magazine -- The First One Ever Without Oprah"Breonna Taylor had dreams," Oprah Winfrey said. "They all died with her the night five bullets shattered her body and her future." GUESTS: Irene Papoulis - Teaches writing at Trinity College Mercy Quaye - Founder and principal consultant for The Narrative Project and a columnist with Hearst Connecticut Media Group 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.

Native Americans have been getting forced off their land for a long time. Although Thomas Jefferson promised they shall know the United States as only "friends and benefactors," he forced them from their ancestral home in 1804 after he signed the Louisiana Purchase.   Assured by the government that Kansas territory would be theirs forever, they were soon forced from their new home by white settlers (including the Wilder family of Little House fame) who plundered their burial sites and squatted on their land until they felt little choice but to sell to them. The Osage finally settled on territory in Oklahoma that most whites found "unfit for cultivation," at least until they found oil underneath those rocks. Then it became attractive to powerful white men who hatched a plot to kill the Osage obtain and obtain mineral rights to the land.  This is the chilling story of the systematic murder of one group of native people. It's the bigger story of how the United States government has betrayed and controlled the sovereignty of a nation of people who lived here first. This story never seems to end. In 2019,  Attorney General William Barr announced a plan to address the crisis of missing and murdered Native Americans. I wonder whether anything has changed.  GUESTS: David Grann - Staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Lost City of Z: Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon and Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI Denny McAuliffe - Editor at The Washington Post, adjunct professor in journalism at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the author of The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History Jim Gray - Former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation and current Tribal Administrator for the Sac and Fox Nation Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired August 10, 2017.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Colin McEnroe Show alum Chion Wolf has a new show: Audacious. Hear this guest episode from her series! Last year, a 28-year-old guy in Mumbai tried to sue his parents -- who are both lawyers -- for having brought him into the world. He claims his parents didn’t get his consent to live. In addition to being a very bold person, he is an anti-natalist. That is, he believes that it is morally wrong to bring sentient life into this world -- no matter how charmed or how troubled that life is -- and that humanity should stop reproducing, full stop. Anti-natalism is not a novel concept. You can trace it as far back as some interpretations of the teachings of Buddah, and in ancient religious sects. Nowadays, the subreddit dedicated to anti-natalism has 70,000 members, and there are 15,000 people following the Facebook group the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. You'll hear from one of its leaders in this show. The screenwriter for the HBO series True Detective says that that the antinatalist beliefs of one of the main characters was inspired by the book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by the philosopher David Benatar. You'll meet him too and learn a lot more about the belief that this world would have been better had none us been here in the first place. GUESTS: David Benatar - A professor and the head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence and The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions Les Knight - A volunteer with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and email. Catie Talarski contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How we define what it means to be a hero depends a lot on the values shared by the group that's in power at any given time. We're seeing it today in the push and pull over the statues of men whose values no longer reflect the values of a changing community. And time tends to wash away the nuance and complexity of heroes that stand as a symbol of a prior generation. Yet, America loves its heroes, even if only for a time. But ​we have a way of using the language of "heroism" to sacrifice the very heroes we admire. Many of the essential workers we deemed heroes of the pandemic had to choose between their health and a paycheck. They didn't choose to be heroes. Some didn't want to be. Others were silenced or shamed for speaking out about unsafe conditions. This hour, we talk about what it means to be a hero, and we consider some Connecticut heroes you may not know about. ​ Also, a look at the unlikely hero driven to heroic acts to avoid being labeled a coward. GUESTS: Dahlia Lithwick - Writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus Chris Walsh - Director of the college of arts and sciences writing program at Boston University and the author of Cowardice: A Brief History Walter Woodward - State historian of Connecticut, the author of Creating Connecticut, and the host of the Grating the Nutmeg podcast 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.

Race is a myth; racism is not. I'm stealing this line from Gene Seymour, one of our guests on our show today.  We're reairing a show with three people who discuss what it's like to be Black in America. The show was originally in 2017. We chose to reair it today to coincide with the memorials this week for Congressman John Lewis, who will be the first Black congressman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, after fighting his entire life for social justice. And because the recent police brutality, along with a pandemic that disproportionately affected minority communities, exposed how little has changed for Black Americans since we first aired this show in 2017. Many of us hoped the election of Barack Obama in 2008 was a sign that we were finally entering a time when America was ready to recognize that racial inequality is the direct result of systemic discrimination going back to the founding of this country.  That did not happen.  Congressman Lewis fought for civil rights and dignity for all black Americans. We should all think about that as we honor his legacy this week.   This show originally aired on July 12, 2017 and was reaired on January 15, 2018.  GUESTS:  Gene Seymour - Cultural critic, writer, jazz aficionado, and contributor for CNN Opinion, The Baffler, Book Forum and The Nation Bruce Haynes - Professor of sociology at U.C. Davis and co-author of Down the Up Staircase  Kris Marsh - Demographer and associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and a 2017 Fulbright Scholar in South Africa Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.  Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My son, Simon, is a year old. His mother and his grandmother are both librarians. His father is, well, me. Simon is, predictably, obsessed with books. Back before everything changed, we'd gotten into a pretty good reading routine. Every morning before Simon went to his grandparents', we'd read a big pile of books. Every evening when I got home from work, we'd read a big pile of books. We'd read Goodnight Moon. We'd read Little Blue Truck. We'd read Peek-a Who? and Peek-a Moo! and Peek-a Zoo! We'd read Who Hoots? and Who Hops? We'd read Dear Zoo and Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? and Each Peach Pear Plum and Spooky, Spooky, Little Bat and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? And then we'd probably read them all again. Now that our whole family stays home all day every day, we still do all the reading. What's lost is the routine. What's lost is any sort of limit at all. From Simon's point of view, there's nothing to stop us from reading all day every day, from when he jams me in the back with his copy of The Mixed-Up Chameleon too early in the morning until he falls asleep wearing one sock and with a clump of Cheerios somehow stuck in his diaper too late at night. If you've got smallish kids and you're staying home these days, children's literature has undoubtedly become a much larger part of your life than you'd ever bargained for. This hour, a look at what it's like reading kids' books as an adult. GUESTS: Bruce Handy - The author of Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult Julia Pistell - Managing director of Sea Tea Improv and cohost of the Literary Disco podcast Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired April 9, 2020.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It took two years for the word AIDS to get from coinage to dictionary. It took COVID-19 thirty-four days. The pandemic has inspired a thousand new or repurposed words, slang, nicknames, and neologisms. It has changed the way we speak.   We made technical medical language part of everyday conversation. We created new words to describe  emotions that had no words. We repurposed old words or combined two words to express a way of life we never expected. Lockdowns. WFH. Pancession. Doomscrolling. We made phrases to unite us, others to make us laugh, and some to explain our confusion. Workers became essential and advertisers made them heroes.    Do you speak Corona? GUESTS: Peter Sokolowski is a lexicographer and editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster; he's also a musician and public radio jazz host at NEPR, and he's the author of a chapter in The Whole World in a Book (@PeterSokowski)  Tony Horne is a linguist, lexicographer, and a language consultant in the faculty of Arts and Humanities, at King’s College, London (@tonythorne007)  Justin Peters is a correspondent for Slate and the author of  The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet (@justintrevett) 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.

Historian Christine Sismondo says that "America, as we know it, was born in a bar." Taverns were where the Boston Tea Party was planned. They were where court cases were carried out, where land was bought and sold, where immigrants came to congregate. Over the centuries since, bars have fostered so much social change. And today, they're where we go to meet people, to catch the game, to talk about our problems, to relax. Or at least they were. Back when bars were open, back when there were games to catch... Back when we could relax. This hour, a look at what we've been missing these last few months when we've been missing bars. GUESTS: Rand Richards Cooper - A contributing editor at Commonweal, and he writes the "In Our Midst" column for Hartford Magazine Christine Sismondo - The author of America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops Karl Franz Williams - Principle, The Anchor Spa in New Haven Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Religious scholar Elaine Pagels trusted the Gospel of Thomas to get her through the almost unbearably painful years after the death of her six-year-old son -- born with a congenital heart defect -- followed one year later by the unexpected death of her husband.  Thomas was one of many hidden texts discovered in a cave in Egypt in 1945, written around the time of Jesus but omitted from the New Testament.  Pagels's exploration of the secret gospels revealed early Christianity to be a mix of traditions, stories, music, mysticism, art, and poetry that were lost in later versions perpetuated by individual Christian groups. Pagels wonders how Roman Catholics, Baptists, Mormons, and Quakers -- to name a few -- could all proclaim themselves the one true version of Christianity. The Gnostic Gospels challenged thousands of years of Christian ideology regarding our views on God, women, sexuality, and death that still dictate the cultural values we follow today. How had we not become aware that thousands of years of censoring Christianity has come to contradict our own experience of what is meaningful in our lives? So often, religion fails us in our time of need. The Gnostic Gospels gave Elaine Pagels hope. She was grateful for that.  GUEST:  Elaine Pagels - Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of several books including The Gnostic Gospels, Beyond Belief, and, most recently, Why Religion? A Personal Story Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired February 21, 2019.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.