The Colin McEnroe Show

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.

For the past few months, Nose regular Jacques Lamarre has been posting debate-starting, head-to-head style Facebook posts. Taylor Swift vs. Katy Perry. Ketchup vs. mustard vs. mayonnaise. When Harry Met Sally vs. Sleepless in Seattle. That kind of thing. And so now, we've decided to try to turn the concept into a radio show. This hour, YOU MUST CHOOSE.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joyce Maynard has been writing for over 45 years about the kind of human experiences we're often taught to keep hidden - stories  about envy, anger, vanity, self-pity, pride.   We read her stories because they offer a chance to first confront and then forgive ourselves for how those emotions can shape us into people we don't like.  Her honesty has come at a cost to her.  She has been criticized for writing about her relationship as an 18-year-old with a famous 53-year-old writer after 26 years of silence. She was told she should have kept quiet.  She did this 20 years before #MeToo. Today, we have a wide-ranging discussion with Joyce Maynard about politics, #MeToo, art, music and her marriage at 59-years-old to a love who died from cancer 3 short years later.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It was hard to watch the first part of Leaving Neverland, the documentary which aired on HBO aired on March 3. The poignancy of the mixed emotions expressed by two men and their mothers who fell under the spell of Michael Jackson and later, his predation, left me feeling like a fly on the wall of a particularly difficult visit to a therapist. I was forced to consider my own complicity in how we collectively create and reward a celebrity culture that allows us to suspend reality against our own better judgment. We've seen time and again in the recent year with Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and R. Kelly, to name a few, and how it takes a village to let serial predators go unscathed in the name of art and profit. Also this hour: The cheating and doping scandals in the world of professional bridge. Lastly, we take your calls. Have we hit peak cancel culture yet? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nobody likes the termite. They get into the wood in our homes that can lead to infuriating and expensive repairs. What's to like. It turns out, there's a lot to like about the termite; scientists study how termites build their "mounds" for clues to solving some of the world's most pressing problems, like mitigating the effects of drought, building colonies on Mars, and the creation of biofuels. Plus, their ability to adapt to the harshest conditions over millions of years says a lot about them. Almost 90% of the microbes found in their guts are unique to the termite. Those same gut microbes are what make them so productive and on the flip side, so destructive. Lastly, some believe termites work with joy and have a soul. You be the judge.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Why do we dance? The answer is more complicated than you might think. Dancing has served a multitude of functions for various cultures throughout history, and there is even evidence to suggest we, as a species, are biologically hard-wired to dance.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.