The Colin McEnroe Show

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.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever been to the opera? I know, you think it's stuffy and formal and only for rich, white people of a certain age. You're wrong. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Common wisdom says that once you walk downstairs to the place where the sizes of candidates’ body parts are fodder for discussion, where one presidential nominee calls another “such a nasty woman” in a debate, where middle-finger salutes at the working press become commonplace at presidential rallies, you never go back up those stairs.On the eve of a midterm, we want to talk about whether that’s true and whether the 2018 political ecosystem caught the coarseness virus from 2016. And how do we get back up those stairs? How do we bleed some of the anger and vulgarity out of our political discourse?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Despite Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and attempts by hackers to infiltrate voter-registration databases in Illinois, Arizona and several other states in the summer of 2016, little has been done to better secure America's network of electronic voting systems.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We now have no fewer than four big screen versions of A Star Is Born.There's the 1937 original, the Judy Garland/James Mason remake, the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson remake... and now's there's the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper remake, which is directed by Cooper, and which might just take the fall movie season by storm.This hour: a Noseish (but not quite actually The Nose) look at the phenomenon of A Star Is Born.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, when Prince died (which was two-and-a-half years ago), we announced that we were finally going to retire our theme song (which was a Prince song). And then we promptly did... nothing at all.Earlier this year, though -- and in typical Colin McEnroe Shovian fashion -- we decided that this non-problem was a big problem. And so, in order to try and hopefully finally fix this non-problem big problem, we did a whole show about theme songs -- ours and other people's.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is yodeling, anyway? Some consider it singing, some say it's an ululation, and still others consider it merely a means to herd animals. Whatever yodeling is, one's thing clear: Yodeling has been around for thousands of years and shows no signs of disappearing.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were using strategies to deliberately divide America's political system decades before the pivotal 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush divided us into gangs of  'red' or 'blue.'Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today, we've booked no guests. It's Colin and your calls. Saturday's confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was the anticlimatic coda to a nomination that has both riveted and more deeply divided our country.Depending on your view, the Kavanaugh confirmation either endangers the legitimacy of the court or is a welcome culmination to a decades-long effort to capture a solid conservative majority on the high court.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So we did a Nose last week. It was good. It was about the second season of Slow Burn and the third season of Serial, and it was kind of also about how both of those shows tie into our present moment in interesting ways and that that's kind of interesting and suchlike.We thought it went well.You probably would've thought so too.Except you didn't hear it, so how would you know? That present moment that I was just talking about got in the way: We were preempted by some Senate Judiciary Committee vote or something.So we brought the show back for this week. We hope you'll like it now too.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.