The Colin McEnroe Show

The dream to live forever has captivated mankind since the beginning. We see this in religion, literature, art, and present day pop-culture in a myriad of ways. But all along, the possibility that we'd actually achieve such a thing never quite seemed real. Now science, through a variety of medical and technological advances the likes of which seem as far fetched as immortality itself, is close to turning that dream into a reality. This hour we talk with experts who are on the cutting edge of this research about the science and implications of ending aging.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

According to the latest Q-poll, a lot of Connecticut voters don’t like any of the candidates running in the upcoming gubernatorial election. But, they don’t have much choice in that race or any of the other state races that generally have 2 candidates -- maybe three if we’re lucky -- on the menu.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Shade tobacco came to Connecticut in 1900 from the island of Sumatra, which was beginning to dominate the world of cigar wrappers. The leaf had a light color, delicate texture, and mild flavor that cigar lovers love. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scandal is a theme today. One of our guests today is Anne Helen Petersen, who left academia to write full-time about celebrities and television and celebrity gossip.  One of the themes her first book, "Scandals of Classic Hollywood," is the history of Hollywood scandal so lets get my own theory out of the way. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some human observers." (Wikipedia)Some version of the uncanny valley phenomenon is tangled up in the national freak-out this week over actress Renee Zellweger’s post-nip & tuck coming out party. Of course, the uncanny valley usually flows in the other direction — from the artificial toward the almost-natural. Cosmetic surgery can work in reverse. We almost recognize Renee. It’s so close — but also indubitably the result of manufacture — that we are unsettled by it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Whenever I see a production of Hamlet, I am newly floored by its impact on language, no matter how many times you tell yourself that a lot of our spoken language is in this play, you're freshly assaulted by how many things people say all the time that come from Hamlet. It's crazy.But then there are all sorts of questions about staging Hamlet. There can be, and there have been many theories about what to emphasize in the play. Themes of sex, politics, indecision, suicide, and reality testing are either brought to the fore, or pushed to the back. No matter what happens on the stage, it's a really, really good story.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Nathan Hale to John Brown to lynchings to executions of accused witches, the hangman's noose has played a grim role in American history.While its usage has declined and changed over time, just in the past week, articles have surfaced about a political flier using a noose as the background that was circulated in a church parking lot in South Carolina, and nooses hanging in rival high schools in California. A police officer in the latter article, Sgt. Martin Acosta, stated, "A noose in itself is not making any correlation to anything." Is that true? Isn't a noose in 2014 an explicit evocation of lynching? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know campaign commercials, those things you fast-forward through whenever you can. Despite your best efforts, you've probably seen more of them than you intended to this season and heaven knows, campaigns and outside interest groups have shown no interest in cutting back on them.Ad spending in this election cycle is poised to break  $1 billion dollars, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. In Connecticut, most of the advertising is focused on the highly competitive gubernatorial race with occasional excursions into the 5th Congressional District.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Okay, I'm warning you. You're going to have to adjust the band on your thinking cap. Christian Bok, our first guest, is an experimental poet with some fascinating ideas, some of which will strike you as unfamiliar and maybe dissimilar to any other ideas you ever heard. In a nutshell, Bok is part of a small movement of thinkers and writers who want to revolutionize the way literature is produced, stored and consumed. For example, Bok has spent years trying to encode  a poem into the DNA of a bacterium able to survive extreme conditions, like vacuums.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here on The Nose today, we're at least potentially talking about high-tech employers who offer egg freezing as a benefit for female employees, a proposal to get rid of high school football, the sinking sensation that it's time - or too late - to fight back against Amazon, and the Florida debate that almost broke down because of a candidate's use of a fan at the podium.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.