The Colin McEnroe Show

In 2030 B.C., somebody brought cucumbers from India to the Tigris Valley, and they said, "We can pickle that!" And so it began, from the first stirrings of civilization, to modern-day Brooklyn artisan pickles: we've found ourselves up to our eyes in brine, looking for the next object we can pickle.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While visitors watching the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, enjoy spectacular feats of athletic ability from the world's most accomplished athletes, those in Russia's LGBT community anticipate laws that punish Russians for even suggesting that it's okay to be gay, let alone live openly as a gay adult.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While tying together all the stories for today's session of the Nose, I keep hearing (in my mind) Charlie Seen say, "Winning!" We have a lot of stories about how people who try to win, often by following the logic of a game out to its extremes.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The first secret society, according to Theodore Ziolkowski, a Princeton-based scholar on the literature of cults and conspiracies, "consisted of Eve and the serpent and then it just kept going," Ziokowski writes.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In February of 1964, the Beatles appeared not once, but on three consecutive Sunday nights on "The Ed Sullivan Show," attracting what was the the largest audience in television history, and still might be the largest percentage of all possible viewers. To some of us, the whole thing is still kind of exciting 50 years later. But why?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last fall, the New York City Opera -- what Mayor LaGuardia called "the People's Opera" -- declared bankruptcy. This is/was the opera that introduced Americans to Placido Domingo and Beverly Sills.  Make what you will of the fact that the bankruptcy announcement coincided with the presentation of a new opera about Anna Nicole Smith.This is either a problem very specific to the New York Opera, or part of a virus that has been taking down opera companies all over the U.S. and maybe all over the world. In Italy, where opera receives much more public and government support, one fourth of all major opera companies were in a version of bankruptcy as of 2008.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On Sunday, two people named Dylan made news. So much so that you had to be careful on Twitter. If you tweeted "Dylan sold out" about Bob Dylan's Super Bowl commercials, you might offend people who thought you meant Dylan Farrow who broke 20 years of silence to talk about her memory of childhood molestation by Woody Allen. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on the Nose, we'll discuss one of those eruptions that happen in the digital world -- a frenzy of discussion and expressions of outrage over an essay on the site xojane, by a writer who tried to describe her reactions, as a skinny white woman, to the way she thought a heavyset back woman was reacting to her in yoga class.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Imagine a day without adjunct faculty. Many colleges and universities would effectively shut down.  Somewhere between 70-75% of the academic workforce in higher education is not tenured or on track for tenure. Most of those people fall into the category of adjunct. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot of interconnected things were happening in the 1990s, an oncologist and hematologist  named Mitchell Gaynor discovered trough a Tibetan monk, the so-called singing bowls and began incorporating them into the guided meditation and breathing work he did with his patients. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.