The Colin McEnroe Show

When I first started writing about politics in Connecticut, I can honestly say that there were many more Republicans who excited my admiration than there were Democrats. It was 1979, the wave of interesting new progressive Democrats was coming, including that Bill Curry guy you hear so much about, but the entrenched Democratic leadership was anything but progressive. It was calcified, blinkered, and in too many cases, dirty. They'd had too much power for too long. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You may think that composting all your kitchen waste sounds like a good idea, but you probably don't realize how many things really can be composted, what services are available if you can't get yourself organized to do it, and if you do have a compost pile, which animals visit it at night, and for what purpose?This hour, a heap of information about compost!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today is Monday. That's when we do the show on the fly. We call it The Scramble and one of the twists we're trying is the reverse of ordinary public radio guest booking. Usually, we start with a topic and try to find the best possible guests. But, for one segment of The Scramble each week, we pick a guest we want to talk to and then ask him or her what the topic should be. The idea is to pick an interesting person and then find out what's on that person's mind right now. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Governor Chris Christie's administration is under fire for ordering  lane closures  that blocked access to the George Washington Bridge for four days last September, indulging in an egomaniacal fantasy of vengeance against a political foe who refused to recognize the Christie administration's self-professed superiority.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My two favorite film critics, A.O. Scott and David Edelstein, appear on the show today, and we've got a longer list of topics than we can possibly get to. I'm interested in the way a lot of the recent hit movies take little bites of our recent past: "Inside Llewyn Davis" tackles 1961. "American Hustle" bestrides the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. "The Wolf of Wall Street" started with the Crash of '87 and pans forward into the 1990s. Suddenly, for Baby Boomers, the stretch of our living memory is a series of period pieces and costume dramas.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Identical twins are just like us - and then they're not! From Ann Landers and Dear Abbey, from the Castro brothers, one of whom might be our first identical twin president one day, carbon-copy twins live lives that the rest of us cannot fathom.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For many years, Ralph Nader has pushed the idea of an American Museum of Tort History which would be located somewhere in Connecticut, probably Winsted. The exhibits would concern tort cases from all over the U.S. but you have to think the Hartford Civic Center roof collapse would merit a special diorama.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Scramble we lead off with some reporting that will be featured this week on a PBS' "Frontline" story, To Catch a Trader. It's the story of a federal probe into insider trading and the specific role of Connecticut's Steve Cohen, and his SAC hedge fund. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today on The Nose, we'll talk about this relatively insignificant bit of Rush Limbaugh peevishness, and the degree to which each of us thinks he or she has (informally speaking) patented something: a word, a phrase, a style we've made our own.Also, Adam Platt's decision to dispense with the fiction that he, as a restaurant critic, is anonymous. It's not exactly the same as claiming to create, but Platt is talking about the anxiety of influence in a different way. How can one do "pure" work? Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Wandering the vast labyrinth of useless information, you might encounter some people having a debate about the last person who knew everything. This is a great, and also pretty hopeless debate, because it requires a judgment about what all the useful information in the world might have been and who was capable of knowing it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.