The Colin McEnroe Show

As my friend Alex Beam said today, 12 Years a Slave has a way of taking things that were abstractions and making them real. It's one thing to talk about abolition, another to see the essential need for it. Even a figure like John Brown, says Alex, looks different when you see the true carnage of slavery. We're talking about this astonishing new Steve McQueen movie today on The Nose and we'll find it pretty easy I predict. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This show originally aired on July 2nd, 2013. When considering what show we wanted to re-run, we found this recent article from the New York Times, As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry. The debate is still being discussed and on this show, it gets heated!Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

Okay, this is sad. Like a lot of people, I have trouble achieving the deep focus needed to enjoy long fiction. And, like a lot of people, I have trouble finding time to read novels.Recently, I came up with a solution. I go to the gym, get on a recumbent bike, and I read while I pedal for an hour, so yes,  I kill two birds with one Robert Stone. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is one of our new Monday shows where right up to show time, I'm not 100% sure what we're talking about. I know for sure we'll discuss the time change you experienced over the weekend and the ever-swelling choir of voices suggesting that its harms outweigh its advantages, assuming there are any real advantages.I'm also dying to discuss the attempt by Saturday Night Live to address on this weekend's episode another ever-swelling choir, the voices of people who say the show is not diverse enough. It's not, and the show pretty successfully made a joke out of that this weekend without really committing to doing anything about it. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On today's Nose we're stuffed into the facade of the XL Center in Hartford on Trumbull Street. Come on over and join the live audience.We got interested in funeral Selfies, the practice more common than you might think among young people taking smart phone pictures of themselves at a funeral or memorial service.  You can well imagine our first reaction. Is there any basis on which this practice is defensible.We're always interested in public relations disasters, and this week they happened to Senator Rand Paul, in an odd case of plagiarism, Jay-Z , caught in a collaboration with Barney's. The upscale clothing store. Another public relations disaster is brewing a few blocks from where we sit as civil rights attorney Gloria Allred sets up yet  another  UConn press conference today. All this and more.Leave your comments below, email us at colin@wnpr.org, or tweet us @wnprcolin. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ok, Ok, you're a super-rational public radio listener but you live in a place drenched in supernatural legend. In fact, historians like David Hall and David Hackett-Fischer have argued that the new world was imbued with notions of magic and superstition from Jumpstreet. One of the paradoxes of the Puritan migration was that even as they imported a belief system that rejected popish superstition in favor of what they saw as leaner, cleaner Calvinist faith, they somehow also brought all kinds of magical nuttiness. And, you could say it never left. Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I've been writing a newspaper column for The Hartford Courant since 1982. For my first 15 years or so, I tended to write the column at The Hartford Courant. In the last ten years, I have written columns in the following places: a sports bar in San Francisco; a boat moving along the Rhine; the famous Brasserie Balzar in Paris; an outdoor clearing in the Yucatan jungle where, bizarrely, there was WiFi; and a living room in Kobe, Japan.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Salt! It's the only rock we eat!That gets us into some touchy territory. Some say that salt is a major factor for high blood pressure, and some say that it's more complicated than that. We can't NOT eat salt, but in the grand scheme of things, are we eating more now than ever, or way less?Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What do Lou Reed, President Taft, and this past weekend's violence in New Haven have in common? They're all part of our first episode of Mystery Surprise Monday Theater on today's Colin McEnroe Show, where we'll bring you up-to-the minute and interesting bits of cultural news, some from Connecticut, some much bigger. The news will be so new that we won't even know what we're going to air until we do it.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.