Daniel Dennett was one of the most famous philosophers in the world, one of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.”

Dennett died April 19 at age 82.

This hour, our 2015 conversation with Daniel Dennett, as recorded onstage at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford.

GUEST:

• Daniel Dennett: Was a philosopher, writer and and the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

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Colin McEnroe, Betsy Kaplan, Dylan Reyes, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired January 21, 2016, in a different form.

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It took almost a week to select the jurors and alternates for the Manhattan trial of former President Donald Trump. This hour is all about juries. We'll talk about jury selection, how to root out potential bias, and the process of choosing an impartial jury in this day and age. Plus, we'll look at depictions of juries in popular culture. And, some of the jury selection questions have to do with what media a person consumes, so we'll look at what the media we consume can say about us, and discuss media bias.

GUESTS: 

• Renato Mariotti: Trial attorney and partner at the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP. He is a former federal prosecutor, and host of the “It’s Complicated” podcast
• Nancy Marder: Professor of Law, Director of the Justice John Paul Stevens Jury Center and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and the Humanities at the Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Tech. She is author of The Power of the Jury: Transforming Citizens Into Jurors
• Vanessa Otero: Creator of the Media Bias Chart and the Founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode. 

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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Rupert Holmes won two Tony Awards for his musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood. His single “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. His dramedy Remember WENN was AMC’s first original scripted series. And his newest novel, Murder Your Employer, was a New York Times bestseller.

This hour: Rupert Holmes.

GUEST:

• Rupert Holmes: Playwright, composer, singer-songwriter, and author

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

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Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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In January, we did a show that wondered both how much the American Civil War speaks to the present American moment and how likely a new American Civil War might be. Well, movies and television have now, finally caught up with us.

Civil War is the fourth film written and directed by Alex Garland. It tells the story of the end of a future second American Civil War as four journalists — played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson — move through it. Civil War is currently the No. 1 movie in the country.

And: Manhunt is a seven-episode limited series on Apple TV+. It is based on the book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson. It’s a conspiracy thriller that focuses on War Secretary Edwin Stanton (as played by Tobias Menzies) leading the chase and on John Wilkes Booth (Anthony Boyle) as he’s being chased.

GUESTS:

• Taneisha Duggan: Associate producer at Octopus Theatricals
• Xandra Ellin: A producer at Pineapple Street Studios
• Frankie Graziano: Host of The Wheelhouse on Connecticut Public
• Matthew Warshauer: Professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, and he’s the author of the forthcoming book Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation: The Real Story of September 11

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Our programming is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Please consider supporting this show and Connecticut Public with a donation today.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This hour, we've got one show with three topics. First, the Trump 'hush money' trial; next, the history of slouch-shaming; and finally, the Golden Bachelor's divorce news.

GUESTS: 

• Mark Joseph Stern: Senior writer at Slate covering courts and the law

• Beth Linker: Professor and Chair of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recently-released book is called “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America.”

• Kay Brown: Host of the Bachelor recap podcast, “The Betchelor”

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, comes out Friday. So this hour, we are taking a look at the idea of the actual tortured poet. We talk about where the idea of tortured poets came from, learn about the nature of creativity, and hear from a poet about where their inspiration comes from.

GUESTS: 

• Roland Greene: Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Center at Stanford University. He is editor in chief of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. His newest book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes 
• James C. Kaufman: Professor of Educational Psychology at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books, including The Creativity Advantage and The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity
• Sandra Simonds: Writer, professor, and author of eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Triptychs. She is also the author of the novel Assia

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode. 

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

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We imagine pirates to be the quintessential rule-breakers — but really, they had their own strictly-followed codes.

How did 18th-century pirates dictate their own community standards? How did they create social mobility in an age when changing one's social status was nearly impossible?

This hour, we join pirate historian Rebecca Simon to find out!

GUEST:

• Rebecca Simon: Pirate historian with a doctorate in history from King’s College London; she’s the author of several books about piracy, including simon.com/product/the-pirates-code-laws-and-life-aboard-ship-2023/">The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show, which originally aired on October 11, 2023.

Our programming is made possible thanks to listeners like you. Please consider supporting this show and Connecticut Public with a donation today.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ve been doing these shows a couple times a month where we don’t book any guests, where we fill the hour with your calls. And your calls have been interesting and surprising and amusing.

This hour, the conversation winds around to an essay about NPR in The Free Press, NPR’s response to the essay, (our friend) David Folkenflik’s reporting on the essay and NPR’s response and such … Oh, and Scrabble … Anything. (Seemingly) everything.

These shows are fun for us, and they seem to be fun for you, too. So we did another one.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ripley is an eight-episode limited series adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. It is the first serialized screen version of those stories following five feature film adaptations, including the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law. The Netflix series stars Adam Scott, Dakota Fanning, and Johnny Flynn. It is created, written, and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian (who also created The Night Of) and shot — in black and white — by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit.

And: Scrabble Together is a new, forthcoming version of the classic board game that’s coming to Europe from Mattel. It’s a faster-paced, collaborative version of Scrabble that’s being billed as less “intimidating.” It will not be available in the U.S.

GUESTS:

• Irene Papoulis: Teaches writing at Trinity College, and she’s the author of The Essays Only You Can Write
• Lindsay Lee Wallace: Writes about culture, health care and health equity, and other stuff, too

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If I say “cult classic,” what do you think of? Probably an underground movie that built up an intense following over time, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room, right? Or maybe even something a bit more mainstream like The Big Lebowski?

But where’s the limit here, if there is one? Is Blade Runner a cult movie? Or Pulp Fiction? Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Office Space? Slap Shot? (I mean: Slap Shot?!?)

This hour, a look at a genre, a cross section of cinema history that seems to include everything from all-time classics like A Clockwork Orange to all-time terribles like Plan 9 from Outer Space and many, many weird and not-even-so-weird things in between: the cult classic.

GUESTS:

• Millie De Chirico: Co-author of TCM Underground: 50 Must-See Films from the World of Classic Cult and Late-Night Cinema and co-host of the I Saw What You Did podcast
• David Edelstein: America’s Greatest Living Film Critic
• Sam Hatch: Co-hosts The Culture Dogs on WWUH
• Kevin O’Toole: Co-hosts The Culture Dogs on WWUH

This show was produced with Sajina Shrestha.

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donate

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.