We’ve been doing these shows 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 the Iran war, what to do with the old stuff of deceased parents, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Gov. Lowell Weicker, our Mary show, whether or not you can tell time by a cat’s eye … Anything. (Seemingly) everything.

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

Music featured (in order):

• Can I Believe You – Fleet Foxes
• Joy Spring – Karrin Allyson
• I’m In Trouble – Alessia Cara, Norah Jones
• A Brother (Just Like You) – Nnenna Freelon
• Both Can Be True – Trousdale
• Anyone in Love – Jalen Ngonda
• June It’s Gonna Happen – Rumer

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Josephine Riesman, author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, argues that understanding WWE can help us understand President Donald Trump and his politics. This hour, we learn about WWE and its impact on Trump, and discuss the experience and appeal of watching wrestling.

GUESTS:

• Josephine Riesman: Author of Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America

• Tim Kail: Creator of “The Work of Wrestling” website and podcast. He is also the host and producer of “The Sarah Lawrence College Podcast”

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, Meg Dalton, and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show, which originally aired on March 7, 2025.

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

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How do we begin to understand the full economic, human, and environmental impacts of war? This hour we talk with someone who is doing that math.

Plus, a look at the opportunity costs of spending on war. And, the costs of The American Revolution.

GUESTS:

• Neta Crawford: Professor of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor at The Costs of War Project. She is also author of books including The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions

• Joseph Ellis: Author of fourteen books, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, and National Book Award winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. His newest book is The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

Music featured (in order):

• The World Is A Ghetto – War
• Loose Ends – Sergio Mendes, Justin Timberlake, Pharoahe Monch
• The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar – Bob Dylan
• When the War Came – The Decemberists
• Hiway 9 – Eliza Gilkyson
• Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down) – Hamilton Original Broadway Cast

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March Madness is here!

And so the only logical thing is to get improv comedian Julia Pistell and the actual Bill Curry together to talk basketball for an hour on the radio. For the 16th* time.

That may not be the only logical thing to do. It may be that that’s not a logical thing to do at all.

But we’re doing it anyway.

*It’s our 16th one of these, unless it isn’t. Our story is that we’ve done this every year since 2010 except for 2020 — which is to say, every year our show has been on that there actually was a March Madness tourney. And we’re pretty sure our story is true. One of those years, the show was actually about birds. But so what?

GUESTS:

• Bill Curry: Playing the part of Bill Curry
• Mike Pesca: Hosts the independent daily podcast The Gist
• Julia Pistell: A founding member of Sea Tea Improv, among a number of other things
• Elizabeth Davis: The 12th president of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina

Music featured (in order):

• D-Code – Dust Devil
• This Happy Madness – Frank Sinatra (ft. Antônio Carlos Jobim)
• I Wish I Could Go Back To College – Avenue Q
• The Paladins Song – Furman University Fight Song
• Ballad of Paladin – Johnny Western
• I Wish (Radio Edit) – Skee-Lo
• Basketball (edit) – Kurtis Blow

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We’ve been doing these shows 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. So we did another one.

This hour, the conversation winds around to America 250, Oasis, bird songs, the SAVE Act, Trump, natural lawns … Anything. (Seemingly) everything.

Music Featured (in order):

• bite my tongue – wilt
  won’t make it out alive – Nicole Zuraitis, Larry Goldings
• Just Say You Want Me – Lo Steele
• Teach Me Tonight – Ledisi
• I Do, I Do – Dua Saleh
• Penny In The Lake – Ratboys
• We Made It – Sammy Rae and the Friends ft. CELISSE

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 98th Academy Awards were Sunday night. KPop Demon Hunters swept its two nominations. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein cleaned up in the craft categories and won three awards.

But the big question going into the night was what would win the big awards. Would it be Sinners, with its record-setting 16 nominations, or the seemingly inevitable One Battle After Another?

Inevitability won out. One Battle After Another won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson.

This hour, The Nose reacts to the Oscars — the awards themselves, the ceremony as television, the fashion, the memes, Conan O’Brien’s turn as host — the whole thing.

GUESTS:

• Shawn Murray: A stand-up comedian, writer, and the host of the Nobody Asked Shawn podcast
• Vivian Nabeta: Director of digital marketing for Connecticut State Community College
• Gene Seymour: A “writer, professional spectator, pop-culture maven, and jazz geek

Music featured (in order):

• There’s No Business Like Show Business – The Original Movie Orchestra
• Peg – Steely Dan
• Everything’s Come Up Roses – The Replacements
• I Lied to You (Live at the Oscars) – Miles Canton, Shaboozey, Brittany Howard, Eric Gales, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram
• Golden (Live at the Oscars) – EJAE, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami
• The Way We Were – Barbra Streisand (but the original proper version)

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Mike Pesca is one of our very favorite guests — on any number of topics.

His book, Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History, is a whole series of earth-shattering, hypothetical, what-if questions (and posited answers to said earth-shattering, hypothetical, what-if questions):

What if a blimp full of money had exploded over world track headquarters in 1952? What if Nixon had been good at football? What if Bobby Fischer had received proper psychiatric help? What if the Dodgers hadn’t left Brooklyn? What if basketball rims were smaller than basketballs? What if the 1999 U.S. women’s national soccer team had lost the Women’s World Cup? And yes: What if the Olympics had never dropped tug of war?

It goes on and on.

Pesca joins us for the hour.

GUESTS:

• Will Leitch: Contributing editor at New York magazine, founder of Deadspin, and a whole bunch of other things
• Mike Pesca: Host of The Gist and the author of Upon Further Review
• Louisa Thomas: Staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams

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, Carlos Mejia, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired June 7, 2018.

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Trump administration’s messaging around the war with Iran feels reminiscent of stuff like … cowboy movies. And video games. And the manosphere. This hour, a look at the rhetoric around the war and where it’s all coming from.

GUESTS:

• Casey Ryan Kelly: Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and author of books including Manifesting Violence: White Terrorism, Digital Culture, and the Rhetoric of Replacement
• Jonathan Guyer: Program Director at the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group, and a reporter and editor focused on foreign policy, national security, and the Middle East. He is host of the podcast “None of the Above”
• Roger Stahl: Author and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. He is director of the documentary Theaters of War

Music featured (in order):

• “Hoe-Down” from Rodeo – Aaron Copland, NYO-USA, Michael Tilson Thomas
• You Should Have Seen the Other Guy – Nathaniel Rateliff
• Under My Thumb – Rolling Stones
• Son of Your Father – Elton John
• Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other – Orville Peck and Willie Nelson
• I Am a Rock – Simon and Garfunkel

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.