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

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

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

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)

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

From the Golden Globes, to global conflicts, to elections, prediction markets have moved into the mainstream. What happens when we can bet on anything? What are the cultural impacts of that? This hour, we take stock of the status of prediction markets, and look at what they might do to politics and polling. Plus, a look at the "Wisdom of Crowds".

GUESTS:

• Kate Knibbs: Senior Writer at WIRED
• Danny Funt: Reporter and author of Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling
• Sarah Hughes-Berheim: Postdoctoral researcher in the Special Education Department at Vanderbilt University
• James Surowiecki: Journalist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds

Music featured (in order):

• Future Lover – Thee Sacred Souls
• Everybody Knows – Leonard Cohen
• Something’s Gotta Give – Sammy Davis Jr.
• We Can’t Predict the Future – The Flaming Lips
• What Comes Next? – Jonathan Groff, Hamilton
• A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall – Bob Dylan

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Anthropic, cataract surgery, the burrito vs. bowl debate, Saturday Night Live, the general unhappiness in the U.S., plastics … 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):

• Destination Heaven – Euphoria Again & Dogwood Tales
• Farther Along – Ron Carter, Ricky Dillard
• Coming Up Roses – Harry Styles (orch. Jules Buckley)
• Love, Love, Love – Stephen Sanchez
• Sirius – Katherine Priddy
• Blind – Yonder Mountain String Band
• With a Little Luck – Paul McCartney, Wings

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman premiered in 1949. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. It’s been said that it’s “probably the most successful modern play ever published.”

This hour, with a new Broadway revival in previews, and with Peter Jacobson playing the title role in a new production at Hartford Stage, a look at Arthur Miller’s masterpiece of American drama, Death of a Salesman.

GUESTS:

• Melia Bensussen: Artistic director at Hartford Stage and the director of their current production of Death of a Salesman
• Peter Jacobson: An actor; he’s playing Willy Loman in Hartford Stage’s current production of Death of a Salesman
• Stephen Marino: Founding editor of The Arthur Miller Journal and the author, most recently, of Arthur Miller’s New York: Visions of the City

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, Eugene Amatruda, and Robyn Doyon-Aitken contributed to this show.

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.