The Colin McEnroe Show

If you ask an AI chatbot what its favorite color is, chances are it’ll say blue. What’s going on? This hour, we look at why so many people love the color blue, and what blue means in art and culture and our lexicon. Plus: Why are Democrats blue and Republicans red? And, the universe is getting less blue?

GUESTS:

• Kory Stamper: Lexicographer, and author of True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to De...

In April, 2010, we did a segment on the concept of the mesofact, a certain kind of data point that feels fixed even though it’s actually always slowly changing. And we’ve gone back to the idea every now and again ever since.

This hour, a look at three things about the world that changed pretty dramatically while you were thinking about other stuff.

Hey, did you know there’s a fifth ocean now? Hey, did you know tha...

A study shows that AI chatbots often engage in sycophantic behavior. Just like some humans. This hour, we take a look at sycophants in literature and in politics. And we talk about sycophancy and artificial intelligence.

GUESTS:

• Mark Parker: Professor Emeritus of English at James Madison University and co-author of Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy

• Virginia Heffernan: Writes a regular...

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 — calls about grammar, gardening, long-distance dialing, autotune. Anything. Everything.

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

In other words: Give us a call during the 1 p.m. EDT hour about...

Furious is a Hulu Original crime drama-thriller series created by Elizabeth Meriwether, who also created New Girl and The Dropout and other things. It is inspired by the 1987 thriller Black Widow, which is also about a female serial killer and the female cop (a DOJ data analyst in 1987 and a new FBI agent here) who’s trying to catch her. Furious stars Emmy Rossum, Lola Petticrew, Quincy...

What can you say about the sun? It sits at the center of our solar system and has, over time, been at the center of religions, scriptures, songs, art, and countless other aspects of our culture.

We’ve relied on its light, heat, and gravity for as long as we’ve been around, and we continue to find ways to harness its energy for our daily needs.

This hour, we look at the place our sun holds kind of literally at the center...

What does it mean for a work to be incomplete? This hour, we look at a wide span of unfinished projects, from posthumous novels to highways to nowhere.

Guests:

• Alex Belth is the editor of Esquire Classic and author of the substack “Dig This with Alex Belth”
• Jacob Proctor is the Gilbert and Ann Kinney New York Collector at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art and the curator of &ldq...

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently invoked the Fifth Amendment in a Senate Hearing. This hour: we take a look at our Constitution's Fifth Amendment to learn why it exists and what it means for all of us.

GUESTS:

• Akhil Reed Amar: Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His latest book is: Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920, which was a winner of the annual Abraham Li...

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 Todd Blanche, Open AI’s Hugging Face hack, the Iran war, hopium, Connecticut’s highways at night, POSSLQs … Anything. (Seemingly) everything.

These shows are fun for us, and ...

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the 38th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is the 15th movie in the Multiverse Saga and the second movie in the MCU’s Phase Six. I didn’t really follow most of that, but this next bit will be a little clearer, I think: Brand New Day is the 11th theatrically-released feature-length Spider-Man movie, and it’s the eighth movie to feature Tom Holland as Peter Parker...

Typos and misprints are as old as writing and printing. This hour, we take a look at them from the "Wicked Bible" to National Park signs and your email inbox. And: the changing status of human typos in the age of AI.

GUESTS:

• Rachel Churner: Art critic, editor, and professor. She is a co-curator with Geoff Kaplan of the exhibit “Beauties of My Style: Errata and the Printed Mistake” at Yale’s Sterling Memo...

Homer’s Odyssey, a 12,000-line, nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, is one of the foundational texts of Western literature. (It’s also one of the oldest surviving sequels!)

It has inspired a list of movies as varied as Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.

But there haven’t been very m...

How do you make a 100-meter telescope that folds down to three meters so you can tuck it inside a space vehicle? How do you make a heart stent that folds out inside the human body? In each case, researchers have turned to masters of origami, the thousand-year-old art of paper folding.

This hour, a look at how paper folding went from a quaint, simple hobby to an extensive form of art that can achieve hundre...

What would it mean if nothing matters? This hour, a look at the philosophy of nihilism, and how it shows up online and in children's books.

GUESTS:

• Nolen Gertz: Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twentein the Netherlands. He is author of books including Nihilism and Nihilism and Technology

• Charlie Warzel: Staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of its technology podcas...

Backrooms is the feature directing debut of Kane Parsons. It is written by Will Soodik and based on Parsons’ YouTube series of the same name, which was inspired by the The Backrooms creepypasta. Backrooms is A24’s highest-grossing movie to date. It is the fifth-highest-grossing independent movie ever made and the second-highest-grossing horror movie of 2026 so far.

And: Obsession is the sec...

Bob Dylan turned 85 years old in May. His first album, 1962’s Bob Dylan, is in its 65th year on record store shelves.

We’re at a point where, for most of us, there has simply never been a popular culture in which Dylan wasn’t a towering figure whose influence seems to touch, well, everything.

This hour, a look at Bob Dylan at 85.

GUESTS:

• Noah Baerman: A pianist, composer, and educator
• Fred Bals: Hosted the&nb...

This hour, we explore the history and economy of fruits, from the strange to the inedible. Plus, we interrogate what it means for fruits to be seasonal, and why the berries in the supermarket your supermarket aisle might be tasteless!

Additionally: why do we think of the Forbidden Fruit as an apple?

GUESTS:

• Lee Reich: Author of several gardening books, including “Fruit: From the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collectio...

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 war with Iran, President Trump’s July 16 primetime speech, President Trump and FIFA and the World Cup Final, Hampshire College, Lucky on Apple TV, usage of words like “proxy,” the Thucydides ...

Cmd + Z! What kinds of things can we undo and when should we?

This hour, we discuss stories of undoing: domestic and global politics in the Trump-era, a project that transformed a river’s ecology, and whether Pluto really deserved that demotion.

GUESTS:

• Bill Curry: Lawyer and politician who has been a two-time Democratic nominee for Governor of Connecticut and a White House advisor in the administration of Bill Clinton
• J...