Colin McEnroe Show - RSS/Podcast

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You could argue that two trends are in a state of modern collision. Women are hitting puberty earlier than they used to, and their breasts are arriving in larger sizes.  There's a complex matrix of factors making this happen. Average bra size in the fifties was a B. A British bra manufacturer now makes an L cup. Meanwhile, we're watching an explosion in women's sports driven here in the U....

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, asexuals seem like brothers and sisters from a distant solar system.    Western societies are gradually growing accustomed -- with varying degrees of comfort -- to the initials in LGBT, but what about A? On our show today. we'll explore the idea that some people have no sexual orientation -- not because of a hormonal deficiency or a positio...

Come on, you must be outraged about something! These are the headlines: "Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World." "Dave Chappelle's Hate-On For Hartford Called 'Sad,' 'Asinine.'" "No Exception For Newington Veteran Being Evicted For Smoking."  Does it ever feel like somebody just WANTS you to get mad? Today on the Nose we'll talk about outrage...

We try new products all the time, rarely with any insight into how they came to exist and what it took to bring them to market.   Barry Nalebuff wants to change that.   Nalebuff -- co-founder of Honest Tea -- is a soft drink tycoon, but he's also still what he was before he went into the beverage business:a professor at the Yale School of Management.   Barry thinks the s...

If you seek parallels between J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon they're easy to find.   Both were literary geniuses. Both were publicity-shunning recluses. Both men were psychosexually arrested by God knows what primal wound. Salinger seemed able to bond only with very young women and girls. Pynchon had a pattern -- somehow linked to inability to form normal alliances --  of hijacking th...

We have in the works, for next week, a show about J.D. Salinger, the American writer most at odds with his own greatness.    Little did we suspect that Dave Chappelle, the comedian most at odds with his own greatness, would come to Hartford and have peculiar and very contrary experience with the audience here and create a national stir by his refusal to perform for them.   You'l...

Thirteen years ago, I wrote an amusing but fairly ignorant op-ed piece for the New York Times triggered by watching a planetarium movie narrated by Tom Hanks. I wrote: "I miss the days of the anonymous, nobody-special narrator. Playing next door to Mr. Hanks at the museum was a Mount Everest Imax movie narrated by Liam Neeson. Take a cab to get there, and Isaac Hayes tells you to take your stuf...

Through the lens of time, the anti-disco backlash looks a little ugly. What was disco, really? It started as an underground dance movement propelled by blacks, gays, and Puerto Ricans. It was a liberating and hedonistic music of the oppressed, and people from those groups gathered and mixed in the early downtown clubs.   Yes, it eventually was hijacked by the bridge and tunnel crowd and...

Today's show was triggered by a confluence.   "Orange Is The New Black," a Netflix series based on Piper Kerman's memoir of a year spent at the Danbury federal women's prison, has become a favorite of critics and audiences.   Meanwhile, federal corrections officials have been pursuing a plan to convert Danbury back to a men's prison. Kerman took to the op-ed page of the New York...

Today it's lobsters, eels and seaweed.    We like to eat things that come out of the water, but we're not always smart about taking care of the happy aquatic hunting grounds. Lobster harvests have seen some bumper crops recently, but that could lead to a false sense of security. There's a sweet spot, temp-wise, for lobsters, and if things get too warm in the water, we could go from feas...

We'll spend most of The Nose today talking about the drama of Chelsea a/k/a Bradley Manning and about series of citizen rescues that crackled through the news of the week.   The Manning case brings up a complex series of issues, including the possibility that Bradley Manning's formal announcement that he is a woman and wants to be called Chelsea is at least 15 percent risky legal strate...

Certain American places are, indisputably, scenes.   Greenwich Village: at least twice. For the Beats in the Fifties and again for the folk movement in the early 60s. Harlem in the 1920s. Haight-Ashbury, for the hippie scene of the late 1960s and maybe even the Ferlinghetti driven North Beach Beat scene too. Montmartre was probably the ultimate scene for about 100 years. Degas, Picasso,...

Because Generation X is eternally younger than the Baby Boomers, we just assumed they’d be eternally young. But a person born in 1965 turns 50 in two more years. Generation X somehow went gliding into mid-life without the rest of us noticing. And, Gen-X’ers would say thats pretty typical, that they’ve never been part of anyone else’s plans from the time in their childhood when their parents...

Today's show is three segments which are interlinked, even though we didn't exactly plan it that way.    We'll begin by looking at the highly competitive four-way race in New Haven's mayoral primary, scheduled for Sept. 10. But we'll look at it with the assistance of the New Haven Independent, one of the nation's most successful nonprofit local news sites.    From there, we'll j...