This hour we took your calls about anything you wanted to talk about.

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We’ve put on a holiday special every year for the last decade. But this year, for the first time, we did it in front of a (pretty large!) audience.

On the night of December 18, Colin got 10 performers together onstage, and they rocked their way through an 18-song setlist of holiday and holiday-adjacent classics.

There were nine different vocalists, three different pianists. Some of these folks had never met in person before soundcheck, but somehow it really worked!

This hour, live from the Foisie Family Ampitheater at Watkinson School in Hartford, it’s part one of our annual holiday spectacular!

GUESTS:

• Michelle Begley: Vocals and guitar, In Trine
• Kate Callahan: Vocals, In Trine
• Jim Chapdelaine: Guitar and vocals, The Shinolas
• Atla DeChamplain: Vocals, Atla & Matt
• Matt DeChamplain: Piano, Atla & Matt
• Lorne Entress: Drums and vocals, The Shinolas
• Latanya Farrell: Vocals
• Atticus Kelly: Piano and vocals, In Trine
• Steve Metcalf: Piano
• Cynthia Wolcott: Vocals, In Trine

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, Maegn Boone, Meg Dalton, Robyn Doyon-Aitken, Megan Fitzgerald, Dylan Reyes, and Lily Tyson contributed to this show.

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‘Tis the season for holiday movies. This hour, we look at this year's offerings from Netflix and Hallmark, discuss what makes a good holiday movie, and get some ideas for what to watch this holiday season.

GUESTS: 

• Laura Bradley: Entertainment and features reporter
• Amanda Hess: Critic at large for The New York Times

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This hour, we take a look at the legends of King Arthur. We discuss their evolution and why they endure.

Plus, we talk with author Lev Grossman about his new retelling of the King Arthur legend, The Bright Sword.

And, a conversation with an archeologist about excavating the history of Arthurian legends.

GUESTS: 

• Lev Grossman: Bestselling author of The Magicians Trilogy. His new book is The Bright Sword

• Leah Tether: Professor of Medieval Literature and Publishing at Bristol University, and Vice President of the International Courtly Literature Society

• Win Scutt: Archeologist and Senior Properties Curator for the West of England at English Heritage, a nonprofit that cares for over 400 historic monuments

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 Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired on July 30, 2024.

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Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their children moved into the house they’d had built at Nook Farm in Hartford — the house that we now call the Mark Twain House — in 1874, 150 years ago this year.

To celebrate that anniversary, this hour we present a new version of our 2015 interview with the late Hal Holbrook.

Holbrook was probably best known for his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, which he performed for 63 years — longer than Samuel Clemens used the Mark Twain moniker.

Beyond Mark Twain Tonight!, you probably know Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. He’s in a Dirty Harry movie. He’s in a Steven Spielberg movie. He’s in Wall Street and The Firm and John Carpenter’s The Fog. He appeared on Designing Women and The West Wing and The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy and Grey’s Anatomy.

Hal Holbrook won a Tony Award. He was nominated for 12 Emmys, and he won five. And he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Into the Wild.

We talked to Holbrook on the evening of February 3, 2015. He was two weeks shy of his 90th birthday — which birthday he celebrated by performing Mark Twain Tonight! at The Bushnell in Hartford.

Hal Holbrook died in 2021. He was 95.

GUEST:

• Hal Holbrook: Film, television, and stage actor

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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This interview was originally produced by Betsy Kaplan.

Colin McEnroe, Cat Pastor, and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, parts of which originally aired February 4, 2015, and June 17, 2023, in a different form.

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This hour we look at the art of the epigraph. We'll talk with writers about how they pick the quotes that open their books, what epigraphs can do well, how the business of epigraphs works, and what they mean for readers. Plus, a look at how some movies use epigraphs.

GUESTS: 

• Tajja Isen: Writer, editor, and voice actor. She is a contributing writer for The Walrus and author of Some of My Best Friends
• Courtney Maum: Writing coach, teacher, and the author of five books including Before and After the Book Deal and the memoir The Year of The Horses. She also writes the Substack titled “Before and After the Book Deal”
• David Edelstein: Film critic

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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.

This hour, the conversation winds around to corniness and sappiness with age, needless words like “personally,” Irishness, the dangers possibly coming to the free press and public media, the Green Bay Packers, bird friends … 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.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Say Nothing. Small Things Like These. Kneecap. Bad Sisters. All of Us Strangers. The Banshees of Inisherin and An Cailín Ciúin a couple years ago. Normal People and Derry Girls a few years before that.

Paul Mescal and Colin Farrell and Saoirse Ronin and Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan and Hozier and Andrew Scott and Daryl McCormack and Kerry Condon.

The list goes on.

Something’s going on with the Irish and Ireland in our movies and TV and elsewhere.

This hour, a Nose-ish look at the current Irish moment in our popular culture.

GUESTS:

• Will Hermes: Writes about music “and life’s other mysteries,” and he’s a longtime contributor to All Things Considered; he’s the author, most recently, of Lou Reed: The King of New York
• Nate Jones: A senior writer for Vulture and New York magazine covering movies and pop culture
• Róisín Lanigan: A contributing editor at The Fence Magazine and the author of the forthcoming novel I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There, and she writes the Substack Notions

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.

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.

Oxford University Press has named “brain rot” the word of the year for 2024. The term beat out five other finalists: “demure,” “dynamic pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy,” and “slop.” This hour, a look at brain rot, from Thoreau’s Walden through to social media.

GUESTS: 

• Casper Grathwohl: President of Oxford Languages at Oxford University Press
• Katie Notopoulos: Senior correspondent at Business Insider who writes about technology, business, and culture
• Laura Dassow Walls: Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, among other books

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Shakespeare, it turns out, is not immune to the culture wars, the book banning, the cancel culture (despite his being dead for more than four centuries). So, fine. Cancel Shakespeare, then, one argument goes. Because here’s the thing: Shakespeare’s plays and poems ARE dirty and smutty and gory — and that’s a big part of what makes them so great.

And: Earlier this year, the romantic comedy Anyone But You became the highest-grossing live-action Shakespeare adaptation ever made. So we look at Shakespeare as fertile rom-com IP, from 10 Things I Hate About You and beyond.

And finally, Bardcore is a thing. The one and only Hildegard von Blingin’ joins us.

GUESTS:

• Maureen Lee Lenker: A senior writer at Entertainment Weekly and the author of the novel It Happened One Fight

• Drew Lichtenberg: Associate director at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC

• Hildegard von Blingin’: A singer and illustrator

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, Cat Pastor, and Lily Tyson contributed to this show, which originally aired on June 14, 2024.

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.