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 Dreamtime podcast, covering Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host, Bob Dylan
• Sean Latham: Director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, editor of The World of Bob Dylan, and the writer and narrator of It Ain’t Me You’re Looking For: Bob Dylan at 80
• Gayle Wald: Professor of American studies at George Washington University; her most recent book is It’s Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television

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 and Cat Pastor contributed to this show, which originally aired May 20, 2021.

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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 Collection” and “Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden”
• Evan Lentz: Commercial Fruit Production Specialist and Educator at the University of Connecticut Extension.
• Azzan Yadin-Israel: Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University and the author of “Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple”.

Music featured (in order):

• No Frills Cumbia (Sensory Fruit) – Kevin MacLeod
• Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie – Jay at the Techniques
• Strawberry Fields – The Beatles
• Coconut – Harry Nilsson
• Underneath the Apple Tree – Carmen McRae
• Adam Lay Ybounden – The Cambridge Singers as conducted by John Ritter
• Garden of Eden – Celtic Woman

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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 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 Trap … 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):

• Soarin’ – Ginger Root
• The Game of Love – Michelle Branch, New Radicals
• let’s go out and play – ganavya (this is very cool)
• Horns of a Bill – Fiona Apple
• I Belong to the Sky (Bright Side Mix) – Peter Gabriel
• Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) – Margo Price, Joan Baez, Memphis Mariachi

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

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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
• John Magee: The Programs Supervisor for New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department and former Fish Habitat Biologist of 19 years
• Alan Stern: Planetary scientist and commercial astronaut, best known as the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. His career in exploration spans the solar system

Music featured (in order):

• Mistakes – Lake Street Dive
• I Wanna Be Around – Sammy Davis Jr.
• Erase/Rewind – The Cardigans
• Mercy Mercy Me – Marvin Gaye
• Into the River – Starling Arrow, Chloe Smith, Rising Appalachian
• Corner of the Sky – Ben Platt

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.

This show was produced by Amanda Adams.

Colin McEnroe, Robyn Doyon-Aitken and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Invite is the third movie directed by Olivia Wilde, her followup to Don’t Worry Darling. It’s a relationship comedy set almost entirely in a single apartment, and it stars Penélope Cruz, Edward Norton, Seth Rogen, and Wilde. It is the fifth international remake of the 2020 Spanish movie The People Upstairs (Sentimental) (and a sixth remake is expected in 2027). For the two weekends of The Invite’s limited release, it was the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. on a per-screen basis.

And: The Featherweight is a 2024 movie that tells the story of boxer Willie Pep in the period before his 1964 comeback. It is set mostly in Hartford, and it was shot in Hartford in 2021. (Disclosure: The production used Connecticut Public’s Hartford building as its headquarters, and The Featherweight is presented in association with Connecticut Public Television.)

GUESTS:

• Sam Hadelman: Director of public relations at Dark Matter Media
• Irene Papoulis: Taught writing for a long time at Trinity College
• Gene Seymour: A “writer, professional spectator, pop-culture maven, and jazz geek,” and he writes the That Gene Seymour Substack
• Lindsay Lee Wallace: A writer and journalist whose latest work includes the cover stories for the four most recent issues of Bat Conservation International’s Batsmagazine

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 Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Irving Berlin. Cole Porter. Rodgers and Hart. Rodgers and Hammerstein. George and Ira Gershwin. We love all those songs. There’s a reason they’ve become standards. And a fresh, exciting, new version of, for instance, “Blue Skies” can be fresh and exciting.

But what about fresh, exciting, new standards from fresh, exciting, new songwriters?

This hour, the great jazz singer-songwriter Nicole Zuraitis joins us in studio to talk a little about her brand new album, The Devil I Knew, and a lot about the idea of a modern songbook — a new, contemporary canon of standards to supplement the Great American Songbook we all know and love.

GUESTS:

• Kat Reinhert: A singer, songwriter, and professor of songwriting at Berklee College of Music
• Nicole Zuraitis: A Grammy-winning jazz singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, and arranger; she is the founder, director, and curator of the Modern Songbook Society

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 and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all love an underdog story. But why? This hour, we take a look at underdogs from David and Goliath to Rocky to The World Cup.

GUESTS:

• A.J. Jacobs: Author of The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning. His previous books include Drop Dead Healthy and The Year of Living Biblically. He is also host of the “Hello, Puzzlers!” podcast. His Substack is “Experimental Living”
• Louisa Thomas: Staff writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, among other books
• Maria Tatar: Professor Emerita of Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is author of books including The Heroine with 1001 Faces and Arachnomania: Spiders and the Cultural Work They Do for Us
• Iceman John Scully: Former World Ranked Light Heavyweight Contender and a Current Boxing Trainer

Music featured (in order):

• Gonna Fly Now – Maynard Ferguson
• Underdog – Spoon
• Born Under A Bad Sign – Albert King
• Pick Yourself Up – Ella Fitzgerald
• David and Goliath – Take 6
• Gonna Fly Now – Rocky Orchestra
• Punching Above My Weight – Snakecharmer

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Biblical scholar James Tabor says that Mary–the mother of Jesus–is “the best known, least known woman in history.” This hour, we’ll get to know Mary a little better and talk about why some people are obsessed with preserving her purity at the expense of her humanity. And, we talk with (The Reverend) Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones from Emory University about Mary mythology, The Black Madonna, and the myriad ways Mary is depicted in art and culture.

GUESTS:

• James D. Tabor is a biblical scholar, and a retired professor of religious studies at the University Of North Carolina at Charlotte. He’s the author of The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus.   

• (The Rev.) Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones is Assistant Professor of Theology and Africana Studies at Emory University. She’s a constructive theologian and scholar of Black religion specializing in Mariology, Black feminist and womanist thought, and theological anthropology. She’s the author of Immaculate Misconceptions: A Black Mariology. 

   

MUSIC FEATURED (in order):

• Mary On A Cross – Ghost

• Along Comes Mary – The Association

• The Wind Cries Mary – Jimi Hendrix

• Mary Rock the Baby – Jarell Smalls

• Like a Prayer – Madonna

• Lady Madonna (Theme from Grace Under Fire) – Aretha Franklin

• Mary, Did You Know? – The Braxtons

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, Dylan Reyes, and Isaac Moss contributed to this episode, which originally aired on February 18, 2026.

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 ticks, the electoral college, nursing, bird doulas, and ambidextrous presidencies … 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):

• Tomorrow, Again – FATHERS (Nate Smith, Kiefer, CARRTOONS, & Kenny Beats)
• Yes – Lucy Woodward
• Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea – Bria Skonberg
• Candle Box – The Mountain Goats
• Past the Veil – Shannon Lay
• Just for a Moment – Sophia Galate, Dende

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

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In 2025, Stevie Wonder turned 75, and our friend the jazz pianist Noah Baerman put out an album of covers of Wonder’s “message music.”

This hour, a look at Stevie Wonder as musical icon, as important civil rights figure, as utterly timeless songsmith.

Plus: some in-studio performances of Stevie Wonder classics.

GUESTS:

• Noah Baerman: A pianist, composer, and educator; his newest album is Right Now Volume 4: Visions of Steveland
• Kevin Gaines: The Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia
• Erica Tracy: A vocalist, songwriter, and arts curator

MUSIC FEATURED (in order):

• You Haven’t Done Nothing – Stevie Wonder
• Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours) – Stevie Wonder
• Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You) – Stevie Wonder
• Higher Ground – Noah Baerman
• Happy Birthday – Stevie Wonder
• Big Brother – Stevie Wonder
• Black Man – Stevie Wonder
• Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart – Stevie Wonder

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 and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show, which originally aired December 12, 2025.

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.