Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. The end of the world has been something humans have been preoccupied with for a very long time. This hour, we talk about how we imagine the world ending, and what it says about us.

GUESTS:

• Dorian Lynskey: Journalist and author of multiple books, most recently Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World. He is also co-host of the Origin Story podcast.

• Brian Slattery: Freelance writer and editor. He is the author of four novels. His latest short story is “Clouds” which appears in the anthology Shadow Lab

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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 Dylan Reyes contributed to this show, which originally aired on February 4, 2025.

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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 Squid Game, the routinization of protests, the elusive Jeffrey Epstein report, 9/11 and the movies Fight Club and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Harvey, Keurig coffee makers, too much plastic everywhere … Anything. (Seemingly) everything.

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

You can now watch our calls shows on Connecticut Public’s YouTube. Subscribe and get notified when we go live. Or 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, 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.

We think of dinosaurs as figures from science, from history, from the fossil record.

But if I say “Tyrannosaurus rex,” do you picture bones arranged in a museum — or do you picture that one scene in Jurassic Park?

The more you think about it, the more you realize that your whole real concept of dinosaurs comes from movies and TV and kids’ books and comic books.

So this hour, with the latest Jurassic World at No. 1 at the box office, a look at dinosaurs in our popular culture.

GUESTS:

• Paul Brinkman: An associate professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University and the author of multiple books, including The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Hannah McGregor: An academic and podcaster and the author of Clever Girl: Jurassic Park
• Megan Schuster: A senior editor at The Ringer, where she hosts The Ringer F1 Show
• Tom Whyman: An academic philosopher, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Liverpool, and the author of Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.