PODRE

There are many ways of eating your child, but only a handful of reasons one might do so. In this edition of PODRE: Bad Dads, Chris & Brad search for answers in the literature of the Italian Middle Ages and in the 9th circle of hell of our own current politics. As ever, we bring you the baddest dads of yesterday, today, and tomorrow here on PODRE. Don't be one of them! 

Brad Franco's book on Siena is here.

The Count Ugal...

Writer, professor, and gourmand John Harvey returns to PODRE for a very special edition of Bad Dads. Chris, Brad, and John look to their beloved poets of ancient Greece to determine which is worse: being a deadbeat dad, murdering your father and marrying your mother, or simply swallowing your children whole without even so much as a nice sauce or side vegetable. We also reach back into the past to hear Julian at age three teaching ...

PODRE is back with two new miniseries to get you through the summer. First up: Bad Dads, in which Chris Brunt & cohost Brad Franco discuss, argue, and occasionally agree on the worst dads in the history of humanity. We all need something to aspire to, and what we've brought you is the bare minimum--the bar we all must clear. Please, please, be better than these dads.

In this episode, we asked to speak to the manager and wen...

It's the season finale of PODRE. Congrats to us! To help us go out in style, George Saunders is here. The MacArthur Genius, the Man Booker Award winner, the National Book Award Finalist, the author of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO and TENTH OF DECEMBER and countless other surreal literary bangers. We talk about teaching Russian literature, how to see the best in people, how to write your dream novel, the all-too-human fatherly grief of...

What's it like to meet your father at twenty-eight years old? What's it like to find out you have a son at fifty-eight? For once, we have answers. Michael Frontain, biological father of your host, and beloved grandpa to your other host Julian, is here to tell the story of our meeting and the development of our relationship. It is... not... unmoving. We didn't not cry a little.

Then, an old friend-of-the-pod stops by t...

Dads matter, yes. But do they matter... as much? Are there fundamental differences in the roles of mothers and fathers? And if there are, is that ok? What do we really mean by "coparenting" and how much more involved is this younger generation of fathers in all of the family business? Literary critic and professor Dr. Monika Gehlawat sits down for a discussion about all this plus the value of parental differences, whether...

It's time to talk about moms. Difficult, one-of-a-kind, ride-or-die moms. Four-time Moth champ, memoirist, king of the one man show, and "Stories in High Heels" TikTok phenom Jamie Brickhouse is here to remember his Mama Jean, to work out why storytelling matters in our family relationships, and why we can't change until our stories do. We also talk about queer identity in families, growing up in East Texas, and...

What if, as a thought experiment, we concede that everything is, in fact, "basically fine?" Even, maybe... "pretty good?" What if we're each of us intrinsically Not-A-Terrible-Father? In that hypothetical dimension of reality, would this podcast still exist? Philosopher, supremely confident father, and cohost of the Very Bad Wizards podcast Tamler Sommers is here to help us delve further into this Borgesian...

Darkness in the family. It happens. How do we move forward as people and as parents when there are violent, traumatic experiences lurking back there in our early life? Friend of the pod, dad, author, and charming devil Daniel Magariel (ONE OF THE BOYS, Scribner 2017 & WALK THE DARKNESS DOWN, Bloombury 2023) is here to enlighten and delight us with harrowing tales of an addict father, how trauma can be channeled into autobiograp...

Has PODRE ever been credited with reviving an entire literary genre? No, but our guest today has. Mary Karr, author of THE LIARS CLUB (Viking 1995), two other best-selling memoirs, and five collections of poetry, comes from a long line of legendary storytellers. Mary talks to PODRE about her new memoir-in-progress, her famed childhood with a larger-than-life father, being a single mom in the 80s, and what makes Texas storytellers d...

Did you have one of those dads who "never raised his voice?" No? Us either. What is a bear dad and is it ok to be one? If you have more than one child, are you a different parent to each one? PODRE discusses these and other pressing items with Keith Gessen, cofounder of N+1 and author of RAISING RAFFI (Viking 2022), a new book on dadhood and raising the little maniacs we adore so much. Then, we honor the very first recipi...

How do we know how to be a good dad if none of the old models are working? What if we grew up without a model at all? Can we learn how to be a good dad from watching HBO? Why is trust the most fundamental piece of a parent-child relationship? Why is silence so corrosive? Comedian, actor, and fellow father-of-two Baron Vaughn (Grace & Frankie; The New Negroes; Corporate) joins us on PODRE to break all this down and tell his sto...