#143 Kevin Maguire: Building The Ultimate Group Text for Dads
Paternal
Just a few months after the birth of his son in 2019, Kevin Maguire noticed he wasn’t feeling quite right. At times he resented his newborn son, other times he would cry for seemingly no reason. He lost interest in his work and some of his hobbies, and he just couldn’t quite shake this idea that maybe something was wrong with him. After all, wasn’t this supposed to be one the happiest moments of his life? Then Maguire discovered he was suffering from paternal postpartum depression, and the diagnosis sent him down a path that changed his life. Two years later he launched , a hugely...
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#142 Jordan Ritter Conn: Why Do Men Feel So Alone?
Paternal
When Jordan Ritter Conn was a teenager growing up in an Evangelical Christian family, he met with a half dozen male friends every Saturday night for Bible Study. The sessions were a free-for-all for owning up to masturbation or admitting your insecurities, for speaking frankly about your father or dreaming about your future. and the author of the new book , Conn still considers those Saturday nights “some of the best of my life.” On this episode of Paternal, Conn discusses why so many men are struggling to make similarly meaningful connections, as well as what he learned from years of...
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#141 Daniel Smith: The Episode that Might Make You a Better Father
Paternal
Brooklyn-based psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author has a motto: Feel everything, don’t look away. But how exactly are men supposed to confront some of the most challenging emotions in their lives, especially when society tells them to suppress or even ignore feelings like shame, envy or regret? On this episode of Paternal, Smith examines our relationship to what he calls “Hard Feelings,” and why reconsidering how we relate to these emotions can be beneficial for men as they become fathers. He also recounts his own story of growing up with a father who lingered at an...
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#140 Tom Junod: All My Father’s Secrets
Paternal
Tom Junod spent more than two decades as one the most celebrated writers in the men’s magazine game, winning two National Magazine Awards and penning unforgettable articles about everything from to . Dubbed by Esquire as the man who has “helped teach readers what masculinity looks like in the 21st century,” Junod has been considered one of great writers in the magazine’s nearly 100-year history, alongside Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Tom Wolfe. But Junod certainly didn’t learn about masculinity from a magazine. Instead he absorbed lessons about manhood imparted by his...
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#139 Seth Wickersham: The Fathers Behind the NFL’s Best Quarterbacks
Paternal
John Elway. Joe Namath. Johnny Unitas. Peyton Manning. Look into the backstory of just about any star quarterback you’ve ever heard of, and you’ll find either an overbearing father, or an absent one. In honor of the Super Bowl and the men who play the biggest role in this game, author and ESPN senior writer joins Paternal to discuss why there’s no cooler job title in America than quarterback, but each star’s story often traces back to the influence of his father. He also discusses the challenges the sons of these star quarterbacks face in living up to the legacy of their dads,...
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#138 Julian Brave Noisecat: Ghost Stories, Coyote Dads, and The Survival Story of “Baby X”
Paternal
As a teenager, often heard ghost stories about the history of the Canim Lake Indian Reserve. He considered them simply rez legends, and figured the details of the stories - that indigenous babies had been born and left in the incinerator of the Christian residential school - simply couldn’t be true. But then he learned the origin story of his own father, and everything changed. Now an acclaimed author and the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award, Noisecat opens a new year on Paternal with the story of discovering the truth about his father, and why...
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#137 Robert Gallery: Football, Rage, and Recovery
Paternal
When was a senior at the University of Iowa, he was one of the most respected and feared college football players in the country. At 6-foot-7 and 320 pounds, Gallery leveraged his size, talent and tenacity into a lucrative contract and an eight-year career in the National Football League. But all the while he was quietly suffering one concussion after another on the football field, and when his career finally ended, he struggled to handle bouts of rage that left him shaking in a chair after his young child spilled a glass of milk. On this episode of Paternal, Gallery reflects on the difficult...
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#136 Aymann Ismail: Three Generations of Men in the Mosque
Paternal
What were the first words you said to your child when you became a parent? Was there something you needed to say to officially welcome him or her into this world, or was it all just a blur? For longtime Slate journalist and author the task was clear: He had to recite a Muslim call to prayer into his newborn son’s right ear, a ritual that’s been performed by countless Muslim fathers through the generations, all over the world. But was he appeasing God, or his own father? On this episode of Paternal, Ismail discusses a life spent navigating being a Muslim kid who preferred...
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#135 Jonathan Malesic: Dads, Work, And Burnout (2023)
Paternal
spent more than a decade in what he thought was his dream job as a college professor. But after years on the clock he found himself exhausted, angry, and struggling to feel like he was making an impact with his students. But even when he quit his job in order to solve one problem, he quickly realized he had another on his hands: Without a job, was he suddenly less of a man? On this 2023 episode of Paternal, Malesic recounts the experience that led him to studying the phenomenon of burnout, how it affects men and women differently, what role work plays in defining a man’s sense of...
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#134 Jayson Greene: Can Artificial Intelligence Help Us Cope With Grief?
Paternal
Proponents of Artificial Intelligence assure us that everything in life is about to change: Work, education, healthcare, art, and even how we remember our loved ones. But what role can AI actually play in alleviating psychological and emotional suffering, especially when a parent loses a child? Welcome to the mind of author Jayson Greene, who penned the celebrated memoir back in 2019 after the tragic loss of his daughter Greta, and who’s very familiar with how opportunistic companies position AI technology as a solution to avoid feeling the pain of grief and loss. On this episode of...
info_outlineIn the final scene of the 1986 coming-of-age film Stand By Me, the film’s narrator sums up boyhood friendship with the simple line, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.” And that’s largely true for a number of men who had no trouble developing deep, meaningful friendships with other boys. So why has a lack of friendship among dads become a cliche, or even a running joke? Why can’t guys hang onto those intimate friendships from their past, and what keeps them from making new friends as adults?
On this episode of Paternal, journalist and novelist Sam Graham-Felsen examines how one of his strongest childhood friendships has eroded over the years in the wake of marriage and fatherhood, and why men are reluctant to reach out to close friends when they’re in distress. He also discusses why listening to Joe Rogan offers some men a community in place of real-life friendships, and what men can do to rediscover the old friends they thought they lost.
Graham-Felsen is the author of the article “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?”, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in May.