Pod Only Knows

Not since that time when Ally McBeal and The Practice had that one crossover episode has an episode crossed over the way that this crossover crosses over! John is joined by Aislinn and Tobin from The Contenders as Aislinn and Tobin welcome John to The Contenders to discuss Shirley Jackson and the film Shirley, which is sort of about Shirley Jackson. Whose show is this? How much is Shirley about the real Shirley? What hot takes will emerge about the casting? Find out in this #EpicCrossoverEvent!

The Pope is the most powerful, influential, and prominent religious figure in the Western world. And there have been a lot of popes (the current one is the 266th) who have lived through a lot of history.

Three years ago, Bry Jensen, along with her best friend Fry Cukjati, decided it would be fun to look at the history of the papacy by chronicling the lives and careers of every pope in history. The result was the podcast Pontifacts. Now that they are 100 full episodes in - and approaching the close of the first millennium - Bry talked to John about how the project is coming along, what she has learned about the evolution of the papacy, which lesser-known popes should be better known, and whether any story in papal history could ever be as good as the Cadaver Synod.

Follow Pontifacts on Twitter @pontifactspod

Check out their official site here.

HBO's recent docuseries Into the Storm, directed by Cullen Hoback, manages to accomplish what no other Q-themed documentary had - "unmasking" the man behind Q and his closest accomplices.

While the culprit came as a surprise to almost no one who closely followed the QAnon phenomenon, Hoback's deeply personal portrait of the father-son Watkins duo, as well as 8-Chan founder Fred Brennan, remains an important journalistic and storytelling exercise. But the problem with the series has less to do with the Hoback's work and more with the response, as many viewers seem to have been lulled into a fall sense of security, assuming that now we know, for sure, who was behind Q, the coast is clear.

John invited his colleague and frequent guest Teddy Smith to watch the series and help him unpack all this.

Check out Teddy's new YouTube show, A Valiant Effert. You may recognize the opening music.

It's hard to imagine a more misunderstood and misrepresented form of religious expression than witchcraft. And the definition of "Witch" is as wide and varied among those how practice witchcraft as the definition of "Muslim" or "Christian" is to those who practice Islam and Christianity.

Hilary Whitmore, Kanani Soleil, and Courtney Weber launched the podcast That Witch Life in part to untangle and demystify modern witchcraft, and in the process created a show that is thoroughly engaging, warm, hilarious, and insightful. The three best friends and practicing witches joined John to talk about how they all wound up together in the Pacific Northwest and how their respective spiritual journeys converged around witchcraft - and, furthermore, what witchcraft is and isn't.

You can find more about more about them and their podcast at the That Witch Life website.

Maybe you don't think there's much philosophy involved with parenting. Descartes, after all, was too busy figuring out how playing with a ball of wax could reveal the nature of existence to worry about which sippy cup leads to the best SAT scores.

But it's hard to imagine an experience that throws a person into a deeper state of existential tension and reflection than does being a parent. And that tension can also open the door for a lot of bad and dumb ideas about which sippy cup is best for navigating the murky waters of parenting.

Robin Wilkins is a teacher, writer, artist, and musician who holds a master's degree in philosophy. She and John - both of whom are parents - discussed the parenting philosophy of Alison Gopnik (who argues parents should be more like gardeners and less like carpenters) as well as some of the dumber, more infuriating, and more toxic ideas that circulate among the vulnerable and often gullible parenting sphere.

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (Night Glow Board Books)

Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children

More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave

Robin's Blog

Robin on Twitter: @pamina_q

In honor of "Shakespeare's" "birthday", a bonus mini-episode featuring a conversation between John and Our Fake History host Sebastian Major discussing the Oxfordian authorship case.

In this episode, John dares to take on something he seldom does on his own podcast - talking about something he believes to be true: that centuries of confusion (sometimes deliberate, sometimes not) have given history the wrong "William Shakespeare".

In this episode, Steven Sabel, an accomplished actor, director, host of the podcast Don't Quill the Messenger, and Podcast and Community Outreach Director at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship (of which John is a member) discusses the Oxfordian case, why he's convinced, and how the work of the greatest author in the history of the English language can only truly be understood in the context of the life of their true author, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Check out Steven's excellent podcast, Don't Quill the Messenger

Learn more about the Oxfordian case at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship

More about Steven on his Facebook page

At the dawn of the 20th century, Russia was in the midst of a political wildfire, and the Tsarist regime was under threat like never before. Enter Tsar Nicholas II, Russia's last monarch, and a man uniquely and catastrophically unfit for the job. Compounding his problems, he and his wife struggled to produce a son to serve as heir. When they finally did, they soon discovered he was a hemophiliac, his life and health constantly under threat.

The inevitable demise of the family and the ruling regime would be remembered less for the complicated real-life history that led to it and more for the conspiracy theories, rumors, and active disinformation campaigns centered around two individuals - the family's resident holy man, Grigori Rasputin, and the youngest Romanov daughter, Anastasia.

John once again welcomes Mike Manzi and Jess Collins to discuss these two stories, and how the diverse cast of pretenders claiming to be the Romanov children - most notably the notorious Anna Anderson - may well have had their roots in the Soviet Union's first successful exercise in politically useful disinformation.

John is on Twitter @ProbablyRealJB

Mike on Twitter @the_mikestir

Jess on Twitter @jayarekay

Sebastian Major is a history teacher with a lifelong love of the subject. He also, like John, is preoccupied with drawing attention to the false beliefs that seem to have latched on to so many of the stories we tell and loves correcting the record. His beloved podcast, Our Fake History - which Major created, writes, produces, and hosts - is dedicated to doing exactly that. John and Sebastian discussed being teachers, what's so useful about teaching history through the lens of what we routinely get wrong, and what doing the podcast has taught him along with way.

And he also goes on record, once and for all, on the question of who is the worst purveyor of fake history - Washington Irving or Erich von Daniken.

Check out Our Fake History's website.

Follow Sebastian on Twitter @ourfakehistory

Thirteen years ago, Nina MacLaughlin found herself burnt out in her job as a journalist for the Boston Phoenix. A fateful visit to Craigslist would lead her to a new job as a carpenter's apprentice that would change her life and help her rediscover her voice. In 2017, she published a memoir, Hammerhead, about her life as a carpenter, and, two years later, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, a reimagining of Ovid's Metamorphoses told in the voices of its silenced women. She was also John's cello stand partner in middle school orchestra.

She joined John to discuss the ways in which we can retell the myths we inherit to better reflect our own world, and her own 13-year metamorphosis, going from writer, to carpenter, to writer again, with a newfound love for carving spoons.

Nina's website is www.ninamaclaughlin.com

Nina is on Twitter @ninamaclaughlin