Modern.
The podcast is supported by produced by the Ilab at WBUR Boston from the New York Times and WBUR Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss, and redemption.
I'm your host, Magna Chakrabarti.
When Rand Richards Cooper was in his forties, he was faced with a how late is too late to first become a dad?
His essay is called fatherhood, I now learn, is a young man's game.
It's read by Stanley Tucci, who starred in movies such as the Devil wears Prada, the Lovely Bones, and Julie and Julia.
His new movie is a private war.
The first time in my life I had unprotected sex.
1 August night three summers ago.
I was 45.
No pill or condom, no diaphragm or IUD, none of the sundry devices deployed to keep me careering childless through a quarter century of romance with women I had lusted after and sometimes loved.
This time the woman was my wife, Molly, and we had decided to have a baby.
Molly was nine years younger than I, and we'd been together eight years.
We agonized about children for a long time.
Then we agonized about agonizing.
Deciding in midlife to become a father unfolds in a series of trenchant recognitions.
A friend at a college reunion says, okay, you've lived one of your two lives.
Now what do you want to do with the one that's left?
Or someone falls ill or dies.