Lean Out with Tara Henley

“What do falling fertility in the United States, a plague of loneliness and lack of friendship, bitter conflicts over racial and gender identity, and a politics of culture wars and moral panics have to do with one another?” The answer to that question, according to a compelling new book, is too many bad, low-wage jobs. Michael Lind is a bestselling author, a columnist at Tablet Magazine, and a co-founder and fellow at the New America think tank. His latest book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

People on the left have been reaching out to Tara for years, saying that they feel like the mainstream media has become politicized, is biased in favour of the left — and they no longer trust it to report the news fairly. Now, a group of international scholars has published an interesting research paper that addresses this dynamic. It finds that when people perceive institutions to be politicized, they lose trust. Even if they happen agree with its politics. Azim Shariff is a professor and Canada 150 Research Chair of moral psychology at the University of British Columbia. The pre-print paper discussed today is titled “Even When Ideologies Align, People Distrust Politicized Institutions.”You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

Life in North America is becoming increasingly lonely — and this trend is impacting all areas of our lives, including our physical health. So much so, in fact, that the United States Surgeon General recently issued an advisory on loneliness, characterizing it as a critical public health concern. But Tara's guest today says that that report fails to grapple with the drivers of our loneliness epidemic, including economics. Brendan Case is the associate director for research at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. His response to the Surgeon General’s report appears at Compact Magazine this week.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

One of the questions of this podcast has been: How do we begin to rethink feminism — given the fact that, in the current era, so many women are so unhappy? A group of powerhouse writers and thinkers gathered at Harvard last month to contemplate that very question. Tara's guest on the podcast today moderated that panel, which, one could argue, marked a major turning point in feminist thought. Erika Bachiochi is an American legal scholar and author, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She’s also the founder and director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute, which publishes a new online journal, Fairer Disputations. Her latest book is The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

Since the pandemic, we’ve been hearing more and more about the mental health crisis impacting teenaged girls. Tara's guest on the program today is a journalist with a special interest in the well-being of young women. In her own adolescence, she was hospitalized nine times for anorexia — which she’s written about in a new book — and in recent years, she has dug into the issue of gender dysphoria, trying to understand the surge of cases among teen girls. It was coverage of gender issues that ultimately led her to part ways with The Guardian, after 22 years with the paper. Hadley Freeman is a columnist and features writer for the The Sunday Times in London, and a bestselling author. Her latest book is Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

With the rising tensions in our society has come increased conflict, including generational conflict. There are now lots of stereotypes being thrown around about existing generations, from Boomers to Millennials. But our guest on today’s program prefers to deal in facts. Her latest book analyses data from 39 million people, debunking dominant ideas about generational cohorts — and, in a departure from the consensus within her field, points to technology rather than major current events as the main driver of generational differences. Jean Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. Her new book is Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

In recent weeks, on the Lean Out podcast, we’ve been exploring the issue of declining fertility in rich countries. And Canada is not exempt from this trend. Canada’s fertility rate has been dropping for years, and is now at 1.4 births per woman — well below population replacement levels. Tara's guest on the program today argues that these statistics represent a world of hidden personal pain. The think tank she’s a fellow at recently conducted research that found that “nearly half of Canadian women at the end of their reproductive years have had fewer children than they wanted.” Andrea Mrozek is a senior fellow with Cardus Family. You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

Liberal feminism is predicated on the idea that more is always better. More freedom, more technology, more autonomy. But Tara's guest today says this ethos is dissolving the bonds between men and women, between women and children, and between women and their bodies. And she argues that it’s time to rethink feminism. Mary Harrington is a columnist and contributing editor at UnHerd, and a fellow Substacker. Her new book is Feminism Against Progress.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

On the Lean Out podcast, we delve into the subjects that don’t get talked about enough in society. And one of the topics that’s still considered third rail is women’s fertility — even as the birth rate in Canada has dropped to a record low. My guest on the podcast today writes a lot about this issue, and she recently published a fascinating piece on South Korea, which has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Anna Louie Sussman is an award-winning journalist who reports on gender, economics, reproduction, and health. Her recent piece for The Atlantic is titled, “The Real Reason South Koreans Aren’t Having Babies.”You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

One of the goals of the Lean Out podcast is to complicate the dominant narratives. And Tara's guest on today’s episode does this all the time in his work. He’s an independent thinker, a prolific essayist — and, as we’ll hear, his conclusions are often surprising, rarely conforming to the orthodoxies on either the left or the right. Wilfred Reilly is a political science professor at Kentucky State University. His latest book is Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com