Lean Out with Tara Henley

The American election highlighted ongoing tensions between men and women — but election commentary often failed to acknowledge the crises that modern men are facing, from declining educational achievement and employment to increased suicides, overdoses, and loneliness. Today at Lean Out, we kick off a series exploring these issues, with a guest who’s recently published a powerful essay highlighting why we need to reconsider how we think and talk about men.Zaid Jilani is the freelance American journalist behind the Substack newsletter The American Saga. His recent essay is titled “Democrats Need to Realize It’s Not Always Easy To Be a Man.”This series is dedicated to Marc Antoine Jubinville. May he rest in peace.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

With Donald Trump winning the presidency, the popular vote, the Senate, and the House, in what The New York Times has described as a “crushing electoral rebuke” of the Democrats, there is a lot of soul-searching going on in the party. Our guest on the program today tried to warn the Democrats in his previous book. He says the progressive moment in American politics is now over — and the Democrats are going to have to face that fact if they want to win again.Ruy Teixeira is a cofounder and politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter on Substack and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, with John B. Judis, is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Ruy Teixeira is our guest today, in this special bonus episode.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

In this engaging discussion, Andy Mills, an award-winning reporter known for co-creating The Daily and The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, dives into the complexities of Trump's political appeal and the media's misalignment with voter sentiment. He reflects on elitism and class dynamics observed during a tense personal encounter, and critiques how masculinity is portrayed in media, especially regarding groups like incels. Mills emphasizes the urgent need for journalistic integrity, advocating for fairness in storytelling amidst a climate of public scrutiny and declining trust.

Since last week’s election win for Donald Trump, we are seeing a renewed sense of scorn for Republican voters in parts of the mainstream media. The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit, for example, writes in her column that “our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” My guest on today’s program doesn’t see it that way. She’s a lefty Democrat who moved from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Trump country — and she writes that the gift of living in a rural county is that “I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.”Larissa Phillips runs the Honey Hollow farm in upstate New York. She’s the founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project, and her essay for The Free Press is, “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.”You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

If you’re living in Canada and you have a cell phone plan, or a bank account, or have taken a flight recently, or struggle to afford groceries, you already know how expensive and dysfunctional the country has gotten for consumers. Our guests on the podcast today have written a book about the rise of corporate monopolies (and duopolies and oligopolies) — and, as they write, this market concentration “goes well beyond the usual suspects.”Vass Bednar is the executive director of McMaster University’s Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program, a contributing columnist to The Globe and Mail, and the host of its podcast Lately. Denise Hearn is a resident senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University. Their new book, for the McGill Max Bell Lectures, is The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

What makes us fat? It’s a contentious debate in the world of health science. Is obesity caused by energy imbalance — consuming too many calories — as has long been conventional thought? Or is obesity caused by the effects of carbohydrates on insulin? My guest on today’s program attended an invite-only global gathering of obesity experts. The resulting paper in Nature Metabolism, co-authored with fifteen other researchers and published this fall, compares the two competing hypotheses side-by-side, as equals. Which, my guest writes, “has never before happened in the century-plus history of meaningful research on the cause of obesity.”Gary Taubes is an award-winning investigative science and health journalist. His latest book is Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. With the journalist Nina Teicholz, he writes the Substack newsletter Unsettled Science.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

This past summer was the summer of the divorce memoir. Books glamorizing marital breakdown were everywhere, depicting the act of walking away from a marriage as radical self-empowerment. But I could not find a single memoir about the opposite perspective: staying and working things out and rediscovering love. My guest on today’s program has written the book I’ve been wanting to read, and he’s here to tell us how a dead marriage can live again. Harrison Scott Key is an American writer. His latest book is How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

There has been a story on the progressive left for some time now that individual actions are largely futile. That for society to change, we must instead focus on systems. Our guest on the program today belongs to a generation that was raised on this message. But now she’s written a powerful piece about the costs that come with such a worldview — and how volunteering in her community helped her to rethink it.Rachel Cohen is a reporter for vox.com, covering American social policy. Her essay is “Why I Changed My Mind About Volunteering.”You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

The period often referred to as The Great Awokening is winding down now, and we’re starting to get a better understanding of what happened. Our guest on today’s program argues that we have seen these kinds of social justice-styled movements before in American history — and that they are in fact driven by, as he puts it, “frustrated erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they deserve.”   Musa al-Gharbi is an American sociologist and an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His new book — out this week — is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

Statistics Canada released new data last week, showing that in 2023, the fertility rate in Canada reached a record low — just 1.26 births per woman — making us one of the “lowest low” fertility countries in the world. It’s true that material conditions, like the housing crisis, have play a role. But there is something else going on, all across the West. Our guest on today’s program has published a fascinating book about that something else: a profound ambivalence towards childbearing.Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and an editor of The Point magazine. With Rachel Wiseman, she is also the author of What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com