Lean Out with Tara Henley: Recent Episodes
Tara Henley
Tara Henley is a Canadian journalist and bestselling author. On the Lean Out podcast, she interviews heterodox writers and thinkers from around the world, in an attempt to widen the Overton window of acceptable thought in society. You can learn more about her work at tarahenley.substack.com
In the maelstrom that is modern life, we’ve lost any sense of seasonality. These days, the summer is as non-stop as any other time of the year and the long, sun-drenched days can come and go without any real rest or relaxation. But we remember a time in the not-too-distant past when July and August offered a welcome lull — a time to retreat, to recharge, to reinvent. To dream, even. The summer felt expansive, wondrous. We're convinced that this annual reprieve was essential for maintaining sanity.
So this year, we’ve decided to bring back the slow summer.
It’s been a busy 2026 so far at Lean Out, during our fifth year in operation. The newsletter has surpassed eight million views and has been on the Substack bestseller list. The podcast, meanwhile, has just published its 256th episode. Not bad for a niche Canadian outlet dedicated to heterodox non-fiction current affairs books (and sometimes articles). That’s all down to you, Lean Out’s wonderful subscribers, and we can’t thank you enough for your support.
Tara's latest book, based on the work that we’ve been doing here — and on the 2024 Massey Essay — will be released in North America at the end of this month. (Pre-orders are helpful, should you be so inclined.) The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity is already getting a great response and it has been especially gratifying to field interview requests from across the political spectrum.
Lean Out normally goes dark for three weeks in the summer, but this year we are taking an extended break as Tara promotes her new book and then takes a few weeks of much-needed time offline — hopefully in the wilds of British Columbia. All monthly payments have been paused as of today, and yearly subscriptions will be extended when we resume production in the fall.
As we slow down and reflect on the year so far — and mull over where Lean Out might go next — we'd love to hear from you on what is working and not working about this newsletter and podcast. Your feedback is most welcome.
In the meantime, our hope for all of you is that you are also able to unplug at least a bit this summer, rediscovering all of the things that make life most worth living, from nature and travel to food and family and friendship and community. And of course, good books!
We'll be doing our best to recapture that same spirit of adventure and discovery, and will share it with you all when we return in the fall.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is a crisis in confidence in the mainstream media. In a few weeks, Tara's new book on this topic will be released in the United States and Canada. The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivityunpacks where the press has gone wrong — and what it needs to do to regain the public’s trust. Cardus in Ottawa hosted Tara for an event on June 9, where she was joined on-stage by a fellow Canadian journalist. We are happy to share a portion of that discussion this week.
Stuart Thomson is a Canadian journalist and the Parliamentary bureau chief for The National Post.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It has now five years since the Kamloops band made an announcement of the discovery of the "remains of 215 children” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, kicking off an intense period of national grief and anger. A month ago, The Globe and Mail editorial board made news around the world, declaring the national press’s lack of scrutiny of the claim a “failure of journalism.” Our guest on the program this week is an award-winning journalist who was early on this story — and he’s here to unpack its aftermath.
Terry Glavin is a Canadian journalist, an author, and a columnist for The National Post.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s Canada Day and many of us are reflecting on our nation and where we are at. We know that we are more divided than ever, but how did we get here? Our guest on the program this week has just written a book on political polarization in the country. He says the roots of our divisions run deep — and the consequences are dire.
Eric Merkley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and director of the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab. His new book is Polarization, Eh? The Causes and Consequences of Affective Polarization in Canada.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On June 10, the Canadian broadcaster David Cayley passed away, surrounded by loved ones, playing bluegrass music. He died in the Toronto home that he had shared with his wife for the past 42 years. It was a home that I had just begun visiting him at in recent months, drinking coffee and talking about books and ideas. David was a brilliant mind, a generous person, a fearless soul. As his friend and former executive producer Bernie Lucht told me this week, “David simply did not accept standing narratives.”
I had great admiration and respect for him. I am happy to replay our recent interview, in tribute to David and all that he was. You can hear his smile in voice.
David Cayley was a Canadian broadcaster. He was a husband and a father and a grandfather, and a friend to many. For thirty years, he made documentaries for the CBC Radio program Ideas. He was also the author of eight books. His last was The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back).
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On October 19, citizens in the province of Alberta will vote on whether they want to proceed with a referendum on separating from the rest of Canada. Our guest on the program this week has written a new book about the history of these tensions — and why they have now come to a head.
Tyler Dawson is an opinion editor at The Globe and Mail. His new book is The Republic of Alberta: An Idea That Won’t Go Away.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The big news in Canada this week has been The Globe and Mail editorial board’s admission that the industry and the paper bungled the unmarked graves story from 2021 — that this in fact constituted a journalistic failure.
In light of this, we are bringing you an episode of Tara's media criticism podcast with The Hub, Full Press, from last week, which took stock of how we in the Canadian media got this story so wrong. This is an especially important conversation, now that the Senate human rights committee has voted to criminalize residential school denialism, with a penalty of up to two years in prison. (UPDATE: The Canadian Senate as a whole has now voted to reject the criminalization of residential school denialism, voting 41 to 32 against it.)
Thanks for listening, and thank you to The Hub for giving us permission to re-air this episode.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
You wouldn’t think that a woman declaring that she is into men would a subversive act — but at some point during recent years, this became the case in certain circles. Particularly online feminist circles. Our guest on the program this week has written a new book on female heterosexuality and she says it’s time we acknowledge that the vast majority of women are, in fact, straight.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a Toronto cultural critic. She is the opinion editor for The Canadian Jewish News and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her new book is The Last Straight Woman — On Desiring Men.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Most of us are aware that the digital age we are living through is a time of incredible transformation. But we may not have contemplated what we’d like to see preserved — things like free speech. Some years ago, our guest on this week’s program began investigating political censorship. What he found was bigger, more all-encompassing, and in fact more interesting. In his new book, he argues that we have entered an entirely new political epoch, that of the information state.
Jacob Siegel is an American journalist. He is the special features editor for Tablet Magazine and co-host of the Manifesto! podcast. His new book is The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Canada’s immigration system was once the envy of the world. And for decades, the country enjoyed a bipartisan pro-immigration consensus. But during the Trudeau years, that consensus fell apart. Our guest on the program this week delivered the 2025 McGill Max Bell Lectures on this topic. His new book explores where we went wrong.
Tony Keller is a columnist at The Globe and Mail. His book is Borderline Chaos: How Canada Got Immigration Right, and Then Wrong. It has been shortlisted for the Donner Prize, which will be awarded tomorrow night in Toronto.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
We know that young women are increasingly unhappy — with high rates of depression and anxiety — and our guest on the program this week says there’s good reason for that. In her new book, she argues that girlhood has dramatically changed in the Internet era and that young women have been transformed from people into products.
Freya India is a British writer and commentator, and a staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter After Babel. Her new book is GIRLS: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
What does it mean to be a man? Our guest on the program this week has published a book that examines that very question. It is part memoir, part meditation on masculinity, and part detective story — as he unearths the secret life of his charismatic alpha male father and forges a new version of manhood, putting himself and his family back together on the page.
Tom Junod is an award-winning American journalist and a senior writer for ESPN. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is based on an article that he wrote for Esquire. Tom’s new memoir is In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In recent years, viewpoint diversity has become a loaded term. But our guest on the program this week says it is vital that we renew our commitment to dialogue, especially across lines of difference. He has edited a new book that brings together prominent professors and journalists to make the case for free speech, intellectual humility, and societal pluralism — in higher education, politics, and the literary world.
John Tomasi is an American political philosopher and the president of Heterodox Academy. He is the editor, with Bernard Schweizer, of the new book Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
There can be no doubt that we are living through politically charged times — and this is especially true at North American universities. My guest on the program this week has spent the past decade making a documentary about unrest on campus. She says many faculty and students are now afraid to debate the big issues of our time, and she worries that we are losing the ability to speak across differences.
Ric Esther Bienstock is an Emmy Award-winning Canadian filmmaker. Her new two-part documentary, Speechless, is available for streaming now on CBC Gem.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
We are at a pivotal moment in Canada, as we reflect on our past and try to forge a more unified future in the face of tensions with the United States. Our guest on the program says now is a good time to reexamine our key institutions. This week, he has published an entertaining new book about the office of Governor General, just as speculation abounds that we may be about to get a new one.
John Fraser is a veteran Canadian journalist, an author, and an academic. He is a former Master of Massey College, and the current executive chair of the National NewsMedia Council of Canada. His latest book is The Governors General: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In the United States right now, a group of feminists is taking stock of the movement — where it is at and where it’s gone wrong. Our guest on the program this week is one of those feminists. Her new book argues that our problem is we’ve bought into an idea of radical autonomy, which is not possible for human beings. It is, in fact, disconnected from physical reality.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is an American writer. She runs the Substack newsletter Other Feminisms and her latest book is The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week on the Lean Out podcast we are shifting our focus from the political to the personal. Our guest on the program has written a remarkable memoir about her time in the food world, her story of addiction and recovery — and what she learned from her years collaborating with the late Anthony Bourdain.
Laurie Woolever is an American writer and editor. Her latest book, a New York Times bestseller, is Care and Feeding: A Memoir.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As tensions mount within the United States — and between the United States and Canada — it has never been more important to understand each other. Our guest on the program this week is the head of a depolarization non-profit and his latest research paints a nuanced and complex portrait of Trump voters and the cultural attitudes and policy positions that energize them.
Jason Mangone is the executive director of More in Common U.S. Its latest report is Beyond MAGA: A Profile of the Trump Coalition.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Many of us grew up reading classics from the great Judy Blume, from Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Blume, now in her eighties, is famous for writing about childhood and adolescence with humour and heart. This week, our guest on the program has published a remarkable book documenting her life story.
Mark Oppenheimer is an American journalist and author. He’s the editor of the online religion and politics magazine ARC. His latest book is Judy Blume: A Life.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In recent years, the world has become an increasingly unstable place. Our guest on the program this week says that Canadians have adopted a “precarity mindset.” And now, roughly nine out of ten Canadians believe this uncertainty is here to stay — that it is, in fact, the new normal.
Eddie Sheppard is executive vice president at Abacus Data. His analysis for Abacus is From Crisis to Condition: The Psychology of Canadian Uncertainty.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the problems with increased polarization is that everything gets politicized, including simple acts of charity. Our guest on the program this week is an American journalist who’s been tracking this trend in liberal and leftist circles and he’s published an essay making the argument that helping your neighbour is an affirmation of our shared humanity — not a “radical act of resistance.”
Ryan Zickgraf is an American journalist and a columnist at UnHerd. His Substack newsletter is The Third Rail.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
If you follow the news in this country, you know that Canada is currently grappling with a number of crises, from housing to mental health. And yet much of our attention is focused on the United States and on Donald Trump. Our guest on the podcast this week has just published an essay about this. She argues that, much like in a dysfunctional family, the media’s fixation on Trump is a distraction from looking at deeper issues.
Amanda Ripley is an American journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. She is the co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict. (You can watch their latest story here).
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Canadians who write books, or cover books, or read books will know that something is wrong with our literary industry. But a new book documents just how far off the rails publishing has gone. Our guest on the program this week is the author of that book, and he says our fundamental problem is an erosion of national identity.
Richard Stursberg is a Canadian author and media executive, and the former head of English services for the CBC. His new book is Lament for a Literature: The Collapse of Canadian Book Publishing.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week on the Lean Out podcast we are taking a look at the chaotic summer of 2020, and the impact of that unrest on mainstream journalism. Our guest on the program this week has a new interview with the former opinion editor at The New York Times, James Bennet, who was famously ousted by a staff revolt. My guest says that now is a good time to think through how that historical moment — and its activists — has shaped our journalism.
Harrison Lowman is a Canadian journalist. He’s the managing editor of The Hub and a former producer of this podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
We live in an age of economic precarity and journalists are not exempt from this. Our guest on the program this week has written a powerful Substack essay about his path from foreign correspondent to Uber driver, and how his troubles have helped him to forge a sense of solidarity with the people he drives to work.
Steven Scherer is an American journalist and a former Canadian bureau chief for Reuters.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Men and women don’t seem very happy these days. They are dissatisfied with dating, polarized politically, trash talking each other online, and both marriage and fertility are on the decline. What is responsible for this rift between men and women? Our guest on the program this week has been mulling this question over, and she says we might want to reconsider some of the assumptions of feminism — starting with the idea that marriage and family are “a trap.”
Larissa Phillips is an American essayist and the founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project. With her husband, she runs the Honey Hollow Farm in upstate New York.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The popularity of identity politics, and the subsequent fallout from this ideology, is something that we’ve tried to unpack and understand on the Lean Out podcast. Our guest on the program this week has published a viral essay on the impacts of this moment on Millennial white men. He argues that an entire generation was shut out of certain professions and found themselves in a society that was “deliberately rooting against” them.
Jacob Savage is an American writer. His latest essay, for Compact Magazine, is The Lost Generation.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With the new year now upon us, we are going to continue our conversation about the state of feminism, and how we might begin to think and talk about women’s lives in ways that are more productive. Our guest on the program this week is a frequent commentator on modern feminism, and she says the central archetypes of our current moment — the girl boss on the left and the trad wife on the right — are both reductive and untenable in today’s world.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is an American writer, and the author of the Substack newsletter Restoring American Adulthood.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s New Year’s Day and many of us will be at home, contemplating the year ahead. For New Year’s every year, Lean Out brings you an episode that is lighter and more hopeful. This year, we set our sights on food and its ability to bring us together. Our guest on the program today has published a wonderful book about famous writers and their recipes, exploring the restorative power of home cooking.
Valerie Stivers is an American writer and a senior editor at UnHerd. Her new book is The Writer’s Table: Famous Authors and Their Favourite Recipes, inspired by her long-running column at The Paris Review.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s Christmas Day and we at Lean Out wanted to bring you a special bonus episode — to celebrate the occasion and to meditate on the meaning of the holiday. Our guest on the program today is the founder of one of the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry programs in the world, and he’s here to share its driving ethos of cherished belonging, and how that might serve as a model for the wider world.
Father Gregory Boyle is an American Jesuit priest and the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles. Last year, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His latest book is Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times. This interview was taped December 18.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, one of the topics that we often return to is the media, and the insanity of the media. For the last show of 2025, our guest is a veteran journalist and a savvy media critic, and he has some thoughts on where we are, how we got here — and where we should go from here.
Mike Pesca is an award-winning American journalist. He is the creator and host of the long-running daily news podcast, The Gist. He’s also the author of Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With 2025 winding down, we at Lean Out wanted to take a look back at one of the most controversial stories of the year — and to see if we could have a calm, reasonable conversation about a divisive issue. We're talking about the feminization theory, or the idea that the shifting sex ratios in influential institutions comes with both positive and negative consequences. Our guest on the program today is a scholar who is studying that phenomenon. Her recent paper, for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, is “From Worriers to Warriors: The Cultural Rise of Women.”
Cory Clark is an American behavioural scientist. She’s an associate professor of psychology at New College of Florida and director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is the Sexual Revolution — and weighing its benefits and drawbacks, both for women and for men. Today on the show, we are going back to the period that led into that historical moment, to a bohemian movement of art and travel and sexual experimentation, but also of destruction and dysfunction and family tragedies. We're talking about the Beat Generation. Our guest on today’s program has written the introduction to a reissue of an astonishingly good book that explores all of this, written by Jack Kerouac’s daughter Jan.
Amanda Fortini is an American magazine writer and Substacker. She’s a columnist at County Highway and a frequent contributor to T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She’s joins me to talk about the 1981 novel Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In Toronto, where I live, you cannot walk a block without seeing a young man in distress — sleeping on the street, or slumped over from drug use, or shouting and screaming. It feels like something has gone very wrong for men in this country and that nobody is talking about it. Our guest on the program today has dedicated his career to men’s health, and he has some important insights to share, both from his professional life and from his personal life.
Zac Seidler is the Global Director of Men’s Health Research at Movember. He’s also an associate professor at Orygen centre for youth mental health at the University of Melbourne, and a member of the advisory council for the American Institute for Boys and Men. He recently joined Prince Harry for a Movember event in New York City.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In the wake of the #MeToo firing of the University of British Columbia creative writing professor Steven Galloway — which is once again in the news this week — our guest on the program today sat down to write a book of advice for young feminists. But her good friend Margaret Atwood convinced her that nobody likes unsolicited advice, and that she should instead frame her memoir around her unusual height and how it shaped her life. The result is a riveting narrative that also offers up plenty of lessons to the next generation of women.
Susan Swan is a Canadian novelist, non-fiction writer, professor emerita at York University, and a recipient of the Order of Canada. Her latest book is Big Girls Don’t Cry: A Memoir About Taking Up Space.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Many women in Generation X are now finding themselves overwhelmed. The world is increasingly stressful. But our private lives are not much calmer, as we care for children and aging parents and spouses, stare down middle age, and mull over the legacy of previous generations of women. Our guest on the program today knows something about this — she grappled with all of these things, all at once, during one truly terrible year.
Molly Jong-Fast is an American writer and political commentator. She’s a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and the host of the podcast Fast Politics. Her latest book is How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s budget day here in Canada. As Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government tables its first federal budget, we will get reaction and hear a lot of different visions for the country. On today’s episode we wanted to bring you one. Our guest on the program says that Canada is in crisis — and that it is now time for "bold adventurism."
Daniel Debow is a Canadian executive, investor, and educator. He is the chair of the board for Build Canada.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is the many crises that Canada is facing —and where we go from here. Our guest on the program today warns that we are at a breaking point, and in desperate need of a national reckoning. As we face threats from without, he says, we are divided from within, along the lines of gender, class, region, and, crucially, generation.
Darrell Bricker is the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs and a previous director of public opinion research in the Prime Minister’s Office. His latest book, out this week — written with veteran journalist John Ibbitson — is Breaking Point: The New Big Shifts Putting Canada at Risk.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Before the Internet, before the literary world was overrun by online politics, before everything you read — and wrote — had to advance an agenda, there was the solitary person, in a room, losing themselves in the words on the page. There was the fan. Our guest on the program today has written a book of essays on fandom and his own obsessions. In the process, he confronts the big cultural forces of our age.
Jason Guriel is a Toronto writer. His latest book is Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe, and Mourn.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Many of us that are big readers have been scratching our heads for years, trying to figure out why so many books are now so tedious and moralistic. What’s happened to North American literary culture — and why hasn’t it bounced back? Our guest on the program today has some answers. He’s written a book about the decline of literary freedom in publishing, and a dynamic that he describes as “a circular firing squad.”
Adam Szetela is an American author. His new outing is That Book is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
If you live in North America, chances are good that you spend a lot of time wondering why things feel so dysfunctional. Why can’t we make any progress on the big issues of our age, like housing? Our guest on the program today has some answers — and he has written a fascinating new book about why nothing works.
Marc J. Dunkelman is an American author and former political staffer. He’s a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. His latest book is Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In recent years, we have seen heated debate in this country around the CBC and its future. With the question of defunding no longer looming, it is a good time to pause, to look back at where our national public broadcaster has been, and to talk through where it might go from here. Our guest on today’s program is veteran CBC producer who has written an insightful and well-researched new book about the institution — and where he thinks it went wrong.
David Cayley is a Canadian author and broadcaster. For thirty years, he made documentaries for the CBC Radio show Ideas. His latest book is The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back).
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Today, as we go to air, our guest on the program takes the stage at Toronto Metropolitan University to address the next generation. He is a legendary Canadian journalist and he’ll be reflecting on the highs and lows that he’s experienced in his ringside seat to history, and how to navigate what he calls “the spinning vortex of ever-more complex news” — all of which he covers in his riveting new memoir.
Brian Stewart is a former foreign correspondent for the CBC. His new book is On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Earlier this year at Lean Out, we covered Canada’s federal election. It was a contest not just between candidates and parties but between dominant narratives about the challenges facing this country. Was our biggest problem the decline in material conditions, or was it Donald Trump? Our guest on today’s podcast was there, on the campaign trail. He’s just written a book about why this election was one of the most consequential in recent memory.
Justin Ling is a Canadian journalist and author. His Substack newsletter is Bug-eyed and Shameless, and his new book is The 51st State Votes: Canada Versus Donald Trump.
This episode was taped earlier this month.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In 2021, Canada was rocked by a discovery at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops: what appeared to be the remains of more than 200 Indigenous children. The story went viral globally and was reported by The New York Times and others as a mass grave. But to date, no remains have been exhumed. Our guest on the program today is a First Nation chief and a podcaster who has made a new, hour-long video breaking down the controversy. He says it’s time for the media to grapple with its reporting errors — and the fallout for the country.
Aaron Pete is Chief of the Chawathil First Nation, and host of the Nuanced podcast, formerly called Bigger Than Me. He’s also a guest host of this show.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
September is here and Lean Out is back with a new season of conversations with writers and thinkers from around the world. We could not think of a more important topic to kick off our fall season than the state of Canadian democracy. Our guest on the program today has written a new book that serves as a wake-up call — he says that while we observe the rituals of the democratic process, we have lost its spirit and its substance.
Andrew Coyne is a columnist for The Globe and Mail and a weekly panelist on CBC’s The National. His debut book is The Crisis of Canadian Democracy.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Lean Out is now on our annual summer hiatus. But we while we’re away, we wanted to bring you some popular encore episodes from our archives, including today’s show — from April of 2025. Enjoy, and we’ll see you in September!
For some time now, writers and thinkers outside this country have been asking me: What happened to Canada? Our guest on the program today has asked this question himself, in a new book that takes a deep dive into our decline.
Tristin Hopper is a columnist and reporter for The National Post, based in Victoria, B.C. His new book is Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Lean Out is now on our annual summer hiatus. But we while we’re away, we wanted to bring you some popular encore episodes from our archives, including today’s show — from November of 2024. Enjoy, and we’ll see you in September!
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.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Lean Out is now on our annual summer hiatus. But we while we’re away, we wanted to bring you some popular encore episodes from our archives, including today’s show — from May of 2024. Enjoy, and we’ll see you in September!
2020 was a turbulent year in American politics, and in the America media. The editor of The New York Times has conceded that the paper went “too far” during that time and said that it is now working to pull itself back from such “excesses.” Our guest on the program today was at the paper during that period — and left to report critically on what she calls “the revolution,” both for her media company and for her debut book.
Nellie Bowles is an American journalist and co-founder of The Free Press. Her book is Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The summer of 2020 was one of the most explosive periods of recent memory — with pandemic lockdowns, the death of George Floyd, nationwide protests and riots, and workplace purges and online mobbings. And yet, so much of what went on has now been forgotten. In his new book, our guest on the program today encourages us to take a good, hard look at the insanity of those months, and how they shaped the era we’re now living through.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book, out this week, is Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In the United States right now, we are witnessing the decline of what has often been called the woke left — and a backlash from an increasingly woke right that is now seeking to impose its own beliefs on society in similar ways. Our guest on the program this week has been an outspoken critic of illiberalism, wherever it originates on the political spectrum, and he believes that defending liberal values has never been more important.
Andrew Doyle is a UK broadcaster, commentator, and comedian. His latest book is The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is the ongoing tensions between men and women. This past week saw a shot fired on that front: a piece published in The New York Times Magazine, titled “The Trouble With Wanting Men.” For this special joint episode, we unpack this essay with podcaster Meghan Daum and a Gen Z guest.
Meghan Daum is an American author and essayist, and the host of the Unspeakable podcast, soon to be renamed the Unspeakeasy. Lily Isaacs is a British writer, and an editorial assistant for UnHerd.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The working poor in Canada are often largely invisible. The struggle to make ends meet in an explosively expensive era tends to be a private matter. But our guest on the show today has taken the step to make her own battle public, with a new cover story for Maclean’s that’s sparking discussion across the country.
Jeni Gunn is a gig worker in Victoria, B.C. Her new essay for Maclean’s is “Confessions of the Working Poor.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In recent weeks and months, a number of you have reached out to Tara about the debate on gender medicine for minors — and a lack of media coverage about it, particularly in this country.
This is a topic that she recently covered on her other podcast, Full Press. And The Hub has been kind enough to let us bring you the free version of that episode today, where you can hear her entire conversation on gender medicine and the media, with co-hosts Harrison Lowman and Peter Menzies.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In recent years, we’ve read a lot of memoirs from women who feel stuck in specific ways: single, childless, consumed by work, and disillusioned with hook-up culture. Our guest on today’s program is the author of the first memoir we have read about breaking free from that pattern — and the story of how it happened is as moving as it is surprising.
Beth Kaplan is a Canadian writer, and the author of Loose Woman: My Odyssey From Lost to Found.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With the excesses of 2020 now being examined in mainstream outlets like The New York Times, we are witnessing a moment of introspection on the American left. To unpack this development, we're joined by a writer who has studied the history of the left. And in this week's conversation, we wrestle with our own complicated — and at times conflicted — relationships to these politics.
Daniel Oppenheimer is an American writer and podcaster. He runs the Substack newsletter Eminent Americans and hosts a podcast of the same name. He’s the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century, and his latest essay for Persuasion is “How the Left Loses its People.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s common knowledge these days that the left has lost the working class. But there is little curiosity about how, and why, and what that means for our politics. Our guest on this week's program has written a deeply researched book on the subject — and she has some ideas on where the left should go from here.
Joan C. Williams is a Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) and Founding Director of the Equality Action Center at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco. Her latest book is Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. (You can find the class bubble quiz at www.classbubblequiz.com.)
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Three and a half years ago, during the pandemic era, we launched Lean Out to explore some basic questions about illiberalism in our response to the crisis — and in our culture, our politics, and our newsrooms. Today, for our 200th episode of the show, we're thrilled to be joined by two academics who have written a deeply researched book that provides some answers.
Stephen Macedo is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. And Frances Lee is professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. Their new book is In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In polarized times, our tolerance for different perspectives decreases. Groupthink becomes common, and we can often find ourselves either censored, or self-censoring. Our guest on the program today has done a deep dive into this topic, and she has some thoughts on how we can begin to speak up — while still seeing our ideological opponents as human.
Jenara Nerenberg is an American author, and the founder of The Neurodiversity Project and The Interracial Project. Her latest book is Trust Your Mind: Embracing Nuance in a World of Self-Silencing.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Tonight, in London, England, a group of writers and thinkers will gather to debate a key cultural question: “Is woke dead?” And tomorrow, the inaugural conference of a new centre for social science kicks off. Academics will gather to talk through the intellectual origins of this movement and its politics, psychology, and driving interests, to establish it as a field of study, and to delve into overlooked topics and perspectives. Our guest on the program is the man behind both of these events, and he joins us to share his thinking on the post-progressive era — and what it might mean for Canada going forward.
Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian academic and author. He’s a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, and director of its Centre of Heterodox Social Science.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As Tara puts the finishing touches on her next book, on declining trust in the media, we wanted to bring you a few encore interviews that have helped shaped her thinking on the media — including today’s episode.
Since the 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.” Our 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
As Tara puts the finishing touches on her next book, on declining trust in the media, we wanted to bring you a few encore interviews that have helped shaped her thinking on the media — including today’s episode.
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. My 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 book 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
In this turbulent era, for many of us there is a moment in every day when anxiety steals over us. We pause, and in that rare period of stillness, the fears surface — but sometimes, if we’re lucky, so too do the reflections and the insights. Our guest on today’s program has called this interlude “the catastrophe hour,” and she’s just published a book of essays that beautifully captures it.
Meghan Daum is an American essayist and the host of the Unspeakable Podcast. Her latest book is The Catastrophe Hour.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Now that the dust has settled on the Canadian federal election, we can pause for a moment and assess where we are at as a country. What lessons can we take from the election results? Our guest on today’s program has been polling Canadians for decades — and he says that we are now a divided nation.
Darrell Bricker is the CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs. He’s also the author of six bestselling books, including, with John Ibbitson, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future. His recent essay for The Hub is titled “Victory Without Unity.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the most polarizing policies of the pandemic era was the extended school closures. Critics have now been validated, with The New York Times reporting that “a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students” — while doing little to stop the spread of the virus. Our guest on the program today is a journalist who’s just published a deep dive investigation into the flawed decision-making behind these controversial closures.
David Zweig is an American journalist and author. His latest book is An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Last week, at the English-language election debate, the leaders’ press scrums were cancelled after tensions between media outlets erupted into shouting in the press room, and other confrontations. This incident is a distressing example of how polarized our press has become. But of course, we are not the first country to grapple with this dynamic. My guest on the program today lived through political polarization in Venezuela — and he has some important lessons to share.
Victor Febres is an Atlanta-based journalist and videographer. He’s also a former activist for peaceful conflict resolution.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As election day nears, Lean Out continues to highlight the issues that we feel have not received enough attention in this news cycle. My guest on the program today is a physician who serves on death review committee with Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner. In today’s emotional interview, we take a close look at medical assistance in dying, or MAiD — and her concerns about how it’s playing out in practice.
Ramona Coelho is a family doctor, and a founding member of Physicians Together With Vulnerable Canadians. She’s a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and has just co-edited a new book, titled Unravelling MAiD in Canada: Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide as Medical Care.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
We are in the final week of the Canadian federal election. And while Trump’s trade policy has received much coverage this election season, our housing crisis has been less of a priority for the legacy press. We at Lean Out happen to think this is the most important issue in the country — and so, on today’s program, our guest is here to answer every question you’ve ever had on the crisis, and how we got here.
Mike Moffatt is a Canadian economist, the founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative, and co-host of the Missing Middle podcast. Mike Moffatt returns to the program, today on Lean Out.
This episode was taped last week, before the release of the Liberal platform and the Conservative announcement of its housing plan.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
For some time now, writers and thinkers outside this country have been asking me: What happened to Canada? Our guest on the program today has asked this question himself, in a new book that takes a deep dive into our decline — and arrives just in time for the federal election.
Tristin Hopper is a columnist and reporter for The National Post, based in Victoria, B.C. His new book is Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As we all navigate a period rife with political tensions on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border, we wanted to bring you an incredible story that celebrates the human spirit and affirms our common humanity. Our guest on the program today was an eight-month-old baby when her parents smuggled her out of communist Vietnam, crossing the South China Sea to begin a new life. Decades later, she reports for the Today show.
Vicky Nguyen is an NBC News Daily anchor and Chief Consumer Investigative correspondent. She reports for the Today show, Nightly News, and NBC News Now. Her New York Times-bestselling debut is Boat Baby.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Throughout the Canadian federal election, we’re taking weekly breaks to think and talk about other things. On today’s program, in light of ongoing debates in American pop culture, we’ll be discussing the phenomenon of heteropessimism with a Toronto culture critic who is quite literally writing the book on it.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a Toronto-based journalist, author, and podcaster. She’s co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, opinion editor at The Canadian Jewish News, and a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. Her forthcoming podcast is The Jewish Angle.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Women’s fertility is a third rail in Canadian politics. We all learned this again last week, when Pierre Poilievre made a comment about biological clocks that sparked outrage. If you followed the controversy in the mainstream media only, you might not know that a number of women were glad to see Poilievre raise the issue of fertility — including my guest on today’s show.
Melanie Paradis the president of Texture Communications and a veteran Conservative campaigner. Her recent piece for The Line is titled “Poilievre was right to bring up my biological clock.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
During the 2025 Canadian election season, we’ll be pausing from time to time to take a breather and to think about other issues — often interesting new books. My guest on today’s program is a blues musician, a scholar, and a heterodox thinker. He joins us for a conversation about his deeply personal new book on interracial family life in the south.
Adam Gussow is a professional harmonica player and a professor of English at the University of Mississippi. His new book is My Family & I: A Mississippi Memoir.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the big stories in the Canadian federal election so far has been the collapse of support for the NDP. New polling from Ipsos shows support for the party continuing to decline. Our guest on today’s program is a former labour representative — and he has some thoughts on where the traditional party of working people has gone wrong.
Brian Dijkema is the president of Cardus Canada, a public policy think tank, and senior editor of Comment Magazine.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As election season builds steam, here at Lean Out we are focused on the question of why daily life in Canada has become so expensive and so dysfunctional. My guest on today’s program has some insights to share. He recently wrote a well-researched book on the federal government’s corporate subsidies — which, he says, “exploded in magnitude” under Justin Trudeau.
Laurent Carbonneau works in public policy in Ottawa, on innovation, science, and technology issues. He’s a former NDP staffer and the author of the recent book, At the Trough: The Rise and Rise of Canada’s Corporate Welfare Bums.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With the Canadian federal election now underway, we’re going to have a lot of political content for you in coming weeks. But today, we wanted to change things up a bit and bring you a lighter story about books — and how hard it is these days to find bookstores that stock a range of different perspectives. Our guest on today’s program argues that booksellers are locked in a moral contract with their clientele, and it’s resulted in a narrowing of the titles on offer.
Ann Bauer is an American essayist and novelist. Her recent piece for Persuasion is “What Independent Bookshops Really Sell.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
After much speculation, Prime Minister Mark Carney has called a snap spring election, and Canadians will be heading to the polls on April 28. To kick off Lean Out’s special election coverage, we bring you a conversation with a veteran Canadian journalist about the unusual moment the country is in — and why, in his view, the current disconnect between the federal government and voters is a once in a generation occurrence.
Tom Korski is the managing editor of Blacklock’s Reporter, an Ottawa-based outlet.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In the wake of President Trump’s executive order on DEI, debates in America have renewed a conversation around DEI in this country. And while the baseline value of greater inclusion is one that many of us share, some DEI programs have proven controversial. Our guest on this bonus episode is the author of a recent report that dives into DEI practices in Canadian federal granting agencies — and asks if they impede political and ideological neutrality and research excellence.
Dave Snow is an associate professor of political science at the University of Guelph. He’s also a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and the author of a new MLI report, “Promoting excellence … or activism? Equity, diversity, and inclusion at Canada’s federal granting agencies.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With Mark Carney in his first week in office as Canada’s new Prime Minister, the Justin Trudeau era is quickly fading in the rearview mirror. But before we move on, it’s important to take stock of what went on in this country during Trudeau’s tenure. Our guest on today’s program says it is time for a national conversation about Trudeau’s legacy. And, in his words, “it’s not flattering.”
Andrew Potter is a Canadian author, and an associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. His latest column for The Line is titled “Justin Trudeau never cared about Canada.” Andrew Potter returns to the program.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Regular listeners of the show will recognize the name Aaron Pete. He’s a talented young broadcaster from B.C. who has guest hosted Lean Out from time to time. Last month Aaron invited Tara on his show, the Bigger Than Me podcast, to discuss some of the hot-button issues from the past few years, and how the Canadian media has handled them. Tara enjoyed their conversation so much that we are going to share it with you here today, in this special episode of the program, where we turn the tables — and Tara is the one answering the questions. Aaron Pete is host of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Tara is in the interview chair with Aaron Pete.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On Monday night, American legislation to ban transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports in schools was blocked in the Senate. The topic was a sleeper issue in the American election — with polling showing public support for sports participation based on biological sex. Today on the program, in an episode recorded ahead of the Senate vote, we ask why some feminists have backed Trump, in conversation with a British author and columnist who argues that Trump has actually done much to advance women’s rights.
Joanna Williams is a columnist for Spiked magazine, and the author of How Woke Won. Joanna Williams returns to the podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is the breakdown of trust between men and women. For a marker of this rupture, we need only look to declining marriage rates. Our guest on today’s program has penned a new book about the institution of marriage, making the case that we should reconsider its benefits — not just for individual health and happiness, but for overall societal good.
Andrea Mrozek is a senior fellow at Cardus Family. With Peter Jon Mitchell, she’s written a new book titled I…Do? Why Marriage Still Matters. Andrea Mrozek returns to the podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week, we're changing things up, here at Lean Out. We are pleased to be able to bring you an episode of Tara's new media criticism podcast with The Hub.
Her co-hosts are Harrison Lowman, managing editor of The Hub, and Peter Menzies, a former newspaper executive. On this show, they discuss an interview with the new president of the CBC, the use of anonymous sources in Canadian media — and why some women may object to being referred to as “pregnant people.” Enjoy!
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Negotiations over border security and the Trump administration’s tariffs have once again highlighted the opioid crisis that’s taking so many lives on both sides of the border. Today on the program, we’re going to leave behind the political and instead focus on the personal. My guest is a beloved Canadian sportscaster who lost his son to an overdose — and who has managed to transform his family’s pain into hope.
Scott Oake is an award-winning sportscaster for CBC Sports, Sportsnet, and Hockey Night in Canada. He’s the author of For the Love of a Son: A Memoir of Addiction, Loss, and Hope, and a founder of the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s been a whirlwind news cycle here in Canada, in the wake of President Donald Trump imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now announced that these tariffs are on hold for 30 days, as Canada implements its 1.3-billion-dollar border strategy, aimed at stopping the flow of fentanyl. The American tariffs have come as a surprise for many in this country. But our guest on today’s program says they have, in fact, been in the making for some time.
Jeff Rubin is a Canadian economist, bestselling author, and a former chief economist and chief strategist for CIBC World Markets. His most recent book is A Map of the New Normal: How Inflation, War, and Sanctions Will Change Your World Forever. Jeff Rubin returns to the program.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The Liberal leadership race is heating up, and former deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland has now thrown her hat in the ring. Freeland is a powerful figure in Canadian politics, a former journalist who went on to become one of the Prime Minister’s most loyal cabinet members — until her surprise resignation in December. Today on the program, as Freeland campaigns to win the Liberal leadership, and thus the top job in the country, we take a closer look at her life and its controversies with the author of a recent biography.
Catherine Tsalikis is a Toronto journalist who covers foreign policy, politics, and gender. She’s the author of Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week on the Lean Out podcast, we continue our coverage of a chaotic time in Canadian politics. As many of you know, in the wake of Justin Trudeau’s resignation, the Prime Minister asked our Governor General to prorogue Parliament until March 24, as the Liberal Party conducts its leadership race. This move has sparked a legal challenge, and over the weekend a judge agreed to expediate the court’s hearing. Our guest on the program today is a Canadian lawyer and bestselling author who has insights to share on this issue.
Christine Van Geyn is litigation director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and the host of the TV show, Canadian Justice.
This episode mentions the WE Charity scandal. You can read background on that her
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
If you follow Canadian politics — and even if you don’t — you probably know that we are in a historic moment in this country. Just over a week ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he would be resigning as leader of the Liberal Party and intended to step down as prime minister as soon as a new leader was in place. Parliament is now prorogued until March 24, at a time of heightened tensions with the United States. Our guest on the podcast today is a veteran Canadian journalist. She returns to the show to unpack all of the mind-boggling developments.
Jen Gerson is co-founder and co-editor of The Line, a popular Canadian commentary platform.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Lean Out is back from our holiday break, and we are resuming our interview series on the challenges facing modern men. Our guest on the program this week is someone we've been wanting to speak to for some time. He’s a former martial arts fighter who has spoken to tens of thousands of men — and he has some insights to share on how to forge healthier ideals for masculinity.
Richie Hardcore is a retired Muay Thai champion in New Zealand. He’s a coach, and an educator and public speaker on masculinity, sexuality, and violence prevention.
This podcast 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
New Year’s Day is often a day of quiet contemplation. A day to take stock of our lives, to review the past year and to look toward the one to come. As we settle in with our coffees, we wanted to bring you an encore presentation of one most powerful interviews of the year — with a war reporter who spent his adult life on the frontlines, until one day the frontlines came for him. Today on the program: A near-death experience and what it reveals about the sacredness of life.
Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, the bestselling author of Tribe, Freedom, and The Perfect Storm, and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. His latest book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face o Face With the Idea of An Afterlife.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
No podcast series on the challenges facing modern men is complete without hearing from my guest on today’s program. He’s a policy scholar who has been ringing the alarm on the social, economic, and health crises facing men for years now — so much so that he recently founded a national research organization dedicated to tackling these issues. Today on Lean Out, we’re pleased to bring you an encore presentation of our 2022 conversation about his ground-breaking book.
Richard V. Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. His latest book is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It.
This podcast series is dedicated to Marc Antione Jubinville. May he rest in peace.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week at Lean Out, we continue our podcast series on the challenges facing modern men, from declining educational achievement to rising suicides and overdoses. We’re happy to bring you an encore presentation of an interview from 2022, with a political economist who says prime, working age men in America are facing Great Depression-era levels of joblessness. The collapse of work — today on Lean Out.
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also the author of Men Without Work.
This podcast series is dedicated to Marc Antione Jubinville. May he rest in peace.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Today at Lean Out, we continue our series on the challenges facing modern men. My guest on the program has done pioneering work on the increasing gender gap in American society and politics. He’s thought a lot about the dangers of men and women growing apart — and about how we might come together.
Daniel Cox is director of the Survey Center on American Life. He is also a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. His forthcoming book is titled Uncoupled, and he writes the Substack newsletter American Storylines.
This podcast series is dedicated to Marc Antione Jubinville. May he rest in peace.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
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 2016, the election of Donald Trump took the mainstream media by surprise, with many in the press struggling to understand his rise to power and the factors driving it. Now, in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive win, here we are again. My guest on today’s program suspected we might be missing the story, and just days before the election, published a brilliant podcast episode unpacking the comeback of Donald Trump.
Andy Mills is an award-winning American reporter and podcast producer, and co-creator of The Daily at The New York Times and The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling at The Free Press. He’s now the host of the Reflector podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
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
The activist left in America has been very visible in recent years, often dominating the public conversation online and in prominent institutions. But our guest on today’s program says that the modern left is curious in that it is “largely leaderless” — that no one in particular is “speaking directly for it, or to it” — making this “a singular moment” in the country’s history.
Ross Barkan is an American journalist, novelist, and Substacker, and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. His recent piece for that magazine is, “The Activist Left Doesn’t Want a Hero. But Does it Need One?”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week saw the arrest of an armed man in Florida, in the wake of an apparent assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump — the second in roughly two months. Our guest on the program today is a reporter who’s been covering the rise of political extremism in America for The Washington Post. In this episode, which was taped in late August, she shares the insights she gained reporting on a man who went to prison for uttering threats against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Ruby Cramer is a national political enterprise reporter at The Washington Post.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The social and economic crises that we are experiencing in Canada are frequent topics of conversation in this country, with many Canadians expressing the belief that we have seen a decline in quality of life. Our guest on the program this week is a former foreign policy advisor to Justin Trudeau’s government — but today he’s on the show to talk domestic policy, and what he sees as “a betrayal of the Canadian dream.”
Omer Aziz is a former Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a contributing writer to The Boston Globe. He’s also the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir. His recent essay for The Globe and Mail is titled, “The Canadian dream is on life support.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the big stories of this summer was immigration. Canada has had a decades-long, bipartisan, pro-immigration consensus — but in recent months, that has collapsed. And one of the most contentious parts of our system is now the Temporary Foreign Worker program, which was deregulated during 2022 in the midst of pandemic labour shortages. Our guest on the program today was just in Halifax at the Prime Minister’s cabinet retreat, making the case that the low-wage, non-agriculture stream of this program should be “entirely abolished.”
Mike Moffatt is a Canadian economist. He’s Senior Director of the Smart Prosperity Institute, and the co-host of The Missing Middle podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The news cycle is currently dominated by the American presidential election — but there’s also a lot going on here in Canada. Our guest on the program today is a veteran journalist and the publisher of a reporter-owned and operated outlet in Ottawa. As you’ll hear, there’s been no shortage of consequential stories this summer. Tara is away this week, but she asked podcaster Aaron Pete to bring you this interview with Holly Doan, the publisher of Blacklock’s Reporter.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the bright spots in the Canadian media landscape is the emergence of a new generation of digital creators, who are filling the gaps in coverage in innovative ways. My guest on the program today is at the forefront of this movement, helming a thoughtful, nuanced current affairs podcast out of British Columbia. He will be guest hosting this podcast next week, and I’m thrilled to get to introduce him to you today.
Aaron Pete is a Councillor for the Chawathil First Nation, and the host of the Bigger Than Me podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, the economic populism that’s ascendent in the Republican Party is in the spotlight. To understand this set of policy concerns, there is no better person to speak to than my guest on today’s program, who has been influential in driving this agenda — and in challenging the economic orthodoxy on the right.
Oren Cass is the founder and chief economist of American Compass, and the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
J.D. Vance was once a liberal media darling. But in recent weeks, since Donald Trump selected him as his running mate, the Ohio senator has been the subject of almost wall-to-wall negative coverage — in both the liberal press, and on left-leaning social media. But our guest on today’s program says that Vance is a complex figure, and one we should take a closer look at.
Zaid Jilani is the freelance American journalist behind the Substack newsletter The American Saga. His recent essay for Compact Magazine is “Why the Left Gets J.D. Vance Wrong.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Given the state of our politics right now, it is easy to feel hopeless. But our guest on this week’s program says things are not as bleak as they seem, that people want to heal our deep societal divisions, and that the answer to bridging these divides lies in rebuilding civic life — one conversation at a time.
John Wood, Jr. is a former nominee for congress, a columnist for USA Today, and a national ambassador for Braver Angels. Its new campaign is called American Hope.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
America is in the grips of polarization, and the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump has underlined the potential for an escalation in political violence. It has never been more important for the media to complicate dominant narratives and resist oversimplification. Today, a journalist I admire returns to the program to model what that looks like in practice, bringing us a nuanced story about tensions within the conservative movement over school vouchers.
Alec MacGillis is an award-winning American journalist, and a reporter for ProPublica. He’s also the author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This summer, the glamorization of divorce has reached its apex. There are divorce rings, divorce parties, divorce albums, and divorce memoirs — all portraying the act of walking away from a marriage as inherently empowering for women. But our guest on today’s program argues that so much of the current divorce discourse is just narcissism disguised as feminism.
Kat Rosenfield is an American novelist, cultural critic, and podcaster – and a columnist for The Free Press. Today, we discuss her essay for the online outlet, titled “Does Divorce Make You Hotter?”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s an election year in the United States. And so far, the media’s focus has not been on working people and what policies they want to see from their leadership. But our guest on today’s program has travelled across America interviewing working class voters — and she shares her insights on what the media is missing.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek. Her latest book is Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. The audiobook is out this month. Batya Ungar-Sargon returns to the show, in an episode recorded in April.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Lean Out is back from our annual summer hiatus — and we have a special episode for you today. Many of you know that Tara wrote “The Trust Spiral,” the 2024 Massey Essay on the state of the media, a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada. Before Lean Out went on summer break, Massey College hosted a public discussion about this essay, and Tara was lucky enough to be interviewed by someone she greatly admires.
Rudyard Griffiths is co-founder and chair of the Munk Debates. He’s also a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and the executive director of The Hub.
Special thanks for today’s episode go to Emily Mockler and Jonathan Rose and everyone at Massey College, to Kyle Wyatt and the team at the Literary Review of Canada, and of course to Rudyard Griffiths.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
If you follow Canadian politics, you know that Justin Trudeau’s political career is now looking uncertain. He’s been polling badly for months, as a series of crises have rocked the country, including the cost of living, the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, healthcare, runaway immigration, and foreign interference. Our guest on today’s program has written a comprehensive biography of Trudeau as Prime Minister, based on interviews with more than 200 insiders, and the man himself — and today, he walks us through Trudeau’s journey from being a global media darling to becoming one of the most divisive figures in the country.
Stephen Maher is an investigative journalist and political writer. His new book is The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In times of war, civilians run from combat. But war reporters have the opposite reaction — they run toward it, putting themselves in danger to bear witness to these armed conflicts, and to try to make sense of our broken world. Our guest on today’s program spent years going to the frontlines, until one day, in June of 2020, the frontlines came to him. The near death experience that followed, he says, changed him forever.
Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, the bestselling author of Tribe, Freedom, and The Perfect Storm, and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. His latest book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of An Afterlife — and it’s out this week.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
2020 was a turbulent year in American politics, and in the America media. The editor of The New York Times recently conceded that the paper went “too far” during that time and said that it is now working to pull itself back from such “excesses.” Our guest on the program today was at the paper during that period — and left to report critically on what she calls “the revolution,” both for her new media company and for her new book, which is out this week.
Nellie Bowles is an American journalist and co-founder of The Free Press. Her new book is Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The failure of our elites to manage society has been a topic since at least the financial crash of 2008. But it is very much on the mind of many Canadians these days, as we face a series of cascading crises, from housing and opioids to the cost of living and heath care. A decade ago, my guest on today’s program wrote a searing indictment against the system of elite education — and now, with the release of its 10th anniversary edition, his critique is more relevant than ever.
William Deresiewicz is an essayist and cultural critic, and the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Canadian politics have hit new low point. According to a recent poll, 70 percent of Canadians now believe that everything is broken in this country — and 59 percent said they are angry about how the country is being managed. Our guest on the program today has a new book about our Prime Minister, and the chaotic times we live in.
Paul Wells is a Canadian political journalist, a frequent commentator on radio and television, and a fellow Substacker. His latest book is Justin Trudeau on the Ropes: Governing in Troubled Times. (You can listen to our previous interview about his last book on the trucker cris, An Emergency in Ottawa, here.)
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The Lean Out podcast has covered lots of books in recent years. We have never covered a poetry book. But all it took was one read of a striking new collection of poems for us to know that we had to have its author on the show. The Canadian writer Stephen Marche said it best when he described this collection: “Like supremely eloquent graffiti written on the wall of a magnificent palace, except the palace is the world, and the world is on fire.”
Michael Lista is a Canadian essayist, investigative journalist, and poet. His new book is Barfly and Other Poems.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of this Substack will know, this spring Tara has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada. You can read it here.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. To mark the occasion, we are presenting a series of encore interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Including today’s conversation, which originally aired in November of 2023.
George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of ten books.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of this Substack will know, this spring Tara has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada. You can read it here.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. To mark the occasion, we are presenting a series of encore interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Including today’s conversation, which originally aired in January of 2024.
Michael Powell is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a former reporter at The New York Times, where he covered free speech, college campuses, and identity politics. He’s also the author of Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of Tara's Substack will know, this spring she has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada, where it’s published.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. Leading up to its publication next week, we will be re-running podcast interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Including today’s conversation, which originally aired in July of 2023.
Peter Menzies is a former newspaper executive and a former vice chair of the CRTC, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. He’s now a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a frequent commentator on the Canadian media.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of Tara's Substack will know, this spring she has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada, where it’s published.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. Leading up to its publication next week, we will be re-running podcast interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Including today’s conversation, which originally aired in December of 2022.
Freddie deBoer is an American journalist. His latest book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of Tara's Substack will know, this spring she has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada, where it’s published.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. Leading up to its publication next week, we will be re-running podcast interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Including today’s conversation, which originally aired in March of 2023.
Steve Krakauer is the executive producer of The Megyn Kelly Show and the host of The Fourth Watch podcast. His recent book is Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of Tara's Substack will know, this spring she has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada, where it’s published.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. Leading up to its publication next week, we will be re-running podcast interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Including today’s conversation (which originally aired in September of 2022.)
David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. In 2022, he published a longform piece titled “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism” in the Liberties journal.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
As regular readers of Tara's Substack will know, this spring Tara has been writing the Massey Essay on the state of the media — a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto and the Literary Review of Canada, where it’s published.
The annual essay honours the legacy of the long-time CBC producer Vincent Massey Tovell. This year’s essay explores the collapse of public trust in the media. Leading up to its publication next week, we will be re-running podcast interviews with some of the journalists that helped shape Tara's thinking for this essay. Starting with today’s conversation — one of Lean Out’s most popular episodes on the Canadian media (which originally aired in July of 2023).
Jen Gerson is a Calgary journalist, and co-founder of the Canadian outlet The Line.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Canada recently reached a grim milestone — the lowest fertility rate in recorded history. We are now well below population replacement, at 1.33 births per woman. Our guest on the show today has studied this crisis in family formation in the West. And he says we need to take a look at our culture.
Tim Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a columnist for The Washington Examiner. His new book is Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs To Be.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve spent much of the past year investigating the collapse of the news media and the decline in public trust. Tara's guest this week argues that the industry is at a crossroads, but media bosses are unwilling to meet the moment, and seem determined to continue on the same trajectory — even if it means the death of their institutions.
Ryan Zickgraf is an American journalist and a columnist at Compact Magazine. His new essay is “Journalism’s Slow Death Threatens Democracy.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In March of 2020, much of the world was in lockdown. The unprecedented pandemic response closed schools, shuttered businesses, and paused public events. My guest on today’s program says it is time to evaluate the measures that were taken and consider whether the harms outweighed the benefits. The UK charity that he leads research for has now launched working groups to examine Covid policies in a number of different countries. Including his own, Canada.
Kevin Bardosh is director and head of research at Collateral Global, and an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
When it comes to race relations, many of us were raised with the ethos expressed in the famed Martin Luther King Jr. quote calling on society to judge people by the content of their character instead of the colour of their skin. Western society has moved away from that ideal — and my guest on today’s program says it’s time we get back to it.
Coleman Hughes is an American writer, commentator, and podcaster, and an analyst for CNN. His new book is The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Canada is embroiled in a number of high-profile political scandals, and it’s a dispiriting moment for the country. This week, we’re taking a break from the news cycle, and instead contemplating the contributions of a famed Canadian — the late philosopher Marshall McLuhan — who, my guest on today’s program says, understood our time better than many currently living through it.
Benjamin Carlson is an American writer, and media strategist, and the author of the Substack newsletter, Carlson Letter. His latest essay, on Marshall McLuhan, is part of a series at The Free Press titled “The Prophets.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s not unusual for well-heeled people to try to imagine what it might be like to grow up without money. But my guest on today’s program says it is uncommon for them to try to imagine what it might be like to grow up without a family. And his new book chronicles exactly that life — his childhood in foster care — but also, his journey from a working-class town in California to the military, Yale University and beyond.
Rob Henderson is the American writer who coined the term “luxury beliefs.” His debut book is Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
We hear a lot of grim predictions about the future of local news, both in the United States and in Canada. But my guests on today’s program are feeling optimistic. For their new book, the pair did a deep dive into innovative local and regional news startups across America, and they say these startups are changing the media landscape, one outlet at a time.
Ellen Clegg spent more than three decades at The Boston Globe. She’s co-founder of a non-profit local news outlet in Massachusetts, Brookline.News. Dan Kennedy is a journalism professor at Northeastern University and a media commentator. Their podcast is What Works: The Future of Local News. And together, they are the authors of What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve talked a lot about plummeting birth rates in the West, about high rates of unhappiness among modern women, about the loneliness epidemic in our society, and about the crisis unfolding among men, with large numbers of suicides and overdoses.
Our guest on the program today says there’s a factor we should consider with each of these issues — and that is low marriage rates. And he thinks it’s time to have a conversation about the state of our unions.
Brad Wilcox is a professor of sociology and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He’s also the author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
What does it take to speak out against orthodoxies in an age of outrage? This is something that our guest on today’s program has spent years contemplating, interviewing people from all walks of life who have managed to stick to their principles in the face of an online mobbing, and not back down.
Katherine Brodsky is a Canadian writer and commentator, and the author of No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage — Lessons for the Silenced Majority.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Canada has, once again, made international headlines. The Federal Court has ruled the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act, in response to the trucker protests, was illegal. My guest on today’s program argued during the crisis that the government had done something that it had no constitutional power to do — and he joins me on the program today to talk through this historic court decision.
Ryan Alford is a constitutional law expert, a law professor at Lakehead University, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
For decades now in Canada, there has been a bipartisan, pro-immigration consensus. But in recent weeks, we have watched that consensus fall apart. Our guest on today’s program has been covering this development in his columns for The Globe and Mail. He argues that it was the Liberal government that broke the consensus — and it must be the Liberals who restore it.
Tony Keller is a veteran Canadian journalist and a columnist for The Globe and Mail.
(This podcast was recorded before Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s announcement that the federal government will cap international student visas. You can read Tony’s latest column on that development here.)
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In Ontario, where Tara lives, schools were closed for 135 days during the pandemic. Both there and in the United States, there was very little critical media coverage on this unprecedented public policy. But our guest on today’s program was reporting on those left behind by school closures from the very beginning. Now, he’s covering an element of the aftermath that’s not getting much attention — the crisis in absenteeism.
Alec MacGillis is an author and an award-winning investigative journalist. He’s a reporter at ProPublica, and his latest piece, published both there and at The New Yorker, is “Has School Become Optional?”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
2024 is an election year for the United States. And one of the stories so far is the political realignment that we’re continuing to witness — with the working class moving to the right. This is something that is also happening here in Canada. My guests on today’s program have written an entire book about the phenomenon, and what it might mean for the future of politics.
John B. Judis is editor-at-large at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at The National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic.
Ruy Teixeira is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a cofounder and politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter on Substack, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Their new book is Where have all the Democrats gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The Lean Out podcast kicked off two years ago this week, aiming to push back on mainstream media conformity, to reaffirm old school journalistic values like viewpoint diversity and curiosity and respect — and, in some small way, to help widen the Overton window of ideas considered acceptable for discussion and debate. Happily, this approach seems to be resonating with a lot of you. We’re pleased to say that we now have listeners in 150 countries and close to 5,000 cities worldwide.
For our anniversary episode today, we're delighted to be joined by a journalist we admire, whose work we have looked to as an example for our times.
Michael Powell is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a former reporter at The New York Times, where he covered free speech, college campuses, and identity politics. He’s also the author of Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This year has not been an easy one for a lot of people. Not only are many coping with economic instability, but our culture is polarized and often extremely hostile. But our guest on today’s program — the last episode of the year — wants to leave us with a vision of unity. And of hope for a better, and more harmonious, 2024.
Monica Harris is the author of The Illusion of Division. She’s also the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
With the pandemic finally in the rearview mirror, a lot of people are eager to put it behind us — and move on. But our guest on today’s program says it’s important that we take a look at the mistakes that were made, and understand what went wrong.
Joe Nocera is a veteran business journalist and a columnist at The Free Press. His latest book, co-authored with Vanity Fair’s Bethany McLean, is The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On Thanksgiving weekend, an essay started circulating — and it was an essay that I felt like I’d been waiting a long time to read. The essay explores a troubling trend: a renewed skepticism of interracial relationships, and, indeed, of interracial families. Its author is a white man, married to a Black woman. And while progressives had applauded their wedding back in 2007, he writes that it now felt as if he no longer had the right to parent his own children.
Paul Kix is an American journalist, and the author of You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live. His latest essay, for The Free Press, is “Liberals Once Embraced Interracial Marriages Like Mine. What Changed?”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In times of crisis, artists often feel the need to take a stand, to engage in activism. But our guest on today’s program says we should recognize that art and politics have very different agendas. “These are different realms,” he writes, “and the values of one can be inhospitable — even deadly — to the values of the other.”
George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of ten books. His latest essay is “Why Activism Leads To So Much Bad Writing.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week on Lean Out, we turn our attention to freedom of expression in the arts. Our guest on today’s program is an acclaimed and controversial choreographer who says the UK’s creative industries are in crisis — experiencing a culture of widespread fear and intimidation. And she’s launched a new organization to address this.
Rosie Kay is the CEO and artistic director of the Kay2CO dance company, and a founder of Freedom in the Arts.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week in New York City, a longtime defender of free speech was honoured by her peers. My guest on today’s program accepted the Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Coalition Against Censorship benefit. She returns to the podcast to mark that occasion — and to talk through the big issues of our current moment, including rising antisemitism.
Nadine Strossen is the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a senior fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Her new book is Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know. She also hosts a new documentary film series, Free To Speak.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
“Be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right.” That was the motion posed at Friday’s Munk Debate in Toronto, to a group of public intellectuals from across the globe.
The starting point for the debate was that liberalism is in crisis. That tensions have reached a boiling point. That its critics believe “liberalism has become an impediment to the goal of progress” — and that “humanity urgently needs a new animating ideology.” My guest on today’s program was at that debate, and he’s here to give us some analysis.
Harrison Lowman is a current affairs journalist in Toronto, and the producer of this podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
For some time now, there have been calls for Canada to launch an independent public inquiry into its handling of the Covid pandemic — including from the British Medical Journal. But this past week, as reported by Blacklock’s Reporter, Liberal MPs rejected an inquiry, opting for a closed-door review by advisors to the Minister of Health. My guest on today’s program says that it is essential that Canadians examine the mistakes that were made during the pandemic, and learn from them.
Joanna Baron is the executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the co-author, with Christine Van Geyn, of the new book, Pandemic Panic: How Canadian Government Responses to Covid-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
There are still people who believe that cancel culture does not exist. But it’s about to get a whole lot harder to make that argument publicly. Our guest on today’s program has a new book out that provides irrefutable evidence that cancel culture is a serious phenomenon — that it is now a common tactic on the right and the left, that it is a threat to individuals and institutions, and that it is ultimately undermining trust. But, our guest today says, there is a solution.
Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He’s also the co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Crime in Canada is on the rise. According to recent Statistics Canada data, violent crime is at its most severe since 2007, and the murder rate is the highest it’s been since 1992. My guest on today’s program says our criminal justice system is not working - that it is expensive and ineffective and inhumane, and that the time has come to transform it.
Benjamin Perrin is a professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, and the former lead policy advisor on criminal justice and public safety for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. His new book is Indictment: The Criminal Justice System on Trial.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Earlier this month, a prominent Canadian academic made headlines when he announced his departure from the University of London. “Progressive conformity and cancel culture are distorting the teaching and research mission of universities,” he wrote on Twitter. “Between the extremely controversial and the progressive-controlled monoculture of academia is a vast and growing zone of unspoken truth.”
Eric Kaufmann is an author and a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he is set to establish the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. In January, he’ll launch a new, low-cost online public course titled “Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Is cancel culture controlled by women? It’s a question that my guest on today’s program has been asking for some time. Her conclusion is that, yes, the phenomenon is driven by women — and only women can stop it. She’s founded a community that, online and in person, has begun actively pushing back.
Meghan Daum is the author of six books, including The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars. She’s the host of The Unspeakable Podcast, and co-host of the podcast A Special Place in Hell. She’s also the founder of The Unspeakeasy, a community for free-thinking women.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In 2019, in the magazine Current Affairs, a former McKinsey consultant wrote, “There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.” My guest on the program today has spent years doing a deep-dive into the prestigious consulting company — and he’s here to talk about what he’s learned about its influence around the world, including here in Canada.
Michael Forsythe is an investigative reporter for The New York Times, and co-author of When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm, whichis out in paperback next week.
You can read McKinsey & Company’s response to the book here.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Schools across the country are back in session — and this fall, the spotlight is on trans issues in the classroom. Saskatchewan and New Brunswick have come out with new policies for parental consent on student pronoun changes, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has launched a lawsuit, saying this violates the Charter and human rights. Add to that, today, some parents will be marching in a cross-Canada protest against what they call gender ideology.
Our guest on the podcast today has been reporting on these issues for years, and she has thoughts on how we might inject some nuance into this polarized conversation.
Katie Herzog is an American journalist and host of the Blocked and Reported podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Between the years of 2010 and 2020, a new way of thinking about identity travelled from elite universities, to Internet subcultures, to social media, and to mainstream media, finally landing at many of our most important social, cultural, and governmental institutions, transforming longstanding rules and norms.
Our guest on the 100th episode of Lean Out is among the first to take a comprehensive look at the roots of this ascendent ideology and how it became so influential — and today we’ll hear why he believes it is ultimately a trap.
Yascha Mounk is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the founder of Persuasion. His new book is The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.
This episode is produced by Harrison Lowman.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
For the past few months on Lean Out, we’ve been doing a deep-dive into the crisis in Canadian media, speaking to critics of the status quo — and asking what’s gone wrong and where we go from here. Tara's guest on today’s program, the last episode in our summer media series, has a unique perspective on our media’s collapse. And he says government and Big Tech subsidies are compromising the vitality and validity of a free and independent press in Canada.
Rudyard Griffiths is the executive director of The Hub, and the co-founder and chair of the Munk Debates.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, America’s streets filled with protesters — in some of the largest demonstrations in the country’s history. But three years later, very little concrete change has been achieved. Tara's guest on the podcast today asks: What happened? Why did this mass movement achieve so little?
Freddie deBoer is an American journalist. His new book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the most important tasks for a seasoned journalist is to pass on what you know. Journalism is something that’s learned by doing, usually alongside someone who’s done it longer. Tara enjoyed this process while at CBC, and is pleased to now be at a point with Lean Out that she can expand the operation to include working with up-and-coming journalists. Late last year, she had the pleasure of appearing on fellow Substacker Aaron Pete’s show, the Bigger Than Me podcast, and was impressed by his curiosity, perceptive questions, and thoughtful interviewing style. So she invited him to work together this summer to create an episode of Lean Out. We're thrilled to have Aaron Pete guest host the show today.One of the ongoing themes of the Lean Out podcast is the importance of viewpoint diversity — particularly on controversial issues. This topic was in the news again this month, with a lawsuit filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, against California Community Colleges state and district officials on recent diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regulations.
Daniel Ortner is a lawyer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Lean Out reached out to Chancellor Sonya Christian and California Community Colleges for comment. They referred us to a recent motion, filed in response to a July lawsuit that also names the Chancellor as a defendant, and is similar to the one filed in August against the Chancellor and Board of Governors. The motion reads, in part:
“[The] Plaintiff has not — and cannot — present evidence to show that the regulations in any way impose an immediate threat of harm to him, or have directly impaired his ability to express himself freely. Nor is there any showing that Defendant Sonya Christian, the California Community Colleges Chancellor, has the authority to undertake any action to restrain Plaintiff’s First Amendment rights. And Plaintiff’s motion fails to present any argument or evidence that justifies the extraordinary remedy of finding state regulations duly promulgated to promote Fourteenth Amendment concepts of equity and inclusion for the benefit of the nearly two million students of California’s community colleges to be unconstitutional.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week, the friends and family of a school principal in Toronto gathered to celebrate his life. Richard Bilkszto, sadly, took his life last month, at the age of 60, and much of the reporting on his death has focused on a DEI training and the lawsuit that he launched about it.
A reminder to listeners that the claims you will hear have not been proven in court.
Our guest today is a reporter whose story on Richard Bilkszto has gained international attention — and our conversation grapples with a number of difficult issues, including suicide and how it’s covered in the media.
Rupa Subramanya is a staff writer at The Free Press.
Lean Out reached out to Kike Ojo-Thompson to request comment, and to invite her on the program. We have not yet heard back. But Kike Ojo-Thompson did release a statement to the media, which reads, in part: “The death of Richard Bilkszto is a tragedy and all of us at KOJO Institute offer our condolences to his loved ones.” It adds: “The allegations made against me and KOJO Institute within Mr. Bilkszto’s lawsuit against the Toronto District School Board are false, and we are not a party to the lawsuit.” You can read KOJO’s full statement here.
We also reached out to Education Minister Stephen Lecce and his office for comment, but did not hear back. In addition, we contacted the Toronto District School Board for comment. It referred us to its two previous press statements, the first of which reads, in part: “The Board would like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family, friends, and colleagues of Richard Bilkszto. Richard was a strong advocate for students, particularly for those in adult and alternative education. Throughout his over 24 years in education, he worked hard to create an environment that fostered student success for students of all ages.” The second statement reads, in part: “Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has launched an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragic passing of Richard Bilkszto, retaining King International Advisory Group, an experienced and well-respected investigative firm with multi-disciplinary expertise in conducting thorough investigations. Our intention is for this investigation to be conducted in a professional, sensitive and respectful manner.” You can read those statements in full here and here.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This summer at Lean Out, we’ve been doing a deep dive into the collapse of the Canadian media — and the role that new legislation, Bill C-18, has played in exacerbating the crisis. Tara's guest on the program today is someone who has thought a lot about the media and digital policy and public broadcasting, and she has a lot to say about where our media is at, and where we go from here.
Sue Gardner is a digital policy analyst, and the former executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She’s also the former head of cbc.ca. (Tara and Sue's paths did not cross there.)
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In the past few decades, something has gone wrong in American life, leaving its citizens subject to increasing levels of coercion. That’s the thesis of a new book, and its author, Tara's guest on the program today, argues that what’s gone wrong is a form of private tyranny, with corporations exercising more and more control over ordinary people’s lives — eroding our freedoms and generating uncertainty, stress, and economic precarity. Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor at Compact Magazine. His new book is Tyranny, Inc. — How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
What does it mean to be a heretic? Why is dissent from the dominant orthodoxies of our age so important? It’s a topic Tara's guest today has thought a lot about, as a progressive who frequently questions the thinking on his side of the aisle. And he says that, in fact, we owe much of human progress to the heretics throughout history who have dared to dissent.
Brendan O’Neill is the chief political writer for Spiked, and the host of The Brendan O’Neill Show. His new book is A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week, in the wake of controversial new legislation, Bill C-18, Meta has announced that it will be ending news sharing on its platforms in Canada. So, for a special bonus episode of the podcast, we reached out to a Canadian academic who’s been following this story closely, to get his reaction to the development — and to hear his analysis on what it might mean for our news sector going forward. (This conversation is part of Lean Out’s summer media series. Please also check out our interviews with Jen Gerson, Peter Menzies, Marc Edge, and Holly Doan.)
Michael Geist a professor and the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He’s also the host of the Law Bytes podcast.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
“Once you question the food, you question everything.” That’s a quote from Rory Feek, a farmer and filmmaker in the growing homesteading movement, which is seeing numbers of Americans turn away from processed foods and rediscover how to grow what’s on their plates, sustaining their communities in the process. Feek made this comment at the inaugural Modern Homesteading Conference in Idaho — and my guest today was there to take it all in.
Olivia Reingold is an American journalist, and a staff writer at The Free Press. Her latest story is “Home Is Where the Revolution Is.”
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In 2019, a white woman in Austin, Texas signed up for a diversity training seminar, in the hopes of better understanding growing polarization in America. But that workshop, in her view, was itself divisive. She went on to publish an essay about it, ending with a call for others to reach out to her with their own experiences — and soon got a letter from a Black man across the country that resulted in a years-long conversation on race.
Jennifer Richmond is a China scholar and international relations specialist. Winkfield Twyman Jr. is a writer and former law professor. Their new book is Letters in Black and White: A New Correspondence on Race in America.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Last week on Lean Out, we heard from Canadian journalist Jen Gerson. The response from listeners was overwhelming. You asked for more coverage of the collapse of our media, including, of course, controversial new legislation. Bill C-18 aims to save journalism in this country — but Tara's guest this week argues that it has instead “accidentally pushed the news industry into the abyss.” Peter Menzies is a former newspaper executive and a former vice chair of the CRTC, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. He’s now a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a frequent commentator on the Canadian media.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
If you listen to this podcast, you know that the Canadian media is in serious trouble. But in recent weeks, that crisis has intensified, with wave after wave of bad news for the industry. Bell Canada laid off 1300 staff. And, when this was episode was recorded, merger talks between the two biggest newspaper publishers were ongoing — negotiations have since broken down.
Add to that, in the wake of controversial new legislation, Bill C-18, Google and Facebook announced they would remove links to Canadian journalism from the platforms. (Though, just as this episode closed, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez announced that the government was drafting regulations that would set a cap on what Google and Facebook would be required to pay to our news industry).
So today, given all that’s going on, we have a special, hour-long episode of Lean Out. And my guest is here to help me unpack these developments — and to think through the state of our press, from lost public trust and pandemic mistakes, to the rise of independent outlets and and the future of the CBC.
Jen Gerson is a Calgary journalist, a contributing columnist at The Globe and Mail, and co-founder of the Canadian outlet The Line. She’s currently writing a book about moral panics.
Jen Gerson is my guest, today on Lean Out. Transcript to come for paid subscribers.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Earlier this spring, student protesters at the University of Cambridge successfully cancelled an event on campus, a screening of a documentary on fertility. Students accused the film of being misogynistic, despite the fact that, as student event organizer Charlie Bentley-Astor put it in The Critic magazine, this was a film “made primarily by women, with women, for women.” And, as you’ll hear on today’s episode, the film — which screened at the Chelsea Film Festival — features a remarkable degree of empathy from the sole male on the project.
A Cambridge administrator has stressed that “the decision about the room booking was based solely on our commitment to prioritising an environment conducive to studying during the University examination period,” and that the event could be rescheduled (which it ultimately was). You can read that statement from the university here. You can also read some of the students’ concerns here. One unnamed protest organizer told the student newspaper, Varsity: “I think a lot of students are understandably quite hurt that an institution as respected as Cambridge seems to promote bigotry to its students … an academic institution should have better standards than to promote events about ‘the pitfalls of Feminism’.”
Stephen J. Shaw is a data scientist and filmmaker based in Tokyo. He is the writer, director and producer of Birthgap — Childless World, the first part of which is available on YouTube now.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This week Lean Out is back from our annual summer hiatus, and we are recharged and ready to get back to tackling the big issues of the day. One of the things that Tara did while she was away was attend Plebity’s inaugural virtual conference, Free Speech and the Left, a timely and important gathering that brought together many prominent writers and thinkers on the left. Tara was honoured to moderate a panel for that conference — which she enjoyed so much that we're bringing it to you today in podcast form, featuring two former Lean Out guests. Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder are history professors at Carleton College. The title of our recent Plebity panel discussion is “Personal Experiences and Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture and Free Speech.” You can find the entire conference archived online at plebity.org.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In recent years, we have seen the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry explode in popularity and prevalence. But Tara's guest today says that at its worst, DEI runs from useless to counterproductive. And he thinks companies would be better off giving the lavish DEI consulting fees directly to the poor. Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a Substack newsletter that highlights exceptional non-fiction writing. Last week, he published a piece at The Atlantic titled “The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege.”
Lean Out will be off on our annual summer hiatus for the next few weeks, but we'll be back at the end of June with more conversations with heterodox writers and thinkers from around the world.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
“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
Earlier this month, a federal court judge went to speak to students at Stanford Law School. Judge Kyle Duncan has referred to the explosive protest that ensued as a “struggle session,” while student hecklers have defended their actions as counter-speech. Tara's guest on today’s program has some thoughts on this free speech controversy — and where the university should go from here. Alex Morey is a First Amendment attorney and the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
If you’re a regular listener of the Lean Out podcast, you know that it has not been a good couple of years for the media. From the lab leak theory to the Hunter Biden laptop, we in the press have gotten a lot of big stories wrong. Tara's guest on the program today is a media veteran, and he has some insights on how this all has happened — and where we go from here. Steve Krakauer is a journalist, media critic and author. He’s executive producer of The Megyn Kelly Show and host of The Fourth Watch podcast. His new book is Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One of the themes of the Lean Out podcast is open inquiry. And Tara's guest on the program today has some thoughts on this. He’s concerned about the suppression of discussion and debate and viewpoint diversity in the field of addiction — and he points to specific actions from the B.C. government and the B.C. Centre on Substance Use. But, as we’ll learn at the end of today’s episode, both view the issue quite differently. (See below for statements.) Julian Somers is a clinical psychologist, a distinguished professor at Simon Fraser University, and the director of its Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction.
STATEMENT FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA CENTRE ON SUBSTANCE USE:
Presentations at conferences that influence public policy and clinical practice should be evidence-based and peer-reviewed. Concerns were raised with the subject of this particular conference presentation, which was based on a self-published rapid review of safer supply that was not peer-reviewed and, using a well-established measurement tool to assess the methodological quality of such reviews, was rated as being of “critically low-quality.” Among the primary issues with the review is a flawed search strategy that resulted in a number of studies unrelated to safer supply being included, and a number of important and highly relevant studies being excluded. Beyond these methodological concerns, other issues are evident with this review, including the misrepresentation of study authors’ expertise, a lack of a public health perspective, and the failure to acknowledge the current state of safer supply research and other publicly available data.
BCCSU LETTER ON THE RAPID REVIEW OF SAFER SUPPLY
STATEMENT FROM B.C.’S MINISTRY OF PUBLIC SAFETY AND SOLICITOR GENERAL:
This province strongly believes in the value of integrated data and academic research. The motivation to create a new Data Innovation Program (DIP) and transition the data previously stored within the Inter-Ministry Evaluation Database (IMED), to which Dr. Somers had exclusive access, was to establish a program that enables all academics in the province access to integrated data to conduct projects for public benefit.
The IMED steering committee began discussions about transitioning to the DIP in the fall of 2020. At that time, the chair of the committee spoke by telephone with Dr Somers and socialized the idea of this transition, including the rationales of allowing more academics in the province to access integrated data and supporting increased data collection from across various sectors of government.
The DIP brings together all the data from the previous IMED and more, and has enabled important research into homelessness, basic income policies, mental health and other social factors. Unlike the IMED, the DIP allows for equitable access to data for all academics who submit a research proposal, which BC Corrections has encouraged Dr. Somers to do, so that he may continue his important work.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
After much anticipation, Justice Paul Rouleau has released his final report for the Public Order Emergency Commission, finding that the Canadian government’s use of the Emergencies Act against the trucker convoy was appropriate, but noting that he came to this conclusion reluctantly. Tara's guest on the program today had a front row seat — both for the convoy protests in Ottawa and the Commission — and he joins us today to talk about what this report means for Canada going forward. Paul Wells is an award-winning Canadian journalist, the author of a popular Substack, and the host of the Paul Wells Show podcast. His latest book is An Emergency in Ottawa: The Story of the Convoy Commission, and it’s out early next month.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Who am I? What am I here for? These are fundamental questions in life — and throughout human history, they’ve often been answered through relationships to kin. But with the collapse of the family unit and the atomization of individuals, Tara's guest on today’s program argues, we have become unmoored. And we are now experiencing a crisis in identity, “a psychic howl” that’s shaping our culture and politics in profound ways. Mary Eberstadt is an American essayist, novelist, and cultural critic. Her latest book is Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited. But today we’re going to talk about her previous title, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
In July of 2020, in The New Statesman, Tara's guest on today’s program wrote, “I fear that history will judge lockdown as a monumental mistake on a truly global scale.” At that time, there was surprisingly little debate over an unprecedented public health intervention. But that dialogue is starting to happen now, and Tara's guest’s recent book is one reason why. Mark Woolhouse is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. He’s also the author of The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This past week in Canada, a controversy erupted around the National Arts Centre’s plans to reserve an upcoming theatre performance for Black audience members only, with many questioning why any organization would want to open the door for racial segregation, in any form. (And indeed, since this podcast was recorded, the NAC has issued an updated press release, indicating “everyone is welcome at all our shows.”) It’s the latest example of a movement that, as my guest on today’s program argues, presents itself as progressive — when in fact, its ideas are deeply regressive. Andrew Doyle is a British broadcaster, writer, and comedian. He shot to fame with his satirical Twitter account, Titania McGrath, but has since become known for hosting the GB News show Free Speech Nation. His latest book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Without freedom of expression, there can be no great art. Artists must have the ability to express themselves fearlessly, and take risks, in order to create authentic work. So, what happens when this fundamental value is eroded within our culture? It’s a question that Tara's guest on the podcast today has thought a lot about — and one he tackles in his first Substack newsletter, dedicated to a recent incident which saw London’s Field Day Festival rescind a booking request for the rapper M.I.A. in the wake of online comments. Winston Marshall is a British musician, and a former member of the band Mumford & Sons. He’s also the host of the Marshall Matters podcast at The Spectator, and the author of a Substack newsletter called The WinStack.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve talked a lot about the state of open debate in our society. The public conversation these days frequently involves highly contentious and nasty arguments — and science is no exception. Michael Powell at The New York Times recently reported out one such example, involving the naming of a telescope after a late NASA head, and allegations of homophobia. Several of the scientists behind the movement to rename the telescope have issued a statement since The New York Times piece came out, arguing that Powell “has attempted to transform a debate on the naming of JWST into one that raises ‘personal’ issues involving Professor Oluseyi.” You can read that statement in full here. Today, on the podcast, we’ll hear from the astrophysicist at the centre of this controversy. Hakeem Oluseyi is the visiting Robinson Professor at George Mason University, and the president of the National Society of Black Physicists. He’s also the author of A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars.
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 doing a deep dive into the rise of independent journalism, and looking at some of the big stories that independent journalists broke this past year. Tara's guest on today’s program, taped in December, saw several of her own pieces draw international attention in 2022 — including her reporting on the trucker convoy crisis in Ottawa, and, as we’ll discuss today, her reporting around Canada’s controversial Medical Assistance in Dying program, also known as MAID. Rupa Subramanya is a staff writer at The Free Press, and a columnist at the National Post. Rupa Subramanya returns to the show, today on Lean Out.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
One year ago today, the Lean Out podcast launched with an interview with the American journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon. Now, 12 months later, Lean Out has listeners in 135 countries and 2900 cities. To mark this milestone — our first anniversary — we invited Batya back on the show to talk through some of the big stories of 2022. Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, and the author of Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Throughout the month of December, here on Lean Out, we’ve been having conversations with the independent journalists that we admire.
Today, Tara is happy to welcome back to the podcast a writer and thinker whose work kept us sane during the pandemic.
Meghan Daum is an essayist and author. She’s a former columnist for the L.A. Times, host of The Unspeakable podcast, and with Sarah Haider, co-host of the podcast A Special Place In Hell.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Today is a day of rest and reflection for many of us — and, with any luck, of joy and gratitude and communal celebration as well.
With that in mind, we have a surprise bonus episode of Lean Out, featuring a special guest. He’s here to offer us all a little hope and inspiration for Christmas, and for the year to come.
Reverend Christopher White is the minister at Kedron United Church in Oshawa, Ontario, in the greater Toronto area.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This month at Lean Out, we've been speaking with journalists we admire — and having conversations about the state of the mainstream media, and the rise of the independent press.
Tara's guest today runs an independent outlet in Ottawa, and she joins Tara to talk through some of the year’s biggest stories.
Holly Doan is an award-winning journalist, and the publisher and owner of Blacklock’s Reporter.
Lean Out did request comment from the Parliamentary Press Gallery on the recent eviction of Blacklock’s Tom Korski. You can read the statement it sent, in full, below.
The Press Gallery would like correct the record about a decision made last Friday regarding one of its members.
The Press Gallery Executive Committee received a complaint, from several members, of serious misconduct as defined in by-law No.10 of our Constitution, regarding a Gallery member, Tom Korski. The subcategory of serious misconduct at issue in the complaint was that set out in paragraph 2(b) of by-law No.10, which may be described as pertaining to harassing or otherwise inappropriate conduct by a member. The complaint did not pertain to any issue of journalistic practices or principles. The Executive considered the complaint in accordance with the Constitution and the procedures set out in theGallery’s “Complaint Procedures”.
A mediation process was offered, without, however, resolving the complaint.
Mr. Korski was given the opportunity to respond to the complaint, but the Executive did not receive any representations in that regard.
The Executive, after careful scrutiny of the facts alleged by the complainants, has determined that the complaint was well-founded and that the conduct complained-of constituted serious misconduct, as defined in paragraph 10(2)(b) of the Constitution, by the member concerned.
In determining whether any sanctions were required in light of its conclusions on the merits of the complaint, and if so, what sanctions would be appropriate, the Executive gave consideration to both the seriousness of the misconduct and the importance of protecting members who are using Gallery facilities from harassing or otherwise inappropriate conduct by other members. Accordingly, the Executive decided to prohibit the member mentioned in the complaint from having access to certain shared spaces managed by the Gallery, such as the Hot Room, Room 172-B in West Block, the Poliquin Lounge, and the 6th floor boardroom, for a period of 90 days.
The member in question still holds their membership status with the Press Gallery as well as their access card to enter parliamentary buildings for journalistic purposes and will therefore retain the ability to access the Chamber of the House of Commons, committees, and press conferences.
Contrary to certain accounts of these events circulating on social media, Mr. Korski was not escorted by a police officer off the Gallery premises, he was advised of the decision of the Executive andgiven to the end of the day to comply with the decision by leaving the premises.
Mr. Korski was notified of the decision by the president of the Press Gallery, Guillaume St-Pierre, accompanied by the vice-president, Louis Blouin, on Friday, December 2.
The media outlet with which Mr. Korski is associated, Blacklock’s Reporter, retains two members in the Press Gallery, including Mr. Korski. The decision in question pertains only to the access of Mr. Korski himself to Gallery facilities shared by other members.
Guillaume St-Pierre
President, Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
What does it mean to be politically homeless? Tara's guest today describes herself this way, and jokes that her tribe is tribeless. We relate. A lot.
This month at Lean Out, Tara has been speaking with independent journalists who are changing the media landscape. Today’s guest is an opinion writer that always makes us think — and laugh.
Bridget Phetasy is a comedian, writer, and podcaster in Los Angeles. She’s a columnist and contributing editor at The Spectator, and host of the shows Dumpster Fire, Walk-Ins Welcome, and Factory Settings. Her Substack is Beyond Parody.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
This summer on her podcast, Bari Weiss described Tara's guest today as one of the best writers in America. We think she’s right.
During the month of December, here at Lean Out, we're speaking with independent journalists that we admire. And we're particularly pleased to bring you today’s conversation, with a Substack writer who’s had a big impact on Tara's thinking.
Freddie deBoer is an independent journalist in Brooklyn, New York. He’s the author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and he writes an eponymous newsletter at Substack. (This was recorded on December 6, before the latest revelations on The Twitter Files from Bari Weiss.)
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast this year, we’ve talked a lot about the failings of the mainstream media, and the reasons why the press has lost the public’s trust.
But for the month of December, we’ll be focusing on one of the bright spots of the media landscape — and that is the independent press. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be speaking with some of the journalists that I most admire, who are doing fantastic work, at Substack and elsewhere.
We kick off this series today with Leighton Woodhouse. He’s an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker in Oakland, California. His Substack is called Social Studies. (This episode was recorded last week, before the Twitter Files revelations.)
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, we spend a lot of time delving into the big problems of our age. But one thing we haven’t paid enough attention to is the forces that distract us all from solving these problems.
What are the bread and circuses of our time?
Tara's guest on the podcast today argues that we are in thrall to shopping — and that this shapes our culture in profound ways.
Paul Berton is an award-winning Canadian journalist and the editor-in-chief of The Hamilton Spectator. His new book is Shopomania: Our Obsession With Possession.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve been talking about the state of the modern male.
And today, Tara's guest on the podcast is going to walk us through his landmark study on an invisible crisis afflicting prime working-aged men in America — and that is the collapse of work.
Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book is Men Without Work; it’s recently out in a post-pandemic edition.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
There’s a group of people in our society who are in deep trouble. They lag behind in education and employment — and disproportionately die of suicides and overdoses.
Who are we talking about? Boys and men.
Tara's guest on the podcast today says that while this issue has long been taboo, it’s time for a conversation about it, as its impacts are felt all around us.
Richard V. Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he directs the Boys and Men Project. His new book is called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
“I hate it when I find myself agreeing with people with whom I usually disagree.”
These are the opening lines of a book written by Tara's guest on the podcast today. She’s a progressive professor, but she now finds herself breaking ranks with the left over which works of literature are acceptable to be read and discussed in America’s classrooms.
Deborah Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies at Carleton College, and an instructor at the Minnesota Correctional Facility - Stillwater.
Her latest book is Literature and the New Culture Wars: Triggers, Cancel Culture, and the Teacher’s Dilemma.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve been diving into pandemic school closures — and trying to get to the bottom of why there was so little debate over this.
Tara's guest on the podcast today has some insights to share. She’s a mother of four and an open schools advocate, and she’s been outspoken on the issue from the very start.
Jennifer Sey is an American author, former gymnast, filmmaker, and business executive. Her new book is called Levi’s Unbuttoned — The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
When schools were closed at the beginning of the pandemic, we did not have a robust public debate.
The issue, unfortunately, was politicized — and it has only been recently, with the data now emerging, that a mainstream conversation has been possible.
Back in 2020, Tara's guest on the podcast today warned what school closures could mean for children, and particularly for the most vulnerable kids.
Anya Kamenetz is a former education reporter for NPR. Her new book is The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The Lean Out podcast has just celebrated its 50th episode. So, today, for episode 51, we have a special Canada-themed show for you.
We’re going to be hearing from a much-respected Canadian broadcaster who’s written a riveting biography about a much-discussed Canadian politician, former Prime Minister John Turner, Canada’s version of JFK.
As we take a trip back in time — hearing about John Turner’s role in the invocation of the War Measures Act, and his liaisons with Princess Margaret and Marilyn Monroe — my guest on the podcast today will reflect on how things have changed between Turner’s time and our own, in both media and in politics.
We’ll hear why we need a civil culture of debate in this country, now more than ever — and where Canadian politics goes from here, with the faceoff between Pierre Poilievre and Justin Trudeau.
Steve Paikin is a Canadian journalist and the host of TVO’s flagship current affairs program, The Agenda with Steve Paikin. He’s also the author of John Turner: An Intimate Biography of Canada’s 17th Prime Minister. That book is out later this month.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
It’s hard to believe that it has been five years since #MeToo. The culture has moved on many times since then. But it’s worth returning to the movement, to take stock of what it did, and did not, accomplish — and how it’s influenced the moment we now find ourselves in.
Tara's guest on the podcast today does just this in a new piece for The Spectator, “So much for #MeToo.” Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a Toronto writer, editor, and contributing columnist at The Globe and Mail. She’s also co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast, and the author of The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
Washington is known to be a city of secrets. And, for many decades, one of the most dangerous secrets was that of homosexuality. Its spectre haunted the halls of power, and the true stories are only now coming to light.
Tara's guest on today’s podcast has written a sweeping history of gay involvement in government. And he has much to say about the past’s lessons for the present moment — for free speech, for open debate, and for a free press.
James Kirchick is an American journalist and a columnist at Tablet magazine. He’s also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.
You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com
The American journalist H. L. Mencken once said that “puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” This comment resonates now more than ever, with the emergence of a new sanctimonious, humourless movement that targets all of the things that make life most worth living, from sports and comedy to art and food and special occasions.
Tara's guest on the podcast today argues that history will likely not remember these “woke” zealots well — and that, at the heart of their movement, there is a deep distrust of humanity.
Noah Rothman is the associate editor of Commentary Magazine. He’s also the author of The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun.
We talk a lot on this podcast about the ascendent woke ideology. But there is not yet anything like consensus on what this political movement actually is, what values define it — and who advances its agenda.
Tara's guest on the podcast today has tackled these questions in a new book. She argues that woke ideology is an elite phenomenon. That it has breathed new life into old prejudices like sexism, racism, and homophobia. And that elites are unaware how unpopular these ideas are with the public.
Joanna Williams is founder of the Cieo independent think tank and a columnist at Spiked. She’s also the author of How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason.
One of the big debates in journalism right now is over the role of objectivity. Is this an ideal worth upholding — or should we be moving on to other models, like the “moral clarity” ideal recently proposed in the New York Times?
This debate resurfaced last week at a panel discussion hosted by the Columbia Journalism School, “The Objectivity Wars.” Tara's guest on the program today was on that panel.
David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He’s also a columnist at Politico. He recently published a longform piece titled “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism” in the Liberties journal.
Advocates against pandemic school closures have been ringing the alarm for some time. They were all but ignored two years ago. But the tide is now starting to turn, with mainstream media outlets reporting on the impacts of these closures on children.
Tara's guest today has been speaking out about these policies since 2020. And he recently published a powerful paper arguing that extended school closures were, in fact, a moral catastrophe — and one that we must ensure never happens again.
Shamik Dasgupta is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
With school back in session for the year, it’s a good time to take a look at the lessons that we’re passing on to the next generation of children. Are we giving them the tools that they need to succeed in life?
Tara's guest on the program today thinks there’s room for improvement. And his new book takes aim at the “blame the system” and “blame the victim” cultural narratives that he believes impede kids’ ability to recognize, and harness, their own agency.
Ian Rowe is an educator and entrepreneur, and the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies. He’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Woodson Center. He’s also on the board of advisors for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. His new book is Agency.
The fall is here, and the Lean Out podcast is back — renewed, refreshed, and ready to dive in on the debates of the day.
There’s no better way to kick off the season than with our brilliant guest today, who’s been ringing the alarm on pessimism about the West. He grew up in the Soviet Union under communism, and moved to the UK in his youth, forging successful careers as a translator, a comedian, a political commentator, and most recently, a podcaster.
Konstantin Kisin is co-host of the Triggernometry podcast. His new book is An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West.
With summer winding down and the Lean Out podcast about to go on hiatus for several weeks, Tara wanted to leave you all with a really compelling story — a story of one of Canada’s most famous journalists, an investigative reporter and war correspondent who cared deeply about the truth.
This is also the story of that reporter’s son and his quest to understand his father, a quest that took him around the world and inspired him to put pen to paper.
Eric Reguly is the European bureau chief for The Globe and Mail newspaper. He’s also the son of the late Bob Reguly. Eric’s new book is Ghosts of War: Chasing My Father’s Legend Through Vietnam.
“Workers across the developed world have been moving away from traditional working-class parties, while the left has shed most of its connections to anyone outside the email economy, and working-class concerns increasingly meet with progressive resentment and hostility…”
These are the opening lines of a recent piece from Tara's guest today, titled “The New Workers’ Movement” and published in Compact Magazine. In it, he argues that by 2022, this has all become pretty obvious. And that the really interesting question is: What comes next for working-class politics?
Malcom Kyeyune is a writer, podcaster, and political commentator based in Sweden. He’s also columnist for Compact Magazine.
In recent years, Canada — like the United States — has been engaged in a national conversation on race. But Tara's guests on today’s program say that that conversation does not always acknowledge the diversity of opinion within communities of colour. Particularly when it comes to critical race theory.
Jamil Jivani is a lawyer, an author and a columnist at the National Post. He’s also a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, where he helped found the Speak For Ourselves initiative. It recently published a series of essays on critical race theory, including one from Samuel Sey. Samuel Sey is a Canadian writer and thinker who blogs at SlowToWrite.com. He’s also a spokesperson on critical race theory for Parents As First Educators.
If you follow Tara's Substack, you know that over the past six months she has frequently covered the vaccine mandates in Canada. She has been raising questions about the scientific rationale for these mandates — and this week Canada got some answers.
Tara's guest on today’s podcast published new reporting at Bari Weiss’s Substack, Common Sense, in a piece titled “Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.”
Rupa Subramanya is a columnist for the National Post. Her reporting received international attention earlier this year when she published a piece on the trucker convoy, also for Bari Weiss, titled “What the truckers want.”
In 2008, at the age of 44, Tara's guest on today’s program left Yale University, where he taught English, and became a full-time writer. In the years since leaving academia, he’s amassed an impressive body of work — much of it challenging the status quo.
Tara knew she had to talk to him when she read his excellent essay in UnHerd, “Escaping American tribalism,” about his defection from the progressive left.
William Deresiewicz is an essayist and cultural critic, and the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. His latest book is out this month. It’s called The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society, and it is a collection of standout pieces from the past few decades. In it, he writes: “To be an individual, the years have taught me, takes a constant effort. These essays are an offering to those who wish to be one, too.”
When Dave Chappelle’s recent show at First Avenue in Minneapolis was cancelled amid protests, it reignited the debate around cancel culture, with all of the old arguments resurfacing once again.
So the timing could not have been better for Tara's guests on today’s podcast, who published a comprehensive essay that same week on Substack, titled “Cancel Culture: It’s real and on the rise, on the left and the right.” The piece examines the dominant myths about this phenomenon — and debunks them.
Jeff Snyder is professor of educational studies at Carleton College, and Amna Khalid is a history professor there, as well as the host of the Banished podcast on Substack.
Since the sexual revolution, women’s lives have undergone dramatic changes. The dominant narrative is that liberal feminism has freed women in profound ways. So why does data show that women’s happiness has actually declined?
Tara's guest on the podcast today argues that the sexual revolution has, in fact, failed women.
Louise Perry is a British writer and activist. She’s a columnist at The New Statesmen and a features writer for The Daily Mail. Her brilliant debut is called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.
For many journalists, it’s a point of pride to consume as much media as possible, as much of the time as possible. We think this makes us informed, better at our jobs.
So it caused a stir last week when American journalist Amanda Ripley admitted, in The Washington Post no less, that she’s been avoiding the news for years — like an increasing number of Americans, and Canadians. And, it turns out, journalists.
Amanda Ripley’s piece is titled, “I stopped reading the news — is the problem me, or the product?” In it, she poses a question that few have been willing to ask. And that is: “If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?”
Amanda Ripley is a contributor to the The Washington Post and The Atlantic. Her most recent book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.
How do we arrive at truth? Tara's guest on the podcast today argues that it is through reality-based communities — in government, media, the law, and science and academia — which collectively determine truth through trial and error, rules and norms, and discussion and debate. All together, he calls this system “the constitution of knowledge.”
But this system is under threat, he says, from both the right and the left. On the right, through the flooding of the public sphere with what's called a "fire hose of falsehoods." And on the left, through cancel culture. (You can find his useful cancel culture checklist here.)
Jonathan Rauch is a journalist and author in Washington, D.C. He’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.
Those on the political left have long seen free speech as a core tenet — so it’s been bizarre for many of us to watch the left abandon it, and, in many cases now even campaign against it.
Tara's guest on the podcast today has written a new piece for Tablet Magazine arguing that, in fact, this trend is not particularly new. The essay is titled “Who Really Benefits From the First Amendment?,” and it takes a look back in history at attacks on free speech originating on the left — and stresses that the left needs to remember that free speech is essential for minority rights.
Nadine Strossen is the former national president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a professor emerita at New York Law School. Her most recent book is Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.
How do you regulate the Internet? It’s a question that the federal government in Canada is in the process of trying to answer. But its approach is generating controversy, with several bills raising concerns around freedom of expression.
Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, was recently rushed through the House of Commons in a remarkable manner that led one Conservative MP to call it an “affront to democracy.” And Tara's guest on the podcast today says a subsequent ruling from the CRTC — the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — on a CBC/Radio-Canada segment is a “freedom of expression wake up call.”
Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-Commerce Law, and a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society. He’s also a host of the Law Bytes podcast.
NOTE: This podcast was recorded on July 5. Today, the CBC responded to the CRTC ruling, stating, “We simply do not accept the CRTC’s interference in journalism in Canada.” Also, as Michael Geist notes on his blog today, Bill C-11 has now become a trade issue between the United States and Canada.
If you’re a fiction reader and you’ve noticed that novels are getting more political — and more overtly aligned with the progressive political project in particular — there’s a reason for this. Big publishing houses are increasingly hiring what are called “sensitivity readers,” to vet authors’ work to ensure that it doesn’t cause offence.
Tara's guest on the podcast today has written a piece about this trend for Reason Magazine. It’s titled “Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers,” and it argues that overzealous language policing on race and gender is shaping the publishing industry in profound ways.
Kat Rosenfield is an American culture writer, a columnist at UnHerd and the co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. She’s also a novelist; her most recent book is No One Will Miss Her.
For all of the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump, there’s not a very deep understanding of the Republican Party under that president, or, indeed, the forces that led up to his election. In the liberal press, there just has not been that much curiosity about the nuances of the American conservative movement — and the historical and political forces driving it. But Tara's guest on the program today says the history of the American right is actually a rich and complex one, with numerous diverse factions vying for dominance.
Matthew Continetti is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the founding editor of The Washington Free Beacon. He’s also the author of a new book, The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.
Matthew Continetti joins Tara today for a history lesson on the American right — and how that history can help us understand the populist wave now underway in Canada.
As the pandemic winds down, another public health emergency rages — and it is not getting as much attention. We're speaking, of course, about the opioid crisis. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief medical officer of health, recently tweeted that the latest data shows that in 2021, 7,560 people died of opioid-related overdose. On average, 21 people died and 17 were hospitalized every day.
Tara's guest on the program today penned an opinion piece in the Vancouver Sun in 2020 warning that our pandemic response could escalate the crisis. Sadly, he has been proven right.
He is a former criminal justice advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper who underwent a transformation in his views, becoming a passionate advocate for the decriminalization of drugs, for a safe supply, and above all, for more empathy and compassion for Canadians struggling with addiction. Benjamin Perrin is a professor at the University of British Columbia’s law school. He’s also the author of Overdose: Heartbreak and Hope in Canada’s Opioid Crisis.
The realignment of left and right is something we talk about a lot on this podcast, as we try to make sense of the current moment. This political shakeup is producing new politics, new alliances, and new conversations.
To keep up with the pace of such shifts, Lean Out is now expanding to two episodes a week, to better document these developments in real time. Tara will still be interviewing an author every week, but now she'll also be interviewing a journalist — about a newly-published piece that’s making waves in the culture.
This week we ask: What happens when a man of the right hits a leftist labour conference?
We’ll be discussing a provocative new piece, “What the Right Doesn’t Get About the Labor Left.”
Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact Magazine, a new radical American journal. He’s a prominent conservative commentator and the author of several non-fiction books, including The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
Last week, amid growing pressure, the Canadian government suspended vaccine mandates for domestic and outbound international air and rail travel — as well as for the federal civil service and the federally regulated transportation sectors. But this debate is far from over, as the government stated that it will not hesitate to reimplement vaccine mandates in the future.
The question is: Is such a policy backed by science? A recent peer-reviewed paper in the BMJ Global Health medical journal argues that vaccine mandates are, in fact, scientifically questionably — and likely to do more societal harm than good. Tara's guest today is the lead author on that paper, and he hopes to trigger a broader public conversation about pandemic policy.
Kevin Bardosh is a Canadian social and political scientist and an expert in global public health. He’s an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington, an honorary lecturer at the Edinburgh Medical School, and has worked on Zika control in Haiti and on Ebola in Africa. He joins Tara today to talk about the unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy.
There was big news out of the United States last week for those who follow the ongoing debate over the state of free speech. FIRE, the preeminent free speech organization for higher education, is expanding beyond campus. And the organization has been renamed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Tara's guest on the podcast today says its expanded mandate is a result of 2020, the worst year for free speech in his entire career. And he wants us all to think deeply about why free speech is worth defending.
Greg Lukianoff is a free speech lawyer and the president and CEO of FIRE. He’s also a documentary producer and a New York Times bestselling author. Most recently, he co-authored, with Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Greg Lukianoff joins Tara for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech, viewpoint diversity, cancel culture — and how to survive the culture wars.
The pandemic, as we know, has been a different experience for different people. Some of us, the laptop class, isolated and worked from home. But others of us, the essential workers, were out there every day doing the work that it took to keep society from collapsing. The stories of the working class have often gone untold, but Tara's guest on the podcast today has dedicated himself to interviewing working people — on his podcast, in his reporting, and in his new book. And he believes their experiences deserve to be heard, and remembered, and thought about.
Maximillian Alvarez is a writer and editor based in Baltimore. He’s the host of the Working People podcast, a show about the lives of the working class. He’s also the editor-in-chief of the Real News network, and covers labor for Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. Maximillian Alvarez’s new book is called The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.
“Men and women exist. Occasionally, we even like each other. We exist because of these two simple truths.” These are the opening lines of a powerful new book that dives into the crisis in contemporary heterosexuality. It’s been called a “feminist defence of masculinity,” and it is a clear-headed and compassionate look at where we’ve gone wrong. Nina Power is a British writer, philosopher, and fellow Substacker. She’s also a senior editor at the new American journal of radical politics, Compact Magazine. Nina Power’s latest book is What Do Men Want? Masculinity and Its Discontents. She joins Tara for a conversation about how we think and talk about men – and how we might begin to heal the rift between the sexes.
Some months ago, Tara discovered a podcast that gripped her from its very first episode. That podcast is Banished, from Substack’s Booksmart Studios, and it is a deeply thoughtful and nuanced look at the rising tide of censorship and intolerance. Its host is a remarkable academic who is fiercely committed to open inquiry. Amna Khalid is an historian and a professor at Carleton College. She is a prolific writer of essays, often with her colleague Jeff Snyder, on the big issues of our time — including academic freedom, free speech, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the controversy over Critical Race Theory in the classroom. Amna Khalid joins Tara to talk about how her early years in Pakistan fuelled her hunger for free expression, why she speaks out about intellectual conformity on campus, and where she gets her hope from.
Many of us have had the feeling over the last few years that things were just not adding up, that the narratives in the mainstream media simply were not making sense. Well, my guest on the podcast today had that experience earlier than most, years back, with online feminism – and it sowed the seed that became her most recent book.
Meghan Daum is an essayist and the author of six books. She’s a former opinion columnist with the Los Angeles Times, and the host of weekly interview podcast, The Unspeakable. Her latest book is The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, and it was recently released in paperback in Canada, with a new introduction. Meghan joins Tara for a wide-ranging conversation, to talk about the excesses of #MeToo, about cancel culture, about Elon Musk, and about the rise of heterodox thought.
How free is Canada as a country? It’s a question that Tara's guest on the podcast today tackled in a book, back in 2020. He concluded that our freedom was actually pretty precarious. Philip Slayton is a Canadian lawyer and a former dean of law at Western University. He’s also a former president of PEN Canada, and a bestselling author. His latest book is Nothing Left To Lose: An Impolite Report on the State of Freedom in Canada. Philip joins Tara today for a lively, state-of-the-nation conversation, looking at how the pandemic, growing economic inequality, and the use of the Emergencies Act to quash the trucker protests impacted freedom in this country.
“We’re liberated, and we’re miserable.” That’s a title of a chapter in Chrisine Emba’s new book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation – and one a lot of people can relate to. The Sexual Revolution held lots of promises of freedom and liberation, but in many ways it just hasn’t delivered. We’re in the midst of a sex recession, marriage is in decline, and a recent Pew survey found that nearly half of American adults say that dating has gotten harder for most people over the last 10 years. Women know this. Men know this, too. But many are not willing to talk about it publicly. Because to critique where the West has landed on sex and intimacy is to critique feminism, and to question the overreach of #MeToo. Add to that, to focus on relationships between men and women is to risk offending the progressive consensus – which sees the whole conversation as reinforcing heteronormative discourse. Christine Emba is an opinion columnist and editor at The Washington Post. She joins Tara today to talk about the mess between men and women, and how we might get out of it.
When Antonio Michael Downing set out to write his memoir, he gave himself some written instructions: “Tell it plainly, let the sweet be sweet, let the sour be sour, let the truth ring its own bell.” This led to his critically-acclaimed book Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming. In it, the Canadian author and musician recounts his childhood in Trinidad, and what he learned about humanity adjusting to life in various cities and towns in Ontario, in Brooklyn, New York, and out on tour. Antonio Michael Downing is one of our country’s most talented writers and thinkers. He joins me today for a wide-ranging conversation about his life story, fatherhood and masculinity, the crisis between men and women, the culture wars – and why he believes we need more robust public discussion and debate.
In the fall of 2015, Tara's guest on the podcast today had just arrived at Yale. He was an Air Force veteran, working-class, a former foster child. So, when a massive crisis erupted over emails about Halloween costumes and campus "safety," he was a bit perplexed. Rob Henderson is a PhD student in psychology at Cambridge University, and a rising academic star. He writes a popular newsletter on human nature, psychology, and social class at Substack, and has been published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But he’s perhaps best known for coining the term luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson is here to talk about these luxury beliefs, and about the sex recession and the state of the mating game.
Does every human being deserve to have love in their life? The American prison system – through its policies – often answers that question with a “no.” But the human instinct to seek out companionship, affection, and care runs deep. And every year, some of the roughly 2 million people behind bars fall in love with people on the outside. And the way the prisons treat these bonds says a lot about the state of mass incarceration. Brooklyn writer Elizabeth Greenwood spent five years reporting on romantic relationships among inmates. She's the author of Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in American Prisons, and Tara's guest today on Lean Out.
On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve talked a lot about the haves and the have nots. Our guest today has another way of thinking about this: he calls it the front row of America and the back row. The front row is in power; it values education, credentials, and consumerism. But the back row values different things – things like family, faith, and place. Chris Arnade is a writer and photographer who covers poverty and addiction. He’s the author of Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. His new project is walking the world and documenting it on Substack – and he’s recently roamed the streets of Ukraine. He’s here today to talk about the strange, surreal moment we are in, and how the back row/front row tensions play into it. Chris Arnade is our guest, today on Lean Out.
There are a lot of things that we don’t talk about in our society right now. And one of those things is fatherhood. The role of fathers – and the power of their presence, and care – is not explored that often, or in much detail. But our guest on the podcast this week says that needs to change. Shaka Senghor is a tech executive, a New York Times bestselling author, a former fellow at the MIT media lab, and a leading voice on criminal justice reform. He’s also a former inmate, having served nineteen years in prison, seven of which were in solitary confinement. Shaka’s new powerful book is called Letters to the Sons of Society: A Father’s Invitation to Love, Honesty, and Freedom – and it is written to his two children, and to the children in our world at large. Shaka Senghor as our guest, today on Lean Out.
If you're a regular listener of Lean Out, you know that Tara is pretty concerned about the state of the left. Her guest today has concerns of his own. Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, and host of the Give Them An Argument podcast. His recent book, Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, is a brilliant critique of the contemporary left. Ben Burgis makes the case for a smarter, funnier, and more strategic left - that's today on Lean Out.
In today’s media environment, there are often a lot of unanswered questions. Because narratives are so powerful, and because the media is so polarized, there are often pieces of information that don’t quite fit with any given story. For example: that Trump managed to increase his support among Black voters in the 2020 election, particularly Black men. What happened? Tara's guest on the podcast today has one possible answer. Jason L. Riley is a conservative commentator in the U.S. He’s a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His latest book is The Black Boom, and he joins Tara today to make the case that the lives of working-class Black people improved significantly under Donald Trump's economic policies.
Given the state of the world right now, it’s probably fair to say that a whole lot of us are currently lost in a downward spiral of doomscrolling, utterly overwhelmed by the news. But Tara's guest on the podcast today says things have been bad like this for some time – that, in fact, our civilization is in a form of decline. Andrew Potter is an associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He’s a former editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, a former public affairs columnist for Maclean’s Magazine, and a former director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. His latest book is On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever. He joins Tara today for a surprisingly upbeat conversation about the state of our country, and of our world.
With the violence in Ukraine dominating headlines, the world is feeling dark — and uncertain. So today on the podcast, we’re going to spotlight a story of hope. Chris Hedges is a former war correspondent for the New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He’s also a Presbyterian minister and a bestselling author. In his latest book, The Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, he tells a remarkable story that highlights both the evils of mass incarceration and the capacity of the human spirit to overcome. Hedges has been teaching inmates since 2010. In The Class, he chronicles one group’s powerful journey writing a play — and how healing it was for the twenty-eight students involved, who were serving a combined 515 years behind bars. Chris Hedges is Tara's guest on today’s episode of Lean Out.
The world has gone mad. In recent weeks, many people have reached out to say they feel overwhelmed by how divided we are. Many feel like the mainstream media is not doing a good enough job at digging into the complexity of the issues we’re facing, and that it is failing to reflect the full spectrum of views and experiences out there. Today's guest has thought deeply about the challenges facing the media. Mónica Guzmán is a Seattle journalist. She’s also a director at Braver Angles, a grassroots organization that works to address polarization -- and a former fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Mónica is the author of a new book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. She joins Tara today on the podcast to talk about the book, and the overlooked superpower that she says we all need to rediscover – the magic of a good conversation.
The trucker convoy protest in the capital has dominated the news for the past few weeks, with many Canadian commentators expressing shock and disbelief that the country is experiencing such a forceful wave of populism. But at least one person is not surprised at all. Jeff Rubin is an award-winning Canadian author. He’s the former chief economist at CIBC World Markets, and a former Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. His latest book is called The Expendables: How The Middle Class Got Screwed By Globalization - and it has turned out to be quite prescient. On today's episode, Jeff Rubin joins Tara for a deep dive into the economic conditions driving the current unrest.
As we all think through the class tensions that have surfaced in Canada, it’s a good time to take a closer look at an ethos held by many of those shaping the dialogue. This group of decision-makers and opinion-shapers, which includes the media, is often referred to in leftist circles as the professional managerial class. Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, has recently published a fierce and funny polemic on the PMC, titled Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class. In her conversation with Tara, Liu touches on everything from mommy bloggers to land acknowledgements — and argues that we must insist on viewing society’s struggles through an economic lens.
This week — as our culture finds itself embroiled in numerous debates around speech — Danish lawyer Jacob Mchangama has published a brilliant new book that provides a historical perspective. Jacob is the founder and executive director of Justitia, a human-rights think tank based in Copenhagen. Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media is a deeply-researched, engaging, and humane title that grew out of Clear and Present Danger, Jacob’s podcast project on the global history of free speech. Here, in his wide-ranging discussion with Tara, Jacob touches on everything from Athenian democracy to Orwell and Mandela — and makes the case that censorship is not a good solution to the societal tensions we are living through.
Today on a special bonus episode of Lean Out, Tara speaks with lawyer, author, and broadcaster Jamil Jivani - who goes public about his recent firing from his radio show, and talks about why he thinks diversity of thought is such an important principle in media.
It’s been called a pandemic within a pandemic. On today's episode of Lean Out, we dive into the opioid crisis in North America - and why it's underreported. Journalist Travis Lupick joins Tara to discuss his new book, “Light Up the Night: America’s Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting for Survival,” which tells the story of two women, both drug activists who’ve made a huge mark.
If you’ve noticed during the pandemic that you have brain fog, that you can’t read, or concentrate, you are not alone. Many people are struggling with this loss of focus – and Tara's guest on the podcast today says that’s been years in the making. He argues that our attention did not just collapse – that it was stolen from us – and that this development has major implications for society. New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari is here to talk about his new title, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again. In it, Hari outlines twelve forces that have reduced our ability to focus – and many of them will surprise you.
The lab leak theory has been in the news again, following Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform releasing a letter with more details on a February 1, 2020 call between Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and expert scientists, discussing the pandemic’s possible origin. It’s a story that Toronto’s Elaine Dewar has been following for some time. The investigative journalist wrote a book on the topic during the city’s endless months of lockdown, following the trail through news reports, medical papers and government documents — and detailing alarming details about connections between the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg and Chinese military scientists. Elaine Dewar’s book, On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation is a riveting read, and the subject of our conversation on this week’s episode of the podcast.
Free speech is not particularly fashionable these days. Indeed, this summer NPR’s On the Media dedicated an entire episode to the topic without interviewing a single defender of free speech. With free speech skepticism on the rise, the new book Free Speech And Why It Matters could not be more timely, or more important. British comic Andrew Doyle initially found fame with his hilarious social justice warrior Twitter parody, Titania McGrath. But he’s since become known as a crusader for free speech and the host of Free Speech Nation. In this conversation, Andrew Doyle walks through key arguments in favour of free speech and makes the case that the erosion of speech rights we’ve witnessed in recent years is destructive for democracy and human rights — and awful for art.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at Newsweek, is Tara Henley's guest for the inaugural episode of the Lean Out podcast. If you follow media, you know that Newsweek’s opinion section is home to some of the most robust debate in America’s mainstream media. Now, Batya Ungar-Sargon has published a powerful book, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. For anyone puzzling over the woke press, this lively conversation helps make sense of the phenomenon.