Lean Out with Tara Henley

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 ...

17 Aug 202237min

“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 real...

12 Aug 202220min

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 initia...

10 Aug 202241min

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 repo...

5 Aug 202221min

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 Sh...

3 Aug 202229min

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. ...

30 Jul 202229min

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 ...

27 Jul 202239min

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 m...

22 Jul 202227min