Lean Out with Tara Henley

The American election highlighted ongoing tensions between men and women — but election commentary often failed to acknowledge the crises that modern men are facing, from declining educational achievement and employment to increased suicides, overdoses, and loneliness. Today at Lean Out, we kick off a series exploring these issues, with a guest who’s recently published a powerful essay highlighting why we need to reconsider how we think and talk about men. Zaid Jilani is the freelance America...

27 Nov 202430min

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 po...

22 Nov 202447min

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 c...

20 Nov 20241h 17min

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 re...

13 Nov 202430min

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 Univer...

6 Nov 202436min

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-s...

30 Okt 202439min

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. H...

23 Okt 202442min

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 ...

16 Okt 202423min