EP 44: Agency
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 ...
14 Sep 202234min
EP 43: An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West
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 ...
7 Sep 202238min
EP 42: Ghosts of War
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
EP 41: The New Workers' Movement
“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
EP 40: On Critical Race Theory
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
EP 39: 'Court Documents Reveal Canada's Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis'
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
EP 38: The End of Solitude
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
EP 37: Cancel Culture: It's Real and On the Rise
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 Juli 202229min
