Lean Out with Tara Henley

As regular readers of this Substack will know, this spring I’ve 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 m...

As regular readers of this Substack will know, this spring I’ve 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 m...

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. My 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...

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. My guest on today’s program 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 jou...

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 n...

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 say it’s time we get back to it. Coleman Hughes is an American writer, commentator, and po...

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...

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 Un...

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...

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. My guest on the program today says there’s a factor we should consider with each of these issues — and that is low marriage r...

What does it take to speak out against orthodoxies in an age of outrage? This is something that my 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...

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 decisi...

For decades now in Canada, there has been a bipartisan, pro-immigration consensus. But in recent weeks, we have watched that consensus fall apart. My 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...

In Ontario, where I live, schools were closed for 135 days during the pandemic. Both here and in the United States, there was very little critical media coverage on this unprecedented public policy. But my 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 cr...

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-...

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...

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 my 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...

With the pandemic finally in the rearview mirror, a lot of people are eager to put it behind us — and just move on. But my 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 Th...

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 fe...

In times of crisis, artists often feel the need to take a stand, to engage in activism. But my 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 book...

This week on Lean Out, we turn our attention to freedom of expression in the arts. My 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,...

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 presid...

“ Be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right.” That was the resolution 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 “human...

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...

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. My 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 ul...