Lean Out with Tara Henley

When Antonio Michael Downing set out to write his memoir, he gave himself some instructions: “Tell it plainly. Let the sweet be sweet. Let the sour be sour. Let the truth ring its own bell.” It’s a wonderful North Star for writing, and one that 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 his experiences adjusting to life in various cities and towns in Ontario, in Brooklyn, New York, and on tour — and reflects on what he’s learned about humanity along the way.

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, fathers, masculinity, the crisis between men and women, the culture wars, and why he believes we need more robust public discussion and debate.

TH: Antonio Michael, welcome to Lean Out.

AMD: Blessings to you, Tara Henley. I’m happy to be here.

TH: So great to have you. This book is exquisitely written. I relate to a lot of its themes and I want to pull some of those threads today. But to set this up, I want to start by reading a quote: “This is a story about unbelonging, about placelessness, about leaving everything behind. This is about metamorphosis: death and rebirth. About being shattered over and over and reassembling yourself across continents and calamities. This is a story about family and forgiveness. About becoming what you always were.” Take me back to the South Trinidad rainforest of your youth.

AMD: Well, amen. First of all, I love your radio voice. I’ve been listening to Lean Out for a bit, so it’s beautiful to be here. And thank you for reading that passage, which is really an attempt to encircle the heart of the book.

If you look at a map, Trinidad is tucked into the South American continent. It’s an island in the Caribbean, but it’s really just like a little splinter off of Venezuela. In fact, if you’re a strong swimmer, you could just swim to Venezuela at several points in Trinidad. So: Unlimited rainfall, unlimited sunshine. The trees grow massive. The insects grow massive. The birds that eat the insects grow massive. And the things that eat those, you don’t ever want to meet. There’s some monsters in that bush. That’s where I grew up — a place of unlimited fecundity, just bursting with life. I grew up with my grandmother and my brother and my adopted brother. My grandmother really believed in that New Testament Jesus life, and so I grew up surrounded by people that she was always helping, taking into her house.

Trinidad, a British colony. So we didn’t have a Governor General like they have in Canada, we had a Governor. That meant no laws, no voting, no members of parliament, no agency whatsoever. It’s a hard life. And that woman was born in 1904. She taught me two things: how to read and how to sing. She was always singing, mostly hymns. Her eyes were bad at that point; she was in her eighties. She taught me how to read when I was three and a half, so that I could be her eyes — so that I could read for her, because she still needed her salvation.

TH: I love hearing you talk about Miss Excelly. I want to speak about your parents, “a wisp of smoke that blew through your childhood.” I want to focus on your father, and on your grandfather, the saga boy from the title of this book — and ask you what you learned of masculinity from them.

AMD: What a great question. I never knew my grandfather; I knew him in the tales that were told about him, as he had passed away. My dad was alive, but he was never around. And so I learned about him from the tales that were told about him. The very first thing I learned was that being a man is about showing up. I learned how to be a man by what not to do, basically, from my father. I love him to this day; I talk to him regularly now because of writing Saga Boy. We didn’t talk for a very long time, but we’ve found a place of friendship. You know, I tease him all the time. I say, “I can talk to you now because the expectations are so low. There’s nothing you can do to hurt me.” I’m joking, but it’s a serious joke. Like Miss Excelly would say, some things, if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. We choose to laugh.

But yeah, I learned that being a man is about showing up, not hiding, not running, not finding a reason to be elsewhere than your duty. That’s a hard thing. It takes courage and it takes commitment … If you read Saga Boy, the dramatic foil for Al, my father, is my high school basketball coach. Everything my dad does wrong, he does right. He shows up. He creates a safe place for me. He offers me love and respect, just for the price of admission. He took an interest; he would show up to my basketball games, show up to my music shows. I had never had that experience. I’m the kid who, when I played at University of Waterloo, I would finish games and if my high school coach couldn’t make it, I would see all these people with family in the stands, coming down to hug them and love them. Console them if we lost. Cheer them if we won. I’d be like, why don’t I have that?

TH: When you’re 11, your grandmother Miss Excelly passes away. You are brought to Canada to live with your Aunt Joan. You write in the book that you fell asleep in a rainforest and, a few days later, woke up in a blizzard. Take me back to that time and what it was like for you adjusting to life in this small town in Northern Ontario.

AMD: If you’re in Canada and you know where Winnipeg is, if you go east across the border into Ontario about an hour drive or so, that’s where we’re talking about. It’s the Northwest and it’s known for the wind. When I arrived in that blizzard, this wind is just howling outside like a demon. The lakes are all frozen by December, snow upon snow upon snow. Biggest thing for me was the icicles. Let me tell you, Tara Henley, I had never seen ice outside of the freezer do anything but melt. I was mesmerized for weeks on end.

But of course I was traumatized as well. Imagine all the things that define who we are — the house you live in, the people who raised you, the people you grew up with, the food you eat, the language you speak — imagine all of that just gone, ripped away from you. The weather reflected the dramatic change. So, we were shocked, we were traumatized.

My brother was sent to boarding school. I was fascinated and terrified by this brave new world that had such people in it, to quote Shakespeare. The interesting thing is that when I was a kid in that little colonial schoolhouse in Trinidad, the only white face I’d ever seen was Queen Elizabeth II looking down from the schoolhouse. And then I got to North Ontario. I was maladjusted. I got into fights. I yelled and screamed and cried. I threw tantrums, nobody cared. I was really good in school in Trinidad; I was exceptional. And so when I came here, I was the age for grade six [but they put me] in grade eight. Bad enough being the only weird black family in the town, but I was also traumatized, and I was also, now, in a grade where grade eights don’t care about someone that’s 12 years old. Plus, my Aunt Joan was a bible thumper and would dress me in these church boy sweaters with a shirt under it. I was definitely geeky.

I went to Queen Elizabeth district high school. That was my first cue that something was going on that’s bigger than me. How can everything change — but the same white lady is staring down at me when I go to school?[Laughs] So, yeah, that’s what that period was like. I got into heavy metal, much to the terror of my Aunt Joan, who thought that if there was ever the devil's music, it was definitely that. But mostly it was just a loneliness, to be real. It was a loneliness against an avalanche of change.

TH: That loneliness, the rootlessness — I felt a real understanding of that feeling that you were expressing in the book. Throughout your adolescence, you moved around quite a bit. As you say, the things that give people bearings — parents, language, community — those things were gone. There was a moment where you were staying with a family when Aunt Joan was away, and you got to see what this family looked like. And you write that it felt “as if I had been dying of thirst and someone gave me a taste of water.” That longing for family is a theme in the book. And I think something many people will relate to in this time of fragmentation and social isolation. How do you think about that now, with a bit of distance?

AMD: Wow, great questions. They told me you were dangerous, now I know why. [Laughs] I can see why the CBC is out to get you; your questions are too good for them. [Laughs] Yeah, that’s such a great point. You know, we live in a time where I think the importance of having a father in a family is probably overlooked. I had a lot of mother figures. It’s great because there’s always a woman that tends to take that on. But the father role is so crucial. It’s so crucial. For me, in that moment, I saw a father who was firm, but encouraging. Was involved and engaged, but also drew clear boundaries. I loved the boundaries. I was a wild kid because I never had that. I was like, “Yes, give me rules, give me structure.” And the incredible security and the internalized confidence that comes from that. I feel like I’ve sought that my whole life. Also, what that seeking turned into was, as an adult, it became really difficult for me to offer that to people that needed it. Because it was alien to me.

If you multiply that by millions and millions of people, you can see the effect on society. And, by the way, I would argue that the impact on women of not having strong, present, emotionally-available men … Being a heterosexual man — being a mostly straight man — in the 21st Century, I meet the women who didn’t have that man. I’m telling you, it’s a problem.

So that’s how I feel about it. I feel like my life is just this microcosm of what happens in society. The nuclear family is fractured. It’s common and fashionable to say, “You don’t need a man. Who needs a man?” But what does that masculine energy mean? It’s irreplaceable. There’s no facsimile for it. The same as maternal energy; there’s no facsimile for that. You cannot replace that.

That’s been my journey; I grew up without it and, and always longed for it, always craved it. And I found it where I could find it. Thank goodness, I feel healed and available to bring that energy now ... I have a lot of brothers; all grew up without their dad and all are incredible fathers. I think the lack of it teaches us the importance of it.

TH: This is something I wanted to ask you about, as well. The things we’re talking about — family, marriage, masculinity — it’s not necessarily top-of-mind in the mainstream agenda right now. Speaking about heterosexual relationships in particular, it does seem like there’s a crisis. Less and less people are marrying. Those who do marry, marry later in life. Elite marriage has held pretty steady, but working class marriage has completely fallen apart. We’re also seeing a sex recession right now. It seems like there’s this growing disconnect between heterosexual men and women. What do you see as the status of things between men and women?

AMD: What a topic. What a deep ocean to dive into. Personally, I believe that it is a bit of a crisis. The things that have anchored the relationships between men and women are broken. And what is that shift? I think there are a lot of things. Working class people, first of all, are run ragged. We’re run ragged. We’re not allowed time to think, or be present. Because we got jobs. You got bills, you got them kids; you gotta be out there doing your thing. The system is designed to make us work, work, work.

If we’re mapping where we were 40 years ago, in terms of working class families, unions were very strong. And there’s a reverse correlation between unions declining in strength and the gap between the rich and the poor, which is increasing in our society. What that means is you have less rights as a worker, you have less stability in your job. Which means you’ve got to work extra. Which means you can’t be home. You can’t be present. Weekends aren’t weekends. Weeknight dinners don’t happen. Presence is what makes families work. Now you don’t have that presence, because we’re over here working. I think that’s what’s threatening working class families.

I think, also, there’s a mental health component that isn’t talked about … I’m privileged to be the Black artist in residence at the school board that I graduated from and I’ve been meeting young people and hearing them talk about their relationships. There is a crisis of identity, of who we are. There’s a crisis of mental health. And sexual assault is a massive thing. I’ve talked about this, and I talk about it in my book — because I’m a survivor of childhood sexual assault — it’s not just women. They say one in four women before they’re 18. Well, it’s one in six men. That means a lot of men. For men it’s so demasculating that we don't talk about it. Think about it: That’s millions and millions of people. Here’s one of the big fallacies, as well: 45 percent are by women. We’re being told that men are perpetrators and women are victims. Which is true, in many cases. But you know, women are also perpetrators in almost half of one in six men. So that’s just one example of these hidden epidemics.

You have such a spirit of resilience and keeping on and don’t complain. You don’t even acknowledge that you’re hurt. You don’t acknowledge the pain. If you were to acknowledge it, all the other working class people are busy. They’ve got to work. Do you have extra money to go get a mental health professional? Even if you can get to that point, is that supported in your job? Well, no, because you ain’t got that union that would fight to put it in your benefits.

So you suck it up. And we have a culture of self destruction. We over-consume; we over-shop and get into financial debt. We over-eat and our bodies go out of control. We over-smoke marijuana. We over-drink. We over-sex. Well, not sex, really; we over-consume porn, which is why there is a deficit of sex … These are just symptoms of a disease, which rolls back to the lack of presence, which rolls back to the state of the working class. Which used to be way more empowered but is way less now. And the wealth gap increases. And, as a result, the working class is not available for their families. And guess what? Families don’t function as they should.

I don’t believe we want it less. I believe we want it more. I believe we crave it.

My band is all women in their twenties, and early thirties. I’m like the big brother, so I’ll hear their relationship problems. They’ll ask me for advice, which I’ve learned to give very carefully. [Laughs] But, you know, there’s a point where I come to them and say, “Look, if I said to you that you can have whatever you want, however you want it, exactly as much as you want — does that sound like an empowered woman to you?” And they’d be like, “Yeah, absolutely. That is exactly the life I’m trying to live, my best life.” I’m like, “Okay. But do you also want to have a relationship with someone that’s loving, a partnership that lasts and is nourishing?” They say, “Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely what I want. Of course. Everyone wants that.” They don’t see that those two desires are contradictory. One is a deep-seated human need for companionship. And the other is a whole package of illusions that they’ve bought into. Usually pushed by people who are trying to sell them something — makeup, high heels, workout plans, self-help books, courses on the internet, Etsy.

What’s a real relationship? Well, it’s sacrifice. It’s giving up for the team. I learned that playing basketball. We’ve got a real deficit of that quality. All our illusions about ourselves are selfish, and self-driven. And being selfish is the opposite of what makes teams work. So, marriages fail. Relationships fail.

TH: That’s a really deep and comprehensive analysis. I appreciate you thinking it through on that level and sharing what you’ve shared. I think it’s a really important perspective.

AMD: Tara, you know I answer in podcasts — sweeping and epic. [Laughs] But it’s a great question. It’s an important question.

TH: Before we go, I want to ask you about how you’re processing this woke moment that we are in right now, which you know I’ve been very critical of.

AMD: It’s been critical of you, Tara Henley. [Laughs] I profoundly believe that the things that make us similar and the same are more plentiful and more profound than the things that make us different. That is a cornerstone belief.

It’s supported by science. Science doesn’t even study race. Because it’s such a small percentile of the genes, it’s not worth studying. Which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. But I come with the lens that fundamentally we are the same. And I think that’s because I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve lived around Indigenous people, Black people, East Indian people, white folks, German folks, French folks, English folks.

I see the similarities. If I were to say to any of those people, “What are the goals of your life?” They would say, “I want to make some money. I want to have a career that I don’t hate, and hopefully I love. I want to be around my friends, be around my family. Travel a little bit, eat some good food, and grow old with people that love me.” That transcends all these boxes we put ourselves in. And I don’t feel like they’re not important. I love being a Trinidadian man. I love being a Black man. I love being Canadian. I love being an immigrant. But my Black skin doesn’t define me. There’s so many greater things. I’m a friend. I’m an employer, I’m an employee. I’m a performer. I’m an artist. I’m a creator. I’m all of these other things — and that’s what we’re really fighting for. I think the woke movement of the left is always trying to reduce us down to, in my case, my pigmentation. My identity. In my case, I’m obviously Black. I’m like, you know what? That’s like the people who say like nice racial stereotypes, like, “Oh, you’re Black, you must be a fast runner. You’re a great dancer.” I always look at those things as just as offensive as if you tell me I’m a lazy and want to steal from your store. Because, to me, in both cases you are reducing me down to my skin. And I see that as a very small part of all the things that I am.

What are we fighting for? Choice is power. I always say, Tara, if you have choices, you have power. So I don’t want my choices limited by the left or the right, or by anybody else. I want to be the person that chooses what I’m going to be. And that’s what I feel about the woke moment.

I agree with the objectives. Whether you believe in critical race theory or not, whatever you feel about it, it’s an undeniable fact that the history of North America has been written by one side of the story. And we’re having a moment where the other side is coming through, and people are saying we want power. What’s more American than that? What’s more Canadian than that? We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is enshrined in who we are. And we’ve never fully been that. And we’re trying to get there, to aspire to this idea. I love it. I feel like: What a great thing to have ideals that are so great that you always have to keep striving to get to it. What a tremendous thing; what a blessing we have.

The reason why we live in Toronto and not Tehran is because we can have discussions and debate — and we can convince other people of our ideas. That’s what I think the great casualty of this movement is.

Whatever side you believe in, I’m not even getting into that. What I am going to get into is how we have the conversation. There are people dying in Kyiv right now, and in Mariupol right now, to fight for the rights that we have, and we take for granted, and pretend they don’t matter. They do matter. People get on boats in Cuba, on little rafts, and brave the Atlantic Ocean, sharks and waves and storms, so that they can have these rights that we have. And we just talk about them like they don’t matter. Having debate is what it’s all about. This is what it’s all about. This is what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to have more conversation. And, yeah, you know what? There are people that believe some ridiculous things. That’s okay. We’re allowed to have that; that’s who we are. This is our ideal that we’re striving for — more conversation. Let the battle of ideas go on.

I’m going to talk about you, Tara Henley. I didn’t even check the ramifications of you leaving the CBC. I just read your article and I was like, “I support that.” Because, again, I believe, profoundly, we are all the same … I’ve been reading a lot of George Orwell lately, as you know. And Orwell says, look, we know that they are illusions. We know that it’s very easy to point out how things are not fair. But we choose to believe in these illusions. And illusions matter. These are great illusions. Maybe these ideas about democracy, and freedom and rights, and freedom of speech, and independent courts — maybe these things are illusions, but we believe in them. And that’s why everyone wants to come live here. Because we believe in them.

We’re still in a struggle, and it’s a legit struggle, to extend that to Indigenous folks and Black folks and brown folks who have never had it, and all these different identities. Because they are just like us. So they deserve to have that. Because they have something to give to this, and they’ve been giving, and it’s not been recognized. So, I’m all for that. But let’s have more conversation. Let’s not forget what we’re fighting for. Let’s convince people, because that is the privilege of living in a democracy. It should be.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

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In the fall of 2015, my guest on today’s podcast had just arrived at Yale. He was an Air Force veteran and a former foster child. So, when a crisis erupted over campus “safety” and emails about Halloween costumes, he was a bit perplexed — and it became a formative moment in his academic career.  

Rob Henderson is a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Cambridge, 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. He’s also just written his first book, out later this year. But he’s perhaps best known for coining the term luxury beliefs.

Rob Henderson is here to talk about these luxury beliefs, as well as the sex recession and the state of the mating game — today on Lean Out.

TH: Rob, welcome to Lean Out.

RH: Thanks, Tara. It’s great to be here.

TH: I’m excited to speak with you about your concept of luxury beliefs, which I discovered about a year ago. It’s one of the most helpful ideas I’ve come across for understanding the moment that we’re in. But before we get to that, I’d like to talk a bit about your background, and how it’s informed your thinking and your scholarship. Give us a snapshot of your backstory.

RH: Right now, I’m in my final year of my PhD, here at Cambridge in England. Before this, I did my undergrad at Yale studying psychology. But before I entered these universities, my life was a lot different. I was born into poverty. My mother was addicted to drugs. I never knew my father and neither did she. As a result of my mother’s addiction, I was placed into foster care when I was three years old. We were in Los Angeles. I bounced around different foster homes, until, a couple months before my eighth birthday, I was adopted by a family. We settled in a dusty working-class town in Northern California called Red Bluff.

My adoptive father was a truck driver, and my adoptive mother was an assistant social worker. I had a mother and a father and my adoptive sister. So, I had this stable family for a couple of years. But then my adoptive parents divorced and my adoptive father, who was angry at my adoptive mother for leaving him, subsequently severed ties with me as a way to get revenge on her. This was really heartbreaking for me.

We moved into a duplex in this rundown part of Red Bluff, and I would watch my sister go to stay with her dad every other week, and I couldn’t go. This was really hard. So from the point I was nine, I was getting involved in all kinds of mischief and trouble with my friends. I was smoking weed, smoking cigarettes, taking pills. I wrote a story for The New York Post about how my friends and I set one of our friend's houses on fire. Vandalizing buildings, fighting — it got really bad. And then later, once we got a little bit older, drinking and driving, and all kinds of recklessness.

There’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll fast forward a bit. When I was 17, I was about to graduate from high school, and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere in my life. I was seeing the trajectory that I was on was not good. On the advice of a couple of different people, including one of my high school teachers, I decided to enlist. I joined the Air Force and spent a few years serving. That helped me to redirect my life trajectory. That’s how I ended up going to college on the G.I. Bill and landing where I am today. That’s the very short version of my life.

TH: It’s quite a story, and I know you are writing a book about it … I want to talk about the moment that you arrived at Yale. It was 2015; the tide was just starting to turn on elite campuses. There were explosive protests that fall over the Erika Christakis Halloween email. Tell people what that controversy was about and how you digested that — given the story that you just told us .

RH: I mean, it was bewildering. I was discharged from the military in August. I started class at Yale my first semester in September. And then in October, that infamous Halloween email came out. The email sparked this very intense student eruption, and all these protests, and the calling for Erika Christakis to be fired, and calling her a bigot and a racist. And how the university was somehow responsible for these students feeling unsafe. I was just totally confused by all of it.

I couldn’t understand how these students — many or most of whom were affluent, from well-to-do families — they said that this email made them feel unsafe, or that it put them in danger, or harmed them in some way. Words like danger and safety, that just meant something different to me when I was living in foster homes, and when I was in the military. It was confusing to me. I would ask questions about what was so offensive about this email and students would respond with vitriol, just for the fact that I would even ask the question. Even when I would explain my background, they would just shut down; they wouldn’t accept that someone couldn’t understand the moral transgression.

There was one female student who said I was too privileged to understand why that email was so hurtful. Her family is from very wealthy zip code in the U.S. She went to a very expensive private school. It took me a while to understand the intellectual acrobatics involved in her saying something like that. At the time, I just walked away confused.

The whole experience was perplexing for me, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. That was my introduction to elite campus culture, and it has lingered ever since. It was by far the most formative experience I had at Yale — more than any classes, or any readings, or any other interactions.

TH: One of the things I find bizarre, watching this Great Awokening unfold, is that, from a class perspective, you see the complete erasure of the workers in elite spaces.

RH: Yale is in New Haven, which is a very poor, disproportionately Black city. The students didn’t seem to care at all about what was going on outside of the student body and the faculty. When it came to the workers on campus, they were just totally overlooked. And then off campus too. So, I had an apartment in downtown New Haven, and I’d walk to and from my apartment to class. I had to walk through a lot of poverty and addiction and homelessness and mental illness. It was very sobering.

I’d walk through and have memories of living in a car with my mom when I was a little kid and watching her shoot up and get high. Then I’d see the university, and how fortunate the inhabitants were. Yet they all seemed to feel put upon in some way.

Small things irritated me, like the student income contribution; some of them apparently had to work for 10 hours a week, in a library or helping to serve food in a dining hall. Most college students have to work. My sister went to college in California, and she worked part-time in a coffee shop. It never occurred to me, or to her, that this was a problem.

If you were to ask [these students] point blank, “Is there anything wrong with doing this kind of work? Is it respectable work?” They would say, “Of course.” But the impression I got was that they felt this intense humiliation at having to do this kind of work themselves.

TH: I want to ask you about moving between these two worlds. I’ve been a journalist 20 years and I’ve interviewed a lot of people at this point. Very few people have that experience of moving between these two poles. I’m very curious about that experience — and how it’s shaped you.

RH: It’s interesting. A lot of social scientists study working class communities as though they are anthropologists, going into this other world and trying to understand the culture and habits. They seldom turn those tools of analysis around on themselves … I was a student on campus, and I would observe these things and recognize, “Oh yeah, there’s different vocabulary here.” It was a difficult adjustment at first.

My second semester, I tried to join this humour magazine on campus, and we were brainstorming headlines for that month’s issue. The theme of the issue was puberty. So we had to come up with humorous headlines about puberty. I came up with “Area male discovers porn goldmine in his front right pocket.” I was just tossing this idea out there and the student editor looked at me and raised an eyebrow. He was like, “Why does it have to be gendered?” That lingered with me. Like, what does “gendered” mean? I’d never heard it used as an adjective. I was realizing, “This is a different world.”

In the military, they like explicitly tell you — they give you a guidebook when you're in basic training. It’s not like that at elite universities; you have to pick it up through osmosis. Most of these students had been in similar environments their entire lives. So, it was definitely a period of adjustment.

TH: Speaking of which, let’s talk now about luxury beliefs. For our listeners, what is that?

RH: I define luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. I'll give an example of this. A couple years ago now, I was having this conversation with a former classmate of mine from Yale. [She was] saying, “I think monogamy and marriage are outdated. We need to move on, we need to evolve beyond this. These are oppressive patriarchal institutions.”

So, I asked her, how were you raised? How did you grow up? And she said, “Well, you know, I was raised by a mom and a dad in this typical conventional family.” Then I asked, what do you plan to do? What do you want to do in terms of your relationship? And she said, “I’ll probably get married and have kids and do what my parents did.” I asked her, well, then, what are you talking about? She said, “What I mean is that in general for society I think it’s outdated. It shouldn’t have to be for everyone.” So on the one hand, she was raised by married parents in this stable family, and she’s going do it for herself. But then she’s cultivating, and broadcasting, this belief that other people shouldn’t do it and it’s outdated and we need to move past it.

In the past, the elites demonstrated their upper-class status through luxury goods, through their dress and appearance. My claim is that now people do it through their luxury beliefs. These are unusual, or novel, or bizarre ideas that are often at odds with conventional opinion. If there’s a belief that’s widely held by ordinary people — like marriage is probably a good thing and stability for children is probably a good thing — then a way to distinguish yourself as a member of the upper class is to hold a belief that’s against that. It signals, “I’m a sophisticated member of the educated class.”

There are examples of vocabulary too, like cisgender and heteronormative and gendered. Regular people who work for a living and have jobs where they can’t scroll Twitter all day, they don’t have time to keep up on the latest fashionable lexicon and viewpoints.

This concept was informed by my readings of Pierre Bourdieu, and Thorstein Veblen, who wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. And then, more recent research from social psychology. It helped me to understand the intense status anxiety I was seeing on campus. From my perspective, I got to Yale and I was like, “I made it, I don’t have to worry anymore. I worked so hard and struggled so much in my life and now I’m probably going to be okay.” But all around me, students were constantly stressed out about getting to law school or medical school. Or getting that prestigious internship or their dream job. There was just this sort of restlessness and anxiety.

TH: So interesting. You can see luxury beliefs throughout the woke movement. I can think of a lot of examples, Defund the Police being one of them.

RH: Defund the Police was a huge one. You know, I coined that term luxury beliefs in 2019. I had no idea that within a year, the most powerful example of a luxury belief would arise.

It was very easy for me to dig into survey data. On YouGov, they administered a poll asking how supportive Americans were of defunding the police and they broke it down by income. The Americans in the highest income category were the most supportive of defunding the police, and the people in the lowest income category were least supportive. The people who want to defund the police are the wealthiest, because they can afford private security and bodyguards, and to live in a gated community. They can afford this luxury belief. This was an example of inflicting cost on the lower classes, because rates of violent crime and homicide and burglary, which disproportionately affect the poor, have increased. It’s actually the poor who are suffering the most from this.

TH: I want to come back to the first luxury belief — the state of marriage. I know you’ve talked about this quite a bit. Elite marriages have held steady, but working-class marriage has completely collapsed. We also know that there is a sex recession happening and marriage is being delayed. We just saw Christine Emba writing in The New York Times, this evocative piece based off her book, Rethinking Sex, saying that we have no rules anymore, and that this is a problem. When you think of all of those trends — what’s your take on the status of things between men and women right now?

RH: It’s a tough question. There was an article in The Washington Post showing that rates of sexlessness among young adults has increased — and for men it’s increased much more than for women. It seems like men in general, young men, are dropping out of the dating market, out of the marriage market, and having a more difficult time.

Everyone has an opinion about why this is. So much happened: social media, dating apps, smartphones. All those things are intertwined to some degree, but I think dating apps are having a major role to play here, for a why there’s this sort of asymmetry, but also why, in general, rates of sexlessness have climbed.

TH: In my lifetime, I’ve seen dating change drastically, and with it, the collapse of norms. With the dating apps in particular, they have a business incentive for you not to find a monogamous relationship and get off the apps. That’s the first thing. The second thing is how there’s a small group of the men doing most of the dating on these apps. That is skewing relationships. Walk me through what’s happening here.

RH: Yeah, so I’ve looked at some academic research on the apps; it’s a small but growing field and it’s really interesting. There was a study recently showing the swipe rates on Tinder. Men swipe right on about 60 percent of the women’s profiles they see. Whereas for women, they only swipe on about 4 percent of the male profiles they see. This is a classic principle of evolutionary psychology — that women are much more selective in who they’re willing to date and enter romantic partnership with. In the long run this is creating strange dynamics where small numbers of men are getting tons and tons of matches.

I had a friend. He’s in a relationship now, but he accumulated more than 20,000 matches across the dating apps. He was a very busy man; it was like a part-time job for him. But then I have other friends. It’s interesting; they aren’t super unattractive. A lot of it is your ability to take good photos and invest your time, and there’s just a whole strategy around improving your likelihood of getting matches. So even though they weren’t that much worse looking than my friend who was very successful, they would only get a handful of matches a week. It would slowly trickle in, and oftentimes it wouldn’t go well, or the dates went nowhere. That is the male experience on the apps. The average guy on any of the apps is just not getting that much attention.

This isn’t to say that women are having the best time of their lives on these apps. A lot of them are having the opposite problem, where they’re getting flooded with attention. I’ve had female friends who have shown me, “Look at all these guys sending me all these horrible messages or being disgusting.” So for them, there’s this filtering problem. How do you know which of these guys is actually worth your time?

Often the men, they experience rejection up front, where it’s hard for them to get matches. They maybe have a date, and the girls aren’t interested in them. For women, often what seems to happen is they will be interested in a guy, and maybe they’ll sleep with him, or have a few good dates with him. And then he just vanishes. Because guys who have lots of options often will vanish, because they have those options.

I think it’s cultivating this hostility on both sides. After a couple of negative interactions, they draw sweeping generalizations from them. And then I think they kind of withdraw and stop being as interested in going out on dates.

TH: I wonder, too, about the conversation around gender and how that plays into it. If we’re saying that there’s no such thing as a man or a woman, how do we talk about the state of things between men and women right now? That gets really tricky.

RH: Yeah. That’s an interesting point. It’s weird. No one will explicitly acknowledge that gender roles exist, and certainly won’t acknowledge that they’re important. But we behave as though they are. The whole ritual around dating is still heavily gendered, to use a term I learned at Yale. But people don’t want to acknowledge it. They don’t want to talk about it. I think this is also adding to the confusion and the complexities.

TH: It’s such a strange time on so many different fronts. I wanted to ask you about is about politics and the right/left divide. Right now, to talk about both things like family formation and what it means to be working class, you need to go to conservative writers. What is happening in this scrambling of the left and the right?

RH: That’s an interesting question. My adoptive mom, at least for a portion of my childhood, she entered a relationship with a woman. So, she and her partner raised me for a few years together. They were working class Democrats. But they wouldn’t recognize progressive liberalism on elite college campuses. I mean, it’s really fun for me to go home and tell my family terms that I’m learning, or videos from campus, you know, what’s going on at these elite schools. My mom just doesn’t understand it … But yeah, like you said, it’s increasingly shifting, and there’s this sort of realignment going on. The data I saw in 2020 was that like 14 of the 15 poorest counties in the U.S. voted for Trump. And something like nine out of 10 of the wealthiest ones voted for Biden. Very strange thing happening here.

A lot of the affluent people are broadcasting these luxury beliefs, trying to impress one another, trying to obtain status within their own peer group. And these beliefs sort of morph, and spiral into strange ways that would be unrecognizable to a lot of people who haven’t spent a lot of time on elite campuses. It seems like people who are less progressive in their views are being sort of turned off by that.

It sort of happened with me. My own views were center, maybe center-right, when I got on campus. But then when I saw what happened, it solidified my own views. My thinking was, “Whatever that is, I can’t be associated with it.” I’ve heard similar stories from other students as well on campus who come from more working-class backgrounds.

TH: So many people are feeling politically homeless. Where do you think this all goes from here, in terms of the arc of the Great Awokening? Do you think we’re getting to the end of this?

RH: I just did this panel discussion with Musa al-Gharbi. He’s a sociologist from Columbia, and he says we’re almost at the end. I hope he’s right.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

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Here’s a question: 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 need for companionship, affection and care runs deep. Every year, some of the roughly two million people behind bars fall in love with people on the outside. And the way that 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 she’s our guest, today on Lean Out.

TH: Liz, welcome to Lean Out.

EG: Thank you so much for having me.

TH: Great to get to speak with you today. I found your book so engrossing; I picked it up and I could not put it down. It’s very good storytelling. Now, to start, you have a friend, a former hedge fund manager Sam Israel, who absconded with half a billion dollars and is now incarcerated. I want to know, how did that friendship come about — and how did it spark an interest in love in the prisons?

EG: I started corresponding with Sam Israel when I was researching and reporting my first book, Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud. That is about people who have faked their own deaths to varying degrees of success, and about the whole disappearance and fraud industry. Sam staged his own suicide in 2008 after being revealed as one of the biggest Ponzi schemers in American history. Up until Bernie Madoff’s crimes came out just a few months later, he was the biggest Ponzi scheme. I corresponded with Sam. We conducted most of our correspondence via CorrLinks, which is one of many third-party email applications that prisons utilize. I asked Sam about his experience faking his death. And then our correspondence really grew into a kind of friendship. I still talk to him frequently. It’s one of most bizarre friendships of my life, and also one of the most satisfying.

Long after I had asked him about all the death fraud stuff, he would occasionally mention to me that people would hear about his story, usually via some tawdry news tabloid program, and people, usually women, would write to him. They wanted to meet him, get to know him. I just found that so interesting because, of course, I’ve heard about this before. We usually think of the more high-profile serial killers and how they have groupies, and this lurid, train wreck vision about what that’s about.

But here’s Sam. He still has a long sentence left. He’s not even that famous. I just was so curious about what that was about. So, I started looking into this. I started speaking to some of the women who’d written him. And what I found was that this is much more complicated, and much more understandable as an impulse when you get to know people and hear their whole stories.

TH: The stories are powerful, as I mentioned. Introduce us to Crystal and Fernando.

EG: Crystal and Fernando are a couple who met in the early 90s. They were both very young at the time. Crystal was 18. Fernando was in his early twenties. Fernando Bermudez is a Dominican American man. He was living in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City, and he was picked up and ended up being wrongly convicted for a nightclub murder that took place in 1991. This story, at the time, made national news, partly due to the fact that Fernando’s family was lobbying so vocally about their son’s innocence, which was very real. He had an alibi that put him 10 miles away from the crime when it happened, and upon a closer look — which didn’t happen for 18 years, unfortunately, which he served in maximum securities prisons in New York — there was a lot of procedural problems with the way he was picked up.

This is all to say: In the early 90s, Fernando was serving time on Rikers Island, the jail in New York City, while he was awaiting trial. Crystal was living a very cloistered, sheltered life in Oklahoma. As a young woman, she saw his father on the nightly news, proclaiming his son’s innocence, and the way she describes it, something about Fernando’s father and his story just pierced her heart. She knew she had to write to this person. Crystal is very religious; she wanted to tell him about the Lord. This was back in the 90s; there were not the ways we can interact with people who are incarcerated today. Finally, she got the address for the jail and sent him a letter.

From there, they corresponded. She came to New York and met him. They got married while Fernando was still on Rikers, I believe, or very early into his false imprisonment. And because New York is one of only four states in the United States that allows for conjugal visits, once they were legally married, they were able to have weekends, about every six weeks, in privacy. They ended up having a family. They had three children who were conceived on prison property during the 18 years Fernando and Crystal were both fighting for Fernando’s freedom. He was eventually released. He received a settlement from the state of New York for his wrongful conviction. The couple is still together. They are grandparents. They now live in North Carolina. Even though Fernando was wrongfully convicted, he still spent 18 years in prison and he came out with all of the PTSD and challenges that anyone in that environment would. So they got their happy ending, thank God, but it’s also still been a challenge for them readjusting and dealing with the mental health issues they both sustained having been in the system for that long.

TH: I want to come back to conjugal visits. But first, this book really smashes the stereotypes about these types of relationships. One of those stereotypes is that the women hold all the control in the relationship. I was surprised to see how much waiting around by the phone there was for these women.

EG: That was also very surprising to me. We think that the person in the free world has all the power. But visits don’t happen all that often and a lot of the day-to-day affection and communication of a relationship with someone in prison happens through phone calls, through letter writing, through email correspondence. It turns out that the person in the free world is really at the whim of the prison system. You can’t just call up a prison and say, “I want speak to my husband.” They have to call you, at certain times when that’s available — and those times can change on a dime due to institutional upheaval, which sometimes does seem to be very random and capricious.

So, there’s very little control that the outside partner has. They find themselves waiting by the phone, and sometimes structuring their whole day around that phone call. When you only get to talk to someone 15 minutes a day, those are the most important 15 minutes. Until they get that phone call, they’re holding their breath. People in prison are in a perilous situation. There can be fights, lockdowns; you don’t know what’s going on.

TH: You mentioned letter writing, and that really emerged as a theme. What are the benefits of that mode of communication?

EG: The world we live in today is so fast. Our attention spans are the time that a TikTok video takes to play. There’s just so much speed and stimuli in our lives. When it comes to dating, that same phenomenon is really mirrored in swiping through people on the different apps. The whole culture of dating feels so fast. It feels so disposable. In a prison relationship, everything is really slowed down. Of course, slower than people would want. But just because of the structure of prison and what’s available, it’s a very slow correspondence that people take to get to know each other.

When it comes to couples who met while incarcerated, which is the type of couples I looked at here, people met often through pen pal sites. It’s so uncommon for us these days to do anything in long-hand, let alone get to know someone through the very old school process of writing. People describe this process to me as so intimate … What a lot of people told me, time and again, was that through letter writing — through this container — they could make themselves so vulnerable and disclose things in these letters that they’d never told anyone. It is really old fashioned. Really at odds with a lot of what we experience in the world.

TH: Letters are also important to the prisoners because it’s public when you get mail. And so it’s an indication that people on the outside care about you. So, for predators in the prison, whether that’s guards or other prisoners, it’s an important indication. I thought that piece was interesting.

EG: That was so interesting to me, too — that letter writing, in and of itself, is a very effective harm reduction tool. As you said, mail call usually happens in front of prison staff and other people who are incarcerated. If you hear your name called frequently, that means you have someone in the free world, on the outside, who is looking out for you, who cares for you. That really sends a message and creates a veil of protection. Then, of course, for the person who’s incarcerated, that connection to the outside world is invaluable. I think a lot of people who are behind bars feel that they have been forgotten. In the United States, that cruelty is by design. We lock people away in remote parts of states and they have very little interaction with society at large.

TH: The conjugal visits, the family visits, are also a harm reduction tool. Talk to me about why you think it’s important that this is extended beyond the states that do it.

EG: Conjugal visits is really a misnomer for what these visits are. I think that we have the image in our mind of this just being for sexual trysts. Conjugal visits, family visits, family reunification programs — they are private visits for immediate family. So that’s not just your romantic partner, that is your children, your parents, your siblings. Every piece of research that has been done around not just family visits, but any kind of visit, shows that these visits help improve outcomes in the prison in terms of safety. It reduces prison sexual assaults, and it also really improves outcomes for people when they come home and reenter society — to have that little bit of normalcy woven in. You know, to be able to cook a meal with your children and maintain those bonds.

It’s hugely important. In the United States, it is hugely politically unpopular. The United States is so backward in a lot of ways. Family visits are considered a right for prisoners in India, Mexico. Canada, of course. We’re really behind the times. The positive outcomes really outweigh the cost in dollars. In the long term, prisoners get a sense of normalcy, humanity, connection with families. If we do say that this is a rehabilitative program — which you know, is arguable — this is what we want to be doing. These are the kind of programs and measures we want to be instituting.

TH: You reported out this book for five years. What was it like for you navigating the prison bureaucracy?

EG: It was a big learning curve. There was a lot I could not have anticipated at the outset. You say this book took five years. The big reason it took five years was because of the glacial pace of working within the prison system. So, for example, I would set up a reporting trip to go meet someone in a prison across the country and get the clearance for it, which could take months sometimes. And then the trip would have to be canceled at the last minute because there was a lockdown.

I would write to people; they sometimes would not receive my mail for weeks at a time, months at a time, due to whatever’s happening at the prison … I found that before I would go to a prison, the night before I could never sleep. Prison wives would always tell me, “I never sleep the night before a prison visit.” I felt that firsthand. That insidious kind of self-surveillance — again, that’s by design. You are stigmatized as a person going into a prison, even as a visitor. I experienced some of that. But it’s nothing compared to what so many of these women live every day.

TH: The cruelty of the system stood out, reading your book. The suffering stood out. The humanity stood out — the fact that people go to such great lengths to pursue emotional bonds, in a system that is designed to break bonds apart. Can we spend a moment and talk about the big picture here? What is wrong with the United States that there are two million people behind bars?

EG: How much time do you have? I mean, how long is this interview? I could go on … I think that you have to look at the whole system of prisons in the United States from such a broad, bird’s-eye view. Just one small example is that prisons are often built in the middle of absolute nowhere. And why is that? That gives people in rural places jobs being employed at the prison. So, it becomes very politically popular for local politicians to get a prison in their jurisdiction. And the jobs at these prisons pay more than what most high school diploma jobs could ever get you, and they have great benefits. There’s a huge racial dynamic to that … You know, that economic imperative is just one tiny part of this big picture of why prisons seem as American as apple pie, unfortunately.

TH: In 2020, we saw a huge outpouring of activism after the murder of George Floyd, this grassroots resistance against systemic racism. Mass incarceration seems the most obvious example of systemic racism. Has anything changed?

EG: Not nearly enough. There are measures happening. I’m thinking particularly in California, where in the past few years, people serving life sentences now can experience conjugal visits when before they couldn’t. We’ve seen the decriminalization of marijuana on state levels. So, there are little things here and there, but I think until you look at the effect of prisons from this financial imperative — the amount of money that go into prisons, the amount of jobs they produce — I’m not sure that the kind of systemic overhauls we hope to see will happen. There are these hopeful pockets of change, but they are just band-aid measures.

TH: You’ve kept the focus very much on your subjects in the book. But I’m curious about your own personal experience. In the five years as you were reporting out this book — a very heavy book to report on — we’ve also lived through a global pandemic. And in your personal life, you got married, you had two children. What has it been like for you navigating all of that?

EG: You should see a picture of me before all this versus now. I feel like the pictures you see of the presidents, you know, day one in office, and then when they leave — it’s kind of similar. [Laughs]

I learned so much about the entrenched racism of this country. I also learned so much about love and so much about human ingenuity, innovation, the instinct we have to survive and to flourish. And I saw that both within people behind bars, and within the women I profiled who formed communities and friendships among themselves. The really interesting thing I saw, which I could not have imagined at the outset, was the way going through these relationships built a sense of confidence in the women themselves.

That sounds crazy, but I’ll tell you why. Many of the people I interviewed had never had any connection to prisons prior to becoming involved with their partner. This world was so new to them, and they had to learn so much, so fast. A big part of what they had to learn was how to deal with judgment and stigma from friends and family. So, advocating for themselves. From that — and from the relationships between prison wives and the emotional intimacy they share — [there was] this immense sense of purpose and drive and self-esteem that I saw reflected in women going back to school and women starting their own businesses.

This is such a bleak world when you’re talking about the prison system. But I saw how these women also have the most incredible sense of humour about the predicament, about themselves. There were so many times where I would be in an interview, and it would go from crying to hysterically laughing. That was so impressive and beautiful to me, and I really wanted to reflect that in the book. Because the truth of the matter was this was not all doom and gloom. This was also people falling in love. This was people finding a voice. This was people really coming into themselves.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.  

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

On the Lean Out podcast, we’ve talked a lot about the haves and the have-nots. My guest today has another way of thinking about this. He calls it the “front row” 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 recently roamed the streets of Ukraine. He’s here today to talk about the strange, surreal moment we’re in — and how the back row/front row tensions play into it. Chris Arnade is my guest, today on Lean Out.

TH: Welcome to Lean Out.

CA: Thank you for having me.

TH: I’m interested in speaking with you about your project, Walking the World, and some of the countries you’ve visited and written about on Substack, especially Ukraine. But first, I want to talk about how you became a wanderer. 10 years ago, you were working on Wall Street as a bond trader, living in an exclusive neighbourhood in Brooklyn, the kids were in private school. How did you find yourself walking into Hunts Point in the Bronx?

CA: Walking has always been my way of exploring the world. I had a PhD in physics; I went to Wall Street when I was 28 and stayed there for 20 years. But that was more the anomaly. I did enjoy the career, but I still always had the academic, curious side. So I’d go for long walks through New York. It was my way of relaxing, decompressing. That was generally confined to weekends when I was working so hard and when the kids were tiny. As my career advanced, and I got more disillusioned, I found myself walking more often. Also, the scope of the walks changed.

I walked the entire New York subway system, above line. I’m a mathematical type, so I like a goal. But then the walks became more about meeting people.

I was an amateur photographer then. When I brought my camera, people would start asking me to take their pictures. It became a new way of learning. I had spent so much of my life being a math geek — very quantitative. If you asked me to approach a problem, I would go, “Well, I’ll just solve it. I’ll go to the library and find all the books and read them all and look at the data.” If you approach the world from a very quantitative, positivistic framework, that’s a framework. And we tend not to think of it that way. I started pivoting towards an experiential, ethnographic approach to life. Like, “Okay, people say Hunts Point is dangerous. Let me go see if it’s dangerous.”

When you look at data, you only look at two things about Hunts Point: It has high crime and it has lots of drugs. Hunts Point, for your listeners, is considered to be the “worst” neighbourhood in the South Bronx. I think it’s New York's poorest district by metrics. But it’s 15 minutes from the Upper East Side, one of the richest.

I made a point of walking into the Bronx. I saw a lot of stories and a lot of resilience. A lot that was missing if you just look at the statistics. … I quit my job on Wall Street and ended up spending four years documenting a street family of homeless addicts, people who lived in abandoned shelters, and cars under bridges, and were shooting up heroin. I ended up becoming friends with many of them. The only thing I could really do, given my skill set, was document their lives and try to bring it to a wider audience. We, the educated class, tend to filter these issues they’re dealing with through our lens. I was trying to give some insight into their perspective and how they see the world.

TH: I do want to talk about the class issue. But first, can you introduce our listeners to a few of the people who really stand out to you from that time?

CA: Shelly, who I’m still in contact with, is from upstate New York. I think she ended up in Hunts Point at the age of 17 or 18. She’s in and out of jail, has been on the streets for probably most of her life. She’s transgender. She works as a sex worker. She calls herself a prostitute, so I’ll use that word. She hustles. And she’s hilarious, funny. She’s a lifelong addict. It’s a rough life, but she doesn’t particularly feel sorry for herself. This is the world she knows. And that’s one of the things I try to get across — feeling sorry for someone is very demeaning.

Then there is Millie, probably one of the more tragic stories. Millie was born into a very bad situation. I met Millie at two in the morning. She was on the street. She told me her whole life story. I always printed what people told me without doing “journalism” and fact-checking. Her arm was always bandaged; she made a point of not letting me photograph her arm because she was embarrassed by it. I remember seeing her in the laundromat late one night around Christmas. She looked very, very bad. So I offered to drive her back to her home. That was it; she disappeared. After two months, I started getting worried and I went and searched for her. I did the journalism. I found that she had died with no papers.

If you die in New York City with no papers, and no claim on your body after three months, they bury you in a place called Hart Island. Which is a story unto itself. It’s got over a million bodies buried in trenches. It’s been there since 1870, a small island off the Bronx. It’s the paupers grave, and you’re not allowed to visit it traditionally. Due to the work of one woman who made this her lifelong project, you can now visit it once a month. We ended up getting Millie exhumed. I found what exists of her family and we ended up getting her properly buried.

That was a real moment in my life. Because if you had talked to old me, the scientific me, I would say, “What does it matter where you’re buried?” But I remember one of her friends saying, “You only really die when people start forgetting about you.” If you’re buried in a mass grave on Hart Island and nobody can visit, it’s easy to forget about you. So that was a real moment of like, “Ah, yes, there’s these spiritual things that I used to dismiss.” I think about Millie a lot. She ended up having died of that wound. She would shoot heroin into her wound and that ended up getting infected.

TH: [In talking about spirituality] you’re touching on a different value system. This is something that you write about in the book, in terms of the front row of America and the back row. The front row values consumerism and credentialism, but the back row values other things, like faith, like place. Tell me about that conception.

CA: That’s been the hardest thing to get across to people. I got a PhD in physics. So, I’m not here to dismiss education. It’s wonderful, and that’s the life I live. But we have a worldview. And it’s one that we don’t question as a worldview because we think it’s right. It leads to what I call intellectual colonialism. We believe that everybody should share our worldview. That worldview is pretty simple; it’s very materialistic. What is valuable is what you can measure.

So, things that are unmeasurable — what I’d call transcendent qualities, or non-credentialed forms of meaning, things you can’t put on a resume — are dismissed. Things like faith, like family, place. These things that you can’t trade in the marketplace are actually deeply important to people. And in a very non-elitist way, in the sense that they’re free. You don’t need to go to college to find the power of God, or Allah. You don’t need to study to appreciate the town where you’re from; you’re gifted that at birth. These are things that are free for everybody. And when you demean them, it’s a very elitist framework. We’re saying that the only things that are really valuable are the things that we can acquire through education.

Place is really important. The meme of “just move, idiot” is so condescending. It’s wrapped in a scorn of provincialism — that you shouldn’t want to stay your entire life in the same city. But that’s very important to people. That defines who they are, that gives them literally a place in the world. It’s a way of understanding. It’s a way of being valued. The idea that you might want to spend your entire life surrounded by the hills that make you happy, or the people that make you happy, is kind of foreign to us because we move all the time. I do, I’m guilty; I will jump at a dime to change where I live. … After I did the Bronx thing, I went around the country and put 400,000 miles on my car, just walking and talking to people.

Place, family, faith — these things are organic regulatory bodies that provide people not only a place to be integrated, but also rules to live by. We in the front row look at those as outdated. We want to replace them with bureaucratic state-sponsored institutions that regulate stuff. I think a lot of the chaos that’s going on in so many of these communities is that you’re tearing apart regulatory bodies and replacing them with a uniform regulatory body that just can’t handle these things.

When we erode [daily custom] and try to replace it with a rule book written from D.C., or Ottawa, it’s going to cause a lot of chaos. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. You’ve eroded these places that give people a sense of who they are. You’re left with this very hierarchical, materialistic society that says your place is how much stuff you have, and how big your resume is. The only people happy with that are the people at the very, very top.

… Look, I’m not over-romanticizing the back row. I don’t want to be that person. There are two worldviews. They have very different perspectives; they both have their faults. The point I want to get across is we’re the ones in control. We make the rules for everybody. We’re the occupiers. Forget about the moral side, I think at a sheerly pragmatic level, you’d want to know how the people you’re occupying think. The people you’re making rules for, what do they value? Especially if you’re going to masquerade as saying we have democracy.

If you keep imposing this highly materialistic, highly competitive, very secular framework on people, they’re going to revolt. If you don’t want that to happen, maybe you should listen a little bit more. When you make your rules from far away, what do the people think about it?

TH: I wanted to ask you about the scrambling of the left and right that we’re seeing right now. You identify as a socialist but your book was embraced by Republicans. And blurbed by some very prominent Republicans, like Tom Cotton and J.D. Vance.

CA: If you look at the extremes of communism and capitalism, both are two sides of the same coin. They are very materialistic. They don’t value transcendent values. The framework is arguing over how we should distribute stuff. People don’t just want stuff. There’s other issues out there, and those are the cultural issues. Everybody in the policy class gets really angry when we’re arguing over cultural issues, what they see as symbolic issues. But that’s what matters to people. Do you value me and my lifestyle? Do you get me? Do you understand my lived reality?

I was surprised with the reaction to my book from both camps. I had thought it was a book from the left. I think in many ways, what appealed to the right is the fact that I wrote about God. Someone on the right told me, “You wrote a book that had faith in it where you didn’t make fun of it. Thank you.” I not only not make fun of it; I actually celebrate it.

The East Pasco County Democratic Club used to meet in my father’s house once a month. As a small kid, I was raised around Democratic meetings. It was people who had complicated lives, a mixture of academics, gays, working class, African Americans, Mexicans. It was just a weird group of people. If you go into a Democratic party meeting now, it’s generally the professional class.

[Before] it was a very forgiving group of people because their lives were complicated. There was no purity test. But the Democratic party has been taken over by the elite, educated class. Debates in the Democratic party amongst the activist class look like a grad student seminar on what the people want. You’re sitting in the conference room talking about what the people want. And you’re not the people! You’re reading about it through books and you’re imposing what you hope they want on them. It’s not what they want.

Most people hate both parties. Most people don’t pay attention to politics. Most people don’t vote. There’s a reason for that: Nothing changes. One thing’s the same as the other.

I wrote in my piece of walking in Washington, D.C. about this. One day I walked from Virginia to the White House via Anacostia, which is the working class Black neighbourhood. And then the next day I walked to the White House through Alexandria, which is upper income educated whites. That’s the Democratic coalition. There’s a good historical reason for the coalition — Republicans haven’t done anything appeal to Blacks. So I understand why the coalition is holding together right now. But I don’t think the front row/back row coalition can hold much longer.

One of the things that happens all the time is I’m on Twitter telling people I’m doing these walks. When I did the Anacostia walk, people told me, with good intentions, things that are very revealing. Like, “Watch out, you’re going to get mugged. Be careful.” How can you think that? These are your coalition partners. These are the people who keep you in power, the people you claim to care about. And you’re telling me to be scared of them? Anacostia is fine. It’s a working class Black neighbourhood.

TH: Before we close, I want to talk about Walking the World, and what you saw in Kyiv.

CA: So now I just go around the world, walking cities. I didn’t go to Kyiv for any reason other than I was curious and it was cheap. I kind of dismissed the troops clustered on the border. I left three weeks before the war. You know, it was a really interesting town. Nobody thought the war was going to happen. Nobody. I wrote that — to some mockery now — but I was trying to reflect what I saw.

It was a wonderful town. I spent most of my time in the Northeast corner, which is working class, Soviet block houses. What I was seeing was a pull between the West and the East, but not in the way that is being played out now, with soldiers. A lot of the countries I go to — like Ukraine, like Peru, like Turkey — still have transcendent values. Still value family, place, community. That’s partially why I go, because it hasn’t been fully taken over by Western liberalism. … We always think of Western democracy and liberalism as being this great thing that everybody wants. You know, “Everybody wants more stuff.” But when secular democratic materialism comes in, it destroys a way of living. And not everybody necessarily wants that, or necessarily understands what’s coming. I think you see that played out in so many of these countries. I certainly saw that in Kyiv. There was the old Kyiv, these outer fringes that still were built around family, around local ownership. That still celebrated an aesthetic that I really appreciated: Art as beauty.

TH: That’s interesting. It’s a time of such flux and such change. What do you think it would take for us as a society to start reprioritizing these makers of meaning that are free? What would it take for us to reprioritize family, faith, community, and place?

CA: This is where I end up short. I got criticized in my book for not offering solutions. It’s not just about policy. It’s much larger than that. You know, we can stop policy that’s directly corrosive of these things. And almost all policy is, because we don’t value them, so we don’t think about them. Unfortunately you have to convince the political class. They’re not going to give up power without a fight. And I don’t want a fight. So, the less messy answer is to convince the political class. Like: “When you look at policy, don’t just do it in a spreadsheet, actually go out and be part of the community you’re making policy for. Talk to people, rethink what you prioritize. If you prioritize economic growth above all else, there’s a lot of destruction. Because you tend to forget about these things that get in the way of growth — these messy things like family and place.”

So, the policy class has to stop being actively aggressive against these values. Short of that, I’m pretty cynical. I wish I could say a happy answer. But I think you’re going to see a lot more chaos going forward. Because you can’t have an elite manage the world, basically against the interests of the people. It doesn’t end well. And when it does end badly, it’s really ugly. I think there needs to be some understanding between the two groups, so we don’t come to blows.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

There’s 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 my guest on the podcast today says that needs to change.

Shaka Senghor is one of my favourite writers. He’s 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. Formerly incarcerated, he served 19 years in prison, seven of which were in solitary confinement.

Shaka’s powerful new 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 sons, and to all the children in our world at large. Shaka Senghor is my guest, today on Lean Out.

TH: Shaka, welcome to Lean Out.

SS: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to catch up. It’s been a while since we’ve talked last.

TH: It has been. Last time we sat down, we were in your kitchen in Koreatown in the Before Times.

SS: Yeah, that was a while ago. I’ve actually moved since then, and bought a home here in L.A. So, no longer in that apartment with the glorious view. But happy with the home that we have.

TH: It’s great to be able to talk today about your new book, which is exquisitely written. I want to open with reading a passage:

I have told the world about the murder. I have told the world about the life I led that brought me to that terrible point. I have told the world about the forgiveness for which I begged and that I was fortunate to receive. I have told the world about my hopes for other incarcerated children and men and women, my dreams of a new way of looking at how we rehabilitate instead of punishing … But I have never told the world, nor you, my dear sons, about the nights when the luggage looms in the darkness. The nights that I am forced to breathe, really breathe, take a step away from yet another ledge and remake myself once again before the dawn arrives.

What a powerful passage.

SS: Thank you so much for reading that and reflecting it back. It definitely just transported me back to those moments. You know, oftentimes when we’re doing work that speaks to our personal stories, people aren’t thinking about the toll, or the impact, that it has on us as individuals. And I really wanted to capture that for my sons. So they’ll understand what it’s like to have your personal experiences, especially those less-than-stellar moments, on public display. I wanted to ensure that they understood what that looks like when it comes to solving tough problems, and giving people a path forward.

TH: And turning those moments of darkness into this incredibly beautiful writing, and this experience of humanity.

SS: For me as a writer, it is really respecting the craft. When I think about my first book, I think people got so immersed in the story that they didn’t account for the fact that I’m actually a writer. I have studied the craft. I’ve read some of the most beautiful, and incredible, writers that we all know of. For me, anytime that I think about the stories that are important for me to tell, and that I feel led to tell, I also think about the creative process. How do you tell these stories in a way that’s really inspiring, uplifting, and insightful?

TH: I do want to talk about this book in depth, but before we get to that, for listeners who may be new to you, new to your work — can you give us a snapshot of your backstory? How you went from being a young honour roll student growing up on the east side of Detroit, dreaming of being a doctor, and then going to prison and finally coming out and becoming this New York Times bestselling author.

SS: That’s a great question. At this stage of my life, I don’t talk much about that part of my journey. I think because I’ve written so extensively about it. However, I do think it’s important to contextualize these conversations. As a kid with dreams of being a doctor, and with all the possibility and potential in the world, unfortunately I grew up in a very difficult household that I ran away from. I thought that I would be welcomed into somebody else’s home and wrapped in the love and care that all children are deserving of. But unfortunately I found myself seduced into the drug trade, where I encountered high levels of gun-related trauma, including being shot at the age of 17. And then 16 months later, tragically shooting and causing a man’s death, and repeating that cycle of PTSD and gun trauma in my community.

I was sentenced to 17 to 40 years in prison, and ended up serving a total of 19, with seven of those years being in solitary confinement. And it was in solitary confinement when my journey as a writer and a storyteller and a truth-teller really began.

Fortunately, after 19 years, I was released back into society, in June of 2010. So I’m actually coming up on my 12th year of freedom. I have done a tremendous amount of work around criminal justice, around personal transformation, and efforts to end gun violence in the inner city. As much as I do other stuff in the world, I’ll always be passionate about working with young men and women who come from communities and experiences similar to mine.

TH: This book is interesting because you’re talking about fatherhood and masculinity. It is inspired by letters your father wrote to you when you were in prison. In fact, his letters are on the cover of the book. Talk to me about what those letters did for you.

SS: For the 19 years of my incarceration, my dad wrote me. He would write these beautiful, handwritten, long letters that really encapsulated the world he was navigating being the parent figure for my oldest son, Jay, who he was taking care of due to my incarceration.

One of the things that was great about the letters between my dad and I were the life lessons about being a man, being a father, being a husband. But also his sense of humour, his insights. We were able to share things we were reading, our perspective on what we read. We were able to agree; we were able to disagree. Most importantly, we were able to heal some of the broken pieces of our past. To unpack life choices that I made that led me on the path that I was on, but also life choices that he made.

It’s just an incredible gift from a dad to a son. My goal with this book was to not only give that gift to my two sons, but to the sons of society at large. And those who love the sons: The dads, the moms, the sisters, the lovers. I think this book really speaks to the humanity in all of us, even though it’s directed toward my two sons.

TH: I want to talk about your two sons. The first letter to Jay is so powerful. Talk about your process writing that — it’s a very vulnerable, very raw letter.

SS: That first letter was probably one of the harder letters to write, because of the depth of emotional vulnerability and the honesty. The things that I got wrong as a dad, the things I came to understand about myself. Then there’s just the horrific realities of inner city life, and thinking about what happens to Black boys. And thinking that my son was a victim of circumstances that so many young men in our community have been victimized by, which is the high levels of gun violence. Oftentimes, as parents, we find ourselves taking our children on journeys that they didn’t agree to.

When I got out of prison, I had this idea of who I thought I was as a father, and who I thought I needed to be. And it couldn’t have been further from the truth.

A lot of dads, we try to mentor, we try to coach. Sometimes our children really just need us to be present. I missed a mark on that. I really wanted to share that with my son, so that he would understand. But I also mentor so many young children across the country, and even outside of America. I find that that pattern is similar when it comes to dads. We show up as the heroes, the disciplinarians, the ones who are like, “Here, let me straighten you up, so that you’ll be ready for the world.” Really, what children need more than anything from their dads is just our presence, and the confidence that that gives children, and the freedom that it gives them to navigate life.

TH: In the book, you expand the narrative around fathers, and the way that we see fathers, and think about fathers. I want to read another quote.

There is a trope in our culture of the absent father and the sainted single mother, but the reality for so many of us is actually agony. Do you really think we want to be away from our children? Who would choose such a thing?

We have learned to take the second road, to acquiesce to the image of us as less than, as inadequate to the task of love. We are not inadequate to it. We yearn for it, but so often we find ourselves out here in the garage of our lives, away from the main rooms, steeling ourselves for either loss or reentry.

SS: Every time I think about that passage, I get really emotional. Because I have incredible friends in my life who are amazing dads. I come from a family where all the men are really present. They’re not just present as providers, they’re nurturers.

I think about when I was 16 years old, and I attempted to commit suicide. It was my dad that sat by my bedside, and nurtured me, and helped me get back to a healthy space. I’ll never forget him sitting on my bed and rubbing my head. Even though he didn’t have all the answers, he had his presence. That emotional availability is something that I’ve seen historically in my family.

Even now I can go home and I have an uncle, his name is Chris. He will still fix me a plate. I’m a grown man. I’m 50 years old. But it’s just that care that I’ve witnessed with my friends and the men in my life. That narrative never gets talked about.

My dad cooked, my dad cleaned the home. My dad also worked and provided, and did all the other things that are typically associated with manhood. But none of the things he did were one-offs; they weren’t outliers in our family. Me as a dad, I’m relatively successful, but there’s still things that are important for me to do. It’s been that way since Sekou was born. I’ve always been a caretaker of him; I’ve always been a nurturer.

There’s moments where Sekou is like, “Dad, I want a hug.” I’m fully present in that. There were some things that I didn’t experience in my childhood that my dad and I, we talked about. Because he hadn’t had those experiences.

But as I got older, and I was going through the most difficult time in my life, my dad showed up as the most incredible nurturer you can imagine. He was the one who was there on those visits. He was there to hug me, and love on me, and make sure I was able to eat some food outside of the prison food. The narrative around dads — those things need to be included. And they don't have to be included in a way that takes away from what mothers have historically done. But we also don’t need to be beat down because we decide to share what brings us joy in parenting.

TH: We’re in a funny moment for talking about masculinity. On the one hand, there's the progressive dialogue about “toxic masculinity.” I understand that. We talked last time in our interview about the kind of masculinity you saw in prison and how limiting that is. So I understand that. But in some ways, “toxic masculinity” can limit talking about what it means to be a man and a father as well. Do you find that?

SS: Absolutely. I think the terminology is like a lot of terminologies now in our pop culture. A lot of those things have lost their original flavour and their original intentions. Now they’re weaponized in a way to dismiss behaviours that we either don’t understand, or we’re uncomfortable with.

I think it is hypocritical, honestly. Because on the one hand, we’re talking about, “How do we create this collective culture of centering our humanity?” But then on the other hand, there’s this othering when we are using language that doesn’t really contextualize certain behaviours. I think it’s a lazy approach. It’s where we’re at as a culture — we don’t lean into intellectual dialogue. We’re not curious enough to really understand why people behave in the manner they behave in.

The easiest thing is to dismiss their behaviour, with language that erects a wall as opposed to builds a bridge. I try to steer away from that language. What I try to do is lead with my humanity, which is an ever-evolving thing.

As long as you’re living, you’re evolving, you’re growing. There’s potential to bring in new information; there’s potential to learn new things. I think that is really important when we’re talking about, “What does it mean to be masculine?” Sometimes there’s contradictions that may seem counterintuitive. Can you be a nurturer and still love football on Sundays? Can you be anti-interpersonal violence, but tune in to the latest boxing or UFC match?

To me, that’s the complexities of being a man. I don’t think we talk enough about how complex the emotional makeup of men really is. We’ve simplified us to these barbaric tropes, and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

TH: I wanted to talk about cancel culture, something I’ve written about a lot. You’re actually the first person that I learned about cancel culture from, in our last interview. Walk me through your feelings about where we’re at with cancel culture.

SS: I think we’re at a real sad time. Again, I think it points to intellectual laziness. I don’t think that we actually care about solving the thing. I think we’re more interested in exalting ourselves at the expense of somebody else’s misstep, misdeed, or poor judgement.

Because of how I live my life, my personal story, I believe in redemption. I believe that people should be given an opportunity to atone. I think people should be given an opportunity to make things right. That requires an invitation from us all. Exiling people, because they have an opinion that’s not popular, without understanding how they arrived at that conclusion — that does a disservice to us as human beings. It doesn’t allow us to grow. It doesn’t allow people an opportunity to heal. To reinvent themselves, or reimagine themselves.

TH: I want to switch gears for a moment and talk about racism. You’ve written to your sons about the fear that you feel at certain points as a Black man in America. There’s a moment that stands out in the book when you are cleaning dog poo in the middle of the night. Tell us that story.

SS: We had just got a puppy, who unfortunately is now deceased. We had got this beautiful puppy and like many puppies that are growing, they get sick. They eat something and they have a bad reaction. Our puppy was being crate trained. He was really little and he pooped all in the crate, and it was just the most horrific smell at three in the morning. I hadn’t been in my home long, maybe seven or eight months in a new neighbourhood. I’m one of the only youngish Black men that I see on my block. I dress in a way that’s more aligned with hip-hop culture, which is where I come from.

I remember bringing the crate out. It was a noisy affair. I’m dragging this big old crate out of the house. I’ve got to wash the crate down. I remember freezing in panic. It’s L.A., but L.A. nights are really chilly. I’m in black jogging pants, a black hoodie, and I’m out here in this new neighbourhood making all this noise. What I was thinking is: What if one of my neighbours called the police? And: When the police arrive, what does that encounter look like? It was terrifying to think that it’s three in the morning, I don’t have my ID on me.

In that moment, it was paralyzing. I had to do some self-talk. Like, “Okay, this isn't happening. This is just a thought that’s triggered by all these other things that do happen. But this is not what’s happening right in this moment. Clean the poop up, get the puppy in to safety, you’ll be fine.” But that’s what it’s like being Black in America, Black in a society that has demonized Black men specifically.

Our stories often are not told fully … I was just talking to my girlfriend last night and we were talking about the levels of gun violence, and the death rate for Black males in America. The reality is if as many white boys were killed in America by gun violence as Black boys are killed, it would be considered a humanitarian crisis. And we don't treat it that way. So, the perception is that Black male life has little value in society. That’s one of the things that I really want to change.

TH: You also wrote about a moment outside a barbershop and how that moment was able to shift. Can you tell us that story?

SS: I was in Cincinnati and somebody had made a false call and said that a group of Black guys were obstructing traffic. Actually we weren’t even in the street; we were on a sidewalk in front of a barbershop that had just won a grant. The police were called and a young white police officer came and we ended up having an exchange that turned out to be very powerful and very beautiful, because we both leaned into our humanity.

When I asked him what was going on, he told me about the false call. I told him that he should come into the barbershop and meet the owners. He was hesitant to do so because he felt like his uniform alone would cause the party to go flat.

I told him Jerome Bettis, Hall of Fame, NFL football player, was inside. Initially he didn’t believe me. So I went and got Jerome Bettis and he came out. The officer got really emotional because Jerome Bettis was his dad’s favourite player and his dad had passed. In that moment, we were just three boys. It wasn’t Jerome Bettis, the NFL football player. It wasn’t an officer; it wasn’t a writer. It was just three boys, talking about our dads and our experiences as men.

I ended up writing a Facebook post and it went viral. That really spoke to me about where we’re at. I think people are wanting more hopeful outcomes. I think people are wanting to see more of these stories — that actually happen all the time.

There’s the system. And then there’s the people. We have some systems that are bad that good people exist in. I really wanted to highlight what it looks like when you lean in to your humanity.

TH: Such a great story. To close, Shaka, you mentor young men. What do you think society is not seeing about these kids? What do you want everyone to know?

SS: What I want everyone to know is that boys crave love and acceptance in a way that we haven’t really thought about. They crave emotional intimacy … Every time I’ve mentored a group of young boys, it starts off with that hard shell. But once that shell is peeled back, you see these beautiful children who are trying to understand the world and their place in it.

We don’t allow our boys to be kids long enough. We’re too busy trying to usher them into adulthood, into manhood. We’re missing out on letting them navigate their innocence for as long as possible, and joy that comes with that. Because with innocence comes curiosity, and with curiosity comes great adventures. I think we have to create space for our boys to go on more great adventures, and to be as curious as anyone else in the world. And to be affirmed with love and affection.

That creates healthier adults. It creates more loving men, more caring and compassionate men. But we can’t expect men to grow up and be compassionate, loving, and vulnerable, if we shut that down while they’re boys. If we tell them to stop crying, if we tell them to toughen up when they’re actually hurt. If we tell them to run away from love because that makes them weak. Then we create weak men.

What I would say is love your boys in a way that you would desire to be loved, so that they can grow up to become loving men. If we can expand the narrative around that, I think it’s a game changer.

TH: That’s a lovely place to leave it. This is such a powerful book. It is so well written. I hope everyone reads it. Thank you for coming on today.

SS: Thank you so much for having me, and looking forward to more.

This transcript has been edited and condensed.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

If you’re a regular listener of the Lean Out podcast, you know I’m pretty concerned about the state of the left. Here’s a clip of the kind of thing that drives me crazy, from a 2019 conference of the Democratic Socialists of America. In it, the forum is derailed by interruptions from delegates who recite their pronouns and then demand that audience members stop whispering (it upsets those who are prone to sensory overload and triggers those with anxiety), stop clapping, stop waving banners, and stop using gendered language like “guys.”

My guest on today’s episode touches on this incident in his hilarious book, and notes that the DSA was live streaming the conference. “Everyone knew this,” Ben Burgis writes, “and everyone seemed to think ‘we’re building the kind of movement where no one is allowed to make a loud noise’ was a good face to present to the world.”

Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor, a columnist for Jacobin magazine, and the host of Give Them An Argument podcast. He’s also the author of Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left. He joins me on the podcast today to make the case for a smarter, funnier, and more strategic left.

If you’re in Toronto on April 22, Ben will be giving a talk at Ryerson University, followed by a Q&A with Matt McManus and Victor Bruzzone.

Lean Out with Tara Henley is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

In today’s media environment, there’s often a lot of unanswered questions. Because narratives are so powerful — and because the press is so polarized — there’s often pieces of information that don’t quite fit with any given story.

One fact I’ve been wondering about for some time: How Donald Trump managed to increase his support among Black voters in the 2020 election. Why haven’t we heard more discussion and debate around this?

What happened to increase Black voter support for Trump?

My 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.

Jason L. Riley joins me to make the case that the lives of working-class Black people actually improved under Trump’s economic policies — that’s today on Lean Out.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

If you’re currently lost in a downward spiral of doomscrolling, you are not alone. The news out of Ukraine is almost too much to bear, especially coming on the heels of a national crisis, wrapped in a global pandemic.

But my 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 the former editor-in-chief of the Ottawa Citizen, a former public affairs columnist for Maclean’s, 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.

Andrew Potter joins me for a conversation about the grim state of the world (that’s funnier and less depressing than you might expect).

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

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. (The play, Caged, was later staged in New Jersey, and went on to be published.)

The brilliant Chris Hedges is our guest on today’s episode of Lean Out.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tarahenley.substack.com

Things are not feeling particularly sane right now. Not in the world, not in the media. And not in this country, as we continue to navigate debilitating political polarization.

It feels difficult to know where to start, let alone how to connect across divides.

But my guest on the podcast today is hopeful. Profoundly so.

Mónica Guzmán is the Seattle journalist we met last month, in a Q&A conversation about challenging polarization. She’s a director at Braver Angels, a grassroots organization that works to heal polarization, and a former fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Her new book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, is as energizing and inspiring as it is practical.

On today’s episode of Lean Out, Mónica walks us through her approach to bridge-building and journalism, affirming curiosity, respect, and the magic of conversation.

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