The Metro

You've heard about it. You probably think you understand what's going on with "Incel" culture. Maybe you picture men with extreme ideologies about women. Maybe you picture violence. And you wouldn't be entirely wrong.

Most people don't know the word "incel" didn't start that way. It began in 1997, in a small online forum, built by a young woman who was tired of feeling like she was the only one struggling with loneliness and looking to find love and connection. 

She called it Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project. It was open to anyone. Alana stepped away around 2000. When she did, the word “incel”  was taken from her. It was turned into a space for misogynistic incel to connect over shared ideologies and victimhood. 

However, the forums didn't create the problem overnight. The loneliness was already there. The entitlement was already there. The misogyny that fueled all of this was already in the culture. What social media did was find all of that and give it a megaphone, a community, and an algorithm.

Neither the internet or social media created the problem. It just gave it an audience. So how does a term born out of compassion become a banner for some of the most dangerous ideologies circulating online today? When did loneliness curdle into something this destructive? 

Dr. Julia DeCook is a researcher and former professor of advocacy and social change at Loyola University Chicago, and one of the leading academic voices on misogynist incel communities and male supremacism. 

She joined The Metro to explain the mainstreaming of misogyny contributed to the current culture.

Five years ago drug overdoses were killing more than 3,000 people a year in Michigan. It was the worst the state had seen. Behind that number were parents, sons and daughters — people who’d been trying to get well for years. That number is coming down. But the people who do this work are cautious about it. Fewer deaths may not mean fewer people in danger.

Addiction touches lives in different ways. For many of us, it might be indirectly. One analysis put the cost to Michigan last year at $38 billion: lost work, lost wages, courts, treatment. Now there’s money to fight this: Millions from the settlement with the maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma. Detroit gets a share, and it's deciding how to spend it now.

Ali Abazeed leads Detroit’s health department, and founded Dearborn’s before that. He spoke to The Metro's Robyn Vincent about what the city is doing to reduce overdose deaths and help residents be healthier.

If you’re a leader in Detroit, your attention is trained on a big task: attract more people to the city. That’s for good reason — with more people comes more tax revenue. But the city is running into a problem when it comes to increasing its population: High property taxes.

Because property taxes are capped until a property is sold, homebuyers in Detroit neighborhoods that have become more desirable bear the burden of potentially very high taxes. As an example, hundreds of homes will see their taxes climb above $10,000, according to an Outlier Media estimate of the city’s 2026 tax roll.

So what does it mean when the system rewards staying still and punishes moving in? Kevin Bain is the chief financial officer for Public Sector Consultants, and a former debt manager for the city of Detroit. He spoke with The Metro's Robyn Vincent.

When someone leaves an abusive home, we tend to think of it as the end of the story. Advocates say it's often when the violence escalates — and when survivors are left to rebuild a sense of self after years of being told they had none.

For Mental Health Awareness Month, JoJo Dries joins The Metro to talk about the long work of healing after domestic violence. Dries runs On the Wings of Angels, a metro Detroit nonprofit meeting survivors with shelter, security, therapy and a community willing to stay. She spoke with Ahlem Mahdhi, a fellow at WDET through the U.S. State Department's Professional Fellows Program.

Editor's note: This episode includes descriptions of abuse. If you need help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.

Since we last spoke to food critic Melody Baetens, new restaurants have opened, Detroit’s culinary scene has the opportunity to gain national and international attention, and the summer food festival calendar has rounded into shape. 

Melody is a restaurant critic and dining reporter at the Detroit News. She joined the show to catch us up. 

Langston Hughes is one of the most recognized names in American literature. His poems are taught in classrooms, quoted at marches and memorials and Sunday morning services.

But that celebration comes with a cost. Because the Hughes most people know, has been made comfortable. Sanitized. Stripped of his edges. And what gets lost in that sanitizing is the very thing that made him matter.

Here was a man who believed that art was never neutral, that democracy was not something America had already achieved but something it still owed its people. 

He championed that Black Americans practicing respectability politics was itself a form of political control.

He wrote about it. He lived it. And in his own life, he faced the impossible choice that respectability politics always eventually demands: your safety or your principles. Your platform or your truth.

Randal Maurice Jelks is a professor, documentary producer, and award-winning author. In his new book “My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy”, he strips away the veneer placed on Hughes's legacy to reveal the radical, clear-eyed democratic thinker underneath.

For those of us in Detroit, a city that has built its own armor out of necessity, that has dressed for work and maintained its properties and measured its words as a matter of survival…this book is not just about Langston Hughes.

It is about every Black family that ever had to decide how much of themselves to show, in order to make it through the door.

Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks joined The Metro to talk about the book and the audacity of Hughes to write truth to power. 

Terms you would typically only hear in therapy like "trauma," "gaslighting" and "narcissist" are now being used to refer to everyday experiences. Does the adoption of therapy terms in popular language help remove stigma around mental illness? Or does it dilute the terms' original meaning?

Kristen Abraham , a professor and the chair of the psychology department at the University of Detroit Mercy, joined the show to explain how the mainstream use of therapy terms is changing our understanding of mental health.

When relationships get tough, couples can venture into infidelity. While cheating remains as frequent as it has always been, we wanted to better understand why it happens.

Todd Shackleford is an evolutionary psychologist from Oakland University. He joined the program to discuss how and why infidelity happens.

Twenty-five incarcerated men at Macomb Correctional Facility are working toward a Wayne State degree. Jonathan Roden — a Wayne State graduate who served 23 years in Michigan prisons — helps run the program. Host Robyn Vincent asks him how education changes a person when they're behind bars. 

In recent years, notable art theaters in metro Detroit have shuttered or completely changed the way they operate. 

Main Art Theatre which was in Royal Oak and Cinema Detroit which was based in midtown Detroit are recent examples. They both showed more niche, independent or foreign films you could not catch at a commercial movie theatre. The Main Art Theatre was demolished and replaced with apartments, and Cinema Detroit now operates as a pop-up. 

When theaters like them closed, John Monaghan and Kevin Maher started Motor City Cinematheque which is a series of art film screenings that will take place over the next few weeks. It supports independent, niche, art films and theatres in the metro area. John Monaghan joined the show to discuss their upcoming screenings and what they provide for the Detroit film community.