Hello, welcome to Everything Else, the culture podcast from The Financial Times.

My name's John Sonia.

And I'm Grizalda-Marie Brown.

On this podcast, we'll be talking about what it means to be a man today and whether we're

living through a crisis of masculinity.

Later on, the cook, food writer and Instagrammer, Delicious Leela, comes into the studio

to tell us why she hates being called the Queen of Clean Eating.

And we'll also speak to the FTs Neil Munshi about whiteness and blackness in America today,

following his interview with the Jamaican-born poet and essayist Claudia Rankin.

And now, masculinity in crisis.

Well, we'll talk about that later. Really, we're only talking about masculinity today because

Griselda, we talked about girls and I was the only man in the studio last week, so it's role

reversals. So we're doing the opposite this week. In fact, we've actually been thinking about doing this for quite a long time now. Yeah, it's a theme that keeps cropping up. Yeah, so it's the Oscars this weekend. We've seen a load of those films. Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea are both very intimate studies of masculinity, male repression. Yeah, absolutely. And lots of books that we've been reading, particularly you John, interested in authors like Knausgard, talking about these ideas of what it is to be a man today and the sort of problems that men navigate. This week, there's a production of 12th Night Opening at the National Theatre in London, and Tams and Greg has taken the role of Malvolia, which has been kind of feminized from Malvolio.

And there's lots of this kind of gender bending and gender crossed casting going on on stage at the moment. So women playing men's roles and sort of investigating, what does it mean to kind of act the mannerisms of a man? And on top of that, of course, we've had the election of Donald Trump in Brexit. And those two events have led to a lot of articles about masculinity, what it means today.

Yeah, I mean, and people are saying not only have those events led to a kind of questioning

of masculinity, but actually the sense of masculinity or a traditional masculinity being under threat

actually caused those events. That's one argument that's

made. And I guess the types of discussions we've been, people have been having about masculinity

in relation to Trump and Brexit are in fact very different from some of the discussions about

masculinity played out in books, theatre, film. So today I guess we're going to try and bring some

of that together a bit and see if there is, in fact, a crisis of masculinity. So we invited our colleague Jananne Ganesh onto the pod today. He's an FT political commentator and he also writes a column in FT Life and Arts at the weekend. And his column last week was called masculinity crisis, what crisis? So he thought he'd be a great person to have today. Also with us is

friend of the pod, John Day. You might remember him from a few episodes ago. He is the writer,

...