Today's headlines:
- The Spokane Housing Authority is trying to combat the cost of living crisis by building childcare into its newest low income housing project. It's getting support from Washington state.
- The U.S. Forest Service axes most of its research stations.
- Washington State University gets a "new" athletic director. Spoiler alert: it's Jon Haarlow, who's been filling the role for months.
Plus, New York Times opinion columnist Christine Emba visits Whitworth University today. She'll give a lecture on "Modern Love, or or Lack Thereof: Bridging the Gender Divide” in Weyerhaeuser Hall’s Robinson Teaching Theatre at 4 pm. SPR's Eliza Billingham chatted with Emba about combatting loneliness, defining new gender ideals, and wading through misogynistic online dating advice.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting contributed by Eliza Billingham, John Ryan and Doug Nadvornick.
Owen Henderson hosts and produces the show. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Wednesday, April 8, 2026.
On today’s show, Washington has some of the highest childcare costs in the country. One affordable housing group is trying to combat that by building childcare into a development in Spokane Valley.
And the U.S. Forest Service is planning to shut down research stations around the country, including across the Northwest.
Plus, a conversation with Christine Emba. The columnist and gender and sexuality researcher will be at Whitworth University today, giving a lecture on bridging the growing gender divide in modern relationships.
Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
[FADE OUT THEME]
Affordable childcare is being built into one low-income housing campus in Spokane Valley—and it’s getting support from Washington state.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham reports.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: The Orchard Vista apartments will have 240 low-income units close to WinCo Foods, the Valley Transit Center, and the Spokane Valley Library. The site will also have a built-in childcare center.
The Spokane Housing Authority has already put more than half a million dollars into developing the center. It will serve around 40 children through Washington state’s Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program or Working Connections Child Care initiative.
The state’s commerce department also just granted the site more than $100,000 to make sure the center is designed correctly.
The housing authority wants to make sure the center meets community needs by offering nontraditional childcare hours.
Washington state has some of the highest childcare costs in the nation. In Eastern Washington, it can cost families more than one thousand dollars a month per child.
The housing authority hopes accessible childcare will add to overall affordability for the people who will live there. The first Orchard Vista apartments are scheduled to be available this May.
I’m Eliza Billingham, reporting.
— — —
OH: Some fire experts say cuts to U.S. Forest Service research could hamper firefighting efforts this summer.
The agency is shutting down most of its research stations, including in Seattle, Wenatchee and Portland.
KUOW’s John Ryan reports.
JOHN RYAN: The Forest Service says researchers won’t lose their jobs, but they will have to move to different locations.
University of Washington scientist Susan Prichard collaborates with several researchers whose stations are closing.
SUSAN PRICHARD: “Whenever people are required to uproot and move, that disrupts their ability to conduct place-based research, including what's happening in this upcoming wildfire season, which will be a doozy.”
JR: The lab in Seattle specializes in wildland fire.
Prichard says the lab will be busy making smoke forecasts this summer.
One Forest Service researcher who asked to remain anonymous says the agency’s closure plan lacks detail in order to scare people into quitting.
A spokesperson says the Forest Service’s work to manage forests and wildfires will continue without interruption.
I'm John Ryan, reporting.
— — —
OH: Last November, Washington State University asked Jon Haarlow [harlow] to lead its athletics department on a fill-in basis after it fired its previous athletic director.
Yesterday, WSU announced Haarlow will remove the “interim” from his title.
SPR’s Doug Nadvornick has more.
DOUG NADVORNICK: President Elizabeth Cantwell says Haarlow has shown he’s capable of leading WSU athletics through an important transition.
As interim director, he guided his department through an aggressive push to raise money to pay football players and other athletes so they stayed at the university.
He hired a new head football coach and a new women’s soccer coach.
He made his department more visible through events around the state, including last weekend in Spokane.
Cantwell says boosting the athletics department is a key part of her strategy to help the university become more attractive to prospective students and increase its enrollment.
The university is making improvements to Martin Stadium as a way to lure more fans to football games next fall.
Now, with Haarlow as the official athletics director, the school is gearing up for another major transition.
In less than three months, WSU and Oregon State will welcome seven universities to a revamped Pac-12 Conference. Those newbies, including Gonzaga, will replace 10 schools that jumped to other athletic leagues.
I’m Doug Nadvornick reporting.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
OH: The earliest uses of the #MeToo turn 20 this year, and the public discourse around sex, relationships and gender has been evolving quickly since those first posts.
Opinion columnist Christine Emba dove into that conversation with her 2022 book “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” exploring the goals—and failures—of the MeToo movement and modern sexual ethics.
But in research for that book, Emba started noticing another pattern: men struggling in education, work and relationships, prompting her to write the viral Washington Post piece “Men Are Lost: A Path out of the Wilderness” in 2023.
Emba now researches sexuality, gender and social norms at the American Enterprise Institute, and she’s visiting Whitworth University today for her lecture “Modern Love, or Lack Thereof: Bridging the Gender Divide.”
SPR’s Eliza Billingham chatted with Emba before her stop in Spokane.
EB: You start off with this premise that “men are lost.” How did we get there?
CHRISTINE EMBA: I wrote the piece in the summer of 2023. It came out on the heels of Richard Reeves’s well-known book “Of Boys and Men.” And I think at a period also, kind of post-election, where people were suddenly waking up to the fact that men and boys didn’t really seem to be doing that well.
The 2016 Trump campaign was fueled by memes from 4chan and, like, a backlash against MeToo. You saw the 2024 election then upcoming targeting young men through sort of podcasts and other sort of spheres of influence.They ended up having a big impact on the outcome of the election. They formed an unexpected voting bloc for Donald Trump.
Then there was sort of like the broader data problem, where, you know, you note that men account for almost 3 of every 4 deaths of despair. Men are accounting for more than 70% of the decline in college enrollment. Nearly half of women have reported in surveys that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners, which is a huge jump from, I think the number was fewer than like 4% of women did so in 1960.
And then, you know, I write a lot about Gen Z. I heard from my peers and younger peers, and experienced this myself, that the men around me were getting a little weird. They were suddenly listening to these sort of like bro-y, manosphere podcasts and getting obsessed with this certain kind of often misogynist content.
They seemed to be seeking out advice on how to be a man and how to live their lives, whether that advice came from Jordan Peterson or worse, from Andrew Tate. They seemed a little bit unclear as to what their role was supposed to be in the modern age.
Like, should they ask women out? Are they even allowed to talk to women? Are they providers anymore? Are they protectors? Like, what does it mean to be a man when women are now capable of doing all the things that men can do? And in some cases seem to be outdoing them. There seems to be this like latent anxiety that was clearly having an impact on the culture.
EB: Do you think it's important to differentiate masculinity and femininity versus just focusing on people being good people? Why do you think it's important to parse out what should masculinity be?
CE: I mean, I think the ideal goal is for people to be good people, to be kind of like the highest, most virtuous version of themselves.
You know, we talk about gender and sex as maybe being made up of different traits. But of course, there's also often substantial overlap. If we say that courage is a male trait, well, women can be courageous too. If we say women are nurturing, like men, hopefully we should learn to be nurturing too.
But I think the problem with just saying that, ‘well, we all need to be good people,’ is that it's pretty vague. And especially for young men who are sort of the focus of my interest, who are just now kind of defining who they are in the world, just ‘be a good person’ doesn't give them very much to go on.
It's not specific. It doesn't really speak to many of the traits that they might feel like differentiate them from their female friends and partners.
EB: It seems to me like scholars and young people alike are concerned with whether men and women are having sex together. As a scholar, what do you think the point of sex is?
CE: It kind of feels like an odd turnabout, right? From just a decade or two decades ago, scholars and policymakers were like, oh, no, there's too much teen pregnancy, like the teens are getting out of hand. Suddenly, they're like, wait, why aren't the teens getting pregnant anymore? We need them to have more sex and drink more. But I think it does speak to something real.
You asked what sex is for, which is sort of a huge question. And I'll note that I'm Catholic. And so I'm speaking about this from both my perspective, but my perspective as informed by my faith, too.
I think that sex is meant to be unifying–a real and deep expression of connection with another person.
And also it’s often procreative. So I think one problem with or one worry for policymakers about the kids not having enough sex is that where is the next generation going to come from?
I think of that as not the main concern or at least that's not my main concern. I'm more focused on the idea of teens not having sex, not dating, not interacting with each other as a statement about how teens are not connecting with each other.
They're not forming romantic relationships. In some cases, they're not forming platonic relationships either. It speaks to an increasing level of solitude and loneliness.
EB: And I wanted to bring up this line from a recent New York Times opinion piece on why Gen Z isn't dating. And you write that, “if trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute.”
I guess I see a lot of people who are lonely in marriage. But would you say that marriage is probably the most prominent or the best cure for loneliness?
CE: I don't see marriage or sex necessarily as cures to loneliness. Exactly as you say, there are many people who are in marriages who are lonely. Like there are people who have sex who are still lonely during and afterwards.
Again, I think that my worry about people not getting married, people not having sex, speaks to this difficulty that I see people having in forming connections.
EB: So the second half of the article title was, “A Map Out of the Wilderness.” Can you give us a sneak peek of what that map is?
CE: A solution is not obvious or clear. But I do have some thoughts.
I think the most obvious one, and the one that, frankly, you've also heard from other people, I hope, is to “touch grass.”
I continue to think that one of the things that's contributing to this sort of misunderstanding and distrust between the sexes, especially now, is that we spend a lot of our time on the internet, online, on social media, where our feeds and the information that we reach is increasingly shaped by algorithms.
Algorithmic content succeeds based on the sort of force of feeling that it engenders in the people who watch. The content wants to make you angry. It wants to make you scared.
And so if you're listening to dating content or gender advice content from a dating coach who wants to make you angry or scared, that is not going to make you feel good. In fact, it probably will make you want to stay home and not even try.
This idea that women only want to date guys who are above six foot tall or, you know, something about body count–that tutors you in a kind of fear of the opposite sex. They're not telling you anything true or useful, and that will make it harder for you to form relationships with other people.
The best way to bridge the divide is to stop mainlining that content and talk to real members of the opposite sex or your own sex in person, in third spaces, to actually try and make real world connections, which takes bravery in this moment and takes practice. But that's what you have to do to make a friend or find a partner. So you best get started.
OH: That was SPR’s Eliza Billingham speaking with New York Times columnist Christine Emba.
You can hear Emba’s free lecture today at 4 p.m. at Whitworth University’s Robinson Teaching Theater.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Eliza Billingham, John Ryan and Doug Nadvornick.
I’m Owen Henderson, your host and producer. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Thanks for listening.
It’s SPR.
