Blue City Blues

Episod

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  Michael Powell Pt. 2: "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs" 11.08.2026 1j 1min

  Atlantic staff writer Michael Powell, our guest on the last BCB episode where we discussed NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rise of anti-Zionism on the left, rejoins us for a second conversation about his searing new piece, "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs," which is now available online and will be published in the September issue of The Atlantic. When David was reporting for Seattle's NPR affiliate, he interviewed a family living a couple of blocks from the open-air drug market in Little ...
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  Michael Powell on Mamdani, Anti-Zionism, and the New Socialism 31.07.2026 1j 8min

  In 2020, at the height of peak woke, then-New York Times sports columnist Michael Powell decided to make a career zag, abandoning sports to begin covering what he calls the “third rail beat” of the rising tide of progressive left illiberalism: controversies around race, identity, political correctness, and the increasingly censorious, authoritarian and oppressive cultural milieu of progressive institutions. It was a dangerous career move at a time when the New York Times was purging itself of...
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  Is the DSA a Threat to the Democratic Party (with Jake Altman)? 20.07.2026 58min

  All of a sudden, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) seem to be a potent force within American politics, winning high profile mayoral and congressional races in blue cities across the country. In so doing they have grown from a fringe but scrappy activist group into a national political movement to be reckoned with, challenging the teetering establishment consensus within the Democratic Party. But is the DSA a welcome reformist movement that brings new and more youthful energy an...
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  Jonathan Weber on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly about How Tech Remade San Francisco 09.07.2026 1j 9min

  In 1990, at the dawn of the internet age, reporter Jonathan Weber was tapped as the LA Times’ first Silicon Valley correspondent. Taking up a perch in San Francisco, where he went on to become one of the city’s leading journalists, Jonathan over the next three plus decades had a front row seat to watch how tech innovation – closely followed by growing pyramids of tech money – transformed an economically down-at-the-heels but funky, counter-culturally adventurous, egalitarian and welcoming cit...
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  Jamie Paul on the Memory-Holing of the Excesses of Woke 04.07.2026 1j 2min

  Jamie Paul, a former managing editor of Queer Majority and a contributing editor at Bi.org, is the founding editor of the American Dreaming on Substack, where (among his other writings) he has set out to provide a comprehensive catalog of the authoritarian excesses of the woke era of progressive cultural ascendency. At 11 extensively researched and sharply written installments (so far), Paul’s “Memory-Hole Archive” seeks to preserve for posterity the almost hallucinatory lunacy of what came t...
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  Maia Szalavitz Makes the Case for Harm Reduction Policies in Blue Cities 27.06.2026 1j 7min

  Maia Szalavitz, a prominent neuroscience journalist and progressive drug reform champion who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon and other publications, is the author, among other books, of Undoing Drugs (2021), a stirring history of the harm reduction movement. A former cocaine and heroin addict, Szalavitz is one of the country’s foremost journalistic critics of the war on Drugs era, and she remains a fierce proponent of non-punitive approaches t...
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  Mike Madrid on the Establishment vs. Populist Throwdown in the LA Mayor’s Race 08.06.2026 58min

  What just happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and why didn't former reality tv star and social media darling Spencer Pratt live up to the incessant, breathless hype (so sorry for your loss, X)? Now that it’s clear that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass is going to face off in the general election with democratic socialist (and alleged political backstabber?) Nithya Raman, how much trouble is Bass in? What are Raman's strengths and vulnerabilities, and what does she need to do to prevail in ...
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  Sherman Alexie: An Ode to the White Urban Working Class 04.06.2026 1j 20min

  These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the...
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  Nancy Rommelmann on How Portland Traumatized Itself 25.05.2026 58min

  In recent decades, no major American city can match the sharp ups and downs of Portland, Oregon. From a poor but pretty backwater burg of white gearheads and provincials in the 1980s, Portland underwent an exceedingly unlikely – and quite radical – transformation to become one of the country’s most distinctive and culturally vibrant urban renaissance stories in the 2000s (the New York Times memorably declared Portland “cool and refreshingly unneurotic” in 2007). But then, in the 2010s, ...
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  The Death of the Gatekeeper: Adam Penenberg on Traditional Journalism's Identity Crisis 14.05.2026 1j 5min

  For decades, a handful of legacy media outlets decided what counted as news, how to frame it, and who got to report it. Now trust has collapsed, The New York Times is selling cooking apps to stay alive, and there is no consensus regarding what's real or what the truth is anymore. So what comes next? Adam Penenberg has spent his career inside the journalism industry and inside the classroom training the young journalists who'll inherit it. He's a professor at New York University’s journa...
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  John Roderick on the Decline – and Comeback? – of Urban Cool 07.05.2026 54min

  What's the fundamental difference between an authentically cool city and a contrived, gentrified one? What makes a great music and arts scene, and can deliberate government action actually make a city cool? That’s the topic we take up with our guest (and Gen X contemporary), the legendary indie rock frontman of The Long Winters and one time Seattle City Council candidate John Roderick, now the host of the popular (and omnivorous!) Omnibus podcast that he founded with Jeopardy host Ken Jenning...
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  Preview: Why Is David Rieff a Cultural Pessimist about Blue America? 28.04.2026 8min

  This is a free preview of our latest Patreon-only episode of Blue City Blues, with writer David Rieff, a war correspondent, an essayist, and a leading cultural critic. David, the son of sociologist Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desir...
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  Democracy Dies in Ineffectiveness with Richard Pildes 16.04.2026 57min

  Is a return to good, effective governance not just a glaring need in blue cities but a key to saving liberal democracy? NYU law professor Richard “Rick” Pildes is the author of an insightful scholarly article that recently caught our attention titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective Government.” A leading scholar of constitutional law and democratic governance, Rick is a Guggenheim Fellow, Carnegie Scholar and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After reading his...
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  In Praise of “Solid B" Cities with Halina Bennet 08.04.2026 47min

  There are the superstar cities that act as the seedbeds of American cultural cosmopolitanism and the great engines of blue America's knowledge economy: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle etc. These are the cities that we obsess over and that typically provide the grist for this podcast. And countering them, of course, is the red America of small towns and rural areas that powered the rise of Trump and MAGA. Both the urban powerhouses and the rural heartland receive more th...
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  Three Blue City Mayors Innovating on Drug Policy with Keith Humphreys 31.03.2026 46min

  Keith Humphreys, a friend of the pod, is widely recognized as the country’s leading expert on drug and addiction policy. The Esther Ting Memorial Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Keith served as a senior advisor on drug policy in the Obama White House and on the White House Advisory Commission on Drug Free Communities under President George W. Bush. We had Keith on BCB last March for an insightful conversation about why the drug reform and d...
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  Do Public Sector Unions Wield Too Much Power in Blue Cities? 24.03.2026 55min

  In late February, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, who have both had extensive careers in Democratic governance – Nicholas was Chief Legal Counsel for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer until 2022, Robert most recently served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on the Domestic Policy Council of the Biden White House – went where few left-of-center commentators have been willing to go: they directly called out what they see as the excessive political influence of public sector unions. Those d...
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  Eboo Patel Says Blue America Needs to Rethink How We Do Diversity 20.03.2026 56min

  Eboo Patel, an Ismaili Muslim, is the founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based non-profit that works to promote pluralism and foster cooperation across differences of religion. He is a fierce advocate for diversity - "America is a diversity project," he contends - and for the importance of identity to our conception of self. And yet he is also a sharp critic of DEI regimes as they are typically practiced on college campuses or within other culturally progressive institutio...
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  A Dem Socialist Insurgency in Los Angeles? 14.03.2026 47min

  In the 1970s, as a young left wing activist seeking to upend capitalism, Karen Bass was a leader in the Venceremos Brigade, an organization that sends Americans to Cuba in support of the Cuban revolution. From those outsider beginnings Bass went on to become a progressive Speaker of the California State Assembly, and then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress, before defeating law-and-order former Republican mall developer Rick Caruso in 2022 to become Los Angeles’ 43rd mayor.&n...
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  John Judis Has Advice for Young Leftist Mayors in Blue Cities like New York and Seattle 07.03.2026 52min

  Author, journalist, and political analyst John B. Judis cut his political teeth in the (briefly) ascendant New Left politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of Students for a Democratic Society until 1969, a founding member in 1971 of the New American Movement (a predecessor organization to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and a founder of the rad left journal Socialist Revolution, Judis had a bird’s eye view of why that previous generation of leftists flamed out before ...
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  Why Does William Deresiewicz Believe the Culture of Elite Universities Elected Trump? 25.02.2026 57min

  A former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz has become one of the country’s most erudite and insightful commentators on the cultural trends that have remade higher education on elite campuses. He is a prolific essayist and the author of four books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite (2014), which is based on an essay in the American Scholar that went viral, and which argued that the country’s most prestigious colleges were producing conformist, incuriou...