Blue City Blues

In 2023 the US Supreme Court issued its landmark – and highly controversial – ruling striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, a decision that has had major repercussions far beyond the confines of college campuses. It was a victory for conservative activist Edward Blum and his anti-affirmative action group, Students for Fair Admissions, who had filed lawsuits challenging...

Democrat Gina Hinojosa, the incoming governor of Texas, claims the mantle of economic populism. So does James Talarico, the newly elected Texas senator, who argues present day American politics is “top versus bottom” rather than “left versus right.” Senator-Elect Troy Jackson in Maine framed his successful campaign as a battle between “the money and the many.” Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, whose sen...

Peter Moskos spent the better part of two years as a cop patrolling the mean streets of East Baltimore on the midnight to 8 am night shift, before he left policing to complete a Ph. D. in sociology at Harvard University. He now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where he directs the NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program, and where he writes extensively about the impo...

In recent decades, visible unsheltered homelessness, and the street disorder that comes with it, have become both the background noise of life in urban America and perhaps the most frustratingly persistent and seemingly intractable problem facing blue cities. But how did we get to this point? For answers, journalist Emma Pettit joins us on BCB to talk about her fascinating, insightful, and sound-r...

Benjamin Ryan is a prominent independent journalist who has written for major national publications like the New York Times , NBC News , The Atlantic , The Washington Post , and The Free Press , and who writes regularly on his Substack page, Hazard Ratio . After graduating from Columbia University in 2001, Ben established himself in New York City writing initially about the AIDS epidemic and about...

[This episode is a live taping of a panel discussion at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle on September 29, done in conjunction with the GeekWire podcast ]. For this BCB episode David and Sandeep moderate an all-star panel about how the rise of Big Tech has transformed not only the economies, but also the politics and the cultures, of San Francisco and Seattle, the nation’s two largest blue cit...

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent NYT Magazine essay –  " In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? " – in which she offers her mea culpa for enrolling her daughter in poorly performing, mostly minority public schools in order to demonstrate her commitment to her systemic racial equity principles, has caused a huge stir online. The questions it raises – and to a significant degre...

If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026  Elizabeth Glazer is a former law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and federal prosecutor who prosecuted violent gang activity, who then went on to serve first as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for...

Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi came to national prominence in 2003, as the mastermind behind then-Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s internet-fueled insurgent bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. That groundbreaking campaign effort, which presciently harnessed grassroots and online Democratic base energy to challenge a seemingly out-of-touch party establishment that had coa...

Elected on a law-and-order platform, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs with a June 1971 press conference in which he declared drug abuse on the streets of American cities to be “public enemy number one.” Or so the conventional narrative goes. But drug historian Emily Dufton says that the true story is much more complicated, and interesting. In fact, Dufton writes in her fascinating new book,...

For nearly two decades, Chris Cillizza was a star political commentator for legacy media. In 2005 Chris founded The Fix , the seminal, must read Washington Post political blog, before moving on to CNN in 2017, where he was based until 2022. Then, abruptly, he was laid off, and  for a few dark months he thought his career in journalism was over. Instead, he started over in the brave new world of in...

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 Seattl...

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 in...

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 Par...

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 econom...

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 “...

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 c...

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 i...

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 assoc...

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 memora...

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 t...

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 th...

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....

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, Car...

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...