City Journal Audio

Kay S. Hymowitz  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss Pennsylvania's Williamson College of the Trades, a three-year school for young men offering a debt-free path to high-paying work—and the life skills to help them get there. "Trade schools" have long had a stigma in American culture, but Williamson is no ordinary trade school: students wake up early to the sound of reveille an...

Music critic and historian  Ted Gioia  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss the 4,000-year history of music as a global source of power, change, and upheaval—topics explored in his new book,  Music: A Subversive History . The music business is a $10 billion industry today. But  according to Gioia , innovative songs have always come from outsiders—the poor, the unruly, and the ma...

Stian Westlake joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss the future of productivity and how institutions and policymakers can adapt to the new "intangible" economy. Throughout history, as documented in the book  Capitalism Without Capital  by Westlake and coauthor Jonathan Haskel, firms have invested in physical goods like machines and computers. As society has grown richer, companie...

Rafael A. Mangual  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss New York City's plan to replace the jail complex on Rikers Island with four borough-based jails and what it could mean for public order in the city. New York City jails currently house a daily average of about 8,000 people, in a city of 8 million residents. Under the new plan, the borough-based jails (once constructed) will be able to house 3,300 p...

Beth Osborne , director of Transportation for America, joins  City Journal  contributing editor  Nicole Gelinas  to discuss the state of U.S. infrastructure and how federal spending could be used more effectively to improve safety and reduce fiscal waste. The federal government spends between $40 billion and $60 billion on transportation infrastructure annually. In recent years, congressional lead...

Heather Mac Donald  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss homelessness on the streets of San Francisco and the city's wrongheaded attempts to solve the problem. "San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior,"  writes  Mac Donald in  City Journal . For nearly three decades, the Bay Area has been a magnet for the homeless. Now...

Howard Husock  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss Husock's new book,  Who Killed Civil Society? The Rise of Big Government and Decline of Bourgeois Norms . Government-run social programs funded with tax dollars are thought to be the "solution" to America's social ills. But in his new book,  Who Killed Civil Society? , Husock shows that historically, it was voluntary organizati...

John Tierney  joins  City Journal  assistant editor  Charles McElwee  to discuss Pittsburgh's recent resurgence. "If you want to see how to revive a city—and how not to," John Tierney writes, "go to Pittsburgh." Pittsburgh has transformed itself from the Steel City to central Pennsylvania's hub of "eds" and "meds." But before that could happen, the city nearly destroyed itself under various misgui...

Edward L. Glaeser  discusses how the proliferation of unfair laws and regulations is walling off opportunity in America's greatest cities at the Manhattan Institute's 2019  James Q. Wilson Lecture . We like to think of American cities as incubators of opportunity, and this has often been true—but today's successful city-dwellers are making it harder for others to follow their example. In this year...

City Journal  contributing editor  Christopher Rufo  joins  Brian Anderson  to discuss an increasingly influential progressive faction in many cities—one that seeks to rebuild the urban environment to achieve a wide range of environmentalist and social-justice goals. According to Rufo , these "New Left urbanists" rally around controversial (and often dubious) ideas like banning cars and constructi...

Labor unions have dramatically declined as a percentage of the American workforce over the last 30 years. A new proposal from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seeks to double union ranks,  City Journal  senior editor  Steven Malanga   reports , which would mean adding nearly 15 million new members. Malanga joins associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss Senator Sanders's proposal, which would...

Corey Johnson, Speaker of the New York City Council, joins Seth Barron to discuss the state of New York City's transit system and his plan to break up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), allowing the city to take control of its buses, subways, bridges, and tunnels. According to Johnson, direct control of the MTA would enhance its responsiveness, accountability, and transparency.

Brian Riedl and  Shai Akabas  discuss the U.S. federal budget, budget negotiations, and why Congress hasn't addressed the rising national debt—even as it gets worse. The case for a "grand deal" on the budget has never been more evident: within a decade, annual budget deficits are projected to exceed $2 trillion. Entitlement programs are projected to drive trillions in new government debt over the...

James B. Meigs  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss last month's power blackout in Manhattan, California's self-inflicted energy crisis, and potential energy sources for the future. "As power outages go," Meigs  writes , "the Broadway Blackout of 2019 was pretty modest." But energy reliability is becoming an issue in states across the country. California's largest power supplier, Meigs  reports , recen...

Milton Ezrati  joins  Paul Beston  to discuss escalating trade tensions between the United States and China. The Trump administration announced new tariffs on $300 billion worth of Chinese goods last week, prompting China to order its state-owned businesses to stop purchasing U.S. agricultural products. Ezrati has  written  on U.S.-China trade issues for  City Journal  previously, and he maintains...

Steven Malanga  and  Rafael Mangual  join  Seth Barron  to discuss concerns that lawlessness is returning to American cities, a theme that Malanga and Mangual explore in separate feature stories in the Summer 2019 Issue of  City Journal . Memories of the urban chaos and disorder of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have faded, and many local leaders today have forgotten the lessons of that bygone era. M...

City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  joins Vanessa Mendoza, executive vice president of the Manhattan Institute, for our second annual discussion of Brian's summer and vacation reading list. Summer is upon us, and the  City Journal  editors are ready for some vacation. We asked Brian to tell us what books he's taking with him to the beach this year and why. Check out Brian's summer reading list,...

Ray Domanico  joins  City Journal  associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza's controversial and divisive leadership of the nation's largest public school system. Domanico details Carranza's emphasis on ridding schools of purported racial bias in his recent essay for  City Journal , " Richard Carranza's Deflections ." Over the past four decades, wi...

Stephen Eide joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss how homeless services are putting pressure on one of New York City's most valued cultural institutions: the New York Public Library. Eide describes the situation in " Disorder in the Stacks ," his story in the Spring 2019 Issue of City Journal . Homelessness has been a challenge for every New York City mayor since the 1970s. Prior to...

Anthony Daniels (known to readers as  Theodore Dalrymple ) joins  Brian Anderson  to discuss Daniels's quarter-century of writing for  City Journal  and his new book,  False Positive: A Year of Error, Omission, and Political Correctness in The New England Journal of Medicine . "Theodore Dalrymple" first appeared in the pages of  City Journal  in 1994 with an aptly titled essay, " The Knife Went In...

Nicole Gelinas  and  Howard Husock  join  Seth Barron  to discuss New York's landmark rent-regulation law and its potential impact on housing in the city and state. Lawmakers in New York recently passed the toughest rent-regulation law in a generation, imposing new restrictions on landlords' ability to increase rents, improve buildings, or evict tenants. The bill made permanent the state's existin...

James R. Copland  joins  Rafael Mangual  to discuss how activist investors are turning corporate America's annual shareholder-meeting process into a political circus. Most of corporate America is wrapping up the 2019 "proxy season" this month—the period when most publicly traded companies hold their annual meetings. It's at these gatherings that shareholders can (either directly or by proxy) propo...

Erica Sandberg  joins  City Journal  associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss the deteriorating state of public order in San Francisco. The Bay Area's most densely populated and desirable neighborhoods are being destroyed by lawlessness and squalor. San Francisco now leads the nation in property crime, according to the FBI. "Other low-level offenses," Sandberg  reports  for  City Journal , "inclu...

Kay Hymowitz  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the world: loneliness. Her essay in the  Spring 2019 issue , " Alone ," explores this subject. "Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness," Hymowitz writes. "Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers...

Economist Allison Schrager joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss her new book,  An Economist Walks Into A Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk . Risk is a universal fact of life, but some of us manage more of it than others. Schrager examined how a broad cross section of people handle it: horse breeders in Kentucky, members of an elite tank unit during the Gulf...