City Journal Audio

Charles McElwee  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss the decline of the Catholic Church in the Rust Belt and the impact of immigration on a working-class community in Pennsylvania. The Catholic Church faces a crisis in an area that remains disproportionately Catholic. In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury report detailed how clergy covered up the abuse of children by more than 300 priests over a period of...

Myron Magnet  joins  Brian Anderson  to discuss his new book,  Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution . Magnet contends that Justice Thomas's originalist jurisprudence offers a path forward for recovering our nation's "lost Constitution" and restoring America as a free, self-governing nation made up of self-reliant citizens. Author of  The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817  a...

Urbanist Alain Bertaud joins  Michael Hendrix  to discuss how urban planners and economists can improve city management. Bertaud's book  Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities  argues that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities' growth. The book is a summation of what Bertaud has learned in a lifetime spent as an urban planner, including a stint at the World Bank, where he...

At the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, Professor Jacob Howland  writes  in  City Journal , "a new administration has turned a once-vibrant academic institution with a $1.1 billion endowment and a national reputation in core liberal arts subjects into a glorified trade school with a social-justice agenda." Speaking with  Seth Barron , Howland describes how, in early April, TU's new administration...

Nicole Gelinas and Aaron Renn join Seth Barron to discuss recent developments in New York and Chicago. In the first week of April, both cities marked milestones: Manhattan got the nation's first congestion-pricing plan, courtesy of the state legislature, while Chicago elected its first black woman as mayor. New York City's transit system badly needs improvement, but Gelinas argues that this conges...

Joel Kotkin  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss China's urbanization, class tensions in Chinese cities, and the country's increasingly sophisticated population surveillance. Rapid migration from China's countryside to its cities began in 1980. Many of the rural migrants arrived without  hukou , or residential permits, making it harder to secure access to education, health care, and other services. The...

Steven Malanga  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss expanding efforts to legalize recreational marijuana use, a movement helped along by extensive misinformation about the drug's supposed health benefits. This year, at least eight states are debating laws that would permit recreational pot. Marijuana advocates claim that the drug is therapeutic and that legalizing it will end the unjust imprisonment of...

Rafael Mangual  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss the disturbing leftward trend among urban prosecutors in major cities and the consequences of undoing the crime-fighting revolution of the 1990s. In recent years, cities like Philadelphia and Chicago have elected district attorneys dedicated to the principles of social-justice and the goal of "dismantling mass incarceration." The shift away from proac...

City Journal  contributing editor  Howard Husock  joins associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss the Manhattan Institute's  Civil Society Awards , which recognize outstanding nonprofit leaders who develop solutions to social problems in their communities. History has shown that free markets are the best way to organize economic activity, but a healthy society relies on charitable and philanthropi...

Hoover Institution fellow and award-winning historian  Victor Davis Hanson  joins the Manhattan Institute's  Troy Senik  to discuss the presidency of Donald Trump and Hanson's new book,  The Case for Trump . Hanson argues that our 45th president alone has the instinct and energy to upset the balance of American politics. "We could not survive a series of presidencies as volatile as Trump's," he wr...

James B. Meigs  joins  City Journal  senior editor  Steven Malanga  to discuss the limitations of renewable energy and the need to expand nuclear technology as a source of clean and reliable electricity. For nearly four decades, environmental activists have opposed nuclear power in favor of "green" energy. But as Meigs  writes  in the Winter 2019 Issue of  City Journal , "nuclear power is finding...

Ray Domanico  joins  City Journal  associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss charter schools in New York City, the growing protests by education workers across the country, and Democrats' weakening support for charters. In teachers' unions protests from West Virginia to California, activists claim that the growth of charters has come at the expense of district schools. New York City's charter scho...

Daniel DiSalvo  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss the impact of last year's Supreme Court decision in  Janus  v.  ASFCME , in which the Court ruled that public-sector unions' mandatory "agency fees" were unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Unions provide an important source of financial support for politicians—primarily Democrats—around the country. In a new report fo...

Glenn C. Loury of Brown University joined  Jason Riley  to discuss the persistence of racial inequality in America. Their conversation took place at a Manhattan Institute event in New York City entitled " Barriers To Black Progress: Structural, Cultural, Or Both?" Professor Loury, who has also taught at Harvard University and Boston University, is a professor of economics, with a focus on race and...

Aaron Renn  joins  City Journal  associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss how some big public universities are expanding their tech departments to major cities to maximize their economic impact—creating new political battles in their states. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of  City Journal , Aaron Renn writes on economic development and urban policy in America....

James R. Copland  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss President Trump's impact on the federal courts, the appointment of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and the diversity in conservative judicial philosophy emerging today. The director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow, James Copland has written and spoken widely on...

Milton Ezrati  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss the Trump administration's trade negotiations with China and the "Green New Deal" proposed by newly elected Democrats in Congress, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Proponents of a Green New Deal claim that the plan will prevent damage from climate change. The scale of the proposal is massive: its goals include expandi...

Nicole Gelinas  joins  City Journal  associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss Mayor Bill de Blasio's State of the City address, his aspiration to run for president in 2020, and his attempts to position himself as a national progressive leader. "There's plenty of money in the city—it's just in the wrong hands," de Blasio proclaimed in a speech loaded with tax-the-rich rhetoric. Since his first may...

City Journal  contributing editor  Howard Husock  joins associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss problems at the New York City Housing Authority. With some 400,000 residents, NYCHA is the nation's largest public housing system. In recent years, news reports have documented extensive corruption at the agency along with chronic problems at NYCHA properties, including heating outages, broken elevato...

Christopher F. Rufo  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss an urban struggle with street homelessness and the political fight around it in the Pacific Northwest's largest city. Known as the "Emerald City" because its surrounding areas are filled with greenery year-round, Seattle has recently seen an explosion of homelessness, crime, and drug addiction. Municipal cleanup crews pic...

Heather Mac Donald  discusses the decline of the university and the rise of campus intellectual intolerance, the subjects of her important new book,  The Diversity Delusion How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture . She spoke at a Manhattan Institute event in autumn 2018. Toxic ideas that originated in academia have now spread beyond the university setting, wi...

Naomi Schaefer Riley  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss how family court in New York fails vulnerable children and how reforms could improve child-welfare. In the New York Family Court System, judges adjudicate cases ranging from custody disputes to child abuse. As Riley reports, though, the whole system can feel like an agonizing series of hearings, trials, and meetings—ofte...

John Tierney  joins  City Journal  editor  Brian Anderson  to discuss what the debate over prescription drugs gets wrong and the cost that government-imposed price controls could have on one of the world's most innovative industries. The business practices of the pharmaceutical industry--or "Big Pharma"—are one of the most divisive political issues of our time. Leaders from both political parties,...

Nicole Gelinas  joins  Seth Barron  to discuss the chaos that commuters and tourists endure on a daily basis in midtown Manhattan—especially during the holiday season. Every year, city officials are criticized for their poor handling of holiday crowds and the traffic that fills the streets. This year promises to be even worse. As Gelinas has  documented , tourists visiting the Christmas tree at Ro...

Stephen Eide  joins City Journal associate editor  Seth Barron  to discuss how America's health-care system fails the mentally ill, and the steps that cities and states are taking to keep the mentally ill out of jail and get them into treatment. Urban areas have seen a disturbing rise in street disorder and homelessness over the last decade. Unfortunately, many of the street homeless suffer from s...