City Journal Audio

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, companies have...

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 peop...

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 leaders a...

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 the si...

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 organizations and c...

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 misguided u...

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’s...

City Journal contributing editor Christopher Rufo joins Brian Anderson to discuss an increasingly influential progressive faction in many cites—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 constructing new...

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 put new...

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, and bridges 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 ne...

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, recently ann...

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 that b...

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. Malanga’...

In an extended version of 10 Blocks, Brandon Fuller and Nolan Gray join Michael Hendrix to discuss the state of housing in America and the political coalition driving pro-development policies at the local level, known as YIMBY (“Yes In My Backyard”). Construction of new housing isn't keeping up with demand in American cities. With leaders and residents eager for solutions to high housing costs, pr...

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, in th...

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, with varyin...

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 th...

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,” which rec...

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 existing ren...

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) propose...

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, “including drug...

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,” will be released online this Sunday. “Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness,” Hymowitz writes. “Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising nu...

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 War,...

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 70...