Blue City Blues
Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.
America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming.
The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?
Blue City Blues
Latest Episodes
John Roderick on the Decline – and Comeback? – of Urban Cool
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 ...
Preview: Why Is David Rieff a Cultural Pessimist about Blue America?
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
Democracy Dies in Ineffectiveness with Richard Pildes
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 ...
In Praise of “Solid B" Cities with Halina Bennet
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 obs...
Three Blue City Mayors Innovating on Drug Policy with Keith Humphreys
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 s...
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