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?
Episodes
54 episodes
The Death of the Gatekeeper: Adam Penenberg on Traditional Journalism's Identity Crisis
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 regard...
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...
Do Public Sector Unions Wield Too Much Power in Blue Cities?
In late February, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon...
Eboo Patel Says Blue America Needs to Rethink How We Do Diversity
Eboo Patel, an Ismaili Muslim, is the founder and president of Interfaith America, a Chicago-based non-profit that works to promote pluralism and foster cooperation across differences of religion. He is a fierce advocate for diversity - "Americ...
A Dem Socialist Insurgency in Los Angeles?
In the 1970s, as a young left wing activist seeking to upend capitalism, Karen Bass was a leader in the Venceremos Brigade, an organization that sends Americans to Cuba in support o...
John Judis Has Advice for Young Leftist Mayors in Blue Cities like New York and Seattle
Author, journalist, and political analyst John B. Judis cut his political teeth in the (briefly) ascendant New Left politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of
Why Does William Deresiewicz Believe the Culture of Elite Universities Elected Trump?
A former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz has become one of the country’s most erudite and insightful commentators on the cultural trends that have remade higher education on elite campuses. He is a prolific essayist and the author o...
Anne Applebaum (Live) on Resisting Authoritarianism Here and Abroad
Authoritarianism is on the march, not just here in the US but across the globe. It hardly bears repeating that we live in perilous and troubled times, as a potent and fundamentally destructive combination of nihilism and right-wing populism cha...
Ruy Teixeira on the Democrats’ Cultural Cosmopolitanism Problem
In 2002, political analyst and commentator Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, published near the zenith of the Bush...
Best of BCB: Why Is San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan Breaking So Many Eggs?
We spoke with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan last April about his groundbreaking approach to municipal governance and the new directions he wants to take the Democratic Party. Now, he's
Best Of BCB: Freddie deBoer on Why Blue City Progressives Need to Get Real on Involuntary Commitment
While David is away, we are reposting some early days Blue City Blues episodes that many of our more recent listeners may have missed. We thought this one, with author and cultural critic Freddie DeBoer, was a great conversation on a topic ...
Tricia Romano on the Village Voice, Alt Journalism, and the Rise of New York City’s Countercultures
In 1955, three men in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village got together to form what they thought would be a local community newspaper. But the Village Voice would soon morph into the voice of New York City’s political outsiders a...
Neil Gong on How Class Dynamics Shape Our Approach to the Mentally Ill on the Streets of Los Angeles
The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Nei...
Best of BCB: Sherman Alexie Talks “Monsters,” “Colonizers” and the Urban Left's “Minor League Maoism”
We invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities. Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two doz...
Kelsey Piper on the Shameful Truth that Mississippi Beats Blue Cities on Educational Equity
This week we take a close look at the damning decline in the quality of public education in progressive cities where, as Sandeep puts it, the "glaring contradiction" between a fixation on equity and shockingly inequitable results "drives me bat...
Emily Hoeven on Whether San Francisco's Backlash Mayor Is Making Things Better
In November 2024, fed up San Francisco voters elected an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune the city's 46th mayor. Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and a newcomer to City Hall politics who largely self-funded his own outsider campaign, ran on th...
How a Broken Foster Care System Fuels Crime, Homelessness and the Addiction Crisis in Blue Cities
Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Drawing on the life stories of several foster children, auth...
What Makes a Great City?
This Thanksgiving week, Blue City Blues sits down with former traffic engineer and urban planner Ray Delahanty, better known as “CityNerd” on YouTube. We get into the essential question: “what mak...
Danny Westneat on Why Seattle Can’t Seem to Solve Its Problems
One of Seattle's most insightful chroniclers, longtime Seattle Times metro columnist Danny Westneat, joins us in this episode to discuss the blues that have settled on o...
Nick Gillespie on Whether Socialism Is the Future of Blue Cities
In New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani routed scandal-tainted Andrew Cuomo, completing his at first unthinkable, then inevitable rise to become the next mayor of New York City. His David vs. Goliath triumph has vaulted Mamdani fr...