Blue City Blues
Blue City Blues is a podcast that's about what's broken, what's working and what comes next in America's blue cities. Hosts David Hyde and Sandeep Kaushik bring on a smart guest each episode to dig into urban politics, governance and culture. Clear-eyed conversation for people who care about blue cities and are skeptical of easy orthodoxies. Blue cities, we argue, represent an urban archipelago, which is shaping America's future. Subscribe to Blue City Blues now on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Episodes
70 episodes
Benjamin Ryan on Cosmopolitan Elites’ Truth Problem
Benjamin Ryan is a prominent independent journalist who has written for major national publications like the New York Times, NBC News, The Atlantic, The Washington Po...
Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco (live)
[This episode is a live taping of a panel discussion at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle on September 29, done in conjunction with the
Jack Despain Zhou on Nikole Hannah-Jones and Why Excellence in Education Is So Controversial
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent NYT Magazine essay – "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" – in which she offers h...
Elizabeth Glazer on How Left Progressive Blue Cities Should Tackle Public Safety
If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Ind...
Why Does Joe Trippi Say Democrats’ Divisions Won’t Stop Them from Sweeping the Midterms?
Democratic political consultant Joe Trippi came to national prominence in 2003, as the mastermind behind then-Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s internet-fueled insurgent bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. That groundbreaking camp...
Emily Dufton on the Maddening History of Our Broken System for Treating Opioid Addiction
Elected on a law-and-order platform, Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs with a June 1971 press conference in which he declared drug abuse on the streets of American cities to be “public enemy number one.” Or so the conventional narrative g...
Chris Cillizza on the Media's - and the Democrats'? - Parasitic Relationship with Trump
For nearly two decades, Chris Cillizza was a star political commentator for legacy media. In 2005 Chris founded The Fix, the seminal, must read Washington Post political blog, before moving on to CNN in 2017, where he was base...
Michael Powell Pt. 2: "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs"
Atlantic staff writer Michael Powell, our guest on the last BCB episode where we discussed NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the rise of anti-Zionism on the left, rejoins us for a second conversation about his searing new piece, "
Michael Powell on Mamdani, Anti-Zionism, and the New Socialism
In 2020, at the height of peak woke, then-New York Times sports columnist Michael Powell decided to make a career zag, abandoning sports to begin covering what he calls the “third rail beat” of the rising tide of progressive left illib...
Is the DSA a Threat to the Democratic Party (with Jake Altman)?
All of a sudden, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) seem to be a potent force within American politics, winning high profile mayoral and congressional races in blue cities across the country. In so doing they have grown from a fringe bu...
Jonathan Weber on the Good, the Bad and the Ugly about How Tech Remade San Francisco
In 1990, at the dawn of the internet age, reporter Jonathan Weber was tapped as the LA Times’ first Silicon Valley correspondent. Taking up a perch in San Francisco, where he went on to become one of the city’s leading journalists, Jonathan ove...
Jamie Paul on the Memory-Holing of the Excesses of Woke
Jamie Paul, a former managing editor of Queer Majority and a contributing editor at Bi.org, is the founding editor of the
Maia Szalavitz Makes the Case for Harm Reduction Policies in Blue Cities
Maia Szalavitz, a prominent neuroscience journalist and progressive drug reform champion who has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Salon and other publications, is the author, ...
Mike Madrid on the Establishment vs. Populist Throwdown in the LA Mayor’s Race
What just happened in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and why didn't former reality tv star and social media darling Spencer Pratt live up to the incessant, breathless hype (so sorry for your loss, X)? Now that it’s clear that incumbent Mayor ...
Sherman Alexie: An Ode to the White Urban Working Class
These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and de...
Nancy Rommelmann on How Portland Traumatized Itself
In recent decades, no major American city can match the sharp ups and downs of Portland, Oregon. From a poor but pretty backwater burg of white gearheads and provincials in the 1980s, Portland underwent an exceedingly unlikely – and quite radic...
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...