Blue City Blues

Democrat Gina Hinojosa, the incoming governor of Texas, claims the mantle of economic populism. So does James Talarico, the newly elected Texas senator, who argues present day American politics is “top versus bottom” rather than “left versus right.” Senator-Elect Troy Jackson in Maine framed his successful campaign as a battle between “the money and the many.” Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, whose senate bid was strongly backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, rails against corporate cash in elections and advocates for a wealth tax on billionaires. 

So is left populism destined to be the new lingua franca of a resurgent D...

Peter Moskos spent the better part of two years as a cop patrolling the mean streets of East Baltimore on the midnight to 8 am night shift, before he left policing to complete a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University. He now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where he directs the NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program, and where he writes extensively about the importance of good policing to maintaining order and keeping crime in check in American cities. 

So we asked Peter, the author of four books, including most recently Bac...

In recent decades, visible unsheltered homelessness, and the street disorder that comes with it, have become both the background noise of life in urban America and perhaps the most frustratingly persistent and seemingly intractable problem facing blue cities. But how did we get to this point?

For answers, journalist Emma Pettit joins us on BCB to talk about her fascinating, insightful, and sound-rich Reflector podcast documentary, Street Fight: How America Chose Homelessness, which offers a history of homelessness in America.  (Reflector is the podcasting arm of Longview, a recently formed journalistic entity that focuses on providing explanatory h...

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 Post, and The Free Press, and who writes regularly on his Substack page, Hazard Ratio. After graduating from Columbia University in 2001, Ben established himself in New York City writing initially about the AIDS epidemic and about scientific research on HIV.

But in recent years, Ben’s growing frustration and skepticism with what he sees as cosmopolitan progressive institutions’ resistance to confronting ideologically inconvenient truths led him to reorient the direction of his repo...

[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 GeekWire podcast. Become a member of the National Nordic Museum today!].

For this BCB episode David and Sandeep moderate an all-star panel about how the rise of Big Tech has transformed not only the economies, but also the politics and the cultures, of San Francisco and Seattle, the nation’s two largest blue city knowledge economy bastions. Joining us on stage are: University of Washington historian Margaret O’Mara, the author of T...

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent NYT Magazine essay –  "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" – in which she offers her mea culpa for enrolling her daughter in poorly performing, mostly minority public schools in order to demonstrate her commitment to her systemic racial equity principles, has caused a huge stir online. The questions it raises – and to a significant degree, avoids answering – about how best to provide a high quality public education to children in a nation riven with racial and class divides, are at the heart of our latest episode. 

Jack Despain Zhou, better known by his...

If you are in Seattle join us for a live joint taping of the Blue City Blues & GeekWire Podcasts: Two Cities, One Industry: Big Tech, Power and Politics in Seattle and San Francisco, Sept 29, 2026 

Elizabeth Glazer is a former law clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and federal prosecutor who prosecuted violent gang activity, who then went on to serve first as Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and later as Director of the Office of Criminal Justice under progressive New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio. Now Glazer is the founder of Vital C...

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 campaign effort, which presciently harnessed grassroots and online Democratic base energy to challenge a seemingly out-of-touch party establishment that had coalesced early around John Massachusetts Senator Kerry, fell short – remember the “Dean Scream” implosion in Iowa? – but it nonetheless set the stage for a new paradigm in political campaigning. 

Trippi then went on to further build his career boosting Democrats willing to challenge the inside-the-Beltway party power structure, working wit...

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 goes. But drug historian Emily Dufton says that the true story is much more complicated, and interesting.

In fact, Dufton writes in her fascinating new book, Addiction Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, between 1971 and 1973 the Nixon administration presided over a massive expansion of publicly funded methadone clinics and other treatment services that began...

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 based until 2022. Then, abruptly, he was laid off, and  for a few dark months he thought his career in journalism was over. Instead, he started over in the brave new world of independent online journalism, moving his political coverage to his now hugely popular So What page on Substack and to its companion YouTube channel. 

All of which is to say th...

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, "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs," which is now available online and will be published in the September issue of The Atlantic.

When David was reporting for Seattle's NPR affiliate, he interviewed a family living a couple of blocks from the open-air drug market in Little Saigon. Their daughter's school was on the other side of it. It...

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 illiberalism: controversies around race, identity, political correctness, and the increasingly censorious, authoritarian and oppressive cultural milieu of progressive institutions. It was a dangerous career move at a time when the New York Times was purging itself of perceived apostates like James Bennet and Bari Weiss. But Powell fearlessly dove headfirst into the verboten world of woke era authoritarian excesses because he b...

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 but scrappy activist group into a national political movement to be reckoned with, challenging the teetering establishment consensus within the Democratic Party. 

But is the DSA a welcome reformist movement that brings new and more youthful energy and vitality and vision to a big tent Democratic Party still trying to find its way back to political r...

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 over the next three plus decades had a front row seat to watch how tech innovation – closely followed by growing pyramids of tech money – transformed an economically down-at-the-heels but funky, counter-culturally adventurous, egalitarian and welcoming city into the affluent but sharply unequal global tech hub that San Francisco is today. 

His colorful new book vividly telling t...

Jamie Paul, a former managing editor of Queer Majority and a contributing editor at Bi.org, is the founding editor of the American Dreaming on Substack, where (among his other writings) he has set out to provide a comprehensive catalog of the authoritarian excesses of the woke era of progressive cultural ascendency. At 11 extensively researched and sharply written installments (so far), Paul’s “Memory-Hole Archive” seeks to preserve for posterity the almost hallucinatory lunacy of what came to be the cultural currency and conventional wisdom in cosmopolitan America in the years between 2014 and 2023.

Paul argues that now that t...

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, among other books, of Undoing Drugs (2021), a stirring history of the harm reduction movement. 

A former cocaine and heroin addict, Szalavitz is one of the country’s foremost journalistic critics of the war on Drugs era, and she remains a fierce proponent of non-punitive approaches to addressing addiction. We invited her on to this latest BCB episode to make her case that harm reduction remains the right way...

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 Karen Bass is going to face off in the general election with democratic socialist (and alleged political backstabber?) Nithya Raman, how much trouble is Bass in? What are Raman's strengths and vulnerabilities, and what does she need to do to prevail in November? And will Latino swing voters decide the outcome of the Bass-Raman establishment vs. in...

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 demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness. 

So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native Ame...

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 radical – transformation to become one of the country’s most distinctive and culturally vibrant urban renaissance stories in the 2000s (the New York Times memorably declared Portland “cool and refreshingly unneurotic” in 2007). 

But then, in the 2010s, the self-described “weird” and fun city, experiencing a rapid influx of young and educated newcomers drawn by post-Portlandia “where young people go to retire” hyp...

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 regarding what's real or what the truth is anymore. 

So what comes next?

Adam Penenberg has spent his career inside the journalism industry and inside the classroom training the young journalists who'll inherit it. He's a professor at New York University’s journalism school, the author of Blood Highways (2003) and Viral Loop (2009), amo...

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 with our guest (and Gen X contemporary), the legendary indie rock frontman of The Long Winters and one time Seattle City Council candidate John Roderick, now the host of the popular (and omnivorous!) Omnibus podcast that he founded with Jeopardy host Ken Jennings. 

In the episode, we nostalgia trip with John about the fading of the hipster scenes of...

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 The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate, that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture. 

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 titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective Government.” A leading scholar of constitutional law and democratic governance, Rick is a Guggenheim Fellow, Carnegie Scholar and a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After reading his article, we asked him to join us on the latest BCB episode to make the case for making government work. 

If you’...

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 obsess over and that typically provide the grist for this podcast. And countering them, of course, is the red America of small towns and rural areas that powered the rise of Trump and MAGA.

Both the urban powerhouses and the rural heartland receive more than their share of attention. But then there are also the often overlooked or ignored...

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 senior advisor on drug policy in the Obama White House and on the White House Advisory Commission on Drug Free Communities under President George W. Bush. 

We had Keith on BCB last March for an insightful conversation about why the drug reform and decriminalization efforts that swept West Coast blue cities circa 2020 failed so spectacularly. So now, a y...

In late February, Nicholas Bagley and Robert Gordon, who have both had extensive careers in Democratic governance – Nicholas was Chief Legal Counsel for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer until 2022, Robert most recently served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on the Domestic Policy Council of the Biden White House – went where few left-of-center commentators have been willing to go: they directly called out what they see as the excessive political influence of public sector unions.

Those deep-pocketed unions are, of course, one of the major power centers within the Democratic Party, which may explain why even reform-minded comm...

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 - "America is a diversity project," he contends - and for the importance of identity to our conception of self. And yet he is also a sharp critic of DEI regimes as they are typically practiced on college campuses or within other culturally progressive institutions. 

For our latest episode, at the invite of Seattle University President Eduardo Peñalver and as part of...

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 of the Cuban revolution. From those outsider beginnings Bass went on to become a progressive Speaker of the California State Assembly, and then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in Congress, before defeating law-and-order former Republican mall developer Rick Caruso in 2022 to become Los Angeles’ 43rd mayor. 

In other words, the 72 year-old Bass, once a young radical, is now a leading light within California’s progressive power...

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 Students for a Democratic Society until 1969, a founding member in 1971 of the New American Movement (a predecessor organization to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and a founder of the rad left journal Socialist Revolution, Judis had a bird’s eye view of why that previous generation of leftists flamed out before getting anywhere near achieving their lofty goals for a transformation of American society. 

Now a new gener...

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 of four books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite (2014), which is based on an essay in the American Scholar that went viral, and which argued that the country’s most prestigious colleges were producing conformist, incurious careerists riven with status anxieties and uninterested in self-discovery or critical thinking.

Deresiewicz remains a sharp critic of elite univ...

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 challenges the very foundations of the post-war liberal democratic order. 

That’s why we were thrilled that the latest episode of BCB is a live taping with historian, celebrated journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. Applebaum is perhaps the foremost chronicler of the rise of global authoritarianism, including the serious threats to democratic traditions pos...

In 2002, political analyst and commentator Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, published near the zenith of the Bush presidency in the aftermath of 9/11, gave beleaguered Democrats cause for hope. Demographic change, Teixeira and co-author John Judis predicted, would soon create the political conditions for Democrats to forge an enduring political majority.  

When an emerging coalition of educated knowledge economy professionals, minorities, young people and women powered the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and 2012, Teixeira’s optimism appeared prescient. But the big Democratic majorities of Obama’s early years were ephemeral. The count...

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 running for governor of California, which makes this a good time to give this interview a second spin.

A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, Mahan tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2023. 

Along the way, Mahan has been more tha...

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 that remains timely. We'll be back with fresh episodes shortly:

Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience. 

Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on Ame...

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 and cultural dissidents, as it became the progenitor of a new kind of journalistic outlet – the alternative newsweekly – and a new genre of engaged, inside out journalism that rejected the antiseptic detachment of traditional post-war newspapers. The model pioneered by the Voice spread rapidly across the country, and alt weeklies became a ubiquitous fixture in the media landscapes of large...

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 Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different social expectations of how to address this problem.

Gong spent years observing public outreach and treatment efforts directed at the...

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 dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the boundaries between vastly different cultural communities: after growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the child of alcoholic...

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 shit crazy." Our guest, Kelsey Piper, formerly at Vox and now a staff writer with The Argument, doesn't pull any punches either, arguing that "illiteracy is a policy choice.” 

In a series of cogently argued recent pieces (links below), Piper has provided yeoman service in jump starting a debate, largely dormant during the years of the Great Awo...

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 the promise of fundamental change, reversing course away from the permissive - and often performative - radical chic progressivism of the peak woke era. For a city reeling from spiking crime and street disorder, he won by offering a return to what he calls "common sense" policies that involve getting tougher on encampments, crime, and public drug use, while...

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, author Claudia Rowe, a long-time journalist and now an editorial writer at the Seattle Times, exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster care system is a "major gear" driving mass homelessness and the incarceration crisis in American cities.  She shares shocking statistics—including studies that found up to 59 percent of youth who grew up in foster care have been incarcerated by age 26—and outlines how the system's structural failures lead to such devastating outco...