Blue City Blues
Blue City Blues is where people get real about America's blue cities: what's broken, what's working, and what comes next. Every episode, we bring in sharp guests to dig into the big questions: What connects these cities? What's holding them back? And how do we build something better? We see blue cities not in isolation, but as an urban archipelago: a connected network that's shaping the future of American life.
Blue City Blues
Latest Episodes
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 ...
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