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Blue City Blues
by David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik
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
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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 Post, and The Free Press, and who writes regularly on his Substack page, Hazard Ratio. After graduating from Columbia University in...
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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 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...
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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 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...
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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 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...
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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 campaign effort, which presciently harnessed grassroots…
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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 goes. But drug historian Emily Dufton says that the…
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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 based until 2022. Then, abruptly, he was laid off, and for a few dark…
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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, "The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs," which is now available online and…
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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 illiberalism: controversies around race, identity, political...
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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 but scrappy activist group into a national political...
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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 over the next three plus decades had a front row seat to...
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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 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...
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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, among other books, of Undoing Drugs (2021), a stirring history of the harm reduction...
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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 Karen Bass is going to face off in the general…
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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 demographics of blue cities were very different. As…
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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 radical – transformation to become one of the country’s…
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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 regarding what's real or what the truth is anymore. So what comes...
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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 with our guest (and Gen X contemporary), the legendary indie...
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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 The Triumph of the Therapeutic, and author Susan Sontag, one of the…
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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 titled, “The Neglected Value of Effective…
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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 obsess over and that typically provide the grist for…
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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 senior advisor on drug policy in the Obama White House...
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Do Public Sector Unions Wield Too Much Power in Blue Cities?
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...
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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 - "America is a diversity project," he contends - and for the...
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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 of the Cuban revolution. From those outsider beginnings Bass went on to become a progressive Speaker of the…
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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 Students for a Democratic Society until 1969, a founding member in 1971 of the New American Movement (a predecessor...
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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 of four books, including Excellent Sheep: The...
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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 challenges the very foundations of the post-war liberal...
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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 presidency in the aftermath of 9/11, gave beleaguered Democrats cause for hope. Demographic change, Teixeira and co-author John Judis predicted,...
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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 running for governor of California, which makes this a good time to give this interview a second spin. A Harvard…
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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 that remains timely. We'll be back with fresh episodes...
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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 and cultural dissidents, as it became the progenitor of a new...
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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 Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons,...
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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 dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian...
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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 shit crazy." Our guest, Kelsey Piper, formerly at…
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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 the promise of fundamental change, reversing course…
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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, author Claudia Rowe, a long-time journalist and now an editorial writer at the Seattle Times, exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster…
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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 makes a great city?” Ray also shares his insights on the concept of "affordable urbanism" and gives us…
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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 one of the country's bluest (and most educated and affluent) cities. For more than a decade now, Westneat wrote in a recent...
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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 from backbench obscurity to political superstardom;...
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Can Blue Urban America Find Common Ground with Trump on Homelessness?
On July 24, Donald Trump declared war on the homeless. At least that was how his Executive Order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” was received in blue urban America by many homeless advocates and Democratic elected officials. With billions in federal funding at risk of…
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Blue City Crime: What Both Sides Get Wrong According to Criminologist David Kennedy
Like almost everything else in present day America, crime in blue cities has become a deeply partisan and polarized issue. While progressives routinely downplay levels of urban crime and call for a singular focus on “root causes” like poverty and racism, Trump, with the enthusiastic backing of…
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Hard Hats and Blue Cities: David Paul Kuhn on the Roots of the Working Class Revolt
The modern Democratic Party has a class and culture problem. Blue city leaders struggle to understand their cultural and political disconnect with working-class voters. Why did so many, both within and beyond blue cities, cast their ballots for Donald Trump, who gives tax breaks to the wealthy?...
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Whitney Tilson on Why Kids in Blue City School Districts Are Being Left Behind
Children in urban public school districts are falling behind. While a handful of lower spending red states – Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and, most notably, Mississippi – have delivered remarkable academic progress over the last 12 years, high spending districts in big cities like New York and...
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Has Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Cracked the Code on Progressive Governance in Blue Cities?
Four years ago, a 36 year-old Harvard Law grad and City Councilmember named Michelle Wu rolled to victory as the first elected female, non-white mayor of Boston. Since then, she's racked up further governing successes: Boston these days is often touted as the safest big city in the country, and…
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Did Blue City America Get Covid Wrong, Too?
This week we take a look back at the COVID-19 pandemic with Steven Macedo, a professor of politics at Princeton University and co-author of "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us" (Princeton University Press). The book offers a self-critical examination of how blue leaders and institutions…
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Nicole Gelinas: Blue City Lessons from NYC’s 100 Years' War Between Cars and Transit
New York Times contributing opinion writer Nicole Gelinas, who writes regularly on New York City issues, is the author of a deeply researched and informative book, Movement: New York’s Long War to take Back Its Streets from the Car. In this fascinating account, Gelinas cogently argues that NYC’s...
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Dispatch from an Urban Drug Market
In this special episode we venture outside our respective basements to explore a sprawling open-air drug market in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, which resembles similar drug markets in poor, blue city neighborhoods across the US that have been overrun by the urban fentanyl and...
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What’s the Matter with Chicago?
The Windy City is not just a great American metropolis – the third largest in the United States – it is a world class city, recognized globally as a center of finance, trade and economic dynamism, and as a cultural and tourist mecca. But there is an emerging counter-narrative about Chicago, a...
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Trump Just Defunded Public Media. Did NPR Help Bring This Disaster on Itself?
In the latest installment of Blue City Blues, we welcomed Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, to join us in delving into the Trump-led defunding of public broadcasting. Zimmerman, whose incisive public commentaries have been published at…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Blue City Blues have?
Blue City Blues currently has 69 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Blue City Blues about?
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...
How often does Blue City Blues release new episodes?
Blue City Blues has 69 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to Blue City Blues on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Blue City Blues?
Blue City Blues is created and hosted by David Hyde, Sandeep Kaushik.
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