Show Notes
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 methamphetamine crises. Whether it's the Tenderloin in San Francisco, or Kensington in Philadelphia, or Skid Row or MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, the well intentioned, largely permissive policies towards hard d...
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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 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...
[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 ...
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 ...
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...