Urban Politics
08 May 2023
Featuring Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han on how Chicago’s labor left took over City Hall. Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory, the product of a decade-plus of social movement union struggle, is a model...
05 May 2023
Featuring Nikil Saval and Helen Gym on how the history of Philadelphia social movements brought Nikil into the state senate and has made Helen, a long-time public education organizer, a frontrunner in the mayoral race....
03 Apr 2023
Read the condensed transcript of our interview with Gail Radford here:
https://jacobin.com/2023/04/public-housing-history-new-deal-catherine-bauer-labor-housing-conference
11 Dec 2022
Featuring Gail Radford on her classic book Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Radford tells the story of Catherine Bauer, the Labor Housing Conference, and the struggle to make the...
21 Apr 2022
Destin Jenkins on his book The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, which makes a powerful argument about how the ubiquitous and in many ways invisible dependence of American cities...
02 Aug 2019
Dan interviews Lily Geismer, the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. While Boston whites fought school busing in the streets, suburban liberals along Route 128 maintained and...
02 May 2019
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02 May 2019
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05 Apr 2019
Car dominance, public transit austerity, and the neoliberal political-economy within which both are embedded have fomented what Marx called idiocy, in its classical sense of privatized social isolation. Dan talks to geographer Kafui Attoh, the...
05 May 2018
Dan just moderated a discussion in Philadelphia with Senator Sanders, along with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, scholar and frequent Dig guest Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and veteran defense lawyer and advocate Premal Dharia. Bernie came to...
03 Feb 2018
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As...
27 Nov 2017
We’ve got a bonus episode for you today, which is audio from a debate between Alex Vitale—a recent guest on this show, sociologist and author of The End of Policing—and Heather Mac Donald, one of...
03 Nov 2017
Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according...
12 Sep 2017
This two-hour episode is a look at inequality in Houston from slavery to the present. First, Dan talks to Tyina Steptoe, historian at the University of Arizona and author of “Houston Bound: Culture and Color...