Sherman Alexie joined us on the latest Blue City Blues. We talked Tonya Harding, the white working class, and threw in some politics because we couldn’t help ourselves. @skaushik100 @hyded

BREAKING: Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, citing “credible threats” to safety and security of World Cup says CCTV cameras will be activated in Stadium District. @komonews

We're entering our gladiatorial era now?

This is a very fun listen: my podcasting partner in crime @hyded joined host John Roderick on John's excellent @omnibusproject pod (which John created with Jeopardy host @KenJennings) to tell the improbable story of the Astor Place Riot in NYC in 1849. It's an amazing tale of class and cultural conflict as hard-bitten Gangs of New York Bowery Boys engaged in violent rioting (at least 22 people died) over... Shakespearean theater and acting styles. Really! It's a very strange-but-true, undeservedly obscure slice of American history, entertainingly told. omnibusproject.com/episodes/…

There's been lots of people pointing to the polls to allay concerns about Platner. But polls have underestimated Republicans by an average of 4 points in Maine since 2014.

Allegedly throws a rock??!! We watched it on video do better Komo!

Some academics who denounced the idea of objectivity and declared themselves activists are for some reason shocked that policymakers and the public now view them not as trusted, objective scientists but as...activists.

Five years ago blue cities, particularly on the West Coast, were embracing a progressive-libertarian approach to addiction, decriminalizing hard drug use and leaning into the supposed personal “autonomy” of the addicted. Which flopped, badly, Now some blue city mayors are innovating on drug policy in a very different direction, advocating more proactive interventions to push the addicted towards recovery. So we had Stanford’s @KeithNHumphreys, onto Blue City Blues to talk about the shifting tides on drug policy in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and San Jose (link in the next tweet). These efforts are nascent and experimental, Keith tells @hyded and I, but also promising and perhaps the leading edge of a broader reset in blue urban America.

"If blue state governors and mayors want to get serious about delivering excellent public services... They will have to push back against a core constituency within the Democratic Party that often makes government deliver less and cost more: unions representing teachers, police officers and transit workers.” That's not an argument you typically hear from left-of-center commentators, even reform-minded, abundance-pilled ones, but that's the provocative argument that @nicholas_bagley and @robertmgordon made in a recent, much discussed NYT op ed titled, "Mamdani Will Need to Change How he Governs." Both Bagley and Gordon are prominent Dems: Nicholas, now at the Univ of Michigan Law School, recently served as Chief Legal Counsel for Gov Gretchen Whitmer, while Gordon, now a Harvard fellow, served as a Deputy Assistant to the President on Biden's Domestic Policy Council. So @hyded and I invited them on Blue City Blues (link in next tweet) to dig into why they believe Democratic politicians need to reset their relationship with public sector organized labor if they hope to reverse the loss of public confidence in blue governance that fed into Trump's ascendency. "If we want blue cities to achieve their promise, and if we want to have a viable and effective alternative to what the Trump administration is giving us, this is a conversation we need to have,” Bagley told us over the course of our conversation about what really is a semi-verboten subject on the left.

The latest BCB episode: “A Dem Socialist Insurgency in Los Angeles?” podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Mayor Katie Wilson on @RealSeattleNice this week responds to the criticism and impatience from the left on sweeps and CCTV camera policy