Policy arguments with civic consequences.
City Journal Audio is a serious interview and roundtable feed built around public policy, urban life, economics, law, and political ideas. Its conversations move patiently from contested premises to practical consequences, often through the work of City Journal and Manhattan Institute writers.
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City Journal Audio presents public policy as an argument about human behavior, institutions, and trade-offs. It is not a quick-hit news recap. The show works through long-form interviews, colleague roundtables, and magazine-adjacent conversations that let a subject breathe before narrowing the point. Recent episodes move across mental health, affordability, constitutional history, urban economics, homelessness, policing, education, taxation, and New York City politics. The through-line is consequence. A conversation about therapy becomes a discussion of political bias, emotional regulation, trust, and clinical judgment. A roundtable on affordability turns toward student debt, sales taxes, regulation, and the costs that policy quietly builds into ordinary life. A discussion of economics keeps returning to risk, incentives, welfare states, growth, and the limits of promises that someone else can pay. The show also has a constitutional register. In its conversation with Professor Robert George, liberty and equality are treated as terms that require moral definition, not campaign decoration. City policy gets the same treatment. Episodes on homelessness and serious mental illness ask what public order requires when crisis, compassion, and force meet in the same moment. New York governance appears not as theater but as a test of budgets, property taxes, infrastructure, and mayoral choices. The hosting style is scaffolded and patient. Questions often arrive with examples, caveats, and a stated suspicion about the framing of the issue. Guests are allowed to answer at length. The show can be dry, grave, and occasionally wry, but it rarely becomes casual for its own sake. It assumes the listener can follow law, economics, political theory, and social policy without being spoon-fed. That seriousness is the point. City Journal Audio is for people who want arguments that connect ideals to mechanisms, and mechanisms to the lives they shape.
Made for: For listeners who follow urban policy, constitutional ideas, economics, public safety, and the institutional machinery behind political slogans. It suits people who prefer patient argument to headline chasing.
What sets it apart: Its strength is the movement from abstract principles to concrete mechanisms: taxes, regulations, police calls, clinical norms, welfare-state trade-offs, and city budgets. The show sounds like a magazine conversation that expects ideas to matter in practice.
City Journal is America's premier source of insightful policy analysis, sophisticated cultural commentary, and bold investigations that legacy journalists are too timid to touch. From incisive interviews to lively panel discussions, our podcasts extend CJ's trademark rigor and wit beyond the written page to the dynamic world of streaming audio. Listen today.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
City Journal Audio makes conservative policy reasoning legible by tracing current disputes back to economic, constitutional, and moral premises.
City Journal Audio turns policy disputes into sustained conversations about the principles beneath them. Raphael Mangual interviews colleagues and guests on urban disorder, economic trade-offs, constitutional ideals, and political conflict within mental-health care.
A police call collides with a police-free policy idea; Raphael Mangual makes your easy answer harder.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful case for keeping therapy grounded in clinical judgment rather than reflex.
City Journal Audio centers a conversation with Andrew Hartz about how politics can shape mental health training, research, and practice. The episode keeps returning to the same practical point: political issues can leave clients dysregulated, and they can be harder for…
Madison, liberty, and equal dignity in a deliberate constitutional conversation.
Raphael Mangual and Professor Robert George take up a careful question: what the Founders meant by liberty and equality. The conversation begins with James Madison and Federalist 10, then turns to George's distinction between liberty and license, with equality treated as equal…
A clear, compact case for taking risk, growth, and policy trade-offs seriously.
City Journal Podcast spends this conversation on risk, growth, incentives, regulation, and the welfare state. Rafael Mengual keeps the setup clear, and Alison Schrager moves steadily from finance to macroeconomics and then to the policy questions around security and growth.
A policy-minded conversation about homelessness, public order, and the systems that fail first.
The episode tracks Stephen Eide's path from political philosophy into public policy, with Raphael Mangual guiding a discussion centered on homelessness, mental illness, and public safety.
A thoughtful live discussion of migration, luck, fairness, and the uneasy demands of generosity.
The 10 Blocks Podcast's live Manhattan Institute conversation frames migration less as a tidy argument over right and wrong than as a collision of competing virtues.
Liberty argued from first principles.
Firearms talk from range to rights.
Italian politics, caught in the act.
Raphael Mangual speaks with Andrew Hartz, the founder of the Open Therapy Institute and a clinical psychologist, about why he started the organization.
This episode discusses how regulations contribute to rising costs in higher education and food delivery, featuring policy analysts from the Manhattan Institute.
This episode analyzes New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani's first three months in office, focusing on his proposed property tax increase to address budget challenges inherited from his predecessor.
This episode features a panel discussion on affordability issues in American politics, focusing on tax policies like sales tax and government spending as part of City Journal's affordability agenda.
Raphael Mangual opens with Professor Robert George on James Madison, human nature, and the moral grounding of the American founding.
Host Rafael Mangual interviews City Journal editor Brian Anderson about the magazine's origins as a unique mainstream publication from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
Rafael Mengual and Alison Schrager open by framing how economic views get labeled in public debate.
Raphael Mangual opens by asking Stephen Eide how he ended up in policy work.
Douglas Murray speaks with Lionel Shriver about her novel A Better Life.
Douglas Murray tells City Journal's Rafael Mengual that critics of the West are not fair-minded improvers but people who "want to take the whole vehicle apart," and he points to the coalition around New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as an example of opposition without coherence.
This episode analyzes a recent violent incident in New York City, examining its notable aspects including weapon accessibility, systemic failures, and troubling public reactions reminiscent of historical left-wing revolutionary groups.
This episode analyzes the surprising friendly interaction between newly elected New York City mayor Zoran Mamdani and former President Donald Trump after their White House meeting, exploring its political implications.
A panel from the Manhattan Institute discusses President Trump's recent executive orders, focusing on flag-burning penalties and their First Amendment implications, alongside topics like crime, education, and immigration.
The panel discusses a New York Times analysis showing Democrats losing voter registration ground to Republicans in all 30 tracked states between 2020 and 2024, exploring what this means for the changing electorate.