Sherman Alexie: An Ode to the White Urban Working Class

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 early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness.  So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native American author and writer Sherman Alexie, to rejoin us on the pod to for a walk down memory lane as we remembered the lost world of the white urban working class. We were inspired to take up the topic by Sherman’s poem, “Ode to Tonya Harding, [https://shermanalexie.substack.com/p/ode-to-tonya-harding-38a]” in which he uses Harding as a symbol of the young white working class women he grew up around and interacted with in his youth, vibrant and talented women he laments were destined to be excluded from elite cultural spaces because of class divides, style differences and cultural codes.  We key off the poem to spark a wide-ranging conversation about class, race and the sharp cultural shifts within urban America since the days of our youth. Sherman reflects on growing up among poor white communities in rural Eastern Washington as a Native American, describing both solidarity and pervasive dysfunction across racial lines. He argues that poverty creates shared experiences across race, while criticizing modern Democratic Party politics for moving away from class-based concerns and decentering working-class interests. We wax more than a bit nostalgic for 1970s–1990s working-class culture: restaurant and delivery jobs, service work, heavy-metal parking lots [https://vimeo.com/152843738], bowling leagues, mall ice rinks, and the informal cross-racial friendships formed through shared labor, music, and youth culture. We don’t shy away from the racism that was prevalent in that era, but we nonetheless lament how deepening political divides, the rise of social media, and an increasingly insular elite culture have weakened those shared spaces and killed the social spontaneity and the capacity for joy that characterized youth culture when we were young.  “When I was delivering pizzas, it was a bunch of poor white kids. I was the only person of color, I was the only person with more melanin than average, and race wasn’t a part of it,” Alexie recalls. “Inside the place we were all working, we all smelled like pepperoni, we all hated the boss, we all had a crush on that one young woman who had no interest in any of us…” OUTSIDE SOURCES: Sherman Alexie, "Ode to Tonya Harding [https://shermanalexie.substack.com/p/ode-to-tonya-harding-38a]," April 10. 2026. Sherman Alexie, "Knuckle Sandwich [https://shermanalexie.substack.com/p/knuckle-sandwich]," May 19, 2026. Sherman Alexie, "Billy Elliot [https://shermanalexie.substack.com/p/billy-elliot?utm_source=publication-search]," Jan. 24. 2024. And if you haven't seen it, we highly recommend you watch the short (17 mins) documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot [https://vimeo.com/152843738]," a cult classic.    Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com

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 most distinctive and culturally vibrant urban renaissance stories in the 2000s (the New York Times memorably declared [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/travel/15hours.html] Portland “cool and refreshingly unneurotic” in 2007).  But then, in the 2010s, the self-described “weird” and fun city, experiencing a rapid influx of young and educated newcomers drawn by post-Portlandia “where young people go to retire” hype, experienced what writer and journalist (and former Portland resident) Nancy Rommelmann has dubbed “Portlandization [https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/good-luck-portland].” As the decade wore on, she wrote, Portland became increasingly enamored with ostentatious displays of performative virtue signaling and the militant policing of increasingly narrow and rigid progressive orthodoxies. Then that all exploded into the seemingly endless – and endlessly destructive – protests that roiled the city in 2020, which combined with a failed experiment in the decriminalization of hard drugs to bring the city to its knees, and from which Portland still has yet to fully recover. So we asked Nancy Rommelmann, who has written extensively about Portland’s travails for Reason and Tablet and on her Make More Pie [https://substack.com/@nancyrommelmann] Substack page (she also co-hosts the popular Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em [https://smokeempodcast.substack.com/] podcast), to join us on BCB to unpack what went so wrong with Portland’s fairy tale rise and why, and where the city stands today (Rommelmann left Portland in 2019 but visits frequently and continues to write about  the city).  In our conversation, we trace Portland’s evolution first into a creative, affordable, rising city and then into a symbol of blue-city political and governance struggles. We discuss Portland’s food and cultural boom in the 2000s, the growth of ideological conflict and “outrage culture,” debates around #MeToo and due process, the 2020 protests and attendant unrest, the impact of Oregon’s drug decriminalization experiment, and broader tensions within progressive urban politics.  While Nancy is largely critical of Portland’s recent trajectory, she also acknowledges the legitimate social grievances that have animated the city, and she sharply critiques right-wing and Trump administration efforts to distort and politically capitalize on Portland’s much more benign recent ICE protests, and she ends our conversation with cautious hope that Portland will fully recover. “I get accused of being like a real naysayer about Portland, and I do have bad things to say about Portland, but I do wish good things for the city, because it's a beautiful city,” Nancy tells us. “The food is can be great, you can grow anything, and why would I not want it to fly again?” Our editor is Quinn Waller.   OUTSIDE SOURCES: Nancy Rommelmann, "Portlandization: It Can Happen to a Place Near You [https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/good-luck-portland]," Tablet Magazine, July 11, 2019. Nancy Rommelmann, "The Dream of the '90s Died in Portland [https://reason.com/2021/03/22/the-dream-of-the-90s-died-in-portland/]," Reason, March 22, 2021. Nancy Rommelmann, "Drugs 1 - Oregon 0 [https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/drugs-1-oregon-0?utm_source=publication-search]," Make More Pie, Feb. 29. 2024. Nancy Rommelmann, "Trump's Troops Return to a City That Moved On: Dispatch from Portland [https://reason.com/2025/10/06/trumps-troops-return-to-a-city-that-moved-on-dispatch-from-portland/]," Reason, Oct. 6. 2025. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2418871/support]

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 next? Adam Penenberg has spent his career inside the journalism industry and inside the classroom training the young journalists who'll inherit it. He's a professor at New York University’s journalism school, the author of Blood Highways [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15785350-blood-highways] (2003) and Viral Loop [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6912295-viral-loop] (2009), among other books. Adam has also been a contributor to Fast Company, Forbes, Wired, The Economist, and more. In the late '90s, Adam famously broke the Stephen Glass scandal, the journalistic fabrication story later made into the film Shattered Glass [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_Glass_(film)]. In this latest BCB epsiode, Adam joins us to talk about what he's seeing: the new generation of aspiring journalists navigating a world of news influencers, fractured media ecosystems, and the death of "objectivity.” We discuss how media consumption has shifted dramatically from traditional outlets to digital platforms, fragmenting audiences and feeding a sharp decline in public trust of the media. Journalism education, he says, is adapting to the new world order: students are entering journalism school from non-traditional backgrounds – some are already social media influencers while others aspire to be – and are seeking skills to succeed on diverse platforms, not just what it takes to break into and rise within traditional media outlets.  Our conversation dives into the hard structural trade-offs facing anyone still trying to report honestly and fairly in 2026, and what ethical, fact-based journalism looks like now. The future of media is uncertain, Adam says, but adaptability, ethical journalism and critical thinking remain essential.  And that is in increasingly short supply. There has been a breakdown in our educational systems more fundamentally, Penenberg argues, one that is spilling over to impact the aspiring new entrants into the profession. “We’ve been getting to the point where most of the people coming out of major schools… can’t write an essay. They can’t write an essay that is structured like an essay, where you have a thesis statement and then you back it up with facts," Penenberg tells us. "If you’re talking about a crisis in journalism it’s a crisis in the public as well as it is journalism, the business." Our editor is Quinn Waller. Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2418871/support]

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 rock frontman of The Long Winters and one time Seattle City Council candidate John Roderick, now the host of the popular (and omnivorous!) Omnibus [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/omnibus/id1318335827] podcast that he founded with Jeopardy host Ken Jennings.  In the episode, we nostalgia trip with John about the fading of the hipster scenes of our youth, starting with our cohort’s misconceived impulse to 'facilitate' an art scene, as if urban cool can be jumpstarted with a couple of free parking spots outside local music venues. Roderick calls bullshit: the scenes from the '80s and '90s that we wax nostalgic about weren't created. They gestated organically because kids were bored and had something to rebel against, space was dirt cheap, and the grittiness of the urban environment was real. That more authentic youth culture, born in abandoned light manufacturing spaces in declining cities, has evaporated in this era of blue city affluence and progressive permissiveness, Roderick argues, adding that cosmopolitan adults’ indulgent embrace of 'pure justice' and 'absolute equality' has stripped teen life of its necessary friction. What's left, he contends, is a culture marked by 'disconnect and malaise and bitching.'  As our paean to the past continues, we get into how Gen X, perpetually the punching bag, never stood up for itself, allowing Millennials to define new cultural rules that were simultaneously affirming and uptight. But true urban cool may be poised for a comeback: Roderick has hope that Gen Z, rebelling against the cultural conformism that took root in the 2010s, are starting to tell older generations to "shut up and leave us alone." That desire for distance and defiance is what cool cities are built from, from the bottom up, even if, all three of us conclude, we are entirely unqualified to opine on what the hell the kids are planning to do next.  Our editor is Quinn Waller.  Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2418871/support]

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 [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/391850.The_Triumph_of_the_Therapeutic], and author Susan Sontag, one of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th century, is a formidable intellectual and critic in his own right. He is also a self-described cultural pessimist, who argues in his 2024 collection of essays, Desire and Fate [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/desire-and-fate/9781912475384/], that the rise of woke ideas in blue cosmopolitan America heralds the decline of Western culture.  In our wide ranging conversation – subscribe to Blue City Blues on Patreon to listen to the full episode – we discuss with Rieff why he fits neither on the political left or the political right, and why he has such antipathy to wokeness. Rieff tells us that woke is the cultural handmaiden to late stage capitalism, providing a moral fig leaf that acts as a legitimization mechanism for neoliberal institutions, as he further argues that it medicalizes grievance and prioritizes emotional safety and identity over political economy and universalist humanist claims.  As we delve farther into David’s critique of wokeness, and what he describes as its censorious safetyism, he suggests that his father’s great insight about the rise of culture of the therapeutic has been superseded by what he calls a rising culture of the traumatic. And he says he sees wokeness ultimately as a form of kitsch, one that presents a grave risk to the Western tradition of culture and art.    Our editor is Quinn Waller. OUTSIDE SOURCES:  David Rieff, Desire and Fate [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/desire-and-fate/9781912475384/], Columbia University Press (2024). A recent profile of David Rieff referenced in the episode: David Klion, "Woke Obsessions [https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/woke-obsessions/]," The Ideas Journal, Jan. 22, 2026 Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2418871/support]