City Journal Editor Brian Anderson and Rafael Mangual explore the magazine’s history, its influence on urban policy, and the challenges associated with technological change. They discuss City Journal’s distinctive approach to policy journalism and the importance of style and accessibility in conservative media.

Audio Transcript

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Rafael Mangual: Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal Podcast. I am your host, Rafael Mangual, and I am so excited to have with us the editor of City Journal my boss, Brian Anderson. Welcome.

Brian Anderson: Ralph, great to be here. Really happy to be on the podcast.

Rafael Mangual: I’m so excited to have you in part because for a change, I get to be in this chair interviewing you, whereas you have interviewed me on the 10 Blocks Podcast more times than I can count for sure. So I’m really excited for our conversation, which is going to be about my favorite magazine, City Journal, which I first encountered in the year 2006 as a young college student. It was an essay by Theodore Dalrymple, who we had on the show, and it was entitled “The Knife Went In.” It was published in 1996 and it was being run on the website as a 10th anniversary sort of thing, if I remember correctly. And I was just floored by how good it was, and I subscribed to the print edition straight away. So for those of you who have been watching the show, you’ll know this, but for any of you who don’t, City Journal is published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Rafael Mangual: Now, I think a lot of people would expect a policy think tank like the Manhattan Institute to, if they’re going to have a publication associated with it, for it to be like a scholarly journal or a law review, that sort of thing. And yet the Manhattan Institute in the early 90s decided that it was going to publish a magazine that was going to run sort of popular prose. Talk to us a little bit about just the thinking behind that. I mean, why have a sort of mainstream kind of media outlet attached to a public policy think tank?

Brian Anderson: Yeah, it’s pretty much unique in the conservative world. It certainly was at that time. The magazine’s first issue appeared in 1990. So this was at the height of New York City’s crisis and really the crisis of urban America. So you had all of these problems, you had endemic crime, you had just unbelievable disorder, homelessness in cities, you had failing schools. You take surveys of people at the time and they would say they’d want to get out of the city. They’d want to move to the suburbs. The pervasive view at that time among the elite press was, there’s nothing you could really do about this unless you solved the deeper crisis of America, the injustice of American institutions. The Manhattan Institute at that time said, “No, that’s wrong, that this was really the result of bad policies and bad ideas and bad leadership.” And so if you could change the policy environment, you could make progress on some of these areas, education, crime, disorder.

And so Irving Kristol and a few other people said at that time, the press is extremely left leaning, then as it is today. And yet you can’t just sit around complaining about it. Why not start something that was a kind of journalistic response to that environment and put a human face to public policies? The idea was that if you make these abstract ideas, these arguments concrete in people’s lives, then you could start persuading people. And so City Journal was launched in 1990. The first editor was Richard Vigilante and went through several editors in its early days, Roger Starr, Fred Siegel, the Great Fred Siegel, did a couple of issues. Peter Salins did an issue, but it was in 1994 that my predecessor, Myron Magnet, took over the magazine and really sort of molded it into the shape that it still has in terms of its print edition. He really became the editor for it for a long time, 50 issues, I believe. But it was that central idea that if you can make abstract ideas and arguments concrete in people’s lives in a kind of rigorous and exciting journalistic way, you would build an audience for those ideas. And that turned out to be true.

Rafael Mangual: It really did. It really did. And I want to talk about that era in which Myron Magnet came in and took the magazine over because that was really, I think, kind of the very beginning of City Journal’s incredible run in terms of shaping public policy through that institution. Well, I want to talk a little bit about the Giuliani administration post 1993 and its adoption of a lot of the ideas that had been published and expounded on in City Journal. But the magazine really does seem to garner exactly that kind of audience. I mean, I am constantly surprised by how many people I meet just out there in the wild who know City Journal and who read it and who find it compelling. I’ll often get DMs on social media or random emails from people in Alaska or Hawaii who said, “Hey, I’ve read this article.” And I’m always curious, what is it about what you read that you found compelling? And the answer that I always get is that it’s both accessible but dense. I feel like I’m actually learning something when I read City Journal. And that seems like a sort of hard mix to balance.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. The original idea was to target an audience of policymakers and journalists and academics with the magazine. So through them, especially the journalist and politician side, to reach a broader public with those ideas. So that certainly happened with the Giuliani administration, which really devoured the magazine and committed itself to some of the key arguments, especially on policing and homelessness and on welfare reform, which was another big issue at the time. But we didn’t have... I arrived at the magazine in ‘97, even then we really didn’t have much of an internet presence. It was the emergence of the internet that allowed us to reach a broad direct audience that wasn’t as easy to do back when you were just a kind of targeted quarterly, but we developed a relationship very early on with the New York Post, which began to reprint our articles or versions of our articles.

Rafael Mangual: Still does.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. It’s been a relationship that has lasted decades now. Same with the Wall Street Journal. So nobody was really writing about the urban crisis from a conservative perspective at that time. And so this answered a need by those who did believe that cities could again be kind of dynamos of innovation, of cultural flourishing, places where people wanted to live rather than flee. So we developed an audience over time for that, both among elites in terms of journalists and politicians, but also over time, a broader direct audience.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Well, developing an audience is not an easy thing to do. It takes talent, it takes someone who can make compelling arguments, again, in an accessible way, which has always been kind of interesting to me because being in the policy world, as long as I’ve been in it now, you have people who are incredibly smart analysts who just really struggle with communicating their ideas in a way that just is hard to get through, unduly dense, just riddled with jargon. And it’s just hard to really read a lot of some of the smartest people. And yet City Journal has consistently found brilliant thinkers who also have this talent for making their ideas accessible. I think one question that a lot of people have in their head is like, are these people actually good writers or is this a testament to the editorial team?

Brian Anderson: Well, I think that relationship develops over time with writers. Some of them come to us who don’t always have an easy way with communicating with a broader, educated public. And I think through working with us, they get better at that.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I know I did.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. Well, I think it’s true of a lot of people. It was true of me when I came to City Journal. I wrote for the magazine a lot when I arrived there and got to be a better writer, in part because Myron Magnet was coming from Fortune Magazine and the kind of Time Life, Henry Luce tradition of editing where your job was to not speak in jargon, to be as concrete as possible to... Two of the reigning figures in our intellectual pantheon were George Orwell and V.S. Naipaul. That’s how we thought about, and Myron would drill us into me, how we thought about editing pieces so that they could communicate with people. Concrete language, get rid of the jargon, make sure your essays and shorter pieces have very clear topic sentences. And Myron would say, “Well, imagine you’re a very busy corporate leader.” He would say you’d want someone like that to be able to pick up an essay and just skim the topic sentences and maybe the call outs of a piece and get a sense of what the argument was. And so we really worked at that. And I certainly over the years working with Myron absorbed some of those lessons and have at least tried to perpetuate them at City Journal.

But we also had great writers. So you mentioned Theodore Dalrymple, that’s his pen name. His name is Tony Daniels. He’s really one of the great English language writers.

Rafael Mangual: He really is. Yeah.

Brian Anderson: He’s been with the magazine over 30 years.

Rafael Mangual: We actually had him on the show a couple of episodes ago with Rob Henderson. It was fantastic. I’ve been, again, a huge fan of his work since that day where I first read City Journal.

Brian Anderson: And that essay, “The Knife Went In,” is all about language. It’s about how people use passive formulations to hide human agency.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right.

Brian Anderson: So that’s something else we always emphasized. And George Orwell talked about this, don’t use passive formulations because it does hide who’s acting, who is the responsible party in this sentence.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right. No, I mean, it’s an incredibly important insight, one that often goes overlooked, but it can really change how you receive an idea. So I want you to take us through some of the early days. I know you arrived in ‘97, but you’re also incredibly schooled in the history of the magazine. It launched in 1990. And if I remember correctly, Clarence Thomas, now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had a piece in the inaugural issue and…

Brian Anderson: No, it was a later issue.

Rafael Mangual: Was it a later issue?

Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think it might have been Myron’s first issue. Yes, it was a Clarence Thomas essay on the Constitution and on how to think about judicial rulemaking, if I recall.

Rafael Mangual: So just take us through some of the early days of the magazine. I mean, how did you attract great writers to the magazine? How did you get it off the ground? And was there a delta between the idea behind the magazine at first and what it turned into?

Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think like all publications that last over time, it evolved. Its original name was the New York City Journal. It went by that for a few issues. People were willing to write from it from the very beginning, in part because we paid, because New York, and the magazine was more New York focused at that time. New York is home to a lot of intellectuals and writers and thinkers, and they didn’t necessarily have, they really didn’t have that many options to write for about the city and the plight of the city from a center-right perspective. So you had a lot of people who were very committed to saving New York at that time, and they were willing to contribute to the magazine. Fred Siegel being one, he was an early editor for an issue, but he’s the great now late historian of the city, but Roger Starr was also a very prominent figure in New York intellectual life at that time, an urbanist, kind of a center-left guy, but really understood what was happening in terms of the crisis of the city.

Brian Anderson: So he could go through his Rolodex, as people had at the time, and connect with people. And then we did pay. We always paid from the very beginning, and it’s always been an incentive for writers.

Rafael Mangual: It was for me early on, especially before I was making any real money. It was great.

Brian Anderson: And we pay pretty well today compared to a lot of publications. But from the beginning, you get a couple of very well-known writers, it becomes a prestigious publication, and people then want to associate themselves with it. And I think that has continued to be true for City Journal.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Talk to us about the sensibility of the magazine. I mean, I do think when people think of cities, they think the left, right? I mean, there’s a sense in American conservatism today, I think, that has kind of abandoned cities. And yet City Journal from the beginning and to this day remains committed to the idea that urban life has something to offer, has a unique richness about it that ought to be preserved. And so that means conservative voices need to be in the mix with respect to the debates about how urban life should function.

Brian Anderson: Absolutely. Well, our view was that cities are, when functioning, when well-run, crucibles of innovation, economic growth, platforms for opportunities so people can rise in life, that they’ve been the center of cultural creativity, not just in American history, but throughout history. And they’ve driven a lot of economic growth and increasingly so in the 20th century until they ran into some very bad ideas that started germinating in the ‘60s and then became very pervasive in cities. And we’ve seen significant disruption of urban life in places like New York in the early ‘90s, late ‘80s. Detroit declined. It really almost died in the post-war period, but the city should be places where people feel they can build the future and build lives of success and growth. And that proved to be true in New York’s case, once the Giuliani administration endorsed some of these ideas and implemented them, particularly on broken windows policing and brought the crime rate down dramatically, all of a sudden New York started seeming like a cool place to be again and people wanted to move here and businesses started growing and it was this wonderful period. It really extended past 9/11, which people thought was going to kill New York City, and it did not.

I remember we published an article by Nicole Gelinas. I can’t remember what year it was, but it was well after 9/11. It was after the financial crisis, I believe, and the city had recovered from that. And she was just saying it was an essay on the Bronx. The Bronx had never had more jobs than during this period. So you did see this, and it kicked in again in Los Angeles and other cities. Cities for a while started being places where young people wanted to live and build families and where businesses wanted to be. Unfortunately, as you know well, things have gone a bit in the reverse direction again over the last decade or so.

Rafael Mangual: And I’m sure City Journal will continue to be a part of that, of that battle.

Brian Anderson: It’s amazing. It’s kind how like certain things have come almost full circle.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. So I want to ask you, you’ve already mentioned a couple pieces. I mentioned Theodore’s piece. You just mentioned Nicole’s post-great recession piece. What are some of the ones that have stuck out to you over the years as just making a bigger splash either than expected or just kind of really driving change or the narrative?

Brian Anderson: It’s more of a cumulative thing, I would say, rather than specific big pieces. It’s themes that the magazine and writers have developed. And really my history at the magazine has seen the nation and New York City go through a series of major crises. So you had 9/11, after that you had the financial crisis, then you had not necessarily a crisis, but a very big political upheaval with the emergence of Donald Trump as a viable political figure and president eventually. And then you had, of course, the awful pandemic. And each of those posed challenges for the magazine in terms of coverage and to get our ideas out and to kind of try to shape the debate about the policy dimensions of these crises.

So for a certain period, we were writing a lot about terrorism after 9/11. So Victor Davis Hansen became a major figure for the magazine and would write about war and about how to think about Islamic terrorism. After the financial crisis, Luigi Zingales was writing for us for a while. Nicole Gelinas, who I’d mentioned, wrote a number of very important pieces on how to think about debt and the housing market and recovering kind of market discipline in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And then during the pandemic, we had John Tierney and Nicholas Wade and other very powerful writers on this kind of intersection of science and journalism writing about the policy response and the problems with it to the pandemic. And I think some of those pieces stand up very, very well. But I guess for me, it’s like Heather Mac Donald’s, some her big essays were very important. She did an amazing essay on San Francisco’s homelessness crisis.

Rafael Mangual: I remember that. She bought fentanyl.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. But it was a kind of thing that very few other magazines, at least right-of-center magazines would be doing. That kind of reported on the ground observation. You wrote some great essays on the return to bad ideas on crime. But my favorite pieces, they change from cycle to cycle, I have to say. So I don’t want to single out too many people specifically.

Rafael Mangual: Well, when you think ... I mean, one question I get probably more than anything else about the magazine is how people can write for it. I mean, I get people submitting pieces to me, so I can’t imagine the degree to which you’re inundated with submissions. How do you think about what writers to work with, what topics to cover? I mean, is it topic driven or is it sort of talent driven?

Brian Anderson: There’s certain thematic areas that we just consistently cover. So crime and law enforcement broadly and punishment, how to think about that whole constellation of issues. There’s education and education reform, which has been a consistent theme since the early days. So we’ve been proponents of educational pluralism. So both certainly school choice, but we’ve also written a lot about curriculum and how to have really good ways of teaching math and teaching kids how to read and how to just improve city schools in particular, which as you know, have been really bad. Homelessness has been another big issue in public disorder. Housing has become an increasingly important theme, but all of those kind of urban policy areas we have consistently written about since the very beginning of the magazine, certainly since I’ve been editor, that’s always front of mind. So we think about which writers are doing interesting work in this space. If they’re not already regularly contributing to the magazine, we’ll often reach out to them and see if they’re interested in that. But then other themes come in. So after 9/11, yeah, we started writing more about terrorism and about the compatibility of Islamic radicalism with free societies, like what to do about that problem. So we have James Q. Wilson writing for us and Christopher Hitchens and some very prominent people.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I mean, those are incredibly prominent names. I mean, just naming a few others, again, Clarence Thomas, Jason Riley, Heather Mac Donald, Douglas Murray, Roger Scruton. Yeah.

Brian Anderson: Scruton was a contributing editor and wrote many, many pieces. I have to say, one of the great joys of being involved with City Journal is just getting to work with these amazing people, to say that you’ve edited a James Q. Wilson piece or worked with Christopher Hitchens, who was very easy to work with. He really just, he wanted to get paid and he didn’t want to do second drafts. So he said, “You have power of attorney” once he submitted his drafts.

Rafael Mangual: Wonderful. What every editor wants to hear.

Brian Anderson: They were very well written, but they did require some work, but the one thing he didn’t want to do was work on a second draft. So the writers are often very, very different in their sensibilities. And part of the job of running a magazine like this is just getting a sense of how to work with different people. Fred Siegel’s another person that just wrote constantly for us after I became editor. In particular, he really wrote a lot about the emerging populism, but yeah, Theodore Dalymple, so that’s fantastic, a really wonderful part of the job. But yeah, part of what I do is try to find new writers. And that’s what our whole team does, Paul Beston and Charles Lehman. And yeah, we get a lot of submissions, so you’re not alone in getting people. Yeah. And the internet has made that easier. We now just, not only do we publish the long form journalism and the physical magazine, but we’re doing three, four pieces a day. So it’s almost like running an editorial page for a newspaper. People see that stuff.

Rafael Mangual: Talk to me about that, because as you mentioned, when you came on, City Journal didn’t really have big internet presence. And for the early years, it was just a quarterly print magazine. What was that transition like? How important was it to the growth? Would you consider that kind of a turning point that sort of…

Brian Anderson: Yeah, no question. It was really after ... After 9/11, we started building the website. It was something I involved myself with a lot and initially it was like a couple of extra pieces a week. Then it became maybe a piece a day. And over the years, that started building up our audience. We, early on after 9/11, Real Clear Politics started linking to our content in part because I had reached out to those people and they were kind of just getting off the ground around then and they loved our content and their audience was growing and growing. And so we were able to enjoy some of that. And this was the era that the blogosphere was emerging. And so we would pitch our pieces out or send the links to leading bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and other people, and they would sometimes link and comment. And so we went from being this targeted publication, which could reach a broader audience through adaptations in places like the New York Post, which had huge readerships or the Wall Street Journal, but developing this direct relationship to the audience. And we eventually reached the point where we had millions of online readers and for particular pieces, and you see this with somebody like Chris Rufo’s been writing for us now for five or six years, and his audience has just grown and grown and grown, and that’s almost entirely web driven. He’s brilliant at connecting and has a genius on social media. So he’s been able to utilize that to really drive some pieces that have a bigger impact than stuff you’re reading in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Rafael Mangual: I think oftentimes he’s influencing what’s in the New York Times and all that.

Brian Anderson: That’s right, Ralph. And that’s probably the biggest shift in terms of what we’re able to do. It’s made possible by the technological shifts in media, but that when a small quarterly can suddenly compete with huge multimillion dollar legacy media institutions for particular pieces reaching as big an audience, that in a way goes back to the original hope of the people who launched City Journal that you could find a way to counter the dominant liberal presence in the elite media.

Rafael Mangual: So is that still how you see sort of yourself or the institution as a competitor to some of these left-of-center voices?

Brian Anderson: I mean, it’s a much wider media landscape now. Sure. I think it’s mutating as we sit here. So we’re trying to figure that out and trying to ... But the goal is still to get our ideas out there and to drive change, positive change.

Rafael Mangual: Well, as much as we have developed with the technology, we’re still kind of old school in a lot of ways in that we still publish the print issue four times a year at least, if not more with the special issue here and there. Talk to us just a little bit about how different those two products are. I mean, I know having written for both that there’s definitely a different style, there’s a different level of depth between the print issue and the web. How do you think about that?

Brian Anderson: Yeah. For us, the print is kind of the ... The essays go through more editing. They’re meant to be pieces that can last and maybe have a sense of where things are going so they’re not always responding to whatever’s in the headlines at a particular moment in time. We do still make writers go through a couple of drafts sometimes. We carefully think about illustration for those pieces. We go through a lot of editing. It’s a very involved process. It’s kind of a luxury product in a way, so that’s certainly how it has been viewed by people who are interested in the Manhattan Institute. It’s often the way that people get introduced to the Manhattan Institute. And I’m thrilled that I’ve been able to work with Larry Mone and now Reihan Salam as presidents of the Institute who recognize the importance of that luxury product.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. I think it’s also viewed as a luxury product by the writers. I mean, the first time that I had a piece in the print issue was a big day for me.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. It’s interesting. People still prefer, or they still value appearing in the physical magazine. I was thinking that might be an age-related thing.

Rafael Mangual: Maybe. I am getting old, that’s for sure.

Brian Anderson: I still see this with even our youngest writers. They do like to see their name in print. It’s something they can send to their parents or friends. Yeah, that’s still the case. But the web is designed to be more immediate. The pieces tend to be shorter, punchier. Well, not necessarily punchier, but shorter and often focused on something in the headlines. But those categories also blur. So many of the same writers who are doing the long form stuff also are doing the editorial length pieces on the website. And it all kind of gets out there on the web by the end. Anyway, we do release all of the long form stuff online by the end of the cycle, our quarterly cycle. But I guess over the years we’ve used the web as a way to find new writers too, to try them out on something shorter and see if there’s a compatibility there of vision and also of a writer being willing to accept editing. Some writers are not comfortable with that. And I would say that City Journal’s more aggressively edited than a lot of publications these days. So it’s comparable to maybe something you would experience if you were writing for the New York Times magazine or The Atlantic. It’s always been an advantage for us in my view.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And I certainly saw it as an advantage as a young writer when I first started contributing to the magazine because I did not really know how to write. I think I was coming out of law school. It’s a very different style. And my early drafts were full of red ink, which at least to me was a bit of schooling. It was a nice... I could learn what you…

Brian Anderson: I’m not recalling needing a lot of Red Ink with your early essays, but maybe you would remember better than I would. And you certainly are comfortable writing for us now.

Rafael Mangual: Oh yeah. No, I love it. I love it. I want to talk a little bit just about you and your approach to editing the magazine. I mean, when you’re putting together a print issue, the substance is important, but there’s a kind of curation behind it all. I mean, how do you think about where the magazine is positioned stylistically? And I use that word on purpose because you are, as I’ve said many times to you before, among the most stylish people at the Manhattan Institute.

Brian Anderson: Thank you, Ralph.

Rafael Mangual: I actually thought about breaking out a suit for today’s show.

Brian Anderson: I’m probably overdressed today. I do think it’s a package and that it’s important for, especially conservative publications, to embody a certain style, a certain sense of urbanity. It’s an old-fashioned word, but it’s always been one I’ve tried to associate with the magazine and try to instill in the magazine. So yeah, we think very carefully about design, about the kind of illustrations that we run. We have a terrific art editor, Karen Marston, who helps us go through and select things for us to choose. We try to use a different cover artist for every issue.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Talk to me about that because the covers are unbelievably popular. I often get asked about who does the artwork or is that AI generated?

Brian Anderson: No, we’ve never done an AI generated cover, at least not yet. I wouldn’t be opposed to it necessarily, but for special issues, we’ve used commissioned design firms to do the covers. For the regular issues, we select an artist, and that’s one of the things Karen Marston would do. She’ll sit down and show me four or five artists and a portfolio of potential covers. And then we’ll decide, okay, this one I think will work with the way our cover lettering is laid out. And sometimes that doesn’t look good, and then we’ll go back and find another cover. Sometimes if we haven’t approached the artist already, they might not be comfortable because of their political leanings.

Rafael Mangual: Sure.

Brian Anderson: That’s happened a few times. But generally, artists are really thrilled to see their work on the cover of a magazine, especially one as nicely produced as City Journal. So one model for me was, I mentioned Myron Magnet had worked for Fortune. Well, Fortune in its heyday back in the ‘50s and ‘40s just had these extraordinarily cool covers that were just designed. There’s a book collecting them that you can pick up. So that was always a model for me. How could we just have this kind of thing that you want to pick up when you see it on a newsstand or when you get it from somebody who says, “Subscribe to this.”

Rafael Mangual: Right. So you mentioned earlier in our conversation page views, but I want to know just a little bit more about how you think about success from the magazine. What does that look like? Are there metrics that really drive things? Sometimes I will write something that seems to be a complete dud and then two months on an important person will read it and reach out and that will spark a conversation that either leads to a concrete policy change or maybe it gets picked up in the media and gets some more attention. I mean, how do you think about evaluating the success of an issue?

Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think about it in a variety of different ways. Ultimately, yes, if we can influence policymakers and change the direction of the city or cities on something like crime or homelessness, that’s what the Institute was founded to do. So that’s the ultimate goal. But you’re right, you can’t always predict when that happens. Sometimes things have to get really bad and then people will turn to ideas that you’ve been arguing for a long time. That happened on policing. The case for broken windows had been made from the ‘80s on and was part of City Journal from the very beginning, or order maintenance policing, or data driven policing. All of these ideas that George Kelling and James Q. Wilson and Bill Bratton were advocating for. It took a while for that. Things really had to get bad before policymakers turned to those ideas. So you can’t predict.

And having a body of work out there and the internet has made this possible because our entire history is online so people can go back and say, “Well, yeah, maybe there’s some ideas here that you can turn to. “ I think the same thing’s starting to happen on homelessness where policymakers are starting to recognize that housing-first policies and harm-diminishing policies when it comes to drug abuse in public, that these are backfiring and causing a lot of problems, not only in terms of urban order, but also for the purported beneficiaries of these policies who are dying in many cases. So yeah, policy matters and you can’t always time that, but especially with the internet now, I think you can sometimes drive change. And we’ve seen that with some of Chris Rufo’s work where you create a seismic impact as we just did with the reporting on Somali fraud in Minnesota, that just changes the whole dynamic of the debate.

Rafael Mangual: Made it all the way up to the White House. Right.

Brian Anderson: So there though, you do have policymakers who are paying attention to what we’re doing and they’re willing to act on these ideas. That isn’t always the case. Sometimes you’re publishing things in opposition as we did for a long time during the Obama years.

Rafael Mangual: What’s the next frontier for City Journal?

Brian Anderson: Well, I think the intersection, we’ve been doing a lot more on higher ed and reforming higher ed. We’re doing a lot more on the corruption, not just of the humanities, but of the sciences. I think the biggest question facing everybody now is how to think through the technological mutations that we’re experiencing with artificial intelligence. How is that going to shake out in terms of the economy, in terms of how we think about our own jobs? So I think important work needs to be done there, and we’re doing more and more in that area. And as we mentioned earlier, we have come full circle. So some of the ideas that we succeeded getting implemented have now been dismantled. We’re kind of fighting some of those old battles again over the importance of smart policing, the need to have public order before you can have any of the other things that matter to people living in cities.

Rafael Mangual: That’s right.

Brian Anderson: Public order and education are really fundamental.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. No war has ever really truly won in the long term. I’ve learned some of the ... I’ve been reading a lot of older books the last few years, and it’s consistently both surprising and slightly depressing that a lot of the arguments that were being had in the ‘60s and ‘70s are being had again today.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. Sometimes I just want to start jumping up and down and say, “Well, wait, we went through all of this.“ But I’ve been here long enough now that I have seen a lot of these issues cycle around again and some of the same very bad ideas. And we’re starting to see this with economic ideas where you have... I guess that’s another front where we’re doing more work is the need to remind people that sort of socialism doesn’t work economically.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. Yeah. One thing that is a consistent theme in a lot of the conversations that I have is that people are anxious and if not outright worried about technology and its effect on everything really. I mean, I’m a relatively young parent. I’ve got a six- and a four-year-old. A lot of my friends are either just having kids or have young kids. And everyone’s always talking about how no one reads anymore and how no one does their own work and everyone’s just asking the machine questions and getting answers spit back out of them. I mean, do you worry about that in terms of the future of the magazine? I mean, just having people who are still reading, who are still reading hard copies of things.

Brian Anderson: I have to worry about it. I still see people valuing good long-form journalism and paying attention to those arguments, but it’s hard to say what things will be like in 10 years. And this corrupting influence of technology on teaching and on education needs to be addressed. You can’t have a situation where the students are just pressing a button to generate their…

Rafael Mangual: We’re seeing that already.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. And then the teachers are pressing a button to have those papers corrected and the whole thing becomes fraudulent. I think you’ll see a return to more serious forms of education where students are forced to write sitting in a classroom with a pen, where teachers have to work more directly with students. I think artificial intelligence properly used can help. It can tailor educational programs to different kids, but we’re not anywhere close to that yet. And that’s going to be a big challenge how to think through all of that. But yeah, I guess the optimist in me thinks that there’ll be a reaction to this inundation of AI-generated content, slop, as it’s called, and people will start valuing actual human voices again in terms of both writing and in public presence. I hope so.

Rafael Mangual: I share your optimism, and I am also optimistic that City Journal will be right in the middle of that for another 30 some odd years. Yes. So I’m really grateful to you for everything that you do, for everything that you have taught me how to do in terms of just improving my writing and building relationships with so many great thinkers who continue to contribute to our public debates. I mean, it really is. It’s a real service. I think not just New York City, but the country is better off for City Journal. And I don’t say that simply because I’m a biased voice who works for City Journal, but I work for City Journal because I wanted to, and the reason I wanted to was because it stood out to me from a very early age. So it’s just incredibly cool to be a part of.

Brian Anderson: Well, back at you, Ralph, it’s one of, as I said before, one of the great pleasures of editing a magazine like City Journal is to be able to work with brilliant people like yourself and all of our older writers, but also the new generation that has come along. It’s fantastic and it does give me hope for the future.

Rafael Mangual: Yeah. And it’s a bright future indeed with a lot in store. So for you all who are watching, who are not subscribed to City Journal, what are you doing? Make sure you subscribe, not just to the podcast. Please do that too, but subscribe to the magazine. The print edition is fantastic. You get a cool thing that you can put on your coffee table and talk to your friends about and seem smart when people come to your house, but the pieces are incredible. They’re very thoughtful. They’re constantly illuminating. I find myself going back to old issues just to reread something that really stuck out to me. So it’s a great product and it’s really helped me think through my life and a lot of the policy questions that we grapple with here at the Manhattan Institute. So appreciate you watching this episode. Please, again, do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, do all the things, boost us in the algorithm. We have been so excited to see the audience for the show growing. And until next time, you have been watching the City Journal Podcast. See you next week.

Photo: Sara Kauss