Social Cities

In the early 1960s, uncertainty and menace gripped New York, crystallizing in a poisonous divide between a deeply corrupt, cynical, and racist police force, and an African American community buffeted by economic distress, brutality, and narcotics. On August 28, 1963 - the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial - two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. Dubbed the Career Girls Murders case, the crime sent ripples of fear throughout the city, as police scrambled fruitlessly for months to find the killer.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage. Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry.

Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous "Land Run" in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsize ambitions and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress.

In Anna Clark's full account of this American tragedy, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision making. Places like Flint are set up to fail - and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences can be fatal.

April 28, 2015, West Baltimore, Maryland: ground zero in America's Opiate Wars. In this crime-plagued section of the city, the death of Freddie Gray has triggered the worst domestic rioting since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and created a terrifying new breed of criminal entrepreneur.

When Candace Bushnell started writing her “Sex and the City” column for the New York Observer, she didn’t think anyone beyond the Upper East Side would care about her adventures among the Hamptons-hopping media elite. But her struggles with singlehood struck a chord, making her a citywide - and soon nationwide - sensation. Beverly Hills, 90210 creator Darren Star brought Bushnell’s vision to an even wider audience when he adapted the column for an HBO series.

Nashville - a haven for aspiring musicians and a magnet for country-music fans. By the time Pat Postiglione arrived there in 1980, it was also the scene of an unsolved series of vicious sex slayings that served as a harbinger of worse to come. As Postiglione was promoted from street-beat Metro cop to detective sergeant heading Music City’s elite cold-case Murder Squad, some of America’s most bizarre, elusive, and savage serial killers were calling Nashville home. And during the next two decades, the body count climbed.

Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna. Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of an extraordinary story of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.

Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.

Discover how - and why - Black, Indigenous, and people of color in America experience societal, economic, and infrastructural inequality throughout history covering everything from Columbus’ arrival in 1492 to the War on Drugs to the Black Lives Matter movement.

A connection to nature is vital to our wellbeing. The sound of birds, the smell of tree oils, the effects of natural sunlight. Studies have shown that patients who can observe a natural scene through a hospital window recover faster, and lockdown proved that when most other aspects of life falls away, nature still feels like a necessity, not a luxury. But the majority of the world’s population lives in some form of urban environment, and by 2050, two thirds of humanity – nearly 7 billion people – are expected to live in towns and cities.

Two political titans forge a modern city and a vibrant public sector in this history of strong leadership at a time of national crisis. City of Ambition is a brilliant history of the New Deal and its role in the making of modern New York City. The story of a remarkable collaboration between Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia, this is a case study in creative political leadership in the midst of a devastating depression.

That was where she needed to be, in a field of purple flowers, where no one could bother her. She would sit there until the confusion left her head and the stink of the camp left her nostrils. Shauzia has a dream. She dreams of getting away from the refugee camp in Pakistan and travelling to France. There she knows she would find a better life, away from the war in her home country of Afghanistan...But escape is not so easy. Once she leaves the camp, she has no money, no food - and only her dog Jasper for company. But Shauzia is determined to find a new future for herself...

It is easy to be depressed if you live in a neighborhood that has few supportive resources available or is marred by gun violence. We are able to diagnose people with depression, but how does one heal a neighborhood? This City Is Killing Me brings policy and psychology together. Through case studies, Jonathan Foiles opens up his therapy door to allow us to overhear the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. Through statistics and the example of Chicago, he teaches us how policy decisions have contributed to these individuals’ suffering.

In the fall of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one”—a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. It had been bone-dry for months, and a recent string of blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s already scant resources. Then, on October 8, a minor fire broke out in the barn of Irishwoman Kate Leary. A series of unfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings along with insufficient preparation and a high south-westerly wind combined to set the stage for an unmitigated catastrophe.

When the town mouse and the city mouse visit each other, they discover they prefer very different ways of life.

In the early 1970s, three African American men - Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Rickey Jackson - were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. Almost four decades later, the men were exonerated. But while their exoneration may have ended one of American history’s most disgraceful miscarriages of justice, the corruption and decay of the city responsible for their imprisonment remain on trial.

A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes listeners on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them—but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs.

Saturn was the Roman god, who ate his children to stop them from usurping his power. Men have been psychologically and spiritually wounded by this legacy. Hollis offers a rich perspective on the secrets men carry in their hearts.

Award-winning journalist Alexis Madrigal sculpts an intricate tableau of the city of Oakland that is at once a groundbreaking big-idea book, a deeply researched work of social and political history, and an intimate portrait of an essential American city that has been at the crossroads of the defining themes of the twenty-first century. Oakland’s stories encompass everything from Silicon Valley’s prominence and the ramifications of a compulsively digital future to the underestimated costs of technological innovation on local communities.