Hello and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast.

I am your host, Rafael Menguil, and I am so excited to have with us the editor of City

Journal, my boss, Brian Anderson.

Welcome.

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

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 Block's 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 like 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, you know, 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. 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,

you know, 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, you know,

a sort of mainstream kind of media outlet attached to a public policy think tank?

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