The The Hello and

welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. The usual two guests today, both historians.

Tom Segru will take a look at cities amidst the Corona crisis,

and then Kristen Dumay

will explore the fascinating topic of gender in evangelical Christianity.

We're jam-packed with content so I'll keep it short. Cities have played a prominent role in the COVID-19 crisis, not merely

as places of sickness but as incubators of disease in the popular imagination, although now

that COVID is ravaging the rural US, that mythmaking is harder to sustain.

Thomas Seagru, professor of social and cultural analysis in history at NYU and director

of its city's collaborative, has a long and distinguished career as an urban historian, beginning with his first book from 1996,

the origins of the urban crisis race and inequality in post-war Detroit.

Segru is the editor of a collection of essays on the 2020 crises and their impact

in urban life on the public books website. His own contribution is called

Pre-existing Conditions, what 2020 reveals about our urban future.

I'll be interviewing some of the other contributors in the coming weeks.

Here's Tom Segrew.

A lot of people have been using the occasion of the pandemic to pronounce the death of cities, especially big cities like one we both live in.

Is that a premature announcement?

Oh, I think it's absolutely a premature announcement.

A lot of the discussion of the supposed death of cities is focusing on the sorts of urban amenities

that appeal to the city's elite or the fact that wealthy New Yorkers and residents of certain

other cities have flocked to the suburbs or decamped to their summer

...