Last year, an American writer called Sarah Manavis joined me on the podcast to talk about her home state of Ohio (episode 47). Due to a series of unfortunate accidents that have taken place since, she now works at the next desk from me.

And so, I asked her back, to talk about the cities of her homeland with myself and the editor of the soon-to-launch New Statesman America, Nicky Woolf. The three of us discuss why New York stinks in summer; why LA stinks the whole time; how Chicago invented an incredibly innovative transport technology with the one minor drawback of repeatedly killing people; and what kind of plane crash it would be best to die in.

Critics might say that the result is under-researched and frankly faintly rude. To which I would respond: look, we've had a run of Big And Serious Topics lately and it's 34C today, cut a guy some slack.

Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.

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