Five days a week, from 10 to noon, Brian Lehrer offers intelligent and reasoned discussion on topics that don't always lend themselves to either approach. Police shootings, political brawls, street collapses—all are fair game for Lehrer's deliberative deconstruction on WNYC-AM and FM. He's been doing it since 1989, when he sat down to host a talk show called On the Line. Since then, The Brian Lehrer Show has become the city's oral history in the making, a daily exercise in which anyone from Hillary Clinton to Rosie Perez to your addled cousin is likely to pop up adding their two cents. A cheerful skeptic, Lehrer manages with grace and humor to shepherd both the wise and the wackos who dial his number. He proved his mettle on the frigid first morning of the 2005 transit strike, when he rode his bike from Inwood to the station's Centre Street studios, where he hosted a tutorial on the shutdown while opening his lines to an avalanche of anxious listeners. His is the sound of New York.