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ideas felt solid or certain or quantifiable on a spreadsheet in any way. They felt like quickened breaths, much like the ones I took when Analise told me about her new profession. I wasn’t in formal research mode and certainly couldn’t explain any of this in a way that would be comprehensible to most of my colleagues. I hadn’t yet done any of the things a good researcher should do: design a careful study, be a skeptic, find more data, and keep questioning until some version of truth arose. But the feeling alone was already raising fundamental questions about how I did my work and what it was good for. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I was compelled to question the framework that had given so much meaning to my life, the lines I had drawn around myself. I couldn’t sit. I had to move. I had to follow where things took me.
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    I left Analise sitting on the guest room bed, a bit forlorn and a bit drunk, a beautiful, lost girl who had somehow become an enthusiastic criminal. I walked back down the hall and stood in the doorway to the living room. The vodka glasses were still on the table. I was woozy too, drunker than I’d thought. A drifting feeling washed over me, maybe the oldest feeling I knew: the fear of being unmoored and unattached and lost. I had no idea what to do next.
    This unsettling doubt was the flash that finally lit up the pattern in the rich chaos of the last five years. Five years of prostitutes, drug dealers, madams, johns, porn clerks, and cops finally began to make sense, or at least hint at the possibility of making sense. The first pages of this book had just been written, and now all I had to do was learn how to read them—to understand this story, and my own.

CHAPTER 2
    NEW YORK, NEW YORK
    N ow spin the wheel back to those first tentative steps. A new century was looming, bright and shining with possibility. I was settling into New York City, starting my exciting new job at Columbia University as a young professor striking out for the first time. I couldn’t wait to set up a new apartment, get to know my new colleagues and students, and develop some new research projects.
    A few warning signs appeared. My wife and I felt conflicted about leaving Chicago. I started to feel guilty about moving us out of the comfortable home we had created in the Midwest.
    Columbia wasn’t the easiest place to start my career, but it was the best place. The university had a reputation for treating young faculty poorly. Rarely did they grant tenure, and when they did, junior professors were still thought of as expendable labor. Most of my friends and advisers urged me not to take the job. But I turned down the other offers that came my way—including one from the downtown competitor, NYU—because I was hungry and I felt I needed the stature and challenge of an Ivy League badge. The pressure cooker of the University of Chicago taught me that I needed a high-stakes environment to motivate me.
    The department was going through a period of transition. In a bitter struggle between two competing visions of sociology, Herbert Gans represented the discipline’s original aim. A public intellectual who wrote for a wide audience, he carried the mantle of the great old Columbia sociologists, like Robert Merton and C. WrightMills, who combined vivid storytelling with thoughtful explorations of great national issues.
    But a genuine respect for this tradition sat uneasily next to the growing belief that sociology should be a science. Gans’s contemporaries, like Harrison White (a trained physicist) and his enigmatic and ambitious student Peter Bearman, were formalists who fought for a much narrower, lab-coat view of the discipline, focusing on objective research and academic sobriety. This had been the trend since the 1960s, when young sociologists decided to fight for their legitimacy as scientists by drawing a contrast with the swashbuckling