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anthropologists and new journalists. Opinions hardened to the point where many scholars had a knee-jerk definition of academic quality—if too many people can read your work, it must not be very good. But if you could quantify your research and make it sufficiently unreadable, then you were onto something. Translated into my life, the warning was simple: “Write
only
for sociologists, because a popular book might jeopardize your chances for tenure.”
    I was caught in the middle, searching for my own way. Truth be told, I shared the same view of sociology as Bearman and the scientists: only through careful, systematic observation and analysis could we really learn about the world. I didn’t want to give that up. In my own career, I had gained a great deal of credibility by being objective and attentive to detail. Being seen as a scientist opened up doors and helped me to avoid the “activist” label used to dismiss researchers who become advocates for various methods of social change. I spent as much time with White and Bearman as I could, learning as much as I could about their approach.
    At the same time, I knew I was hired because my research spoke to social issues like race, inequality, and the fate of our cities, subjects that fell squarely into Columbia’s legacy of encouraging the public intellectual tradition. In this regard, I had already been schooled by working with Professor William Julius Wilson in Chicago. As my graduate adviser, Wilson always insisted that the scientific method alone was incapable of swaying the opinion of policy makers or the public. You also had to write well. You had to tell a story. Wilson would do it with epochal books like
The Declining Significance of Race
and
The Truly Disadvantaged
,
in which his vivid and passionate writing reached beyond the academic community and changed the way his generation looked at poverty. I wanted to reach out to a larger audience too, to touch hearts and minds of people who were riding the train to work as well as those sitting in offices making public policy.
    With this in mind, I had spent many hours in the university archives in Chicago researching the history of the field. I discovered that the two contrasting visions were, in fact, the original tension that caused its birth. One of the founding fathers was Robert Park, a journalist by training. He argued for a sociology that could inform the public. He incorporated the criticisms of the scholars who were pushing for a more scientific, empirical approach, recognizing the dangers, inherent in journalism, of anecdotal portraits that proved nothing of broader significance. In the piles of archival notes I noticed that one scholar had scribbled, “Rigor and Relevance.” That summed it up for me: truthful, scientifically valid insights that are comprehensible and that speak to timely social issues. I tried to achieve these two objectives with my first book for the general public,
Gang Leader for a Day.
Its success meant that a few more people understood the complicated struggles for America’s urban poor, from their complex strategies for putting food on the table to fending off the local drug lord. More truth and fewer clichés meant better social policy and, ultimately, better lives for the people I studied. That was the theory, anyway.
    But the two visions were like warring bulls. If you went too deep into storytelling, you were labeled a journalist. If you went too far into hard-nosed, number-crunching science, you were doomed to the bookshelves of specialists. When I arrived at Columbia, I couldn’t find a middle ground. Although my colleagues were supportive and encouraging, everyone gave me the same intimidating advice: publish in the leading journals (which were all dominated by scientists) or you won’t receive tenure. It seemed that I would have to pursue wider relevance at my own risk.
    For me, it was a devil’s bargain. As an ethnographer, I was