3. Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?

In which the conventional wisdom is often found to be a web of fabrication, self-interest, and convenience.

Why experts routinely make up statistics; the invention of chronic halitosis…How to ask a good question…Sudhir Venkatesh’s long, strange trip into the crack den…Life is a tournament…Why prostitutes earn more than architects…What a drug dealer, a high-school quarterback, and an editorial assistant have in common…How the invention of crack cocaine mirrored the invention of nylon stockings…Was crack the worst thing to hit black Americans since Jim Crow?

4. Where Have All the Criminals Gone?

In which the facts of crime are sorted out from the fictions.

What Nicolae Ceau?escu learned—the hard way—about abortion…Why the 1960s were a great time to be a criminal…Think the roaring 1990s economy put a crimp on crime? Think again…Why capital punishment doesn’t deter criminals…Do police actually lower crime rates?…Prisons, prisons everywhere…Seeing through the New York City police “miracle”…What is a gun, really?…Why early crack dealers were like Microsoft millionaires and later crack dealers were like Pets.com…The superpredator versus the senior citizen…Jane Roe, crime stopper: how the legalization of abortion changed everything.

5. What Makes a Perfect Parent?

In which we ask, from a variety of angles, a pressing question: do parents really matter?

The conversion of parenting from an art to a science…Why parenting experts like to scare parents to death…Which is more dangerous: a gun or a swimming pool?…The economics of fear…Obsessive parents and the nature-nurture quagmire…Why a good school isn’t as good as you might think…The black-white test gap and “acting white”…Eight things that make a child do better in school and eight that don’t.