Sudhir Venkatesh is a sociologist, an author, and an expert on street gangs. I originally read about him in the excellent (I can’t emphasize the word “excellent” enough here) book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. A portion of Freakonomics tells the story of Sudhir attempting to conduct some surveys in a bad part of town for his sociology work. Much against his liking, Venkatesh somehow found himself held at gunpoint in a crack house by a drug dealing gang. Long story short Venkatesh befriended the gang, and many an interesting thing came of that, including a detailed look at the economics of Street Gangs as described in Freakonomics.

As it turns out Venkatesh is a big fan of The Wire, a show of which I also greatly enjoy. Venkatesh recently had some kind of Wire watching party or something, with all of his inner city street gang friends invited to attend. Sudhir posts the results on his blog, which basically go to show that the program is indeed very accurate and that thugs like to place lots of bets. It’s a fairly amusing read, but also very interesting to see how the people that are essentially the subject of The Wire respond to the show as opposed to someone like myself, who is indeed white and has in fact never even tried an illegal drug.

Venkatesh’s new book Gang Leader for a Day was just released about a week ago. Hm. I should check that out.