Sudhir Venkatesh Is More Than Just a Crack-Gang Expert

Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student who hung out for several years with a Chicago crack-selling gang, and who is the star of Chapter 3 in Freakonomics, knows an awful lot more about urban life than just the crack gang. On this weekend’s edition of the NPR radio program This American Life (this site tells you when the show plays in your area — click “where to listen,” upper left), Venkatesh tells the extraordinary story of a man who made so much money selling bullets that he didn’t know what to do with it, and eventually came up with a deeply bizarre solution.