TLP Weekend Edition (January 10-11, 2026)
What we're reading and checking out.
📖 “How New York City Got Safe: A historical reconstruction of the Big Apple’s crime decline, told from inside the institutions responsible for public safety,” by Michael Javen Fortner. In the Washington Monthly, the excellent political scientist Michael Javen Fortner reviews TLP friend Peter Moskos’ new book, Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City’s Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. Fortner highlights the book’s relevance to the present day:
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani takes office having already drawn a sharp line with the city’s recent past, pledging, among other things, to end police sweeps of homeless encampments. This marks a clean break from the ethos of order maintenance policing that once defined New York’s anti-crime strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s. When the outgoing mayor announced encampment sweeps in the spring of 2022, he gave voice to the same righteous indignation that animated that earlier era of law enforcement: “No more smoking, no more doing drugs. No more sleeping, no more doing barbecues on the subway system. No more just doing whatever you want.” Mandami’s reversal thus signals a deeper break with that past: less coercion, more compassion; less policing, more social policy. But as a recent book makes uncomfortably clear, this shift might not merely be bad policy. It might well be a grave mistake.
Peter Moskos’s Back from the Brink is both oral history and urban epic—a ground-level account of New York’s astonishing, world-historical crime decline, narrated by the cops, commissioners, city officials, and civic leaders who tried, failed, improvised, and, in Moskos’s telling, ultimately helped turn the city from a national cautionary tale into a global public safety success story. A Harvard-educated sociologist, former police officer, and current professor at John Jay College, Moskos stitches together a dense tapestry of personal recollections and hard-earned reflections to advance a simple, stubbornly controversial claim: Policing matters. No one puts the point more plainly than Louis Anemone, one of the NYPD’s highest-ranking officials in the early 1990s: “Police can affect behavior. We really can.”
For decades, academics and pundits have feuded over the so-called great crime decline. To be clear, the decline was real. Moskos opens with an astounding fact: Between 1990 and 1999, murders in New York City dropped by 70 percent, from 2,262 to 671. By 2018, the number had fallen below 300—a result he calls “a phenomenal achievement for an American city” of more than 8 million people. In less than a generation, New York transformed from the cinematic dystopia of 1979’s The Warriors into one of the safest major cities in the world.”
Bonus: Be sure to check out Fortner’s own book on the origins of the war on drugs and the black working-class anti-crime movement, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
✍🏻 The Metropolitan Review, edited by Ross Barkan, Lou Bahet, and David Roberts. This month marks the first print run of the excellent cultural magazine, The Metropolitan Review, started right here on Substack. If you’re looking for a break from daily politics, the Metropolitan “covers recent books, film, television, and the visual arts, as well as new fiction, poetry, and interviews.” We particularly liked this long examination of William T. Vollmann’s efforts to publish his massive upcoming four-part book on the history of the CIA.
The Metropolitan Review is a nonprofit publication so please consider subscribing if you are able.
📚 Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention, written by Ben Wilson and narrated by John Sackville. If you’re looking for good nonfiction to carry you through long winter walks, try the audio version of this fascinating history of the world’s cities:
In the two hundred millennia of our existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. Historian Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award-winning books on British history, now tells the grand, glorious story of how city living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, dating to 5000 BC and memorably portrayed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he shows us that cities were never a necessity but that once they existed their density created such a blossoming of human endeavor—producing new professions, forms of art, worship, and trade—that they kick-started nothing less than civilization.
Guiding readers through famous cities over 7,000 years, he reveals the innovations driven by each: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Epoque Paris. In the modern age, he studies the impact of verticality in New York City, the sprawl of L.A., and the eco-reimagining of twenty-first-century Shanghai.
Lively, erudite, page turning, and irresistible, Metropolis is a grand tour of human achievement.
🎥 Princess Mononoke, by Hayao Miyazaki. Our Studio Ghibli tour continues with this epic 1997 film set in the Muromachi era of Japan:
Medieval Japan at the dawn of the Iron Age. Touched by the indelible stigma of darkness, noble defender of good Prince Ashitaka embarks on a long and perilous quest to face his destiny after a nearly fatal encounter with a raging demon. But with Mother Nature in disarray and his combat hand poisoned to the bone, the brave protector can only pray for a miracle to lift the deadly curse on his arm. After all, murderous ambition and senseless extermination ravage the land. As life slowly succumbs to chaos and barren landscapes replace the lush green forests of old, Ashitaka soon finds himself caught in the middle of a destructive conflict between humankind and omnipotent nature's ancient gods. Now, Lady Eboshi, the bellicose leader of the Iron Town, stands in the way of resolution. With the future of all living things hanging by a thread, can the banished young warrior count on the feral Wolf Girl to restore peace?
This film is a true masterpiece featuring all of the best elements of Miyazaki’s storytelling and animated creations—human relationships, coming-of-age challenges, conflict between man and nature, the supernatural, and cycles of life. Highly recommended.
🎶 Night Life, by Ray Price. This 1963 release is one of the all-time great honky-tonk records, with Price backed by Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck, Buddy Emmons, and Floyd Cramer. Wait for the sun to go down, pour yourself an amber restorative, and take in Price’s classic tales of rambling life “from the world of broken dreams.”
Here’s the title track written by Nelson and sung by Price.