But we also saw how a small group of New Yorkers generated so many of the city’s problems. This was the minority underclass, defined not just by its high crime rate (blacks and Hispanics, a combined 53 percent of the city’s population, were 92 percent of its murder suspects and 97 percent of its shooting suspects in 2013) but also by intergenerational poverty and welfare dependency, unwed childbearing, drug abuse, school failure, and nonwork. Aside from its other costs, such social pathology imposed a heavy tax burden to fund welfare, disability, food stamps, housing projects, homeless shelters, foster care, special education, jails, and (often corrupt) social-services agencies—all requiring overcompensated armies of employees to run, staff, and maintain. For us, therefore, what created the underclass, and how to turn its kids into productive mainstream citizens, was always an urgent concern.

I had come to City Journal with a theory that the dramatic cultural changes of the 1960s, as they filtered down to the most vulnerable members of society, had brought the underclass into being. The cause couldn’t be the legacy of slavery and racism, for economist Thomas Sowell had already documented the strong improvement by every measure that black America had made after World War II, which suddenly reversed around 1964. It wasn’t too little opportunity or too much welfare, since immigrants easily found jobs, and welfare had existed since the New Deal, three decades before the underclass arose. Instead, as the sexual experimentation of the elites in the 1960s, along with the destigmatization of divorce and illegitimacy, the glamorizing of drugs and of dropping out of the 9-to-5 grind, the questioning of all established authority that even we at City Journal had absorbed, the elites’ horrified guilt over America’s racist history and the resultant belief that black Americans deserved some reparation or special consideration for the damage that we had unjustly inflicted (a strange imputation of inferiority)—as all these new attitudes trickled down through all layers of society, through the press, Hollywood, popular music, the schools, even the pulpits, they changed the beliefs and removed the inhibitions of those at the bottom, sparking an epidemic of sexual predation, child abuse, lawlessness, resentment, and contempt for all authority, especially that of cops and teachers.

The first writer I hired, Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of English psychiatrist and prison physician Anthony Daniels), had come to a similar conclusion from much talking with, and close observation of, his patients in the slums of a once-great English industrial city—with the interesting difference that his underclass patients were white Englishmen, so race played no part in the mix. But what impelled their behavior—so similar to that of the New York underclass—was the belief system in their heads, which had trickled down from “advanced,” nanny-state British culture, a blend of 1940s socialist orthodoxy about equality and “fairness” and 1960s let’s-do-it-in-the-road anarchism. A precise, ironic, and wisely judgmental observer, with sincere rather than condescendingly ersatz sympathy for his patients, as well as a literary man’s appreciation of their Dickensian linguistic inventiveness, Tony saw how utterly, if secretly, self-aware his patients were about their attitudes and their consequences, and he saw, too, with an aching sense of the tragic, how underclass women conspired, wholeheartedly but not unmindful of the consequences, in their degrading and sometimes violent fates. The knack of describing all this in often hilariously ironic yet heartbreaking detail, with comparisons to his experiences as a young doctor in Third World countries or as an observer of Third World totalitarianisms and revolutions, made his articles not journalism but literature—a standard to which we all aspired.

You will find this hard to believe, but in 1994 I didn’t understand why underclass women were having so many out-of-wedlock children. After all, I reasoned, with my 1960s assumptions, doubtless everybody wants to have sex, but everybody also knows about cheap and universally available birth control. It was Kay S. Hymowitz who set me straight. Women, she explained politely but firmly, want to have babies. Accordingly, underclass girls, she argued from many interviews in a landmark City Journal article, have a different vision of life from that of middle-class girls. They haven’t been nurtured by diligent parents to develop the sophisticated cultural traits—orderliness, self-discipline, deferral of gratification, goal-oriented ambition, and so on—that prepare middle-class girls to go to college and professional school, defer childbearing, get married to Mr. Right, and become doctors or dealmakers.

Everything in underclass culture, where fathers are absent and marriage is dismissed—as useless as a bicycle to a fish—tells girls that sex before 14 is normal, and an out-of-wedlock baby at 16 is the mark of maturity. The grandmas in their thirties are as excited about the new baby as the teen moms, who imagine that finally someone will love them unconditionally and who revel in showing off their shiny new strollers and cute baby outfits. When the babies begin to toddle, their signs of independence and contrariety spark maternal disappointment. An all-too-common underclass cultural pattern has the oldest sibling left in charge of the younger ones when the grandmother won’t babysit, while the mother goes off on new adventures. As for careers or even work, most of Kay’s informants had only adolescent dreaminess, not plans.

Here, then, was striking confirmation of how the 1960s transformation of mainstream American culture had indeed produced seismic changes at the bottom of society, creating a self-subsisting underclass subculture with its own mores—its own life-script, in Kay’s apt phrase—which policymakers had to decode to understand underclass behavior, let alone change it. In years of wise, carefully observed, and irrepressibly witty articles on women, marriage, sex and sex roles, child rearing, and early education, Kay never lost sight of this central insight. And given the thinness of underclass culture, starting with the many fewer times that underclass mothers talk to their children than middle-class mothers do, with the result that their kids start school with much smaller vocabularies and fewer concepts than their middle-class counterparts—some teen moms themselves haven’t learned to do a budget or brush their teeth—it’s hard not to worry that even the best schools can’t fully make up the deficits in childhoods that are so culturally, intellectually, and often emotionally impoverished.

But the education that these kids generally get is far from the best, and Sol Stern, an alumnus of the glory days of the New York public schools, pondered for two decades how to restore their luster, scrutinizing them up close while his own sons went through them and his wife taught in them. Starting out as a writer for far-left Ramparts magazine and finding that the Black Panthers, whom Ramparts had romanticized as political radicals, were mere thugs and killers, Sol indelibly learned to inspect evidence with a cold eye and take nothing for granted, including his own assumptions.

I leaned hard on those assumptions early on. Hearing that Gotham’s Catholic schools were successfully educating the siblings, cousins, and housing-project neighbors of the minority kids who were failing in the public schools, I sent Sol to find out if that was true—and why. Still harboring childhood apprehensions of Catholic anti-Semitism, Sol began his visits reluctantly, but he became an instant convert. Here were schools that fostered a culture of self-discipline, orderliness, and hard work, beginning with their students’ neat uniforms, and that rejected the condescending multiculturalism and “social justice” pedagogy taught in the ed schools, believing instead that their largely minority and non-Catholic pupils could master the basic skills and fundamental texts of Western civilization. Much higher graduation rates and standardized test scores than the public schools achieved with the same low-income kids vindicated that faith in high intellectual and disciplinary standards. And all this success came at one-third the per-pupil cost of the public schools, with a tiny administrative bureaucracy and with no unions or tenure to shield incompetent teachers.

In story after story, Sol, always a step ahead of other pundits, searched for ways to expand and replicate this success, whether through vouchers that would let kids leave failing public schools in favor of private (including religious) ones, or through nonunion charter schools—which politicians indebted to teachers’ unions strove to quash—or through ed-school reform or alternative-teacher qualification, or through standardized testing, and finally through stressing the importance of learning real content as opposed to “learning to learn,” as the ed-school orthodoxy puts it. Meanwhile, Mayor Giuliani believed that the solution was finding a schools chancellor as visionary and iron-willed as he, and he searched in vain for such a prodigy, while Mayor Bloomberg believed that funneling private charity into the public schools was the secret, which had the unintended consequence of starving the Catholic schools of philanthropic dollars. So I left the editorship with this problem unsolved and with Sol still seeking public education’s philosopher’s stone.

I came to think, though, that America’s decades-long emphasis on closing the racial achievement gap was misplaced, since policymakers seemed not to care if it got closed by lowering the top performance or by raising the bottom. New York, I thought, should return to its old model of providing talented or ambitious or hardworking kids with as much opportunity as they can take advantage of, both for the kids’ sake and for the city’s. So even if research could show (to take the most modest example) that charter school students had an edge in having parents caring enough to apply for admission, no concept of justice could demand that those kids be stuck in low-performing unionized schools, for the benefit of teachers or of kids from less concerned families.

After musing to Manhattan Institute president Lawrence Mone that City Journal needed a writer like Steven Malanga, the brilliant executive editor of Crain’s New York Business whose stories about the political machinations of Gotham’s nonprofits were continual revelations, I finally proposed hiring Malanga himself. Go and try, said Larry; and Steve, raised in a New Jersey city he called “Nerk,” soon joined our ranks. Modest, thoughtful, probing, original, a master of statistics and their interpretation, he began turning out a pioneering series of articles on public-sector unions, those strange organizations that even Franklin Roosevelt thought public servants with civil-service protection didn’t need and shouldn’t have. If Sol Stern had shown how malign was the influence of teachers’ unions, Steve showed how the public unions all together, through their contributions and campaigning, composed the most powerful force in local politics, essentially getting to elect their own bosses. Long before other journalists were on to the story, Steve showed how this power had won public workers higher salaries than similar private-sector workers while enjoying lax work rules and low performance standards and—much more important—how these public workers boasted health-care and pension packages much richer than the taxpayers funding them would themselves receive. Since these were benefits that today’s politicians could promise but tomorrow’s officials would have to pay, the sky was the limit—until tomorrow finally arrived, and municipal bankruptcy loomed. In this way, public servants had become the public’s master and the potential destroyers of the cities that they supposedly served. But Mayor Bloomberg seemed blind to the problem. For him, the tax money would always be there.

Steve had just hit his stride—and Giuliani, having made New York “the safest big city in America,” as he liked to say, was getting bored as his second term neared its close—when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers that brilliantly cloudless September morning in 2001 and changed so much so radically, City Journal included. We realized, with our autumn issue just about to go to the printer, that we’d have to scrap everything and start over. After all, this was our city, and we felt obliged to be first with advice about how to limit the damage to the local economy, how to rebuild the wreckage downtown while avoiding the urban-planning mistakes of the original World Trade Center, and how to understand and defend against the new threat that the city faced. We even asked our architect friends from Franck Lohsen McCrery to draw up a plan for restoring the street grid at Ground Zero and designing the buildings that might rise there, while the great Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart designed a beautiful memorial, so much more profound and moving than what actually arose (or sank, more accurately) there. We had long written about architecture—on Winston Churchill’s apt insight about cities: “We shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us”—and our sense that the city’s spirit needed a rapid rebuilding of Ground Zero gave this theme a new urgency. To no avail, alas, as officials dithered for a decade. But our appeals to reject totalitarian European modernist architecture in favor of buildings in the tradition of the early-twentieth-century American skyscraper—the Woolworth or General Electric Buildings, for example, or River House—had modest success, as witness 15 Central Park West.

For our 9/11 issue, Daniel Pipes wrote the first of our many articles on Islam, as we struggled to understand that even though all Muslims are not terrorists like those who attacked us, Muslim terrorism is nevertheless a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of Islam, not an utter distortion of it, and that a troublingly large number of Muslims approve of jihadi violence. That first article cautioned that, while safeguarding the rights of peaceful Muslim-Americans, the United States should carefully scrutinize Muslim would-be immigrants and bar radicals. Since then, Muslim immigrants to America have increased in number, from an estimated 1.7 million to 2.7 million, and New York Muslims have become the largest group on the National Counterterrorism Center’s watch list. City Journal began to pay close attention not just to Islamic immigration but to immigration in general.

By 9/11, New York had the resilience to bounce back more quickly than anyone expected from so grievous a blow, and we at City Journal saw that the problems facing Gotham had become as much external as internal—and our focus shifted. Now we had to be interested in the War on Terror. Our concern with the power of culture made us one of the first conservative magazines to express skepticism when the war in Iraq, which we supported, began to shift from fighting the Muslim terrorism that had attacked our city to nation-building and the “freedom agenda.” You cannot make democratic republicans, faithful to the rule of law, out of tribal people, with tribal loyalties and hatreds—not easily, certainly, and not in a single lifetime—wrote anthropologist Stanley Kurtz in our pages. Nor did American democracy spring up as the magical production of nature, wrote George Will in City Journal. It wasn’t an expression of “the universal values of the human spirit.” Americans rightly believe that their “political arrangements, and the values and understandings of the human condition that those arrangements reflect, are superior to most other nations’ arrangements.” Our “attachment to freedom,” wrote George, is “the product of complex and protracted acculturation by institutions and social mores that have evolved over centuries—the centuries that it took to prepare the stony social ground for seeds of democracy.” And it required, as well, the alchemy of such great men as George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall—men who also do not spring up by magic or by nature but grow, when they do grow, out of a particular culture, one very different from Iraq’s.

This reality led us to examine even more closely our own culture, as articles by Brian Anderson, Victor Davis Hanson, Stefan Kanfer, Ben Plotinsky, Harry Stein, and indeed all our writers anatomized how old values, old popular music, old movies, old comic strips, and old kids’ books had made our culture and how the tone of political discourse, the new TV shows, the new communications technologies, the new mating rituals—and the curriculum, speech codes, and admissions policies of universities—were remaking it, for good and ill.

Part of that new technology remade us. Stefan Kanfer and my wife had been urging me to set up a City Journal website, and I asked Brian Anderson, then my deputy and now my excellent successor, to use his much better cyber-sense than mine to go ahead and do it. My only stipulation was that, since the Manhattan Institute’s trustees were paying us to disseminate our shared worldview as widely as possible, the website must be free, without any advertising or distracting clutter. Brian succeeded brilliantly. By the time I turned over the editorship to him at the end of 2006, our website attracted almost 1 million readers yearly across the Anglosphere, exceeding our print readership by orders of magnitude. And now, amazingly, we have topped that annual number many times over—and we’re still growing.

In the old media, I had been reading with instant admiration the freelance New York Post opinion pieces of an irreverent, insightful financial analyst named Nicole Gelinas, whom I rushed to hire in 2005. I’d never met anyone who learned so quickly—skills, information, ideas—than this soft-spoken, independent-minded, and sharply observant young woman. From the start, she poured out a torrent of articles and Internet pieces not only on such intricate financial issues as Social Security reform, union-led shareholder activism, and the 2008 financial crisis, but on anything her insatiable curiosity lighted on, from charter schools to infrastructure to the rebuilding of hurricane-devastated New Orleans. And the torrent hasn’t stopped yet.

I hope that when Brian reports to you five years from now, when our 30th anniversary arrives, that the technological power that so vastly extended our magazine’s reach—and that, in Uber, for example, has weakened what seemed an ironclad city-protected cartel—will have abolished still more of New York government’s myriad conspiracies against the public, always with deeply concerned support and help from City Journal’s richly talented and public-spirited team of writers.