According to screenwriter and acclaimed novelist Richard Price, Mark Jacobson is drawn to New York “streets and those who rose from them: the outlaws, the visionaries, the hustlers, and the oddballs.” But Tuesday, Mr. Jacobson put it more succinctly: “In my career, I mostly try to find these really weird and interesting people.” He read at Barnes & Noble Park Slope from his anthology “Teenage Hipster in the Modern World – From the Birth of Punk to the Land of Bush: Thirty Years of Apocalyptic Journalism” (Grove/Atlantic). It contains his magazine articles from the Village Voice, New York, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere.

In the foreword, Mr. Price likens Mr. Jacobson to a judo master who can force personalities to fall of their own weight yet still capture their humanity. In an incident described in one of his articles, actual judo would have come in handy (after a blaxploitation film legend punched Mr. Jacobson in the groin).

Mr. Jacobson cited three characteristics that make a great journalistic subject: a sociopath who is self-destructive and likes to talk a lot. He recalled the line from “The Maltese Falcon”: “I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”

Hucksters and con artists he meets evoke the lost world of Joseph Mitchell or A.J. Liebling, but Mr. Jacobson’s world is not 1940s black-and-white but 1970s Kodachrome, processed through the digital age. New York’s changes over three decades emerge from punk rock’s heyday in the once-gritty East Village to a more cleanly scrubbed New York at the Republican National Convention last summer.

Mr. Jacobson entertained the audience with stories about Harold Conrad, “newspaperman, superflack, friend to bard and bozo, custodian of a bygone age.” This “Zelig of hipness” had done and seen everything, including introducing Muhammad Ali to the Beatles.

He next recounted stories from a New York magazine article that will be the basis of a film by Terry George, who directed “Hotel Rwanda.” It revolved around Frank Lucas, a rich drug dealer who once smuggled heroin in the coffin of a dead American soldier. Mr. Lucas even bribed a general to smuggle drugs aboard the plane of Henry Kissinger on his way back from a goodwill mission in Bangladesh. “I mean, who the f- is gonna search Henry Kissinger’s plane?” Mr. Lucas boasted.

“Another one of these ‘only in New York’ kind of guys,” Mr. Jacobson said, is A.J. Weberman. He left college in 1968 to compile the first computer generated Bob Dylan concordance but remains “most famous for going through Bob’s garbage.” The famous folksinger retaliated by pummeling Mr. Weberman on Elizabeth Street. Bowery bums came over, asking Mr. Weberman: “How much he get?’ Like I got rolled, or something.”

Mr. Jacobson next turned to the topic of travel abroad. “Occasionally, I get to go away,” he said, describing opportunities journalism allows for seeing the world. An audience member, John Kalish, once produced a radio segment about Mr. Jacobson’s earlier book on circumnavigating the globe. But this time, Mr. Jacobson chronicled traveling 7,500 miles for a one-hour interview with the Dalai Lama.

“Jockupson!” he described how the exiled Tibetan leader greeted him as if the author “just happened to be in the neighborhood and [was] thoughtful enough to stop by during this particularly severe monsoon season to see how he was doing.” Mr. Jacobson had brought along a replica of a Brooklyn Dodgers cap. “B! … B is for Buddhist!” the Dalai Lama exclaimed, as though on “Sesame Street.” His Holiness drew a parallel to the home team who dashed New York’s dreams by moving from Flatbush to Los Angeles. “These Dodgers,” the Dalai Lama said, “they are exiles from their native country.”

Exiles and outsiders appear as themes in some Mr. Jacobson’s articles, including those about his family. He recounts returning to his childhood home in Queens after his father died and his mother was trying to sell the house. Syrians, Koreans, Chileans, and Thai people walked through rooms his father painted and “sat on the sofa long forbidden to me and my sister.”

An article on summer camp in 1958 captures his loneliness on the bus “as the oil tanks of Secaucus gave way to the low brick buildings of New Brunswick and finally to the rolling hills of Middlesex County.” At camp, the young Mr. Jacobson discovered the wonders of “bug juice and mystery meat” and morning and afternoon “general swims.”

Mr. Jacobson never loses his sense of humor, all while tracing contours of larger social processes. Summer camp involves his Jewish parents’ desire to fit in and assimilate. Selling the house illuminates city immigration. Scenes with neighborhood junkies lead to descriptions of gentrification; pieces on the Reverend Al Sharpton or astrologers show how spiritual means can net material gain.

At the close of the reading, the author leaned into the microphone to announce his home address and say he and his wife were having people over to their house. That moment, as though street gaslights flickered, Brooklyn’s Park Slope returned to a small neighborhood: Had the Brooklyn Dodgers returned?

Guests poured in just before 9. Silence came over the room when President Bush appeared on television to announce his Supreme Court nomination. But lively conversation returned over pasta and lemonade and other food. Seen at the reading or party were Michael Daly of the New York Daily News; poet Chris Butters; cinematographer Ben Wolf; and writers Bruce Stutz, whose forthcoming book “Chasing Spring” (Scribner) describes a trip from Texas to Alaska, and David Grand.

What Mr. Jacobson writes of one Runyonesque character might be said of his book: “He was a conduit to another more vibrant, infinitely more colorful age.”