S. Porter is a Boston University-educated former political aide who worked in the administration of two New York governors before becoming the unlikely owner of a Brooklyn nightclub. For seventeen years, he ran The Lab, a hip-hop club in Bedford-Stuyvesant housed in his family’s old warehouse, navigating hustlers, cops, promoters, ravers, and neighborhood politics while trying to keep the doors open and the peace intact.

His debut memoir, The Lab: An Outsider’s Adventure Inside the World of Hip-Hop, blends gritty, behind-the-scenes stories with the perspective of an Upper West Side kid learning how to survive-and belong-in the middle of one of Brooklyn’s most electric underground scenes.