As part of SXSW 2023, The Atlantic is announcing a full day of interviews on Sunday, March 12, that will bring elected officials and other national leaders to the festival for conversations about the future of democracy. The official SXSW sessions, produced by The Atlantic and led by its journalists, will focus on the state of democracy in America and around the world; the evolution of the nation’s political parties; challenges to voting rights and the urgent need to ensure free and fair elections; civil rights; and the state of immigration.

In recent years, The Atlantic has led the way in covering the fragility of democracy at home and globally, the rise of authoritarianism and extremism, and the related crises of disinformation and misinformation. During the day’s events, The Atlantic will also discuss its April 2023 cover story by executive editor Adrienne LaFrance; and preview a forthcoming podcast, Holy Week (listen to the trailer here), hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II, exploring the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and how those seven days in America diverted the course of a social revolution. Both LaFrance and Newkirk are also leading sessions at SXSW.

Additionally, on March 8, staff writer Adam Harris is moderating a SXSW EDU keynote interview with Ruth Simmons, president at Prairie View A&M University. Staff writer John Hendrickson will talk about the making of his memoir, Life on Delay, on March 11.

The Atlantic’s SXSW speakers and schedule for March 12 are detailed below and here. All sessions will take place at The Line Hotel Austin (2nd Floor), and require a SXSW badge to attend.

Sunday, March 12, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The Line Hotel Austin

10 a.m.: The Future of Global Democracy
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Emerita of the U.S. House of Representatives
with Adrienne LaFrance, Executive Editor, The Atlantic

11:30 a.m.: The Future of Elections
Francisco Aguilar, Secretary of State, Nevada
Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State, Georgia
with Andrea Valdez, Managing Editor, The Atlantic

1 p.m.: The Future of American Conservatism
Chris Sununu, Governor of New Hampshire
with Evan Smith, Senior Advisor, Emerson Collective

2:30 p.m.: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement
Hasan Jeffries, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University
Janai Nelson, President and Director-Counsel, Legal Defense Fund (LDF)
with Vann R. Newkirk II, Senior Editor, The Atlantic

4 p.m.: The Future of Immigration Reform
Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas
Oscar Leeser, Mayor of El Paso, Texas
with Caitlin Dickerson, Staff Writer, The Atlantic

Please reach out to Anna Bross with any questions. If you’ll be in Austin, we hope to see you at The Atlantic’s events on March 12.

Press Contact:
Anna Bross, SVP of Communications
anna@theatlantic.com

Never before have humans lived such a disembodied existence. Many of us spend our days hunched over the computer, ignoring our body until our limbs go numb. As of 2011, only about 20 percent of Americans had physically active jobs, according to the journal PLOS One—down from half in 1960. Even when we work out, it tends to be compartmentalized: a YouTube yoga session between Zoom calls, a quick run and then back to the desk. Rather than reconnecting with our body, we try to optimize the brief time we’ve allotted to exercise, tracking our pace on Strava or mimicking a pixelated teacher we’ve never met. These bursts of activity barely cut into our screen time, let alone counteract the sedentary conditions of modern life.

Women are especially prone to feeling detached from our bodies. We learn early on to see ourselves from the outside, to always think about how we appear. In a 2019 BuzzFeed essay called “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating,” the Millennial writer Emmeline Clein described a trend she had noticed among popular female characters—on TV shows such as Fleabag, in the viral short story “Cat Person”—as well as among her own friends: They cope with the pain and indignity of modern womanhood, of Brazilian waxing and “certain types of sex” (the kind that a woman “does not want to be having”) by simply shutting down, sometimes with the help of benzodiazepines or booze. “Aspirationally dead inside feminism,” Clein called it.

On a certain level, I relate to these young women, to their insecurities and struggle to find their place in the world. I enjoy watching and reading about them. But on another level, I do not relate to them at all. I have a different connection to my physicality—one that might be relevant to anyone seeking a new way to move through the world. I grew up studying ballet, which meant that I was taught to focus not just on how my body looked but on how it felt: how my chest felt open if I imagined teacups on my shoulders, how my legs felt light if I lifted from underneath. How every nerve and joint and tendon felt alert, alive.

[Read: The secret of how we move]

So when I read about Clein learning to decouple her “consciousness from [her] immediate bodily and emotional experience,” about Margot from “Cat Person” imagining herself from above during sex, about the novelist Sally Rooney fantasizing about being “a brain in a jar,” I feel blissfully exempt from the detachment that, for many of my real and fictional peers, is apparently the norm.

I can’t remember ever being shown a two-dimensional anatomical diagram at ballet. The whole process of becoming a dancer was deeply embodied: We learned not by sitting and reading but by imitating, trying, falling, adjusting, trying again. We understood the body through luscious metaphors: I didn’t know what muscles were involved when I held my foot in front of me in the air, but I knew that my leg should be so steady that I could balance a glass of water on my heel. When I lifted my arms, I didn’t think about flexing my biceps; I thought about how my fingertips would feel if they were brushing against a velvet curtain.

Dancers “have brains in their toes,” wrote Toni Bentley, a veteran of the New York City Ballet. I used to experience this feeling all the time. I would lie in bed or sit in class, my legs folded into a hard plastic chair, and sense my muscles brimming with potential energy; I felt powerful, knowing what my body could do. I felt like my body was different.

As it turns out, it probably was—not just in the way my muscles were built but in the way my brain was shaped. A study by doctors at Imperial College London found that the area of the cerebellum that receives signals from the “balance organs” in the inner ear and converts them into feelings of dizziness was visibly smaller in ballet dancers. Through years of practicing turns, the dancers had trained their brain to suppress the sensation of dizziness.

In 2003, the anthropologist Caroline Potter, hoping to learn how dancers experience their body, enrolled in an elite dance academy in London. She spent her days training and her nights socializing with her classmates (and slyly taking notes on their conversations). Dancers, she came to believe, occupy a “shifted sensorium” featuring an “interconnected, bodily-grounded sense of cultural identity.” They develop a heightened awareness of gravity, of the weight of the air and the resistance of the ground.

I remember being told to feel the floor, use the floor, strike the floor; that the floor was my friend; to piqué like the ground was hot and dégagé like I was moving through water. When I struggled to balance en pointe, my teachers repeated the famed choreographer George Balanchine’s advice: “Just hold on to the air.” We thought continuously about the relationship of our bodies to space and to one another. We learned to dance in straight lines without turning our head; to sense one another’s locations from the sound of our breath or our feet on the floor. We strove to keep our hips “square,” according to an imagined geometry, and our shoulders “open” or “closed.”

Of course, ballet wasn’t all bliss. We struggled daily with the pain of twisting our bodies into unnatural shapes, of strapping our feet into corsetlike pointe shoes and then jumping up and down on the tip of the toe. Yet even the pain helped enhance our awareness of the body, incessantly reminding us that we had a physical form.

As an adult, I’ve experimented with all kinds of exercise: hot yoga, half-marathons. But nothing quite matches the full engagement that ballet classes require. When I run in the park or work out at the gym, I distract myself with podcasts or pounding music; I check my GPS or the tracker on the machine, calculating my pace and counting down the minutes until I can stop. It’s medicine, a chore, a means to an end. When I make time for a ballet class, though, I remember how impossible it is to participate without being fully present: watching the teacher, listening to the music, feeling the floor.

It’s no coincidence that ballet’s imprint is all over the history of modern fitness. For decades, when exercise was seen as unfeminine—when perspiring in public was considered unladylike—ballet was the exception: a vigorous workout that would not turn women into men. Bonnie Prudden, who opened one of America’s earliest fitness centers in 1954, first discovered the magic of moving her body at the age of 4, when her parents enrolled her in a ballet class. The dancer Lotte Berk opened the world’s first barre studio in an old London hat factory in 1959, offering classes that combined ballet- and yoga-inspired stretches, lunges, and lifts. (Barre remains one of the most popular workouts today, with more than 850 studios in the United States and hundreds of thousands of devotees.) Even Jane Fonda, who in the 1980s introduced millions of women to the joys of Jazzercise, aerobics, and brightly colored leg warmers, considered ballet an integral part of her routine: From her early 20s on, she sought out ballet studios all over the country, wherever her acting jobs took her.

Striving for and achieving goals in dance, as in sports, can help women appreciate their body as more than just an aesthetic object. As Potter, the anthropologist, carried on with her training, she noticed profound changes not only in the way she danced but in the way she took up space outside the studio. She no longer perceived the world through the five senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Her world, she wrote in the journal Ethnos, came to revolve instead around “a dynamic sense of constantly shifting one’s body in space and time.”

You don’t need to be a professional dancer to have an experience like Potter’s. On a 2021 episode of the therapist Esther Perel’s podcast How’s Work?, a successful model explained how, from the moment she was scouted at 15, she was subjected to a constant barrage of objectifying eyes and hands—from the agents and designers who appraised her looks, the hairdressers and stylists who treated her like a hanger. She had to find a way to deal with her discomfort on set—painful shoes, revealing clothes, extreme heat and cold—so she taught herself to vacate her surroundings and imagine that she was off “somewhere in a cloud.” She got so good at this trick that she ended up unable to feel much at all—even pleasure. But dance classes, the anonymous model said, led her back to herself, helped her rekindle her relationship with her body and her senses—with, as Perel put it, “movement that is not about performance but about experience.”

When I crave that kind of movement, I go to the same New York ballet studio where I once trained. Instead of signing up for an advanced class, I go to the beginner one. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and cringe: I know how this step is supposed to look, and I’m momentarily surprised to see that I no longer have the ability to do it. I feel self-conscious when the teacher corrects me, even a bit defensive: I know I’m doing it wrong. The teacher doesn’t have to tell me.

But then I look away from my reflection and think of the second half of Balanchine’s dictum: “Don’t think, dear. Just do.” I arrange my feet in first position, and I feel at home in my body.

This essay has been adapted from Alice Robb’s new book, Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet.

Every Saturday morning when I was in high school, I would take two buses across Brooklyn to my cousin’s exterminating business, where I worked the front desk. I dispatched crews to dismantle hornet nests, helped identify mysterious bugs in Ziploc bags, and fielded panicked calls about animals—raccoons, squirrels, mice, and, of course, rats—being where animals shouldn’t be. Back in that storefront in Flatlands, I believed that pests of all kinds could be controlled. Little did I know that across the city, tunneling below my feet, one of those creatures was—litter by litter—besting man.

[Xochitl Gonzalez: Mayor Adams, we need a rat czar]

About a month ago I Zoomed with Robert Corrigan, a fellow Brooklynite and one of the world’s foremost rodentologists. When I told him about my exterminating experience, he said, with some delight, “So, you speak the language.” A slight man with graying hair and an accent that would have been at home at my family’s dinner table, he has been studying rodents since he took a job as an exterminator, installing baits in the city sewer system, to put himself through college back in the late 1970s.

For a decade, Corrigan has been sending out surveys to pest-control professionals around the city, asking questions such as “Have rat calls gone up each year?” Corrigan also looks at rat sightings and the number of restaurants failing health inspections. “When I put that trifecta together,” he told me, “there are more rats. The question we don’t know is: Is it 20 percent more rats? Is it 36.6 percent? Empirically, we’ll probably never get that answer.”

What we do know is that recorded rat sightings in New York are at an all-time high. In December, Mayor Eric Adams posted, with great fanfare, a job announcement: The city was looking for a “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty” candidate to take on the newly restored position of rat czar. (A brilliant idea, I thought; I had, after all, suggested that he take such action in an open letter.) Yet, three months later, the position still hasn’t been filled. A few weeks ago, the mayor himself had to pay a $300 fine for failing to control rats at a rowhouse he rents out to tenants.

The coronavirus pandemic certainly brought more rats into our peripheral vision. Rats long dwelled in or near the city’s subways, where sloppy commuters and takeout restaurants provided a reliable food source. Empty offices and barren subways forced rats aboveground to forage by our dining sheds.

But Rattus norvegicus, the brown rat, has been in America for about 250 years. And although dining sheds may be the easiest of scapegoats, they are the least of our problems. Over the past half century, changes in climate and the way New Yorkers dispose of their trash have given the rat population an unprecedented opportunity to boom, an increase unabated by man and undeterred by politics.

Rats are gross, but they can also be dangerous. In New York City, cases of leptospirosis—a bacterial infection that can lead to kidney and liver failure and that is predominantly transmitted in rat urine—are on the rise. In 2021, 14 New Yorkers were diagnosed with the disease and one died of it—far more cases than in any previous year. In November, researchers discovered several COVID-19 variants in sewer rats, opening up a whole new range of concerns. Studies have found that people living near infestations are more likely to report feeling anxious or depressed.

I’m somewhat familiar with this phenomenon. In 2021, a dream of mine came true. I was able to buy an apartment. Not just any apartment, a garden apartment. I tricked out the tiny backyard: tables, chairs, lounge furniture, sun umbrellas, daffodils, roses, hydrangea bushes—everything that would make someone want to spend every possible moment that they could outside, which was exactly what I planned to do. Until I met my neighbors. A lot of them.

My apartment is on the border of Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, an area deep in the throes of gentrification and not too far from the mayor’s rental property. No sooner had I gotten the yard sorted out than a construction project broke ground next door. This drove the rats to the surface, where they turned my backyard paradise into a subway platform. I prohibited trash in the yard; I stomped burrows; I sprayed mint oil; I called exterminators. Nothing worked. It turned out that my whole neighborhood was besieged. Rats were nesting in car engines, popping up in toilets, grazing legs at outdoor eateries. One day, I attempted to toss a doggy bag into a trash can and made hand-to-paw contact.

I felt fairly certain that I’d never seen so many rats in New York. But were there more of them or was I just seeing more of them? The answer turned out to be a little bit of both.

Illustration by Doug Chayka, Source: Getty

No one can say with certainty exactly when the brown rat first came to America from Europe, but almost everyone agrees that it was sometime early in the American Revolution and that the rats’ first landing place was likely New York City. Even if, like the animals in Noah’s Ark, only one male and one female rat boarded a ship in England, they and their descendants could have numbered in the dozens by the end of a four-month transatlantic crossing and, under ideal conditions, 15,000 by the end of a calendar year. Rats are randy, having sex as many as 20 times a day. They have about six litters a year, and each litter includes an average of eight to 10 but sometimes as many as 20 rat babies, which will live for about two years.

Rats quickly became woven into the infrastructure of the city. Rats are tunnel-shaped for a reason: They are born to burrow. Sewage pipes, electric pipes, broken laterals from the earliest days of indoor plumbing provide the perfect habitat. “We have built, down below our feet, coming right out of our houses, all these rat apartment buildings,” Corrigan told me. “But we can’t see ’em and nobody pays attention to ’em.”

The transformation from urban menace to public enemy took place in the 19th century. The first rat attack I could find on record took place in 1860, when a baby was eaten in Bellevue Hospital. Her mother, an Irish serving girl, gave birth unattended in the night, and the child may already have been dead; the mother remembered “a cat or rat on the bed, but could not tell which.” The women’s wing of the hospital, a reporter for The New York Times explained, was built on land reclaimed from the marshes of the East River, on top of rock and rubbish and sewers, “and by these sewers the vile, gregarious, amphibious and nomade vermin, swimming in crowds from place to place, have been induced to stop.” In the female wards, the reporter wrote, “the rats in the night-time run about in swarms … This sounds like fiction, but we are assured that it is true. Myriads swarm at the water side after nightfall, crawl through the sewers and enter the houses. In a bath-tub, last Monday night, forty rats were caught.”

[Read: Rats have not changed. We have.]

After 1893, when electric trolleys replaced horse-drawn ones, rats had to leave the stables where they’d snacked on grain and turned more often toward human residences. They eventually flocked to Rikers Island, which the city had begun using as a dump in 1894. Later, a prison farm opened on the island. Rats devoured the prison farm’s vegetables, pigs, and other livestock. At one time, more than 1 million rats were estimated to be living on the island. By the 1930s, the rats had begun to swim to other parts of New York, including the suburbs of Long Island, and serious exterminating measures were finally undertaken.

Still, the rat problems of yore were mild in comparison with those of modern times. The fear of rats loomed larger than the populace itself. Despite the myth that there was a “rat for every New Yorker,” one study put the real number at about 250,000 by 1950. By 2014, that had grown to about 2 million—an 800 percent boom in fewer than 65 years. (But humans are still winning, at 8.5 million residents.)

The rat population has not only grown exponentially; it has also spread. In 1974, another rat survey of New York found that only about 11 percent of the city was rat-afflicted. Today, Corrigan puts the estimate at 80 to 90 percent.

Global warming isn’t helping. This winter, New York City broke the record for the most days without a snowfall. This January was the second warmest on record. A degree or two of difference may not sound like much, but it goes back to food and opportunities to forage.

Rats do not hibernate, but they do slow down their reproductive cycles. Cold, frozen streets have fewer people, and less food. “It’s not a great time to have a healthy family,” Corrigan told me. “They have to shut it down. And the research is very strong on that. So let’s say we have a global decade of warmth. Now let’s just say we take this animal who produces logarithmically as it gets going, and it squeaks out one more litter. We’re talking a lot more animals. But it’s so gradual. It’s so insidious. Who’s going to be paying attention to that kind of thing?”

Perhaps the most pivotal development in the booming rat populace can be found in your own kitchen: the plastic trash bag. Plastic bags were invented in 1950 and became widespread in the late ’60s. Before then, residents used metal trash cans and restaurants used dumpsters. Today, Corrigan told me, we put everything in these bags, “from dog manure to half-eaten lunches to, at night, big, giant, 60-pound bags of food waste that the restaurants put on the curb waiting for several hours to be picked up.” Considering that a rat’s teeth are strong enough to cut through copper wire, a measly little trash bag is no match for their hungry little mouth.

In October, Adams held a splashy press conference to declare a “war on rats.” The major initiative announced at this event was a new rule restricting the hours when garbage from large apartment buildings can be put out on the street to after 8 p.m. on the night before garbage pickup. But rats are both nocturnal and adaptable. As the exterminator Matt Deodato told Curbed, “You throw your garbage out at midnight, they’ll just come out at 12. It’s almost like ringing a dinner bell.”

The city’s Department of Sanitation has been piloting a program around containerization (or the return of garbage pails). But Deodato thinks it’s never going to happen. “I do buildings in Manhattan,” he said. “The amount of garbage pails you’d need for buildings of this size would take up half a block. And these aren’t cheap containers; they can run $200, $300 each. Imagine if you’re robbed. It could be tens of thousands a year on top of everything else these buildings pay for.”

There is, out there, a land without rats. Well, mostly without rats. Alberta, Canada, boasts of being a rat-free zone, which, it explains on its official rat-control webpage, “means there is no resident population of rats and they are not allowed to establish themselves. It does not mean we never get rats.” In contemplating the scope of work awaiting New York’s incoming rat czar, I was curious to learn how Alberta did it.

Rats emerged in nearby Saskatchewan in the 1920s, putting Alberta on its toes. “By the time they hit our border,” the then-head of Alberta’s Rat Control Program told the BBC in 2019, “we had a department of health and a department of agriculture, and we had a system ready that we could actually do something.” This currently includes a “border patrol” area, a force of pest-control officers to police it, and a poisoning program to deal with any reported infestations.

But Corrigan quickly dashed any hopes I had that New York could learn a thing or two from Alberta, explaining that the two locales are “apples and oranges.” The brutal winters and low population density of Alberta give it a natural advantage.

So where does this leave us? I called for the rat czar, but what can any one individual do after decade upon decade of infestation? Is it even possible to wrangle the rat?

Vigilance and anti-rat enthusiasm aren’t enough, which is a shame because New York has these in spades. For nearly as long as we’ve had rats in New York, we’ve had people who wanted to kill them. John James Audubon shot rats on the waterfront in the late 1830s. A midtown florist named Peter Drapp made headlines in 1897 when he attempted to harpoon a rat with scissors and hit a policeman instead. People have gone after rats with baseball bats. The infestation on Rikers Island? Before using poisoned bait, the city considered populating the island with snakes.

The city’s first “rat specialist” was appointed in 1949. In 1979, a woman was attacked by rats in an alley in Lower Manhattan. The head of the city’s pest-control bureau was at a rat convention upstate when the incident occurred; Mayor Ed Koch made a point of summoning him back.

Rudy Giuliani’s administration had no shortage of rats or political theatrics about tackling them. In 1997, after dealing with the squeegee men and the nightlife, the mayor declared his own War on Rats, established the Interagency Rodent Extermination Task Force, and gave it $8 million in annual funding. But in 2000, after a massive outbreak in the Lower East Side, residents protested at City Hall. “One rat, two rats, three rats, four. Everywhere I look, there’s more and more,” the crowd chanted. That same year, Giuliani appointed the first rat czar—the famous civil servant Joseph Lhota. Giuliani’s task force was expanded under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also created a three-day “rodent academy” to give public employees a crash course on infestation basics.

Though the rat problem keeps getting bigger, the rat budget hasn’t been so consistent. Bloomberg was rather famously a rat-problem denier. In 2003, a Queens firehouse was overtaken by rats, part of a rodent uprising that many blamed on Bloomberg for reducing the frequency of outer-borough garbage pickups. In 2011, an uptick in rodent complaints revealed short staffing in the city’s pest-control force.

Mayor Bill de Blasio committed $2.9 million to anti-rat efforts in 2015, and then another $32 million in 2017. But when COVID hit in 2020, the city went on a “wartime budget,” slashing trash collection on public litter baskets from 736 pickups a week to 272. (An outcry from the private sector forced de Blasio to reverse the decision.) For all of the current administration’s tough talk, outside of funding the containerization pilot program and a $14.5 million investment to “Get Stuff Clean,” the biggest direct investment in rat control is the future czar’s salary: up to $170,000.

Some citizens are taking the scourge into their own hands. Though R.A.T.S., a gang of independent, pro bono rat hunters on the Lower East Side, has been in existence since 1995, the Bat-Signal (Rat-Signal?) for its services has been sounding off more than ever these days. Membership includes both lay New Yorkers with a passion for taking down rats and animal-related professionals, such as vet techs. Their hunts—which usually rely on a pack of half a dozen dogs—take place at night, mostly on Fridays, and have had varying degrees of success. R.A.T.S. has achieved some notoriety on YouTube, and the members, and their dogs, enjoy a kind of local celebrity.

Of course, not everyone is a dog person. After rats were reported at Adams’s rental property, Curtis Sliwa, the public provocateur and Adams’s Republican rival in the last election, showed up outside the rowhouse, offering the services of two of his many cats. “It’s time that we revert to the best measure that’s ever worked. And that’s cats,” he told reporters.

Sheila Massey, a retiree in Washington Heights, started Hard Hat Cats several years ago with this same idea in mind. The program places spayed and neutered “cat colonies” with large businesses prone to rats. Although my colleague Sarah Zhang convincingly disputed the effectiveness of cats as a form of rodent control in this magazine, Massey begs to differ. While they may not be effective rodent murderers, they are, she says, very good deterrents.

But why pit animal against animal when there is alcohol? The more innovative solution on the rat-fighting scene has been the Rat Trap, which debuted before the pandemic and was beta tested in Brooklyn while Adams was borough president. The contraption lures rats up a ladder with bait, then drops and drowns them in an alcoholic pool. But, in addition to facing complaints from animal-rights activists, the high-tech traps are expensive. I know; I looked into one for my own backyard. It was $250 a month to rent, plus service fees.

In Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, Robert Sullivan recounts a 1969 news story about a parade of rats crossing Park Avenue to dine in the posh trash cans of the Delmonico’s Hotel at 502 Park Avenue. The rats were described as “refugees from Harlem.” But rats, studies show, are hyperlocal creatures, rarely venturing more than 660 feet from their home turf. Harlem’s rats were likely still in Harlem. These were Park Avenue rats. They just weren’t, in the residents’ estimation, meant to be there.

Living among rats comes with a stigma, and presumptions about cleanliness and hygiene rooted in racism and classism. There were, in 1969, huge rat infestations in predominantly Black Harlem, the Puerto Rican Lower East Side, and sections of Brooklyn where more Black and brown people lived. Such outbreaks cemented the public perception that rats were not just a problem for New York’s poor people of color but a problem caused by these communities. Like many by-products of racism, this belief ignored systemic explanations, such as the infrequency of trash pickups in these same neighborhoods, as well as the proliferation of slumlords who failed to properly maintain their buildings’ garbage and infrastructure.

Rats are still not distributed evenly across New York. A 2014 study found that areas of the city with less educated residents and older apartment units were associated with higher rat density. Though the temperature on the rat heat map has turned up citywide, the hottest spots remain largely consistent.

It’s possible that the people have changed more than the rats. As New York has gotten wealthier and whiter, perhaps the biggest difference between our current rat war and those of the past is that although rats are now everywhere, there are fewer and fewer places New Yorkers think they should be.

When I suggested hiring a rat czar, I saw rats as the least controversial, most politically expedient way for the mayor—and New Yorkers—to get a much-needed win. The rats are the window dressing on a stage set of blight. The streets of post-pandemic New York are full of unhoused people, open drug consumption, empty offices, and, yes, rats. The first three are complex, potentially intractable challenges. The rats seemed easier. I see things differently now.

[Read: Rats have learned to hide and seek. We have learned way more.]

History shows that rats arise, the public cries out, and a mayor declares war and sends an army of civil servants armed with press releases to wage a public-relations battle on what is actually a biological war.

When I typed this in February, a rat was outside my window. After an especially warm December and January, this critter had likely sired an extra litter of pups—up to 40 bonus rats living on my block, under my house, in old pipes that existed long before the house did. No snake or cat or dog or vigilante or politician can make a real dent in this issue, because this is a matter not of politics but of science.

Rats’ purpose on this planet is to procreate; they are in the business of creating more rats. Rats are what is known as an R-selected species: They breed so much because they die so fast. Last night, Tom the Rat might have gotten hit by a car, Rosco the Rat just met his demise chewing an electrical wire, Calvin the Rat keeled over after ingesting poison—no matter! As long as they left behind pregnant female rats, they led good, productive rat lives.

Short of a nuclear winter, or going back in time before those Revolutionary rats landed in the new world, is there any way to defeat the rat?

I asked Corrigan what it would really take. To reduce the population enough that it wouldn’t just bounce back, he said, we’d have to eradicate 96 percent of all rats in the city. “If we could get 90, I would be ecstatic. Like, Oh my God, this is fabulous,” he said. But at this point, even if we undertook the most holistic anti-rat campaign in history—clearing streets of trash bags, mass poisoning efforts, working with the private sector on rat prevention—Corrigan thinks it’s probably too late. We could maybe, best-case scenario, get rid of 50 to 60 percent of the rats, but that just wouldn’t be enough, he said. We’d be missing the target “by forever. We’re missing it at 40 percent on an R-selected species? Forget about it!”

The link to the rat-czar job posting was taken down some time ago because so many people were sending in their résumé. This week, Kate Smart, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, told me that the hiring process is ongoing as the administration works through “nearly 900 applications.” As long as the post remains vacant, I thought perhaps an amendment might be made to the job requirements: Rat Czar wanted; must be highly motivated, somewhat bloodthirsty, and naively optimistic.

Rock Creek Park was still dark when the killer emerged from his den, a flame-colored phantom on black-stocking legs. With exquisite night vision, the fox surveyed the contours of the park’s forests and the curves in its stream. At the woodland’s edge, he could see the glow of Washington, D.C. He pressed his paws into exposed soil, indenting it with diamond-shaped prints that grew farther apart as he accelerated into a trot.

That it was early May indicates that the fox was likely a new father, a detail that has gone unmentioned in published accounts of his crime. The cold months are cuffing season for foxes. After mating, pairs move in together to raise kits, usually by expanding a burrow abandoned by a woodchuck or skunk. In springtime, the hills of Rock Creek Park are alive with these renovated dens. When litters are born, in late March or early April, the kits remain in their depths for nine days, curled up nose to tail, eyes closed serenely. Only recently had the park’s kits ventured toward the mouths of their little caves, to flop around with their siblings and play tug-of-war with bones while awaiting their fathers’ return from the hunt.

It’s not clear whether the fox had his final destination in mind as he moved through dense stands of sugar maples, oaks, and beeches under the light of a crescent moon. With his swiveling ears, he would have heard cars whooshing down nearby streets. This noise had quieted during the pandemic, when D.C.’s mayor closed restaurants and human life drained out of downtown. But by last May, the city was again thrumming with traffic, increasing the appeal of hunting targets within the park, especially its ultimate garden of forbidden treats: the Smithsonian National Zoo.

Spread across the zoo’s grounds are more than 100 enclosures where bamboo-bingeing pandas, neon tree frogs, and all manner of other creatures are held for the viewing pleasure of visitors. These enclosures have been refreshed since the zoo opened in 1891: Steel bars have been replaced with moats, stone walls, and other naturalistic barriers to deemphasize the aesthetics of the cage. Changes like these have proved soothing for visitors, but the animals remain confined in spaces that constitute a tiny fraction of their natural range.

Senior staff at the zoo told me that they try to respect the layered local ecology, which includes the larger park and the surrounding concrete expanse of the capital. The zoo’s perimeter fence may be 8 feet tall and topped by barbed wire, but that’s mainly to keep people out at night. “Guests do stupid stuff,” one staffer told me. “If you’re not careful, someone will come in and smack an elephant on the rear end and run.” Otherwise, the borders between the forest and zoo are as porous as possible, so as not to interrupt the wildlife corridors that crisscross D.C. like Metro lines.

If officers from the zoo’s dedicated federal law-enforcement agency spot a white-tailed deer on a control-room monitor, they do not express alarm. Raccoons that fish ice cream from the trash are likewise tolerated. One curator told me that juvenile bears have recently been spotted in Rock Creek Park and that she wouldn’t be surprised if she soon sees one strolling down the zoo’s central path. Even foxes are welcome to roam the grounds, subject to certain limitations, which are strictly enforced: If, for instance, a fox indulges his darker vulpine impulses and hunts the zoo’s animals, he will swiftly be brought to justice.

The fox seems to have entered the zoo by slinking up a wooded hillside on its southern edge, his white-tipped tail bobbing behind him like a wind sock. We don’t know exactly what lured him to the level path that runs along the back of the Bird House, although given that he hails from a multimillion-year hunting tradition, it may have been his well-honed sense for easy prey.

During the 20th century, most zoo animals were plucked roughly from biomes across the planet until eventually a distaste for these abductions settled in among the public. In accredited zoos today, most are bred from existing captives. Breeding arrangements span a global network of zoos, but gene pools remain limited, making some of the animals vulnerable to genetic disease. Life in captivity can also diminish animals’ immune system, not to mention their morale. The fox may have made previous visits to the zoo and noticed that its captives don’t always move with a wild animal’s sense of purpose and alertness; some may have been in outright distress. He may have wandered just beyond the Bird House to the sloth-bear enclosure, where the bears have been seen pacing in circles, a behavior also exhibited by this zoo’s tigers, and many other large captive mammals across the world.

An old Rilke poem describes the pacing of a caged animal as a ritual dance of “powerful soft strides … around a center / in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.” Depression is the word we use to describe a paralysis of will, and captivity inflicts a special form of it on animals, which we call “zoochosis.” Those suffering from it sometimes pluck their own fur compulsively, and may even mutilate themselves. These are obvious signs that something is amiss with an animal, but a fox may be attuned to others that are less legible to us.

At the back of Bird House, the fox may have noted the way the 74 flamingos ambled across their nearly 10,000-square-foot enclosure. Something about their movements may have struck him as curious. Great hunters of birds, foxes have cognitive processes that may contain an algorithm alerting them when an animal’s wings aren’t working. In the wild, some flamingos power up to Andean peaks or glide, pelicanlike, for miles along the coast. But not these flamingos. They were permanently grounded when zoo staffers removed their flight feathers three days after they were born, to make sure they wouldn’t escape their enclosure.

Wing clipping is cruel in part because it shrinks a bird’s world: A land animal’s range is a two-dimensional shape on a map, but a flying being can explore a truly voluminous chunk of the Earth’s atmosphere. Grounded birds are also more vulnerable to mass slaughter. If a fox came upon a flamingo flock in the wild, he’d be lucky to get his teeth into one before the rest flew away. But the zoo’s flamingos would never fly away, even under direct attack. They couldn’t. They were trapped like hens in a coop.

Jim Naughten for The Atlantic

The fox had to work to get into the Bird House. As a rich target, it’s well fortified. “It has the right-size animals for the predators we have,” Bill McShea, a wildlife ecologist at the zoo, told me. When the zoo’s American flamingo exhibit first went on outdoor display in the 1970s, the birds were surrounded by a fence that, for more than 40 years afterward, kept them successfully protected. Six years ago, it was replaced with a fence made of stainless-steel mesh that met national enclosure standards, which change to keep pace with the ever-evolving creativity of animals. Every day since, the new fence had been checked, most recently at 2:30 the afternoon before the fox arrived, when it was found intact.

Tales of fox cunning are as old as culture. Aesop’s foxes were constantly involved in deceptions. In Apache lore, a thieving fox stands in for Prometheus, stealing fire for humans. I imagine that at the zoo, the fox walked back and forth along the flamingo fence, sussing out its vulnerabilities. Tunneling underneath wasn’t practical: A concrete dig barrier extends underground, too deep for a single night’s digging. If the fox tried to chip away at it over several nights, zookeepers would have noticed. Whether out of insight or frustration, at some point in the dark hours before dawn, the fox began to grind the fence mesh between his teeth. Like a spy cutting a circle of glass out of a high-rise windowpane, he was able to chew a softball-size hole in the fence and, with some wriggling, slip through.

Flamingos are large birds; some weigh nearly half of an adult male fox. Their size did not deter him. “Foxes are the ultimate opportunists,” Dan Rauch, a wildlife biologist for D.C., told me. “They’re happy to make meals of field mice, snakes, Canada geese, and everything in between.” Keeping low to the ground, the fox would have moved toward the birds in quick, measured steps. If he saw one of the birds glance in his direction, he would have stilled every muscle. When he got within leaping range, an adrenal thrill would have surged through his limbs. Feeling playful, like a kit romping around in the den again, he would have sprung forward in a lethal pounce.

Sara Hallager arrived at the Bird House just after 6 o’clock that morning. As the zoo’s head curator for birds, Hallager makes sure to check on the animals first thing when she works the early shift, methodically looking in on the cranes and herons. When she reached the flamingo enclosure, she was alarmed to find herself eye to eye with the fox. Not all foxes react skittishly upon spotting a human, but this one seemed to have consciousness of guilt. “As soon as he saw me, he ran away through the hole in the fence that he had created,” Hallager told me. Any hopes that the fox had just arrived were dashed when she saw that pink-feathered mayhem was strewn across the enclosure’s bare soil and in its shallow pool. “I could already see a large number of dead flamingos,” Hallager said.

Hallager is one of the National Zoo’s longest-serving curators. She started as a volunteer in 1984, helping hand-rear tiger cubs, baby seals, and red pandas. She met her husband, another lifer, at the zoo. Today, she oversees a team of 10 curators and keepers who care for more than 400 birds, including gem-colored hummingbirds and ostrich-size rheas. For the past six years, she helped lead a $69 million renovation of the Bird House, along with a major shift in its curatorial philosophy. No longer will the zoo acquire birds from Africa, Asia, or South America, she told me when I visited her there earlier this winter. Instead, new exhibits will showcase North American birds. The idea is to tell a story about protecting the wildness of this continent against the backdrop of Rock Creek Park. A long-standing migratory way station, the park’s forests sit on the Atlantic flyway, a coastal path traveled annually by millions of birds, which together make up an airborne river of song that runs all the way up to the Arctic.

Instead of putting the final touches on one of her new exhibits, that morning Hallager found herself presiding over a grisly scene. She called two keepers who were already on-site at a different part of the zoo, and they immediately ran over to help. The zoo’s vets arrived about 30 minutes later. They have a special van for ferrying animals up to the on-site hospital, where an open bay feeds into a pair of operating rooms. On the rare occasion that a lion requires surgery, zoo protocol insists on a special police escort, but no police were needed to move the flamingos. “We tried to triage the birds that were obviously injured,” Hallager told me. They were able to save three but lost 25 others—more than a third of the flock—plus a pintail duck. The victim tally made for shocking headlines, but it had a simple explanation: Foxes operate on a “kill now, eat later” philosophy. When Hallager happened upon the fox, post-rampage, he’d already buried two flamingos in the sand, beak to toe.

The flamingos are managed as a group, which means they aren’t given individual names, except for those raised as chicks by keepers. Hallager had dribbled baby-bird formula into some of the flamingos’ tiny beaks and watched as they grew into adults capable of living into their 50s. She described them to me as “charismatic, cranky, and very funny.” Zoo leaders made grief counselors available to her and the other keepers, just as they had when two elephants died of old age during the pandemic. She described the elephants’ deaths as profound experiences for the staff, but the loss of the flamingos just struck her as tragic. “The pictures I have in my mind from that morning haunt me to this day,” she said.

Last month, I met with Bryan Amaral, who runs animal care for the entire zoo, to discuss the institution’s response to “the flamingo incident,” as he called it. Over coffee in a large conference room not far from the cheetah enclosure, he told me that he has had to deal with a range of animal intruders over the course of his career, including a Florida alligator that snuck into Disney’s Animal Kingdom and bit an elephant. In the case of the fox, “we didn’t have the attack on film,” he said. “All we could do was CSI the situation to the best of our ability.”

Foxes have hunted captive flamingos in bulk before. In 1996, one snuck past the red-coated guards at Buckingham Palace and killed six flamingoes that Queen Elizabeth II kept as garden pets. In 2014, another fox broke into Germany’s Frankfurt Zoo and killed 15 flamingos. Some of the birds were granted a dignified death: A single bite snapped the pink velvet rope of their neck. Others were fully decapitated.

When caught committing these acts of ultraviolence, foxes can be first-rate escape artists. In ranching country, they’ll run through herds of sheep to break up their scent trails. In snow, they’ll wave their floofy tails back and forth, possibly to broom away their tracks. No one at the zoo tried to pursue the fox after he dashed away from Hallager, but the staff worried that he’d strike again. Like many killers, he might not be able to resist returning to the scene of his crime, especially if he had hungry kits awaiting flamingo meat back home. What if next time he killed a whooping crane, or one of the zoo’s other endangered birds?

Keepers set about bolstering the fence surrounding the Bird House. They also set cage traps around the perimeter of the flamingo exhibit. Amaral told me that he holds no grudge against foxes in general. “We didn’t want to indiscriminately trap foxes around the zoo,” he said. “We tried our best to target the perpetrator.” More than a week later, they found a frantic fox rattling around in one of the traps, but they’re not sure that they actually nabbed the actual culprit. During my conversation with Hallager, she made sure to emphasize that they’d caught a fox, not necessarily the fox.

Amaral explained that a DNA test had proved inconclusive, and that a police lineup was obviously impossible. Despite this uncertainty, the zoo’s staff immediately initiated Phase 2 of their plan: A plastic bag was draped over the cage trap, shrouding the fox in a dark balloon. Anesthetic gas was pumped in until he fell asleep. After he was sedated, a syringe dripping with barbiturates was pushed into his orange fur until it punctured his skin like a venom-filled fang. Inside the rib cage of every fox is a small but mighty heart that beats up to 400 times a minute when the animal is trying to escape death. His stopped within minutes.

I asked Amaral whether there was any internal dissent about killing the fox. He told me that no one had lodged any objections, so far as he could recall. This unanimity among the staff surprised me. It struck me as contrary to the zoo’s spirit. At the very least, it seemed like a failure of imagination. Surely an institution devoted to caring for animals should have found a way to spare the fox. Why not relocate him to a forest across the Anacostia River?

“That would lead to all kinds of issues,” Amaral said. Apart from humans, red foxes have the most extensive natural range of any land mammal on the planet. They’re at home in North Africa’s deserts, in the Taiga, in the mountains of Argentina, and in the Canadian Arctic. In the United States, their distribution is dense because European settlers killed off cougars and red wolves, their natural predators. Anywhere the fox was relocated, Amaral argued, he’d soon find himself in a deadly turf war. “It would be like remote euthanasia,” he said.

I left the zoo unsettled. I couldn’t shake the sense that the fox had been wronged. The very next night, I experienced a visitation. In the predawn hours, I awoke to a sudden, high-pitched scream. For 30 seconds, I laid still in bed, thinking that the sound was a remnant of an unremembered dream. When I heard it again, I leapt up to my window and swept the curtains aside. To my astonishment, a fox was sitting on the sidewalk directly in front of my house, screeching into the dark wintry air, trying desperately to summon a mate. This went on for several minutes until headlights beamed down the street and he fled.

Later that week, during some late-night Googling, I learned that several zoos in the eastern United States exhibit red foxes, presumably to showcase one of North America’s most vivid manifestations of wildness. Two of the zoos were in Florida, in Melbourne and Naples. Another was in Little Rock, Arkansas. I emailed Amaral to ask if he’d considered moving the trapped fox to a different zoo. He wrote back to say no, on account of all the preplanning it would have required. Among other complexities, the zoo would have had to care for the fox during a lengthy quarantine. “We were acting quickly in response to a crisis with a known skilled predator,” he said. Fair enough, I thought. Perhaps it’s just as well. Confinement is no life for an animal, anyway. It’s certainly no life for a fox.

WIth Alex Murdaugh's murder trial nearing its end, legal experts who have participated in some of America's most high-profile cases joined CNN Wednesday night to examine key questions that have loomed over the proceeding, including whether Murdaugh's admission of lying to investigators could help or hurt his case.