This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

As a reward for sending so many excellent emails on your variety of religious experiences, you’re off this week so that I can finish up a feature I’m hard at work on, and so that I can run a second installment of your responses on religion this Monday.

Conversations of Note

The States That Reopened First

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, nearly every U.S. state shut down parts of its economy. Looking back, Nicole Gelinas argues in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal that states that opened up sooner are still reaping economic benefits:

By February 2022, the United States had finally clawed back its lost Covid jobs. But Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas hadn’t just recovered; they were excelling. First, they beat the country’s recovery by nearly a year, gaining back their pre-Covid job totals by the summer of 2021. This early start enabled these states to gain economic strength, even as much of the country lagged. As of October 2022, the nation had just 1.8 percent more private-sector jobs than in October 2019. Yet Florida had 6.8 percent more jobs, Texas 6.7 percent more, North Carolina 6.1 percent, and Georgia 5.2 percent.

Big states that were slower to reopen are still suffering employment stagnation, even more than a year after ending restrictions. Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are all missing between 0.6 percent and 1.8 percent of their pre-Covid jobs. But New York State, with among the nation’s strictest lockdowns, remains the worst performer. The state is still down 2.8 percent of its 2019 jobs, or 228,400 positions. New York City, particularly, has struggled. Quick to recover after the tech bubble burst and after 9/11 and even after the 2008 financial crisis, the city is missing 2.4 percent, or 100,100, of its pre-Covid positions. This experiment shows that states can’t just pause and restart their economies at will, as Cuomo and his peers tried to do. “Paused” jobs become lost jobs, long after extraordinary government aid for the unemployed has expired.

Elephant Versus Mouse

At New York, Jonathan Chait argues that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on Disney constitute an abuse of power and a portent of intimidation tactics to come should he ascend to federal office:

DeSantis established the principle that he can and will use the power of the state to punish private firms that exercise their First Amendment right to criticize his positions. Now he is promising to continue exerting state power to pressure the firm to produce content that comports with his own ideological agenda … A few things ought to be clear. First, DeSantis’s treatment of Disney is not a one-off but a centerpiece of his legacy in Florida. He has repeatedly invoked the episode in his speeches, and his allies have held it up as evidence of his strength and dominance. The Murdoch media empire, which is functionally an arm of the DeSantis campaign, highlighted the Disney conquest in a New York Post front page and a Fox & Friends segment and DeSantis touted his move in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Second, DeSantis’s authoritarian methods have met with vanishingly little resistance within his party … And third, DeSantis has been very explicit about his belief that he sees his methods in Florida as a blueprint for a national agenda. So there is every reason to believe that, if elected president, DeSantis would use government power to force both public and private institutions to toe his line.

In The New York Times, Damon Linker grants that DeSantis would do many things, if elected president, that Linker would dislike, but nevertheless argues that the Florida governor would be better than Donald Trump, and cautions his fellow liberals against overreaching when making the case against DeSantis.

We Mislead, You Applaud

Some of the most well-compensated people at Fox News misled their viewers about the winner of the 2020 election––and acted as though doing so was a sign of respect, David French argues:

In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth”—an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.”

Representation can have its place. Fox’s deep connection with its conservative audience means that it can be ahead of the rest of the media on stories that affect red states and red culture.

But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. It can result in audience capture (writing to please your audience, not challenge it) and in fear and timidity in reporting facts that contradict popular narratives. And in extreme instances—such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election—it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.

There are courageous reporters at Fox. We learned some of their names in the Dominion filing. They were the people who had the courage to tell the truth. But then there are the leaders and the prime-time stars. Tough? Courageous? Hardly. When push comes to shove, they embody the possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And follow them they did, straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come.

As I see it, no one shows more disrespect to the Fox audience than its pandering hosts.

The Harm of Victimhood Culture

The feminist writer Jill Filipovic recently argued:

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life—to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean—are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

Back in 2015 and 2016, I wrote about concept creep around harm and the rise of victimhood culture.

On the Nature of Drummers

Jack Stilgoe deigns to speak on behalf of a tribe to which he belongs:

We drummers tend to be ambivalent about technology. Like most musicians, ours is a craft that is technologically mediated. The affordances of sticks, pedals and things to hit with them enable our sound. We are used to the jokes that suggest we lack the intelligence of our fellow musicians. (What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once.)

We worry that our bandmates, presented with technological alternatives, might look on us as a problem to be solved. We are loud; we take up space; our instruments are heavy and slow to assemble; our sounds are harsh and inconsistent, and sometimes we speed up or slow down when we play. Faced with a drum machine that keeps metronomic time, plays no more or less than is asked of it and, once purchased, costs nothing, we can’t help but feel judged: is that all you think of us? Is that thing all it takes to make a drummer redundant?

That’s his jumping off point for a meditation on AI and music.

Feeling Great and Hating It

Marc Andreessen has been teetotaling and feels great, which he considers terrible. As he explains in his new Substack:

Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s become clear that most or all—probably all—of the scientific studies on the benefits of alcohol are fake, the scientists unwitting or witting victims of selection effects. As Michael Crichton says, “wet streets cause rain”, or rather wet streets don’t cause rain. It turns out that sick people often don’t drink, or subjects just lie to researchers about their consumption outright. There go the studies.

It is now pretty definitively clear that no amount of alcohol is good for you. Andrew Huberman recently summed this conclusion up on his podcast; the topic made me so enraged I never listened to the episode, but I did read the notes. Andrew says “the best amount of alcohol to drink is no alcohol”—imagine someone who both hates and loves humanity that much.

Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert … cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet. It’s great, and I am super mad about it. I feel like the color has drained out of my evenings. Spending time with people is still fun, but now it’s hard to sit still and watch a movie or read a book and unwind at the end of a hard day. I’m more prone to just work until bedtime. Grump grump grump.

Provocation of the Week

Is The Scarlet Letter incomprehensible to today’s Harvard students? I would not have thought so, but I encountered the claim in a New Yorker article about the national decline in English majors:

“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

The 19th century was a long time ago––but public shamings carried out by puritanical zealots are so current!

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.

The New York Police Department is investigating allegations that musician Travis Scott assaulted a sound engineer and causing $12,000 worth of damage to sound equipment at a club in New York City early Wednesday morning, according to a law enforcement source.