Arkansas is planning to install a “monument to the unborn” in the state capital of Little Rock following its nearly total ban on abortions last year.

Read more...

Pop quiz: Which of the following Shakespeare works is about race? (A) Hamlet, (B) Othello, (C) Romeo and Juliet, (D) the sonnets. If you answered B, you’re not alone. Many of us have been taught that Othello is Shakespeare’s primary race play, because, of course, it focuses on a Black character. You might also recall that Shakespeare wrote a few other plays with nonwhite characters: the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, a suitor to the heiress Portia, who begs her, “Mislike me not for my complexion.” Or Cleopatra, the African queen whom Roman soldiers blame for seducing their general, Antony, with her “tawny front.” Or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, a schemer alternately villainous and compassionate, who asks, “Is black so base a hue?” Or even Caliban, the island native in The Tempest whom Prospero, his enslaver, calls “this thing of darkness.”

These works compose the lineup typically billed as Shakespeare’s race plays. A limitation of that understanding, however, is that it assumes that race applies only when people of color are present. Such a view is definitively rejected in the revelatory new essay collection White People in Shakespeare. It’s cannily edited by Arthur L. Little Jr., a UCLA professor and notable scholar of Shakespeare and race, and even the title is a doozy. White people in Shakespeare? Isn’t that, well, redundant? That reaction is part of Little’s and his fellow essayists’ point: White people have for so long been taken as the universal norm in the Western canon that to name them as white is to engage in critical race study. White People posits that Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and the sonnets are just as much about race as Othello, because they’re all involved in defining whiteness. Shakespeare’s work, the collection argues, was central to the construction of whiteness as a racial category during the Renaissance, and white people, in turn, have used Shakespeare to regulate social hierarchies ever since.

This is not, to be clear, a book that tries to demonize Shakespeare or vilify folks who relish him. The complexity and power of his dramatic verse are givens in these essays. The collection contends, though, that what’s beautiful in Shakespeare—or what Shakespeare’s speakers take as beautiful—is often cast in racial terms. A striking example comes in the first essay of White People, by the late Imtiaz Habib, a founding scholar of race in early modern England. He takes up the opening line of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 1,” which implores a handsome young man to reproduce: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” The key word here is fairest. In Shakespeare’s day, fair could mean physically attractive or morally just. It could also refer to complexion. More influential, it could be used to link attractiveness and justness to whiteness. When the Duke of Venice approves of Othello’s virtue, for instance, he calls him “far more fair than black.” (Is it any coincidence that the answer to the fairy-tale question “Who’s the fairest of them all?” is “Snow White”?) The scholar Kim F. Hall, another contributor to White People, demonstrated the racial valence of fair almost three decades ago in her field-defining study, Things of Darkness—a dynamic work whose implications are still contested. Although I’m in Hall’s camp, not all Shakespeare scholars agree with her ideas. As a result, it’s still common for people to read passages such as those that open “Sonnet 1” without acknowledging that a paraphrase could basically be “We want the whitest people to have more babies.” Habib calls the “Sonnet 1” opening a “declaration of the desirable eugenic privilege of white breeding,” which is the kind of bracing take, both unsettling and compelling, that this collection offers at every turn.

[Read: Why I read “King Lear” each Advent]

This method of race scholarship often attracts the charge of anachronism—that it’s imposing contemporary categories on the past. That objection tends not to bother me; every era generates its interpretive questions from its own concerns, and an anti-racist approach to Shakespeare is long overdue. On historical grounds, though, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that even if people in the 16th and 17th centuries didn’t use racial categories in quite the same ways we might, they were wrestling with the construction of social hierarchies based on emerging categories of race that went on to shape our world.

In fact, one of the chief interests of White People is how fluid and vexed the idea of whiteness—as both a racial and an aesthetic category—often was as it developed from the medieval to the early modern period. Little even proposes that in 1613, the first documented occurrence of the phrase white people (in a pageant scripted by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas Middleton) would have seemed an oxymoron. Whiteness was the property of the elite, who could boast pure Christian souls, the illumination of humanist learning, and cosmetically lightened faces, whereas people, the collective term for the common throng who had to labor for a living, couldn’t claim the appearance, let alone the power, of being white. “White people,” Little writes, “was not a thing.”

Yet already during that time, the theater was staging performances, deploying cosmetics, costumes, prosthetics, and props, that helped redefine the boundaries of whiteness. Those boundaries could be national and geographical, as in the case of Shakespeare’s history plays; or historical and civic, as in his Roman plays; or even romantic, as in his courtship plays. Romeo, for instance, spends much of his first few scenes trying to determine if there is anyone “fairer than my love”; degrees of whiteness in Verona, as the scholar Kyle Grady writes in White People, are a recurring concern.

The most provocative essay to show whiteness under negotiation comes from Ian Smith: “Antonio’s White Penis: Category Trading in The Merchant of Venice.” The provocation doesn’t come from naming the merchant’s penis; that’s not a new move for scholars who have wondered whether the bond he signs with Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, in which he promises that if he fails to repay the loan, Shylock can cut off a pound of Antonio’s flesh “in what part of your body pleaseth me,” might involve a kind of circumcision or castration. Smith’s ingenuity is noticing the precise terms of the bond: “an equal pound / Of your fair flesh” (Smith’s emphasis). In Smith’s reading, Antonio’s whiteness is what Shylock covets as a Jew who, though not dark-skinned, is nevertheless excluded from the privileges that fair, Christian Venetians enjoy.

[Read: Shakespeare wrote his best works during a plague]

Is this too tendentious a reading? Not to my ear. Sure, some scholars might want to prioritize a religious interpretation over a racial one, but Smith is simply adding a layer of analysis, hidden in plain sight, that shows how, in Shakespeare’s imagination, race and religion, like sex and money or flesh and blood, were so often intertwined. Smith’s own new volume, Black Shakespeare, includes another innovative argument: that Hamlet’s reluctance to take revenge against his uncle for murdering his father stems from his fear that avengers are marked as a type of “Violent, Murderous Black Man.” If Hamlet committed revenge, he’d no longer be quite as white. That might seem a stretch until you look at the language that describes an avenging figure Hamlet recalls from the Trojan war: “he whose sable arms, / Black as his purpose, did the night resemble / When he lay couched in the ominous horse, / Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared / With heraldry more dismal.” Whenever I started to feel skeptical—was race really the defining issue for Hamlet more than any other psychological or social explanation scholars have proposed?—a passage like this one made the theory hard to dismiss.

By joining established scholars such as Smith, Hall, and Habib with emerging voices, White People heralds a breakthrough for a rising cohort of Shakespeare scholars—many of them people of color—whose focus on race has sometimes been excluded from the field’s top journals. One of this volume’s goals is to chart the history of white people controlling access to Shakespearean interpretation and, in turn, controlling access to the ideas that Shakespeare’s works helped fashion. White people invoked Shakespeare to justify opposition to miscegenation, as when former President John Quincy Adams wrote in 1836 that “the moral” of Othello “is that the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of Nature.” A century later, his descendant, Joseph Quincy Adams, opened the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., with a celebration of Shakespeare as a centerpiece of a compulsory education system that had saved America from immigrants “who swarmed into the land like the locust in Egypt,” “foreign in their background and alien in their outlook upon life,” with “varied racial characteristics” that posed “a menace to the preservation of our long-established English civilization.” If in America, “the melting pot of races,” Adams concluded, “there has been evolved a homogenous nation, with a culture that is still essentially English, we must acknowledge that in the process Shakespeare has played a major part.”

Focusing on these invocations, however, risks overshadowing the ways that some people of color globally have appropriated Shakespeare for their own purposes, many of them performing and rewriting the plays to challenge colonial legacies. So it’s salutary to see White People move in its second half toward creative counternarratives. A conversation with the playwrights Keith Hamilton Cobb and Anchuli Felicia King explores how they flipped Shakespeare’s script in their own adaptations of Othello. Discussing Cobb’s American Moor and an Othello reimagining, Desdemona, by Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, Hall says that is “incumbent on us to help students and audiences hear voices beyond the white noise of the Shakespeare industry.” And the Shakespeare and race scholar Margo Hendricks calls on her white peers to think critically about whiteness as an implicit standard of value. If those of us who, like me, fall into that category heed Hendricks’s call, that may be the lasting contribution of White People: to make it impossible to assume that whiteness is the norm, either for Shakespeare’s characters or for the audiences that interpret them. That doesn’t mean rejecting Shakespeare as an outmoded dead white man. On the contrary, it means reanimating him as a crucial part of a negotiation that continues to script our culture today, far beyond the theater and the classroom.

In classic fables and fairy tales, no predator—and perhaps no villain—makes more frequent appearances than the wolf. Greek antiquity gives us the Boy Who Cried Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood famously gets eaten by a wolf, and yet another one blows down the Three Little Pigs’ houses. Wolfish, the writer Erica Berry’s debut, looks both at these invented wolves and at the real ones that have, of late, returned to her home state of Oregon; she also examines the more contemporary wolf metaphors—lone-wolf terrorists, warriors as wolves—that many people use to describe, or perhaps justify, their fear of other humans.

Berry has suffered badly from fear of that “symbolic wolf”—a term she gets from the veterinary anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence. This is Wolfish’s true subject. Her wolf is a male one, created by a string of disturbing encounters with men and by a lifetime of messages—explicit and subliminal alike—that tell girls and women to perceive men as threats. One of Berry’s projects is dismantling this idea, both to defuse the danger it creates for poor men and men of color and to free herself from the anxiety it creates. She writes of realizing that the “calm I chased on human streets would not come from pepper spray but from metabolizing, and contextualizing, the things that had scared me in the past.”

Among the book’s strengths is Berry’s awareness that, as she puts it, “my wolf is not your wolf.” Berry combines memoir, journalism, and cultural criticism, weaving in others’ voices to remind readers that her perspective is only one of many. For some—such as the writer Cyrus Dunham, who fears not being able to honestly explain their gender identity to others—the wolf represents deceit. For others, the wolf, endangered as it long has been, symbolizes the terrifying destruction that humans have wrought on our environment; a conservationist tells Berry that he is “so worried about our collective future” that he and his wife don’t want to have kids. Berry’s braided approach renders Wolfish both a vulnerable self-investigation and a wide-ranging exploration of fear—and, ultimately, an antidote to it. She makes a stirring case for walking alongside the symbolic wolf.

Wolfish has its share of real animals. Berry devotes one chapter to a childhood wolf sighting—imagined, it turns out, not real—in Yellowstone National Park, and another to a research trip to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust, where wolves unable to live in the wild are kept and cared for. She writes about a cousin in Montana who posed on social media “grinning with a boyfriend as they held up the freshly killed carcasses of what looked like two dead wolves,” and travels to a county in eastern Oregon where a resurgence of wolves has created a furious split between people who want to protect the wolves and people who see conservation projects as a form of government overreach. OR-7, an Oregon-born, radio-collared wolf whose thousand-mile quest for a mate made the news in the early 2010s, appears in nearly every chapter, his trek giving the otherwise sprawling book a measure of shape.

Berry writes evocatively about these real wolves, yet she seems consistently drawn away from the wolves themselves and toward humans’ responses to them. Her writing is richest when she fully commits to examining wolf metaphors and the ways in which we turn even very real wolves into symbols. On a return visit to eastern Oregon, she speaks with a Forest Service ranger who tells her that the wolf-conservation arguments from Berry’s first trip have evolved into broader debates about the role of government in individual lives. “The new wolf is the face mask,” he says. A comparison of wolves to face masks is hardly one of the traditional metaphors Berry set out to investigate, and it seems to fascinate and alarm her in equal measure.

Still, Wolfish focuses primarily on wolf metaphors that have been handed down over time. Berry returns frequently to the story of Little Red Riding Hood, a stand-in for women like herself who have learned to fear predatory male wolves—which is to say, predatory men. A key difference between literal wolves and wolves as metaphors for our fears is that, in general, even wolf-fearing humans know how unlikely they are to be killed by one. As Berry writes, “To call a death by wild wolf a freak accident is almost to understate it.”

By contrast, in Charles Perrault’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which is the basis for most contemporary iterations of the tale, the Big Bad Wolf’s attack is anything but random. Indeed, it is promised, so long as you understand that the wolf is meant to be read as a man, and Little Red as a girl who, by straying from the route to her grandmother’s house, invites that man to attack her. “Perrault’s story,” Berry observes, “is not meant to teach boys. You cannot train a wolf. Only the girl has the lesson to learn. Only the girl can keep herself safe.” Contained in the parable is a regressive notion of female responsibility: It is Little Red’s duty to control and conceal herself, lest her female presence excite a man to violence. Anyone raised as a girl, or around girls, is likely to recognize this idea.

To Berry, the harmfulness of this paradigm—that women are to blame if they suffer male predation—is evident. It generates fear and distrust pervasive enough to stifle not only female sexuality but also the development of female minds. A more difficult question, for her, is whether fear of men is useful. She wishes to consider it “residual from a world that told me I was a victim” and, as a result, does not “want to risk crying wolf.”

[Read: On rape narratives and the surprising value of plot]

Yet Berry cannot silence her sense that Little Red’s story has a “bulb of truth.” On a multiday train ride across the country, a man sits next to her and begins talking, inappropriately and somewhat incoherently, about his ex and his struggles with addiction. When, apprehensive, she moves to a different car, the man brings her a notebook’s worth of hastily written letters suggesting that Berry may be an “evil person” but could potentially still “help [him].” She shows a conductor, who gives her a lockable sleeping car to wait in until the man can be removed from the train. In retrospect, Berry can neither deny the utility of her fear nor decide how valuable it was. Was the man a “lone wolf,” poised for violence? Was he simply lonely and ill? Or was he, like real wolves, a being “that could be both feared and feared for?”

Feminists have long struggled with the question of what male behavior to fear—or, to put it more dramatically, the question of whether women need to be on guard against all men. Berry writes about a childhood friend who, upon hitting puberty, was warned by her mother not to put on makeup or dress nicely if she planned to take public transportation: Doing so would invite attention, the logic went, which was inherently dangerous. Many parents, consciously or not, teach their children such lessons, inviting them to fear the opposite sex, or people of other races or backgrounds, or the world beyond what the parents know. (Consider the extreme example of a recent Curbed piece about Upper East Siders who don’t let their adolescent kids outside alone.)

In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, the academic Katherine Angel notes that rhetoric that emphasizes fear of the unknown over the potential richness of exploration “doesn’t allow for ambivalence, and it risks making impermissible—indeed dangerous … the experience of not knowing what we want.” Indeed, it turns recipients into 21st-century Little Reds, charged with avoiding the wolf through social savvy and personal knowledge more perfect than that which anyone could reasonably attain.

Berry, like Angel, wants to fight for exploration and ambivalence. She sees them as tools for alleviating fear. Another of her proposed tools is the diminishment of myopia. At the British wolf trust, watching visitors and researchers react to the wolves living there, she sees that to “understand an animal exists neither to kill you nor cuddle you is to untangle your ego from its life—to see it as complex and wild, worthy of existence independent of your feelings about it.” She does not explicitly connect this revelation to how humans might approach one another.

But considering real wolves always brings Berry back to the symbolic one, and considering human responsibility to wild animals helps her reassess our responsibilities to one another. In the case of wolves, we can mitigate danger through land-management strategies that create habitats for both wolves and their natural prey. It isn’t so easy to know how we can mitigate the dangers we pose to other humans, but Berry ends Wolfish resolving to neither ignore her fear nor live in thrall to it—an approach that comes from conservationists’ perspective on wolves. Only by managing and mitigating fear and its causes can we get what Berry truly wants: “a world where we could all stay.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Pity the poor mayors. Or don’t—most voters clearly don’t. On Tuesday, Chicagoans unceremoniously kicked Lori Lightfoot to the curb, depriving her of the chance to win a second term in an April 4 runoff election.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The aftermath of a mass slaughter at the zoo. Does Trump stand a real chance to repeat 2016? George Packer: The moral case against equity language

A Nearly Impossible Job

Being mayor of Chicago used to be almost a lifetime appointment. Richard J. Daley and Harold Washington both died in office. The former’s son, Richard M. Daley, served 22 years before retiring. Until Lori Lightfoot, only one mayor in the past 75 years had been denied a reelection. And she’s not the only U.S. mayor in jeopardy. Also this week, campaigners in New Orleans went to court to put a recall of LaToya Cantrell on the ballot. Being mayor of a big city has become a nearly impossible and miserable job.

Who knows why Lightfoot even wanted to keep the job? She hasn’t seemed all that happy, and has spent the past couple years getting into politically lethal feuds with teachers and police unions, as well as less damaging but more hilarious ones with other groups. Her own reelection campaign pitch involved a heavy dose of accepting blame for errors, which may be honest but is never a good sign. She seemed to be running simply because that’s what politicians do. By contrast, some mayors have simply opted out in recent years. When Lightfoot’s predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, decided not to run for a third term, it came as a shock despite several scandals besetting him. Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms, tabbed as a rising star, also left office last year after serving just one term.

But no one has been more honest about how much he hates his job than Philadelphia’s Jim Kenney, who committed the classic Kinsley gaffe—accidentally telling the truth—after two police officers were shot last summer.

“There’s not an event or a day where I don’t lay on my back and look at the ceiling and worry about stuff,” he said. “So I’ll be happy when I’m not here, when I’m not mayor and I can enjoy some stuff.”

Kenney apologized and half-heartedly walked it back, but he probably spoke for a lot of mayors. (Karen Bass became mayor of Los Angeles last year, which is a headache but might still be a respite from one of the few worse jobs in American politics: serving in the House of Representatives.) As my colleague Annie Lowrey pointed out in January, every city has its own problems, and so does every unpopular mayor. One reason the elder Daley was able to wield power for so many years was a long-standing patronage system, which has since been dismantled; that’s good for stemming public corruption, but bad for modern-day mayors like Lightfoot. Women who run cities, like Lightfoot and Cantrell, may also be held to a higher standard than men. Before Lightfoot, who is also openly gay, the last Chicago mayor denied reelection was Jane Byrne, who was also the last woman to hold the job.

But more than anything else, crime is weighing mayors down. Crime is not, despite what some politicians might want you to believe, a uniquely urban problem. When violent crime surged around the nation starting in summer 2020, it surged in rural areas, too. But cities get more media attention, and the sheer numbers are staggering: The yearly total of murders in Chicago dropped by more than 100 in 2022—to a horrifying 695. New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the nation.

Like presidents who are punished or rewarded for the performance of an economy over which they have little control, mayors don’t have that many levers to control public safety, yet voters will punish whoever is in charge as they search for improvement. The rise in violence was a nationwide trend, underscoring the minimal effect of municipal policies on keeping residents safe. COVID, which seems connected to some of the crime increase, was nationwide too.

A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect. (The current one yesterday announced plans to resign, facing the alternative of being sacked by whichever candidate wins the April runoff.) Pushing too hard risks alienating police, who can either come down with “blue flu,” potentially sending crime higher, or line up behind a challenger; the Chicago police union endorsed Paul Vallas, the top vote-getter on Tuesday. Most cities have little control over gun regulations. A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.

Lightfoot proved (ironically enough) not to be fast enough on her feet to navigate these currents, but her failure should be seen not just as one politician’s misstep but as a sign of the ungovernability of big cities today. She’s the biggest major-city incumbent to get turned out in some time, but she could be a trendsetter.

Related:

The misery of being a big-city mayor The murders in Memphis aren’t stopping.

Today’s News

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, in the first one-on-one meeting between a U.S. Cabinet member and a top Russian official since the invasion of Ukraine. The House Ethics Committee announced that it is moving forward with an investigation into Representative George Santos of New York. The Justice Department said in a new court filing that Donald Trump can be sued by U.S. Capitol Police over the January 6 attack.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf looks at how states handled the economic challenges of the pandemic.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Doug Chayka; source: Getty

New York’s Rats Have Already Won

By Xochitl Gonzalez

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.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How to find joy in your Sisyphean existence Photos: A blanket of snow for California

Culture Break

Eli Ade / MGM

Watch. Creed III, in theaters, gives new energy to old sports-movie formulas.

Listen. In the latest episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, Charlie Warzel and Amanda Mull discuss what AI means for search.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This week marks the centenary of the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. A friend recently half-joked to me that if there’s battle rap, there ought be battle jazz. There is! I immediately thought of Gordon’s classic duel with Wardell Gray, “The Chase.” Gordon was not just a fierce improviser and an icon of coolness but a bit of a renaissance man, as his wife, Maxine Gordon, argues in her biography, Sophisticated Giant. He came to greatest popular notice when, in 1986, he starred in the jazz-themed film Round Midnight. It was his first and last starring role, and he was nominated for an Oscar for best actor. But the best Dex is blowing Dex. Take his classic Go for a spin.

— David

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.