I was shaken to read about the mouse infestation in Ellie Glass’s former apartment: I too once lived in a place where I often woke up to discover a crater had been chewed out of the bread loaf overnight, and even now the merest suggestion of nocturnal movement in the kitchen of my (blessedly rodent-free) new apartment can jolt me awake from two rooms away. (The real pest in this new place is the landlord, but that’s a story for another time.)
The pest control racket is, as Glass points out, a fascinating component of Adams’s “war on rats” that merits closer attention. Despite the proven futility of this war, the exterminator elites have maintained their prestige and standing as key counselors to successive mayors: Pest Management Professional Hall of Famer Bobby Corrigan, for example, has been dispensing rat advice to city hall since last century. In any other industry you’d expect a record of failure this long and comprehensive to have consequences, but pest control clearly plays by different rules: The ratcatchers seem as resilient and invincible as the rats themselves. “Integrated pest management,” the supposedly holistic approach at the heart of Adams’s rat initiatives, slyly positions the extermination industry as the Federal Reserve of the rat economy: a savior ready to step in when all other mechanisms to stabilize the flow of rats fall through, the ultimate backstop.
The real objective here, as Glass suggests, is to maintain a business model that relies on the continued infestation of the city. It was no surprise to see Adams leading the way, gas pump in hand, at a recent press conference in Brooklyn to announce the new $877,000 citywide operation to inject carbon monoxide into the rat burrows that plague many of New York’s 600,000 tree beds. (That $877,000 is so oddly specific as a budget number, isn’t it? With great corruption comes great precision.) The sight of a masked Adams shrouded in gas as he watched the airy rat poison rise from the soil and snake up a tree trunk added to the rich visual dossier he’s put together during his time as the city’s exterminator-in-chief—though there were no piles of rat carcasses to punctuate the spectacle this time, which showed uncharacteristic restraint.
Max Rivlin-Nadler is surely right that we need a new way of talking about the campaign against the critters, but that will remain hard as long as the mayor is out on the streets literally “smoking them out of their holes,” a latter-day George W. Bush war-gaming through Bed-Stuy like it’s Tora Bora. To even talk of a “campaign” against the rats, as I just did, is misguided: The language is too oppositional, too aggressive. A diplomatic idiom might be one way out of the muck, as Rivlin-Nadler helpfully proposes, but I can also see a future in which the rats and humans of New York enter into a deeper syncretism, a partnership of sorts. Spring 2026. Zohran Mamdani is mayor. Andrew Cuomo has returned to Westchester. Eric Adams is a full-time influencer posting Get Ready with Me reels for Turkish Airlines on TikTok. ICE, with the help of the city’s rodents, has been chased from the five boroughs… The dream of a better New York, like the rats themselves, will never die.