Rat Czar’s quarterly briefing documents contained success alongside its uncontained implications
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The Numbers and Their Geography
NEW YORK — New York City’s Rat Czar, Kathleen Corradi, delivered her quarterly briefing this week documenting a 12 percent reduction in rat activity in the 12 targeted intervention zones where the city has deployed containerised trash bins, expanded cleaning schedules, and the biological deterrents whose specific nature the city declines to specify on the grounds that the rats may be reading the press releases. The 12 percent reduction in 12 zones is, Corradi confirmed, good news. The 88 percent of rats not in the 12 zones are unchanged, which she described as the next phase.
The next phase involves expanding the intervention methodology from 12 zones to a broader coverage area, which requires funding, coordination across city agencies, and the specific institutional patience of a programme that is working at a pace significantly slower than the rats’ own programme, which does not require funding or coordination and which operates at the pace of rat reproduction, which is faster.
The Containerised Trash Solution
The containerised trash bin programme, which replaced the traditional New York sidewalk trash bag system in pilot areas, represents the most structurally significant anti-rat intervention the city has attempted, because it addresses the food source rather than the rat, which is the correct direction of causation. Rats are in New York because New York produces food waste at a rate that sustains a large rat population. Reducing the accessibility of that waste reduces the rat population. The alternative approaches — trapping, poison, biological deterrents — address the rat rather than the food, producing a reduction that the food supply subsequently repopulates.
The NYC 311 system tracks rat complaints and has documented declining complaint rates in the containerised zones, which is the citizen-level data that complements the official survey data. The Centers for Disease Control urban vector control programme has provided technical guidance on the city’s intervention design. The rats have not provided guidance. They are not consulted. The programme continues. The 88 percent maintains.
New York in Perspective
New York City in 2026 is a city in the middle of something — not a crisis, not a renaissance, but the specific condition of a place that is trying several large experiments simultaneously and has not yet received the results, and that is conducting those experiments in public, in real time, in front of eight million residents and several billion people who consider it a proxy for what cities can be. The experiments are real: the socialist mayor riding the subway, the city grocery stores, the free bus push, the housing plan. The results are pending. The satire documents the gap between the experiment and the result, which in New York is always wider than the experiment designers expect and narrower than the critics predict, which is what the city has always been: the place where things are tried and the place where the results arrive on their own schedule, which is New York time, which is faster than anywhere else and slower than anyone expects.
The Gothamist and the The City NYC provide the documentation. The satire provides the annotation. New York provides the material, inexhaustibly, as it always has.
The Week in Context
Every story above is a thread in the larger fabric of New York City in its current moment: a city that has elected a government committed to significant experiments in public provision, that is watching those experiments begin with the specific attention of a place that has seen governments of all kinds come and go and that evaluates each new government on the basis of what it actually does rather than what it says it will do, and that is currently in the phase between the saying and the doing where the interest is highest and the evidence is still accumulating. The accumulation is happening. The evidence is being gathered. The results will be available in the time that results take, which in New York is faster than anywhere else and slower than anyone wants, and which is always exactly as long as it takes.
The Gothamist covers the accumulation daily. The The City NYC investigates what the accumulation means. The satire annotates what both of them find, which is always more than expected and never quite what the experiment designers planned, which is the condition of governing New York, which is always the condition, which is why the job is interesting and why the coverage continues and why the city, through all of it, continues.
That is the story as it stands today. Tomorrow it will have advanced by whatever increment New York advances in a day, which is always more than zero and frequently more than expected. The city is in motion. The motion produces the news. The news produces the coverage. The coverage produces this column. The column will return next week with whatever the motion produces by then, which is always something, and which is always New York, and which is always enough.
New York contains multitudes, and the multitudes are all in motion simultaneously, and the motion produces the specific velocity of the city that makes it feel faster than anywhere else and that produces, at the end of every week, the exhausted satisfaction of having kept pace with something that does not slow down to be kept pace with. That is New York. That is the city. That is the story.
More civic absurdity at https://www.betootaadvocate.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism