801: Must Be Rats on the Brain

Support for This American Life comes from Amazon One Medical and Amazon Pharmacy. If you rely on medication, what you don't need is anxiety about that medication. Wondering things like, are the meds going to get refilled on time? Do I need to renew my prescription? Do I need an appointment to get them renewed? Amazon One Medical has twenty four seven virtual care, and Amazon pharmacy delivers meds to you fast. With Amazon, health care just got less painful. From WBC Chicago, it's This American Life. Good morning. And it's a great morning for New Yorkers and a great morning to be in New York City. We had a press conference in a park at Harlem for New York's mayor Adams in April 2023. There are two undisputed truths about the Adams administration. Mayor Eric Adams loves his mother. Mayor Eric Adams hates rats. This event was to introduce New Yorkers to the brand new rat czar. This is a position the mayor created. That is job listing called for candidates who were, quote, highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty with a swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery. Rats impact At the time of this press conference, New York's mayor was not popular. He had huge disapproval ratings on crime and homelessness, fewer than half of all New Yorkers liked the way he was doing his job. And we're revisiting this moment because mayor Adams is about to be replaced on January 1. And this is an episode of ours, that he inspired that we all at our show really love, where we tried some funny things that we had never tried before. It's a show about rats in New York and elsewhere and as a kind of goodbye to mayor Adams. We thought we would play this now, our last show of this year. Because when this embattled disliked mayor, mayor Adams, would talk about rats, it was with a kind of joy. It was like he was a dad whose teenage kids would roll their eyes at everything he said, but then he knew he had this one topic that was like, I don't know, taking them out for ice cream or something. Like, he knew this was at least gonna go over. We are serious about I mean, rats are a big issue. Stories. I hear it all the time. I'm on the trains. I'm walking the streets. People stop me and say, you know, we're with you, man. We hate those damn rats. And, you know, remember Julia? Remember when I came out that rat device? You know, I had a rat device. We caught 96 rats around Brooklyn, Borough Hall. 96 rats. And, you know, there were people that were yelling, you know, oh, you murderer. You murderer. You know? This is the kind of cutthroat swagger in a lot of the remarks this day. Next to the podium is a table with all kinds of gear for shooting, poisoning, and trapping …