623. Can New York City Win Its War on Rats?

It’s a hard time to run a university: public trust is low, political pressure is high, and finances are fragile. But Daniel Diermeier, who trained as a political scientist, has Vanderbilt humming. How? He says the key is choosing magnets over wedges. SOURCES: Daniel Diermeier, ch ...  Show more

Insurance forms that make no sense. Subscriptions that can’t be cancelled. A never-ending blizzard of automated notifications. In this update of a 2025 episode, Stephen Dubner discovers where all this sludge comes from — and how much it’s costing us. SOURCES: Benjamin Handel, pro ...  Show more

November 18, 2022. New York City is at war... with rats. And today, Mayor Eric Adams is set to announce four new pieces of legislation aimed at combating this scurrying problem.Two of these laws will target garbage, the rats' main source of food. If you put trash in places the ra ...  Show more

Animals are essential in maintaining ecosystem balance, but in some cases they can have the opposite effect. In the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, authorities are looking to cull 1 million Indian house crows. Conservationists say they are becoming a nuisance and have significant ...  Show more

Jens Ludwig has an idea for how to fix America’s gun violence problem — and it starts by rejecting conventional wisdom from both sides of the political aisle. 

On paper, a thirty-three-year-old socialist would seem an unlikely contender for mayor of New York City. But Zohran Mamdani’s campaign proved compelling enough to make him the front-runner to lead the largest city in America. On the first in a series of Critics at Large interv ...