In New York, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. During a war, the rat populations of seaports and of ships always shoot up. House rats left their nests in basements and began to dig burrows in vacant lots and parks, particularly Central Park, earlier this spring than they have for many years. A steady increase in shipboard rats began to be noticed in New York Harbor in the summer of 1940, less than a year after the war started in Europe. Rats and rat fleas in many foreign ports are at times infected with the plague, an extraordinarily ugly disease that occurs in several forms, of which the bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, is the most common. Consequently, all ships that enter the harbor after touching at a foreign port are examined for rats or for signs of rat infestation by officials of the United States Public Health Service, who go out in cutters from a quarantine station on the Staten Island bank of The Narrows. If a ship appears to be excessively infested, it is anchored in the bay or in one of the rivers, its crew is taken off, and its holds and cabins are fumigated with gas so poisonous that a whiff or two will quickly kill a man, let alone a rat. In 1939 the average number of rats killed in a fumigation was 12.4. In 1940 the average rose abruptly to 21, and two years later it reached 32.1. In 1943, furthermore, rats infected with the plague bacteria, Pasteurella pestis, were discovered in the harbor for the first time since 1900. They were taken out of an old French tramp, the Wyoming, in from Casablanca, where the Black Death has been intermittent for centuries.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 04, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 04, 2023 من The New Yorker.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.