Rat City
Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun
A New York Times Editors' Choice
"Entertaining, phenomenally weird . . . Rat City may well be the world’s first-ever work of socio-biographical-scientific pop history. . . .a freaky romp down a peculiar passage in the history of ideas, full of oddball cameos (Aldous Huxley! Buckminster Fuller!) and some very sharp science writing."—The New York Times
"Facebook, Yik Yak, Twitter, Twitch—each had a sunny, expansive phase, followed by a descent into flaming, catfishing, and troll wars. To the extent that Calhoun’s rats have any sociological relevance, it would seem to be in the mirror world of the Web. What, after all, could be a better description of X these days than a “behavioral sink”?" —The New Yorker
Behind the internet's…
$41.50
July 16, 2024
Jon Adams is a former BBC New Generation Thinker and author of Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy. Edmund Ramsden and he both previously worked at the London School of Economics, where they began collaborating on the history and influence of John B. Calhoun’s rodent crowding experiments.
Rat City
Jon Adams
Edmund Ramsden is a historian of science at Queen Mary University of London, with an interest in the history of the social, behavioral and biological sciences in the 20th century. Jon Adams and he both previously worked at the London School of Economics, where they began collaborating on the history and influence of John B. Calhoun’s rodent crowding experiments.