Rat Universes

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled environment for more than a year, and found evidence for the same anxieties sparked by their urban cousins: overpopulation and an ensuing ‘behavioural sink’. Jon Day joins Tom to discuss lab rats, street rats and the ‘rat in the head’. They explore the reasons many found Calhoun’s rat utopias compelling, and why his conclusions do both rats and humans a grave disservice. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠ Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,
0:07.4	Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,
0:12.4	from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works
0:17.2	by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes
0:22.5	for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice
0:28.3	and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with
0:35.5	two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.
0:39.2	And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.
0:43.1	You can find a link in the description, or search close readings, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:12.3	Music You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to John Day about rats, in particular about lab lab rats and especially those that were experimented on by John Bumpus Calhoun at the National Institutes of Health in the
1:18.3	1950s and 1960s. John Day teaches at King's College London and his books include homing which is partly
1:24.8	about pigeons which are sometimes known as the rats of the
1:27.8	sky, which I'm sure is unfair to both pigeons and rats.
1:31.5	This piece in the latest LRB is a review of two books.
1:34.7	Rat City, overcrowding an urban derangement in the rodent universes of John B. Calhoun by
1:40.5	John Adams and Edmund Ramston, and Dr. Calhoun's Mouserie,
1:45.1	the strange tale of a celebrated scientist, a rodent dystopia, and the future of humanity
1:50.3	by Lee Allen Dugat King.
1:52.7	Hello John and thank you so much for talking to me today.
1:54.9	Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here.
1:56.4	I hope you don't mind me taking pigeons.
1:59.2	Amen, but I was thinking while i was writing the
	...

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