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India.com
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- India.com
6 Best Works of Franz Kafka: Stories That Changed Modern Literature
photoDetails english 2908398 Franz Kafka, is renowned for his exploration of themes like alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurdity of bureaucracy. His distinct, surreal style often called "Kafkaesque" is evident in works such as The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, and In the Penal Colony. Scroll to read more about him. Updated:May 30, 2025, 03:23 PM IST About Kafka 1 / 7 Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July, 1833 in Prague, Czechia. His work explores themes of alienation, existential dread, and oppressive bureaucracy. Kafka's writing style is marked by dark humor, and nightmarish scenarios, often referred to as "Kafkaesque'. The Metamorphosis 2 / 7 This iconic novel was published in 1915, The story shows the tension between individual identity and societal roles. The protagonist's emotional journey highlights the cruelty of conditional love and the deep human need for understanding. The Castle 3 / 7 This novel was published in 1926 in an unfinished book, The novel delves into themes of bureaucracy, alienation, and the search for meaning. Kafka portrays a confusing, indifferent system that frustrates K's, the protagonist's every effort. In The Penal Colony 4 / 7 Published in 1919, this short story examines themes of justice, punishment, and blind adherence to tradition. Kafka's storytelling triggers discomfort and contemplation, using stark imagery and ethical ambiguity to challenge the reader's sense of fairness and authority. The Trial 5 / 7 This amazing novel was published in 1925. The book explores existential anxiety, powerlessness, and the human longing for clarity and justice. The protagonist, Josef K., is arrested and prosecuted by a mysterious and inaccessible legal system. The charges against him are never revealed. Letters to Milena 6 / 7 These deeply personal letters offer a rare glimpse into Kafka's emotional world. Addressed to Milena Jesenská, his beloved, they reveal themes of longing, vulnerability, love, and spiritual connection and the fact that despite their intimacy, Kafka and Milena never lived together which makes these letters more intimate. The Hunger Artist 7 / 7 Published in 1922, is a short story that follows a professional artist who performs public fasting as an art form. Over time, audiences lose interest in his act, and he is forgotten by his audience. The story explores themes of isolation, misunderstood artistry, and existential longing.
Scroll.in
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Punishment in search of a crime: Franz Kafka's ‘The Trial' turns 100
'A book,' a 20-year-old Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1904, 'must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.' It is a quintessential Kafka image. I see an ice-axe, the sharpened point of its curved metal head shattering a vast plane of ice into hairline curves that ramify in all directions. This kind of blow, this shattering of the surface of the world, produced one the greatest novels ever written, The Trial, and introduced to literature one of its most compelling characters, Joseph K, a senior bank clerk doomed to a tragic fate. In its opening sentences, the novel's premise is established with lightning speed. One workday morning, K wakes up to find two strange men in his bedroom, who inexplicably place him under arrest. Later, he is sentenced to death for a crime he knows nothing about by a judge he never sees. One hundred years after its publication on April 26, 1925, the blow of that axe is still being felt. The feeling it engenders is crystallised in a single adjective: 'Kafkaesque'. It is a modifier that has become as famous as Kafka himself. The Trial was written over the period 1914-15, when Kafka was in his early 30s. Like his two other novels – Amerika (alternatively known as The Man Who Disappeared) and The Castle – it was never finished. Kafka was a perfectionist who, as his diaries reveal, struggled with his artistic self-worth. He published little in his lifetime: two short story collections, some story extracts, and his novella The Metamorphosis, which went largely unnoticed. We would not even have the novels if not for the intervention of Kafka's close friend and literary executor Max Brod. Thankfully, Brod ignored Kafka's instructions to destroy his manuscripts after his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1924. The Trial was the first of the novels to be published posthumously, with the others appearing soon after. The Kafkaesque Fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose youth was shaped by Stalinist communism, characterised the Kafkaesque as a state of powerlessness when trapped inside a boundless labyrinth. He also saw in it an inversion of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. No longer is a crime met with a punishment; rather, the punishment goes in search of a crime. For poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka pioneered the notion of a 'neo-bureaucracy' of 'corridors, of segments, a string of offices' that marked 'the transition from the old archaic imperial bureaucracy to modern bureaucracy'. They found Kafka's worldview so powerful that they incorporated it into their influential theories of capitalism and schizophrenia. Joseph K's grisly fate plays out in an anonymised city, most likely derived from Kafka's home of Prague. The city's Austro-Hungarian ornamentation is stripped to bone, leaving only a kind of proto-brutalist substratum. It's a powerful setting. Has a writer ever generated so much strangeness and awe, so much psychological power, with such basic materials? Much of the novel's action occurs in genteel boarding houses, bank offices, run-down tenements, a dilapidated artist's studio, a quarry. Its potentially grandest setting, a cathedral, is rendered in dark, blurry tones. From these modest elements, Kafka builds vast panoramas, sweeping landscapes, all in the theatre of the mind. It is a phantasmagoria assembled from the world of concrete things – Kafka is nothing if not a writer of specificity – yet it seems to be moulded from some kind of dark matter, the very stuff of consciousness: sensory data that is as close to mind as the senses can be, but which dissolves in instant, only to reconfigure as a new room, a new office, a new studio. In these rooms, a varied cast of characters orbit the hapless K, each exerting an influence, both direct and indirect, on his fate. In K's personal world, there are his landlady, his love interests, bank colleagues, his uncle and guardian. In the world of the trial, which increasingly bleeds into every aspect of his existence, there are the petty officials, his lawyer, the painter, the priest. In his encounters with them, K shows the many sides of his personality. He is, by turns, polite and dismissive, decorous and licentious, driven by a burning sense of injustice, yet prone to periods of lassitude. What he is not is paranoid. The theme of paranoia is central in The Trial (and in the Kafkaesque itself), but it exists at a much more pervasive level than that of the mere individual. To see K as paranoid limits our understanding of what Kafka is trying to achieve. In fact, K's response to his arrest is anything but paranoid. He displays a misplaced confidence that everything will turn out for the best. Instead of fearing the invisible forces arrayed against him, he is often combative and sardonic, ruining his chances of acquittal at every turn. In Kafka's Weltanschauung, the world itself has become irrational, arbitrary and malevolent: a machine for the production of paranoia. K's stance is that of someone who is trying to remain sane in a world gone mad. One way he does this is by refusing to internalise the values of a perverted system. He is innocent, as far as he is concerned, and never passes up an opportunity to declare it. His naivety in the face of the court is his purity. There is no court more perverse than the one found in The Trial. It is ingeniously staged, revealed to us only in glimpses. We first physically encounter one of its offices on the top floor of a working-class tenement building. A small door is opened at the back of a cramped, grubby flat and behind it, where we least expect, is a large, crowded room, buzzing with the activity of the hearings in session. This is where K attends his first and only hearing. Like the tenement building, the room is dirty and dilapidated. The hearing is a farce. The magistrate mistakes K for a house painter. Because of his strenuous proclamations of innocence, K's hearing never gets off the ground. Later, K visits this room again when the court is out of session and takes the opportunity to nose around. Examining the magistrate's reference books, he sees that one is full of clumsy pornographic drawings. Another is titled 'What Greta Suffered from her Husband Franz'. The Trial is full of such absurd humour, trompe l'oeil effects, and manipulations of scale. It also contains touches of what would come to be called surrealism. For example, when the amorous wife of the court attendant shows K her hand as she tries to woo him, she reveals that two of her fingers are joined by an overgrown web of skin. Though we see little of the court, we experience it everywhere through its proxies and their endless discussions on how it operates. K's lawyer, the bedridden Herr Huld, describes a network of judges that 'mounted endlessly, so that not even adepts could survey the hierarchy as a whole'. In lengthy monologues, Huld explains the court's endlessly deferred processes. Reports can be drafted, only to have their completion delayed for any number of reasons. Even if they are submitted, they usually end up circulating up and down the system in great recursive loops with no definitive outcome. Titorelli, the court painter to whom K is sent to progress his case (even though he has no official status), describes the behind-the-scenes operations of the court. There is the lobbying of judges that must be pursued in order to influence the outcome. Verdicts, Titorelli points out, can only end in a pronouncement of guilt, but not necessarily death. K's best option, he advises, is to admit his guilt, but to choose a category where final sentencing is deferred, perhaps forever, perhaps not: there are no guarantees. His case could be reactivated at any time, resulting in the gravest of consequences, or perhaps never – who could tell? How is an increasingly dispirited K meant to negotiate such a menacing world, accept its insane norms? The priest in the penultimate chapter proffers an answer. K should not 'accept everything as true, only as necessary'. K responds: 'A melancholy conclusion […] It turns lying into a universal principle.' Dialectic of unenlightenment Part of the dramatic brilliance of The Trial is the way Kafka brings all of this deferral and recursion to an abrupt halt in the form of the ultimate act of closure: death. In its combination of menace and comedy, K's execution is arguably one of the most chilling chapters in all of literature. It has the hallmarks of a sacrifice, but one that has no point, no reason or explanation. On the eve of his 31st birthday, one year after his arrest, K's executioners, taciturn men dressed in black, appear in his room. They frogmarch him out of town to a disused quarry, where they lay him out on a stone and, under the moonlight, plunge a knife through his heart. Everything about the execution is primaeval, ritualistic, atavistic. What is the nature of this nightmare world, where such an arbitrary execution can take place? It is not only a world where lying is the norm, a world where reason has lost its way: it is much worse than that. This nightmare world consciously works at every point against reason, against the Enlightenment belief that reason leads us to a truth. Any possibility that humanity is continuously improving, that each successive generation draws closer to the truth, is repudiated. Within the ideals of the Enlightenment, The Trial suggests, there lurks the dark glow of the irrational, the persistence of a power that loves nothing but itself, a power that will destroy capriciously and without explanation. This is illustrated in the novel's final scene. K finally acquiesces to his fate and dies, to use his own words, 'like a dog'. With this thrust of the dagger, Kafka sets in motion a reverse teleology, a dialectic of unenlightenment, one where we fall backwards into a corrupt moral order we believed we had transcended, at least in principle. 'I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us,' the young Kafka wrote in his letter to Oskar Pollak. 'If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?' Kafka is still waking us up, 100 years after the publication of The Trial. Whenever power goes awry, serving sinister forces that enact the law according to a perverse set of whims it calls justice, we know we are in the world of the Kafkaesque. Yes, Kafka's worldview, for all its comedy, is bleak and dark. But it sheds a unique light: the kind of illumination of human nature that is essential, revealing aspects that, once seen, cannot be unseen. Without it, we would not only be asleep; we would also be blind.
The Star
24-04-2025
- Science
- The Star
Do you lack an inner voice?
Mel May only realised she was different while reading a news article one day. 'Wait, what? Some people hear a voice in their head?' she thought at the time. She was stunned to discover that this was not just a figure of speech – her friends were actually chatting to themselves in their minds. The 30-year-old Australian video producer who lives in New York, the United States, remembers trying to explain to her family: 'I don't have a voice in my head.' 'My dad was like, 'You are lying',' she shared. But her father came around once May started working with psychologists who agreed – she is one of the very rare people who lack inner speech. A new concept The idea that some people might not experience this phenomenon is so new that a clinical name, anendophasia, was only proposed for it in a paper last year (2024). The inner monologue has proven extremely difficult to study because it relies on people being able to describe how they think – and it turns out that we are unreliable narrators. 'People are ignorant about the characteristics of their own inner experience,' Dr Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US, said. 'And it doesn't matter how confident you are,' added the pioneer in the field who has studied people with a range of inner experiences, including May. Most people assume their inner voice is speaking all the time, but it is actually just one of several phenomena of our inner experience, he said. Others include visual imagery, 'unsymbolised thinking', feelings and sensory awareness. Words vs visuals To study these phenomena, Prof Hurlburt conducted research that would have a beeper go off at random while study participants were reading Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis and describe what was in their head. Rather than speaking the words in their inner voice, they were actually creating visual images – 'their own video' – of the book, he said. People also have different kinds of inner speech. Some have multiple voices, while bilingual people can switch languages. Dr Giordon Stark, a California-based particle physicist who was born deaf, has a mix of inner speech and visual images. 'I don't think of the word 'bed' in my head, but rather, I visualise the idea of my head hitting the pillow', which is similar to the sign language gesture for the word, the 34-year-old explained. Pressed to estimate how often people are hearing an inner voice, Prof Hurlburt emphasised that much more research is needed on the subject. But a ballpark figure could be that people are 'inner speaking' 20% to 25% of the time, he said. That average includes people who have far more frequent speech and those with none, such as May. 'Her inner experience is close to being nothing, but she's the exception rather than the rule,' he said. Dr Helene Loevenbruck, a leading inner voice researcher at France's Universite Grenoble Alpes, has had to change her mind on whether people like May could even exist. 'I thought everyone had an inner voice until very recently,' she said. The idea ran counter to her previous work, which suggested inner speech was an important part of speaking out loud, serving as an 'internal simulation'. But the work of Prof Hurlburt – and the discovery that some people cannot create mental images, a condition called aphantasia – changed her mind. Pros and cons May believes her lack of an inner voice is why she has never been an anxious person – and why meditation is very easy for her. Dr Daniel Gregory, a philosopher specialising in inner speech at the University of Barcelona, Spain, said a potential disadvantage of having more inner speech is 'a vulnerability to negative thought patterns, to rumination'. But we can also 'use inner speech to encourage ourselves, to give ourselves positive messages', he said. May said a common response to hearing that she has no inner monologue is: 'Wow, that must be amazing.' However, she added: 'I'm really quick to push back on that because I think certainly there are pros and cons. 'I reflect a lot about what aspects of the lived experience I'm missing out on.' As well as not stressing about the future, May has a hard time remembering the past. Dr Loevenbruck said that the people she had studied with aphantasia reported having 'weird' autobiographical memories 'because they have no sensory way of reliving a memory'. May emphasised that lacking an inner voice did not mean she was incapable of thought. 'I'm not dead inside. I know stuff and I feel stuff,' said May, who plans to make a documentary about her experience. Asked what was running through her head, she responded simply. 'Well, I'm sitting here, I'm listening to you and then I just automatically respond. And that's it. 'Isn't that how this happens for everyone?' – AFP Relaxnews
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'I don't have a voice in my head': Life with no inner monologue
Mel May only realised she was different while reading a news article one day. "Wait, what? Some people hear a voice in their head?" she thought at the time. She was stunned to discover that this was not just a figure of speech -- her friends were actually chatting to themselves in their minds. May, a 30-year-old Australian video producer who lives in New York, remembers trying to explain to her family: "I don't have a voice in my head." "My dad was like, 'You are lying'," she told AFP. But her father came around once May started working with psychologists who agreed -- she is one of the very rare people who lack inner speech. The idea that some people might not experience this phenomenon is so new that a clinical name, anendophasia, was only proposed for it in a paper last year. The inner monologue has proven extremely difficult to study because it relies on people being able to describe how they think -- and it turns out we are unreliable narrators. "People are ignorant about the characteristics of their own inner experience," Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told AFP. "And it doesn't matter how confident you are," added Hurlburt, a pioneer in the field who has studied people with a range of inner experiences, including May. Most people assume their inner voice is speaking all the time but it is actually just one of several phenomena of our inner experience, Hurlburt said. Others include visual imagery, "unsymbolised thinking", feelings and sensory awareness. - Only a quarter of the time? - To study these phenomena, Hurlburt conducted research that would have a beeper go off at random while study participants were reading Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and describe what was in their head. Rather than speaking the words in their inner voice, they were actually creating visual images -- "their own video" -- of the book, he said. People also have different kinds of inner speech. Some have multiple voices, while bilingual people can switch languages. Giordon Stark, a California-based particle physicist who was born deaf, has a mix of inner speech and visual images. "I don't think of the word 'bed' in my head but I rather visualise the idea of my head hitting the pillow," which is similar to the sign language gesture for the word, the 34-year-old told AFP. Pressed to estimate how often people are hearing an inner voice, Hurlburt emphasised that much more research is needed on the subject. But a ballpark figure could be that people are "inner speaking" 20 to 25 percent of the time, he said. That average includes people who have far more frequent speech and those with none, such as May. "Her inner experience is close to being nothing but she's the exception rather than the rule," Hurlburt said. Helene Loevenbruck, a leading inner voice researcher at France's Universite Grenoble Alpes, has had to change her mind on whether people like May could even exist. "I thought everyone had an inner voice until very recently," she told AFP. The idea ran counter to her previous work, which suggested inner speech was an important part of speaking out loud, serving as an "internal simulation". But the work of Hurlburt -- and the discovery that some people cannot create mental images, a condition called aphantasia -- changed her mind. - 'Pros and cons' - May believes her lack of an inner voice is why she has never been an anxious person -- and why meditation is very easy for her. Daniel Gregory, a philosopher specialising in inner speech at the University of Barcelona, said a potential disadvantage of having more inner speech is "a vulnerability to negative thought patterns, to rumination". But we can also "use inner speech to encourage ourselves, to give ourselves positive messages", he told AFP. May said a common response to hearing that she has no inner monologue is: "Wow, that must be amazing." "I'm really quick to push back on that because I think certainly there are pros and cons," she said. "I reflect a lot about what aspects of the lived experience I'm missing out on." As well as not stressing about the future, May has a hard time remembering the past. Loevenbruck said the people she had studied with aphantasia reported having "weird" autobiographical memories "because they have no sensory way of reliving a memory". May emphasised that lacking an inner voice did not mean she was incapable of thought. "I'm not dead inside. I know stuff and I feel stuff," said May, who plans to make a documentary about her experience. Asked what was running through her head, she responded simply. "Well, I'm sitting here, I'm listening to you and then I just automatically respond. And that's it. "Isn't that how this happens for everyone?" dl/gil/rjm
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
What the Roaches in My Rent-Stabilized Apartment Taught Me About the Housing Crisis
In my fight against infestation, I realized that no man is an island, least of all in the New York City rental market. This is a story with a happy ending—community, hope, a deeper understanding of how we could live in the world—but a less serendipitous beginning. I was lying in bed, falling asleep, when I felt a tickle on my arm. I brushed it reflexively, expecting to feel nothing much, but instead I felt, curled up in my hand, squirming: a roach. Running across me. While I was supposed to be safe and sound in bed. The anguish. The bug was not, unfortunately, a total surprise. Since I had moved into my grungy, downtown Manhattan fifth-floor walk-up in early 2021, I had been dealing with roaches. At first they were a novelty, a sort of quirky new scenario in my zany New York sitcom. I set traps, poisons, consulted my building's exterminator. I assumed they'd be a passing crisis, forgotten tomorrow with the next episode's adventures. When they endured, comedy turned to tragedy. The problem seeped into my self-image. Was this me? Was I the sort of person who had roaches in their apartment? I had visions of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and that clip of the woman on 1000-lb Sisters crying about people seeing roaches in videos of her home while a roach is climbing up the wall in the background. Roaches are a tough look to pull off. Other apartment issues can be fun, even vaguely glamorous in a tongue-in-cheek boho chic kind of way. "Oh, my hot water is out because my landlord can't seem to fix the boiler"—it's a problem out of La bohème, one that you might tell a friend before breaking out into an aria about being an artist seeking true love. But a bug problem feels personal, a supposed reflection of moral failure. In my mind, I had roaches because on some existential level I was doing something wrong. At this point, I hear you whispering the same thing that I initially told myself: Move. Get out of there. Heal thyself in the sanatorium of a new home. The problem was that I was trapped by the New York City rental market. I moved into my place in the depths of the pandemic, when people were leaving cities for big country homes or Florida or wherever else. New Yorkers were fleeing in droves, and the Manhattan market tanked. Landlords were offering deals: Three months free! $400 off your rent for six months! Fortunately, I had the advice of a friend who works in affordable housing, and I snatched one of the deals in a rent-stabilized apartment where the landlord wouldn't be able to jack the rent back up when the crisis passed. I signed a lease for $1,600 per month for a one-and-a-half-bedroom in Little Italy. I knew that I'd never find something like that again, barring another world-stopping catastrophe. So, I dug in and didn't flee. But neither did the roaches. Eventually, I asked experts beyond the friendly man who came once a month to spray the building what I should do, but I only did that after I had tried to handle the problem on my own. As the experts later told me, I started going about it all wrong. Initially, after doing a deep clean to make sure there were no hidden roach nests in the apartment, I set baited traps to kill whatever might be hiding, which Jesse Scaravella, owner of Evergreen Eco Pest Control, now tells me is a common mistake. "Everybody gets on the bait cycle," he says. The problem with baited traps is that in addition to trapping roaches, they also attract them. "You're kind of creating a beacon." I was dealing with German cockroaches, which are smaller than the monstrous American cockroaches. Despite being larger, I learned that American cockroaches are less of a headache overall. In New York apartments, they're usually lost wanderers coming up from sewers via pipes. They are big, but they are often solo travelers and are less likely to linger and infest than their smaller German counterparts. German roaches, once invited inside by bait or food crumbs, will lay eggs and reproduce, multiplying your problems. Because they're so small, they can get in from small cracks or gaps around poorly sealed pipes, for instance, or even the gap beneath the door. Once inside, they look for moisture and food and can snuggle up in tight spots. Roaches, I realize, are an architectural issue, and in an old claptrap like mine, the borders are weak. "Cardboard is the enemy," Scaravella tells me. "All those boxes are infamous for traveling roaches." Collections of plastic bags, like the kind I used to keep under the sink, also create cozy breeding grounds for them. Scaravella's advice is to clean up food crumbs carefully and look for anywhere that moisture accumulates—maybe condensation on a cold pipe or in an appliance. Deal with that, and you will reduce what is attracting the bugs into your home. The next step is keeping them from getting in at all. "The question is not about, Can you get rid of them?" Timothy Wong, the technical director at M&M Pest Control, tells me. "The question is, Can you prevent them from coming in?" After pooh-poohing the other products I panic-bought to keep the bugs away, like essential oils or plug-in sonic repellers, Wong advises me on what exterminators call exclusion, or closing up your apartment so nothing unwanted can get in. "The best long-term solution is sealing up all the access points," he says. It's easier said than done. After I start looking for ways in, I can't stop finding them. My old tenement apartment, layered with various cheap renovations, is a nightmare. I discover a crack where the floor for some reason steps up, small holes around the showerhead, an eerie gap where a pipe runs through the ceiling into the great beyond. I caulk in a frenzy, and when the gaps are too wide, I roll out the duct tape. I develop a maniacal focus on recording where I see them to figure out how they get in, making spreadsheets of sightings. For the persistently difficult portal to hell apparently located in the cabinets beneath my kitchen sink, I bust out some double-sided carpet tape and line the front perimeter of the cabinets to create a barrier that catches any bugs trying to escape, trapping them until I pluck them out to their graves. I make some progress, liberating the bathroom and bedroom, but I can't seem to win the whole apartment. Roaches, I realize, are an architectural issue, and in an old claptrap like mine, the borders are weak. "The problem is that in New York City, you're not living in an apartment where you are the only caretaker," Wong tells me. "You're living with all these neighbors, and you have no idea what their sanitation or hygiene is like." No matter how clean I keep my place and how many cracks I fill, I can't control what happens next door. This ends up being my final liability. "That front door is always going to be subject to insects coming in," Wong says, and he's right in my case. It's the one place where the roaches still made it inside, even after all of my efforts. It's not possible, apparently, to seal myself off from the world around me. Who knows if one of my 20-or-so neighbors is hoarding old boxes or leaving food out overnight or being anything less than monomaniacal in their focus in combatting the roach scourge? Who around me is not part of the solution and is therefore part of the problem? The more I chat with the people around me, though, the less I think that my neighbors are really the enemy. Many of us are in the same boat: We hate the bugs, but our rents are too good to let go of in a city so expensive. Rent stabilization has put us all in a battle together, and though I see us as a horde of tenants floundering in roach-infested waters, others envision more potential. Cea Weaver, the director of New York activist group Housing Justice for All, tells me, "Rent stabilization…creates a political class of people who can act together." Neighbors with trash aren't the enemy; our crummy housing system is. Weaver gives me a quick history of rent stabilization and what it does. "The Emergency Tenant Protection Act, which is commonly known as rent stabilization, has been around since 1974," she says, but over the following decades, the real estate industry successfully lobbied to get loopholes in the system that reduced the number of stabilized units in the city. A 2020 study from the New York City Rent Guidelines Board found that the city had lost about 145,000 rent stabilized units since 1994. I've started to think of my roaches not as a personal flaw but as a defect in the country's housing system. In 2019, tenants groups like Housing Justice won big in the state legislature, which decided to strengthen rent stabilization in New York City and expand it to the rest of the state in what Weaver calls a "generational victory." Now, Weaver calls rent stabilization "the gold standard when it comes to tenant protections, and it covers about forty percent of the rental housing stock in New York City." As she explains it, the system essentially guarantees the right for tenants to renew their leases and limits the amount that rents can go up. Rent stabilization laws set up the Rent Guidelines Board, which meets annually to determine the most that stabilized rents can go up that year. During the peak pandemic years, the board said that stabilized rents couldn't go up at all. Usually the amount is in the low single digits. Weaver and Housing Justice are now trying to organize tenants into a political group that can advocate for better living conditions. The U.S. housing system has long privileged homeowners, offering them tax breaks and mortgage protections. Ownership is part of the American dream. But Weaver and I discuss how outdated that model is at a time when more and more people are giving up on the idea of ever buying a home, especially in New York City. "Stability and security is not something that can be reserved for people who own a home," she says. Rent stabilization is perhaps not the sexiest solution to the housing crisis, but, Weaver says, it's one with the ability to help people across social spectrums. "One of the things that I think makes rent stabilization so special is how many different types of people have a stake in it succeeding," she says. "It is for working class people. It's for low-income people, it's for middle-class people. Stabilization is for everybody." I've started to think of my roaches not as a personal flaw but as a defect in the country's housing system that leaves so many people fending for themselves and fighting for whatever bits of shelter their landlords deign to provide. More cynically, I have thought of the roaches not as a bug but as a feature of my apartment, one that gets tenants with good deals to move out so the landlord can raise the rent. I wish I could say I have drawn some wisdom from my roach experience, but the whole ordeal just illustrates to me how little wisdom there is in the American approach to housing overall. After talking to Weaver, I wondered if my time would be better spent petitioning my state senator for better housing policy instead of caulking some crevice for 30 minutes every week. But then something wonderful happened, at least for me: Last summer, the roaches disappeared. I suspect it had less to do with my work and more to do with some light renovations done to the bakery next door and the stairwell of my building. Whatever, I'll take the win. At this point, though, I can't go back to naive optimism about my housing future. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I make some other concession to stay in my apartment. Already, my rent has crept up over the past few years, far faster than my salary has, thanks to our current mayor's appointments to the rent stabilization board, who have voted to allow rents to rise. It may be time to take my battle outside of my home. "The cost of living crisis is out of control, and we need a rent freeze," Weaver says. Her goal faces some stiff headwinds: Andrew Cuomo is a leading candidate in this year's mayoral election, and he has reportedly told real estate leaders that he regrets elements of the 2019 reforms bolstering rent stabilization, which he signed into law when he was governor. But other candidates, like Zohran Mamdani, have signed on to the idea. Any long-term vermin solution, I've learned, requires cooperation with your neighbors. But there's no reason to stop there. With some broader teamwork, we could all one day be stronger against the bigger pests plaguing our homes. Top illustration by Tiffany Jan Related Reading: A Comprehensive Guide on How to Handle the Pesky Vermin Invading Your Home New York City Is Failing Tenants. So They're Getting Organized 'I Will Die Here': A Conversation With My Mom About Her East Village Apartment of 27 Years
