AI Summary
5 min readOne night in August, a science reporter named Alex Neeson stepped out of a shower, lifted her foot to walk into her bedroom, and felt thready little legs on the bottom of her bare sole. She looked down and saw a gigantic American cockroach on its back, apparently dying. She spent the next several minutes performing an elaborate, terrified ritual—yellow rubber gloves, blue toilet bowl gel, a wad of paper towels, a shoe, a trash bag, a trip to the trash chute—before standing there on her own birthday and asking herself: What is wrong with me? This episode of Radiolab follows Alex’s attempt to answer that question, not by learning to love the roach, but by figuring out how to stop being terrified of it. What she discovers is that the revulsion she feels is tangled up in something far larger than a bug.
The limits of exposure and expertise
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:52) **Reporter’s Birthday Roach Encounter** - Alex Neeson describes stepping on a dying cockroach barefoot and her panicked, elaborate extermination ritual.
- 2 (06:44) **Shadowing Exterminators** - Alex attends the NYC Pest Expo after-party to learn from professionals who face roaches daily without fear.
- 3 (12:01) **Home Test Fails** - Alex’s newfound confidence evaporates when she finds a roach in her own kitchen sink and immediately delegates the kill to a friend.
- 4 (13:13) **The Roach-Eating Plan** - Alex contacts edible insect ambassador Chef Joseph Yoon, hoping that eating a roach will cure her revulsion.
- 5 (14:48) **The Roach Tasting** - Alex and eight colleagues gather at Yoon’s home to eat three types of cockroaches.
- 6 (16:49) **The American Roach Disaster** - The main event: sautéed American cockroach. The dish smells and tastes “medicinal” and “foul sour.”
- 7 (22:20) **A New Framework: “Pests”** - Alex encounters Bethany Brookshire’s book *Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains*, which argues the “pest” label devalues animals and justifies cruelty.
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Show Notes
A couple summers ago, Radiolab reporter Alex Neason got out of the shower and almost stepped on her worst nightmare: an American Cockroach. It was flipped onto its back, struggling, and for a split second, Alex swears she felt the spiny tickle of its legs on the underside of her bare foot. And, like every other time she has come into contact with a roach, this sent her into a debilitating spiral of fear, anger, and disgust.
This week, Alex tries to understand what might be behind her fear, in the hopes she can overcome it. And in doing so, Alex learns more about these so-called pests than she could have ever wanted to.
Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo, Alexandra Bell, and Changlu Wang
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Alex Neason
Produced by - Jessica Yung and Annie McEwen
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Sophie Samiee
and Edited by - Pat Walters
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Articles -
- American Cockroaches, Racism, and the Ecology of the Slave Ship (https://zpr.io/UNKsMz7ZaLvb) by Lindsay Garcia, Arcadia
Books -
- Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://zpr.io/6E5wJBM4Kvcv) by Bethany Brookshire
- The Cockroach Papers (https://zpr.io/CvKePYxEMEAW) by Richard Schweid
- Cockroach (https://zpr.io/UuEAjmfqKccQ) by Marion Copeland
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