Politics & Power Quote by Russell Baker

Leave it to Russell Baker to make real estate sound like a biology experiment. The line lands because it weaponizes scale: the New Yorker’s “home” is not merely small, it’s so absurdly compressed that it requires translation into a more legible American unit - “a couple of closets.” Baker isn’t just mocking cramped apartments; he’s puncturing a whole mythology of metropolitan sophistication. The joke is that the famed urbanite, supposedly living at the cutting edge of culture, is actually practicing an advanced form of domestic minimalism that borders on the ridiculous.

Then Baker swerves from architecture to ecology. “Grow trees and cockroaches” is a perfectly calibrated pairing: one aspirational, even pastoral; the other the city’s indestructible mascot. That juxtaposition turns the apartment into a microcosm of New York itself, where a potted ficus and a roach can plausibly share the same zip code - and where survival often looks like improvisation dressed up as lifestyle. The verb “grow” matters: it suggests the tenant isn’t simply enduring conditions but inadvertently cultivating them, as if urban living naturally produces both greenery and pests.

Contextually, Baker is writing in the long tradition of American newsroom humor that treats New York as both capital and pathology. The subtext is affectionate skepticism: admiration for the New Yorker’s resourcefulness, skepticism toward the bragging rights attached to suffering for proximity. The punchline doesn’t just describe a cramped life; it diagnoses the city’s ability to make deprivation feel like character.