New York

Did You Know?

New York Advertised for Someone Bloodthirsty

In late 2022, the City of New York posted a job. Official title: Director of Rodent Mitigation. Salary: $120,000 to $170,000. The posting asked for a candidate who was "somewhat bloodthirsty" with a general aura of badassery, and listed the useful skills as including operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale slaughter.

This was a real job posting, published by the largest city in the United States, on official letterhead.

Nine hundred people applied. In April 2023 the city hired Kathleen Corradi — a former elementary school teacher, notably not a rodentologist — at $155,000 a year. For scale, the mayor's communications director earns $211,000. New York pays more to explain itself than to fight rats.

The population it was fighting: the old legend held there was one rat per New Yorker, around nine million. A statistician eventually took the myth apart. The current best estimate is roughly two million — about one rat for every four people. New York treats this as a victory, and given the alternative, it is.

The clock: every 31 December, a great many people watch a ball descend in Times Square, and almost none of them know they are watching a navigation instrument.

The first time balls went up in Portsmouth in 1829 and at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in 1833. A ball was hoisted up a mast and dropped at exactly one o'clock, in full view of ships in the harbour, so captains could set their marine chronometers. This was not decorative. Longitude at sea is calculated by comparing local time to reference time, and a chronometer running a few seconds slow put a ship miles from where it thought it was. Roughly 150 time balls went up in ports around the world.

In 1877 Western Union installed one on its Manhattan headquarters, dropped by telegraph signal from the Naval Observatory in Washington. Thirty years later, a newspaper publisher named Adolph Ochs — who walked past that ball regularly — needed a spectacle for a New Year's Eve party in the square outside his new offices.

He borrowed the ball.

The 1907 original was iron and wood, weighed 700 pounds, and carried a hundred lightbulbs. The version unveiled in 2025 weighs over 12,000. New York took a device built to stop ships hitting rocks, covered it in crystal, and turned it into the biggest party on Earth. It is still, technically, telling you the time.

Annual Daylight