| It's too bright at night. I've been spending a lot of time in small towns in France. There are parts of Cape Ferret, a lovely little spot on the coast, without any street lights at all, and it's great. You walk around and it's a little bit mysterious, it feels like an adventure. It's romantic, like some old novel from a hundred fifty years ago. In any sizable city in America (and most of the Western world), it's the opposite. Everything is lit up at night. Security lights flash on when you walk by someone's house. Cars with headlights so bright you can see them from the space station whiz by every few seconds, lighting you up. Billboards and store marquees, pure white streetlights. Even people walking their dogs after sunset in the suburbs will have a headlamp or their smartphone flashlight turned on. You walk by a house after dark and the entire thing is lit up from the 60 inch TV. People are all like 5-year-olds nowadays: they need light at all times. They can't tolerate the ambiguity of darkness and shadows. They need full illumination. And the world is worse for it. You can't see the stars. You look up and it's a beige morass without distinction. You're bathing in LED light every second you're outside at night, suppressing melatonin and pushing back your circadian rhythm. Even the sky is no longer dark. Night isn't black anymore. It's purple or grey. The mystery is gone. The nighttime world becomes garish under LED light. The aesthetics are destroyed. Nighttime is still out there, lurking on the edges. It's in the forests and fields, out past city limits—but few of us venture that far out anymore to ever get it. You should. The night's calling. When you feel like camping, that's the night calling to you. When you're driving through the desert at night and get the urge to turn off your headlights for a few seconds, that's the night calling to you. Let the night in. I don't expect you to get the streetlights disabled in your town, but you can—and should—allow a bit more darkness into your life. Take care, everyone. Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy how you feel about darkness and nighttime. | 