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Hello readers, happy Friday! We have a big weekend coming up: Halloween, the New York City Marathon, and the end of Daylight Saving Time. At 2 a.m. Sunday, our clocks will go back an hour, putting us back on standard time for the next four and a half months or so.
Depending on who you ask, it’s either the welcome return of the pre-work sunshine or the start of a dreary day as the sun sets at 4:30 p.m. (The good news, however, is that no matter how much you want to go backwards, it’s not as hard on the body as jumping forward will be in March, when we return to daylight saving time.)
It’s also a topic that provokes strong opinions, including in the pages of Vox (which has both highlighted the horror of DST and argued that it should last forever).
President Donald Trump, among others, is a staunch advocate of the latter view: several times this month he has harangued the U.S. Senate to pass a bill making daylight saving time—that is, the period we are in from March to early November, with later sunrises and sunsets—permanent year-round, even posting the personal cell phone number of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a perennial opponent of the time summer.
Despite his pressure, the Senate took no action. But should this be the case? Is there a better solution, or are we in a better situation as things are going, despite the blunders? We cover this and more below.
It’s time to debate daylight saving time
As we mentioned above, a bill to establish permanent DST – the Sun Protection Act – is currently pending in the Senate after passing the House overwhelmingly this summer. Nineteen U.S. states have also passed laws that would do the same thing, although they can only take effect when Congress also acts. (Two US states, Arizona and Hawaii, are currently on permanent standard time, which East allowed.)
Advocates say that more daylight in the evening gives Americans more time to pursue leisure activities after work (the golf industry is a big fan), and that it could even have a positive effect on crime rates and the economy.
But the utopian ideal that there would be no darkness before 5 p.m. may not be quite what it’s cracked up to be. Critics of the permanent time change point out that the United States has already tried permanent daylight saving time and it was not well received.
As the Washingtonian reported in 2022: “While 79% of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, their approval had fallen to 42% three months later. »
That’s because there is still only a limited amount of sunlight and permanent daylight saving time makes winter mornings very dark – think sunrises after 9 a.m. along the western boundaries of the time zones. When it came into force in the 1970s, it quickly proved dangerous for children walking to school in the dark.
As Vox reported in 2016, courtesy of mapmaker Andy Woodruff, the change would leave most people in a significantly worse sunrise situation in exchange for an after-work boost.
If we still want to escape the biannual time change, the opposite solution might be better: permanent standard time gives more people a reasonable sunrise time and has less impact on what people have described as a reasonable sunset time (really — check out the maps in the story here).
It’s also considered the healthiest option by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which notes that standing standard time better aligns with our circadian rhythms.
The most likely option, however, is that we continue to get by this way: Darker evenings are a tough sell politically, and Congress abandoned its last permanent DST experiment after less than a year. At least we usually won’t have to reset our clocks manually on Sunday morning.
➨ How to make Halloween quickly. If you’re short on time and/or money and still need a Halloween costume, my colleague Allie Volpe has some tips on ways to harness your creativity (and wardrobe) to pull off something last minute.
- Did you know…that some right-wing elements, including Vice President JD Vance, are trying to rehabilitate the reputation of President Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal and his cover-up attempts came to light?
- Today’s quiz: Who is the lonely neighbor of the Finch family in the classic novel To kill a mockingbird? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s Daily Crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
- Yesterday’s quiz: Yesterday we asked what was the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from its capital, Cusco. This would be the Inca Empire, which covered much of western South America in the 15th and 16th centuries.
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