The Unbearable Lightness

“THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS.” I despise that tagline with the disdain I reserve for anything that is right for the wrong reasons—true in letter but disingenuous in spirit. New York City is indeed a hard place to sleep, and partly for the reason the maxim implies: There’s so much to do here! So much to consume! But crucially: To afford any of it, you can’t stop working long enough to rest. The cost of living makes this city the apotheosis of what art historian Jonathan Crary described in his 2013 classic 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, a coerced state of nonstop productivity. In such a state, economic demand is packaged as hustle culture; rest is squeezed into smaller and smaller slivers of time; devices keep us overstimulated and always on; and we simply cannot afford to unplug. I haven’t been to Times Square since I was a teenager, but I feel the bright lights of the big city blazing down on me in the perma-fluorescents in the subway car, the blinking red surveillance cameras on the street corner, and the constantly glowing screen in my hand.

I’ve lived in a prewar Brooklyn co-op for six years. It has creaky floors, a groaning and sputtering radiator, and questionable plumbing and electrical wiring. I love it dearly, as if it were a person. During the 2020 lockdown, I became overly intimate with its quirks, and I also experienced some of the worst, wildest, life-altering insomnia of my life. I became obsessed with the specifics of the apartment at night that I believed were causing my sleeplessness. For instance, the unsteady temperature of the bedroom has to be regulated by cracking a window, a window that opens onto the street, the street where loud garbage trucks pass on an irregular nighttime schedule. If you’re lying in bed at 2:00 a.m. and listening closely, you can hear the rats rummaging in the trash cans.

But what really destroyed me were the lights. As if the regular streetlamps were not enough, at some point a new landlord bought the building across from mine and, during lockdown, installed four floodlights that face directly into my bedroom. One of them is upside-down, which means its beam is angled up and right at me. I assume that the owner installed them because a lot of people of color hang out on the sidewalk during the evenings. The sounds of the occasional house music and the long-running dice game happening outside are completely insignificant sleep-ruiners compared with those lamps. I called 311 about the excessive brightness; the operator said the lighting rig was on private property and there was nothing to be done. I bought blackout shades and an enormous bug-eyed sleeping mask. I swore I could still see the light.

As soon as the floodlights were switched on, I started to notice the particular searing intensity of artificial light everywhere in the city at nighttime. Sidewalk lampposts as blinding as illuminating; closed storefronts blasting indoor wattage until dawn; empty parking lots lined with stadium-level lamps; and what the fuck is up with car dealerships?

Of course, if you’re an insomniac, you’ll find anything to blame—you need your problem to be circumstantial and therefore fixable rather than evidence of a deep and impossible rift within yourself, a self that sabotages its own physical needs. If you’re a true insomniac, there’s no city, no apartment, no amount of superstitious behavior, possibly even no drug, that will put you to bed. And yet as I continued to worry and obsess about why I wasn’t sleeping, which is code for holding my phone four inches from my face and scrolling PDFs about mayoral lighting policy all night, I became convinced that artificial lighting of all kinds is indeed very bad, not just for the sleepless doomers, but for everyone, by which I mean humanity and nearly every other species. It is no exaggeration to say that light pollution is killing us slowly (some of us more quickly) and that this level of brightness is completely unnecessary. The guy who picked up the phone when I dialed 311 the third time still wasn’t having it.

THERE ARE MANY METRICS for light pollution, none of them perfect, but cities like New York are considered a nine on the Bortle scale, which is a decent measure of how hard it is to see the night sky from where you are. Nine is the top of the scale. The term light pollution was first popularized by astronomers in the 1970s, who noticed that observation of the stars and planets was getting more difficult, not just for them, but for everybody, especially city dwellers. The situation has gotten hyperbolically worse since then. A 2023 Science report estimates that the sky is getting brighter, and stars perceptually dimmer, by nearly 10 percent globally per year. And most of us don’t even know what we’re missing. According to light pollution lore, after the 1994 Northridge earthquake caused mass power outages in the Los Angeles area, 911 received several calls from alarmed residents asking about the strange flickers in the sky—they’d never seen the Milky Way. Today, one-third of humanity can’t see it.

Paul Bogard, an author of popular books about the disappearing night, writes that 40 percent of US Americans “live amid such a wash of electric light that their eyes never transition to scotopic, or night, vision.” We’ve become overreliant on the color-registering cones in our eyes rather than the light-registering rods. This means that the threshold for what we register as “visible” has changed—even a hundred years ago, what now seems like a dimly lit Brooklyn street would have been easily navigable. The more light you’re used to, the more you feel like you need.

Awareness of light pollution has led to a broader public anxiety that often tends toward what the geographer Oliver Dunnett has named “a moral geography of light pollution,” based on (legitimate) fears that we’re losing touch with the “astronomical sublime” through urbanization. But it’s not just an existential loss. Alarming scientific research across fields shows deleterious health and environmental consequences. In response, a growing coalition of stargazers, politicians, and environmentalists have taken up the cause of bringing back the night. Astronomer Christian Luginbuhl, an early protagonist in the Dark Sky movement, helped push Flagstaff, Arizona, to become the first certified “Dark Sky City” in 2001. (One condition for achieving this status is that the Milky Way is visible at night.) He argues that darkness is an intrinsically valuable natural resource, akin to a national park. As he puts it, “Nobody ever seems to make the mistake of thinking that we protect Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon just for geologists and rockhounds.” Bogard compares darkness to clean water and air: basic preconditions for wellness.

In 2022 Swedish biodiversity scientist and bat expert Johannes Eklöf summoned public awareness of the environmental devastation wrought by watts. “Light pollution in the sky,” he writes in his elegiac book The Darkness Manifesto, “rubs out galaxies and distant solar systems, as if we had used a dirty cloth to wipe the window facing the universe.” His argument is based on terrifying data that demonstrate how light pollution is decimating ecosystems and is a much larger factor than previously understood in planetary biodiversity decline.

Every organism on Earth evolved a biological clock. Much of this internal rhythm is innate—in 1997 the neurobiologist Joseph Takahashi identified and named the mammalian “CLOCK” gene—yet much of biorhythmic regularity is dependent on contextual clues that signal when it’s time to do things like grow, eat, sleep, and mate. One-third of all vertebrates and two-thirds of invertebrates on the planet are nocturnal, which means that they can’t regulate their life cycles without real darkness, the kind dark enough to register moonlight. It was through close study of his most beloved species, bats, that Eklöf realized the extent of animalian suffering. In the 1990s in Sweden, churches that once sheltered bat colonies began lighting their exteriors to highlight architectural drama, inadvertently unhousing the nocturnal animals and measurably contributing to their decline, to the point that they’re now endangered in the country.

Everyone suffers, from bats—which are essential pollinators, predators, and fertilizers—to birds, to coral reefs, to orchids. The disruption occurs not only on the scale of the day, but on the scale of the season; the length of a day is supposed to change throughout the year, but artificial lighting keeps it consistent. In cities, trees positioned next to streetlamps wait to shed their fall leaves for three weeks longer than trees unlit by lamps. One of the most chilling indicators of this broader ecological unraveling is what scientists now call “insect collapse.” Picture a moth entering a suicide spiral in the beam of a flashlight a millionfold. The biomass of insects on Earth plummeted 75 percent from 1990 to 2017, with light pollution a major culprit. Some argue that we have reached true “chronoclasm,” a crisis point at which the clocks of organisms and the clock time set by human activity are too at odds to be reconciled.

A tenth of global energy usage goes to artificial lighting—largely powered by fossil fuels that amount to another enormous environmental toll. When it comes to outdoor lighting, I regret to inform you that at least half is totally wasted. Due to sloppy design and planning that maximizes wattage rather than directing it, more than 50 percent of nightlight either shoots straight up or gets reflected by the ground into the sky. According to Eklöf’s research, powering poorly designed and overly bright lights across the US and Europe creates carbon dioxide emissions comparable to those of twenty million cars.

However: Unlike old-growth forests and water supplies, the destruction of darkness is eminently reversible.

IF DECLINING BAT POPULATIONS don’t rouse you to action, perhaps your own misery will. It’s common knowledge that artificial light messes up human sleep. An unending stream of pop-science articles offers alarming information about the negative effects. Psychology Today: “Even a single speck of LED blue light shining from some electronic component in the corner of the room at night will contribute to poor sleep.” British Vogue: “Why You Need to Know About Blue Light.” (According to the article, what you need to know is that you will look so tired in the morning that you must purchase Estée Lauder’s latest Advanced Night Repair Eye Supercharged Complex, price: 45 GBP.)

Andrew Huberman, the hyperswole, unsubtly misogynistic neurobiologist on a mission to optimize and health-max every moment of your life, whose Huberman Lab podcast has garnered over nine million YouTube views, has dedicated more than thirty episodes to body hacking your circadian rhythm back to its “natural” state through “circadian entrainment” and “morning protocols.” For the Huberman acolytes of the world, the goal of getting better rest and better health is better productivity. Being the CEO of your own life is probably only available to those on CEO salaries, but if we all had the time and money to unplug, we should: The mammalian CLOCK gene tries to keep you on a roughly twenty-four-hour schedule (more like twenty-four hours and ten minutes), but your circadian rhythm depends on the cue of light entering eyeballs. We know this because unsighted people get out of sync. This doesn’t just cause poor sleep, it screws with most basic body functions. Huberman, for example, encourages “circadian eating” to accelerate your metabolism and stay ripped. Or, say you switch from taking your antidepressant at night to taking it in the morning. Your liver may metabolize it differently, changing how the drug affects you.

The starkest evidence of what happens when you unsubscribe from natural time is found in studies of people who work night shifts, essentially flipping the body’s clock. As would be expected, staying awake all night increases sleep disorders, but it also elevates the risk for Type 2 diabetes, depression, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and hormone-sensitive cancers like breast cancer, which seem to be linked to melatonin production. The World Health Organization classifies night shift labor as a Group 2A carcinogen, the same group that includes lead exposure, contracting HPV, and eating a lot of red meat. (Carcinogens tend to linger in the 2A category until someone devises a definitive human test.) The DSM-5 says that working nights causes something called “shift-work disorder,” as if it were a disease of the mind and not of the economic system, a classic twist of cause and effect that pathologizes people for their exploitation. Who takes on more night shifts in the USA? Poor people and people of color. The suggested remedy for the diagnosis? Modafinil.

If you accept a biopsychosocial model of health, which says that your mental and physical well-being are interrelated and contingent on both chemistry and context (your brain makes you depressed, but so does capitalism), then artificial illumination interferes with the whole system. It changes neurochemical makeup at the same time as it exemplifies and furthers a sociopolitical world of never-ending work, constant consumption, and total surveillance. More than one psychiatrist has asked me whether I would describe myself as “tired and wired”—which seems to be an actual diagnostic term for a condition that is incidentally not covered by insurance—while assuring me that feeling that way is a completely normal result of living in the city that never sleeps.

FOR MANY ANIMALS, darkness equals security. It protects them while they scurry about escaping predators and mating in peace. For people, whose vision is better adapted for daytime, a degree of fear of the dark, or nyctophobia, is understandable. To be reductive, feeling unsafe at night is probably evolutionarily coded as a survival mechanism. That anxiety has been exacerbated and exploited by the people who want to watch you.

Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of the fantastically idiosyncratic lamp history  Disenchanted Night (1988), writes, “Surveillance and light, visibility and control: these pairs complement each other, as much as crime/conspiracy and darkness/night are paired in myth and psychology.” Tracing the roots of this logic, he finds its origin in seventeenth-century France, where public lighting was first deployed as a tool of crime prevention. Paris, the so-called City of Light, owes its nickname not only to the Enlightenment of the mind/soul, but also to the more literal enlightenment of its streets—to its system of proto–mass surveillance.

In 1667, Louis XIV released a special coin commemorating the introduction of the first public street lighting scheme in Europe. On one side of the coin was the face of the Sun King himself and on the other was a woman holding a beacon of progress. The candle lanterns that the monarch strung above Parisian streets were not bright enough to meaningfully illuminate public space, but they did meaningfully symbolize an uptick in surveillance. He continued adding lanterns as he expanded the police force over the ensuing years—as well as a network of spies and informants who notoriously carried torches. “Public lighting service as conducted by the police soon became one of the symbols of the new state,” notes Schivelbusch.

In prerevolutionary Paris, lighting was at one point the biggest item on the police budget. “By day, 1,500 uniformed police were on the streets. By night, 3,500 lanterns … achieved the same result.” This was part of Louis’s increasing “monopoly on both light and weapons” and provoked a spate of gleeful lantern-smashing by Parisians, who whacked them with sticks and slashed the ropes they hung from. Schivelbusch points out that this must have been “extremely enjoyable.” Such vandalism became coordinated routine as rebellions gained momentum and the symbolic activity transformed into a revolutionary tactic—it’s harder for troops to find you in pitch darkness. Upon the start of the revolution in 1789, two members of the ancien régime were pointedly hung from a lamppost.

It wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth century that gas “thermolamps” usurped oil lamps (and it was about time; rendering whale blubber into fuel had already sent at least one species to extinction). Gas flame was bright enough to fully illuminate the streets. In 1820, Paris installed gas lamps hooked up to a central provider, powering public illumination probably ten times brighter than before. Thus began the process of energy centralization that was fundamental to creating monopolies on public goods. Schivelbusch explains that, unlike a fire or a candle, when lighting, domestic or otherwise, depends on a centralized source for power, it “enter[s] its industrial—and dependent—stage.” Factory lights extended the workday; shop lights encouraged nighttime shopping; theater lights added hours of entertainment. Gas lit a flame under the ass of work and consumption.

If gas lighting enabled the consolidation of energy supply, electricity sealed the deal. Paris and London lit their first electric systems in 1878. In 1880, New York was one of the first North American cities to follow suit; Edison opened the first power station in lower Manhattan in 1882. (Schivelbusch makes the curious argument that until electrification fervor struck, the English-speaking world largely relied on locks instead of lamps. Whereas France was innovating mass surveillance, the Americans and British were inventing ever more complex mechanisms for barring the door and securing their shit.) As the Continent got wired, slowly at first, centralized electricity sold itself as the cheapest safety mechanism available. By 1924, General Electric was advertising light bulbs as “allies in the alleys.” The campaign waxed poetic: “To Emerson is ascribed the saying that ‘light is the best policeman,’ [but] light is also a good fireman, a first class salesman, and a wonderful protector of human life! And at what low wages it works!”

In the words of Lee Scrivner, author of my favorite book on not sleeping, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (2014), “It soon became clear that, unlike pre-modern or agrarian societies, technological modernity quite literally needed constant supervision.” Law enforcement needed lamps. Night-shift workers needed lamps. Malls needed lamps. Emergency services needed lamps. Moralists needed the metaphor of lamps.

Suddenly, late-nineteenth-century Victorians reported anxiety, restlessness, and a veritable epidemic of insomnia. Scrivner quotes a Chicago lawyer who remarked in 1886 that everyone was blaming their sleeplessness on

Electric lights, plus the telegraph, railway, and soon radio, added up to a cultural freak-out about the acceleration of time and the collapse of space. Statistics about insomnia are hard to come by, but the literature supports the historicity of a real vibe shift on the part of the upper classes, who were wringing their hands about how novel technology was keeping them awake. A proto-creative class of flex-working creatives and inventors known as “brain workers” claimed to be thinking so hard and so fast that they sometimes died from insomnia. By 1919, Encyclopedia Britannica had labeled insomnia a “condition of modern urban life,” both an individual malady and a social pathology, much as Crary would describe it today.

The afflicted and their commentators were precisely those with enough time to think about their sleeplessness—those doing mental and managerial labor, who could afford to buy radios and send telegrams. That edition of the Britannica also noted that insomnia was “comparatively rare among the poor.” It was simply inevitable for the lower classes, who were in fact the people most affected by things like factory lighting and round-the-clock surveillance, to work around the clock and never sleep. The poor were not insomniacs with fragile nervous systems; their sleeplessness was a natural function of capitalism. Always working, always watched. A poor person loitering under a streetlamp at night? Well, that’s criminal behavior.

AH, CRIME. That founding invention of the police state, endlessly invoked to justify idiotic and cruel policy decisions. The issue of whether nocturnal illumination truly prevents it has been the subject of an incredible pile of twentieth- and twenty-first-century research. The results are widely conflicting, context-dependent, and inconclusive. Some studies show notable decreases in crime. Others show that fear of crime goes down, but crime itself goes up. Some indicate that crime increases by huge percentages that are hard to account for, because the crime is displaced into surrounding areas (a phenomenon called “diffusion” or “leakage”).

Clearly, more light allows more formal surveillance, either by cops or cameras. Criminologists intent on proving that light is tough on crime postulate that it is all the more so because it increases “informal surveillance”—that is, it empowers neighbors to snitch on one another. They also believe that in some cases, light deters crime because it indicates “infrastructure investment,” which is another way of saying that it signals gentrification. The theory is that people are less likely to do something bad if they think rich/white people are watching.

One significant test of urban lighting’s efficacy was performed a decade ago in my very own sleepless city at then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s behest. A few months after a federal court finally declared stop-and-frisk policy unconstitutional in 2014, de Blasio announced that he would introduce new crime-busting tactics that were definitely not called stopping or frisking but that sort of enabled a little stopping and frisking. He used the word omnipresence to describe his new strategy for dealing with crime. As part of that initiative, he instituted a $210 million plan to address what appeared to be a minor increase in crime in 334 New York City Housing Authority developments, with $1.5 million earmarked for adding 150 light towers in the public areas of some of these complexes. His plan was framed as a trial to evaluate the expenditure: The NYPD would provide arrest data to researchers to study what happened in the newly lit areas.

The towers look temporary. They’re mounted on poles anchored to wheeled boxes branded “NYPD.” Each unit runs on a rumbling diesel generator that needs to be refilled daily by a city worker. In 2016 de Blasio ramped up the plan, announcing the addition of 400 more provisional lighting units across forty housing developments—a level of illumination that would put the Sun King’s thousands of nightly candle lanterns to shame. As the mayor put it, “Criminals do not want to engage in wrongdoing in the light.”

In 2019, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a study with the results. Accounting for “spillover,” the four researchers behind the paper found “that the provision of street lights led, at a minimum, to a 36 percent reduction in nighttime outdoor index crimes,” defined as “murder and non-negligent manslaughter, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and motor vehicle theft” (“due to data constraints,” they did not include rape or arson). When factored into round-the-clock statistics, this reduction amounted to a 6 percent overall decline in truly “serious” criminal activity in the areas of NYCHA housing under evaluation.

Unbeknownst to the authors, and contrary to de Blasio’s policy plan, the city never did take down all those experimental lighting towers. Three years later the delighted researchers realized that they had three years of extra data: A 2022 follow-up analysis indicated that the deterrent effects were more or less long lasting. If you walk around the city tonight, you’ll see plenty of these towers still chugging away in public housing zones—and you’ll also notice them under the BQE, near a migrant shelter, or up against the fence surrounding a soccer field where people play games at night. The towers seem to have strayed into other places where “wrongdoing” might happen, leaking out of their designated areas along with the supposed crime. The city has planned to replace the polluting diesel towers with solar-paneled ones, but information on the progress of that plan is scant, and it’s hard to imagine a solar contraption that could gather enough rays when positioned under a highway.

Given the two studies that indicate some degree of lasting crime reduction, you’d think that the researchers and other crime experts would advocate de Blasio’s experiment as successful public policy worth replicating in cities across the country. But when asked by a CNN reporter trying to get a straight answer about whether every urban area should adopt blazing mobile lanterns, one of the study authors hedged that “it’s hard to make any firm claim about it.” Part of the ambivalence may be due to the fact that, barely a month after the second paper was published, in April of 2022, Criminology and Public Policy released a systematic review of vetted literature on light and crime over the last half century. Across situations and time scales, the review concluded that streetlights definitively reduce crime by 14 percent. However, it turns out that nearly all of the reduction is seen in property crimes, not violent crimes. Artificial light keeps property safe, not people.

More to the point, the lamps have adverse effects on the people whom they purport to protect. CNN also talked to Art Hushen, the founder of the National Institute of Crime Prevention, who implied that a small reduction in property crime is just not worth the financial or health costs. In his words: “The electeds are like, ‘I got my apple for the day, we did it, we dropped crime.’ But can you imagine living there? That would not happen in an affluent neighborhood.”

No, that would not happen in an affluent neighborhood. Standard residential streetlights emit around 5,000 lumens; on major highways and campuses the level might be 35,000 lumens. Yankee Stadium’s harshest lamps emit 150,000 lumens. Those NYCHA light towers emit about 600,000 lumens. This is bright enough to temporarily blind you. The lights are blue-tinted, which is particularly harmful when it comes to aforementioned health risks like insomnia and cancer. In 2015, the American Medical Association announced a set of guidelines for residential lighting, which recommended that color temperature should not exceed 3,000 degrees Kelvin (the scale used to measure color tint). The higher the Kelvin number, the more harsh, cold, and bluish the light is. The temperature of the NYCHA lights is 3,954.

Even people kept awake by lamps often correlate light with safety. People in all boroughs tend to call 311 to report broken streetlamps rather than bright ones. (Apparently, I’m the exception.) This correlation extends to the curious assumption that if light reduces crime, more light should reduce more crime, as if Lux were commensurate with goodness—which is why urban policy like de Blasio’s focuses not only on visibility, but on extreme visibility (and extremely wasted fuel). One reason that “it’s hard to make any firm claim about” the efficacy of those blasting lights is that the city didn’t start by testing less severe lighting, or really any other solutions, in public housing.

If the lightbulb really were “the best policeman,” as GE claimed a hundred years ago, then ostensibly lightbulbs could replace some of those policemen. It didn’t happen in seventeenth-century Paris, and it didn’t happen here. Today, NYCHA by night is 60,000 times brighter than it would be under a full moon, and the city has about the same number of cops as it did when de Blasio decided to shed light on crime. For what it’s worth, there’s decent evidence that adding grass and trees to urban space also lowers crime, including violent crime, while also improving public health. And yet insomnia is still portrayed as a necessary side effect for those with the misfortune of living in crime-ridden areas. Wouldn’t you want to feel safer when walking home at 4:00 a.m. from your eight-hour night shift?

PERHAPS THIS IS WHY environmentalists have had a bit more luck than public health advocates in getting cities like New York to turn off the lights.

At least 350 bird species migrate through or dwell in this city. Of the 80 percent of North American species that migrate, 80 percent of those travel nocturnally. Birds are more dependent on their eyes to navigate than you might think, and they need astronomical cues from the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Especially when weather conditions force them to fly lower, city lights confuse and distract them; at night they get disoriented and slam into brightly lit towers. The brightness of a building, not its height, predicts how many bird collisions it will cause.

In response to pressure from bird lovers, in 2018 the 9/11 memorial installation, Tribute in Light—which annually on September 11 blasts two spectral columns from dusk to dawn, seemingly bright enough to alert aliens of intelligent life on Earth—agreed to turn off the beams for fifteen-to-twenty-minute periods to allow lumen-addled birds to reorient and escape.

The International Dark Sky Association (for some reason recently rebranded as the sinister-sounding DarkSky International, which could be a Terminator prequel) is the largest of the many pro-dark groups around the world. DarkSky raises awareness, designates places for the best stargazing, advances research, and provides lighting guidance to policymakers. Inspired by an initiative in Chicago, in 2022 a New York “Lights Out Coalition,” including members of DarkSky, the NYC Bird Alliance, and the Sierra Club, successfully pushed forward two city council laws intended to dim lights on public property. (Back in 2014, the same year that de Blasio rolled out the towers, the state assembly had already passed a piece of statewide legislation called Lights Out, intended to reduce excess illumination from state-owned buildings, with mixed results. More legislation to broaden the policy is pending in the state senate.)

Probably due to advocacy from DarkSky and others, other cities have begun to dim the lights. France, the place where it all started, passed nationwide legislation in 2019 to regulate light emission. Vienna now has a lamp curfew of 11:00 p.m. Tokyo turns off Roppongi Hills at night. Eklöf notes that much of the world has “woken up” to the problem, but the US is still in the (proverbial) dark about the (literal) light. DarkSky is a start, but Eklöf, Bogard, and many others see light pollution as a strategic target for environmentalists everywhere: Regulating urban light pollution is the simplest, fastest way to slow climate change. In comparison to halting global fuel extraction, it would be straightforward to lower global Lux levels, install movement sensors that automate lamps, or even just dial the blue tones toward warmer ones. Of course such changes would require using a different metric to measure urban well-being than reported property thefts. As for the current Adams administration, in April 2025 the mayor’s office presented a one-page “certificate of recognition” to DarkSky International to “applaud” its efforts. I figure this is the furthest Adams will go, given his ongoing War on Rats, nocturnal creatures that, like de Blasio’s criminals, “do not want to engage in wrongdoing in the light.”

In 2018 the journalist Linda Geddes wrote an article for the BBC about an experiment on her own lighting intake. She tried to reset her circadian rhythm by maximizing natural light in the daytime and doing without artificial illumination at night—exercising in the park by day and eating dinner by candlelight. She tracked her daily Lux intake using various gadgets and tested her melatonin levels at a lab. The results showed that the schedule caused her body to release melatonin earlier in the evening, that she felt more “energetic and uplifted,” and that she got somewhere between ten and thirty minutes of extra sleep per night. Unfortunately, the project was hampered by real life. It was hard to work and hard to socialize and hard to get her family on board. At the end of the experiment her four-year-old asked to stop because “he wanted to see what he was eating at dinnertime.”

I’ve treated myself as a sleep lab rat many times, albeit with fewer smartwatches and blood tests, and have always given up. In my experience, fighting the workday and social calendar is tedious and exhausting, creating at least as much labor as it saves. (Researchers who perform sleep experiments on actual rats report debilitating sleep issues, because the researchers themselves have to stay up all night to observe the rats.) Feeling trapped by screens and dependent on streetlamps—which, yes, sometimes do make me feel safer when walking home at night, but then keep me awake when I get there—I always find myself returning to Scrivner’s Becoming Insomniac. He writes that insomnia is not

Now it’s 4:00 a.m. I’m propped up on three pillows in bed. The blaring lights across the street cast the shadow of my fire escape onto the wall. My laptop is open on my chest and I’m clicking through tabs with images of birds massacred on skyscrapers. I pick up my phone and scroll the camera roll, back to the time when my insomnia got so out of control. I find dozens of flash photos of elaborate breakfasts my husband prepared during the first weeks of lockdown in March and April 2020. By summer of that year, my roll is dominated by pictures I took during protests. In just one picture, I captured a burning NYPD car. I switch back to my laptop and open the PDF of Schivelbusch’s book, in order to find this one drawing of a horde of people in the streets of 1848 Vienna, who are gleefully throwing streetlamps into a bonfire. Then I Google a video I remember seeing on Instagram in June 2020. The phone footage shows the Herald Square Urban Outfitters just after its windows were smashed by people whom the New York Post loved to call “homegrown looters.” Illuminating the wreckage of mannequins, demolished merchandise, and empty clothing racks, the dozens of redundant fluorescent lights inside the store remain, forever, on.