This story appears in Let me explain today, A daily newsletter to help you get the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Hello fellow 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. on Sunday, our clocks will be set back one hour, returning us to standard time for the next four and a half months or so.
Depending on who you ask, it’s either the return of sunshine before work or the start of dreary toil as the sun sets at 4:30 p.m. (The good news, though, is that no matter how you feel about moving back, the effects on your body won’t be as difficult as returning to Daylight Saving Time in March.)
It’s also a topic that generates strong opinions, including this page on Vox (which both points out the horrors of daylight saving time and argues that daylight saving time should last forever).
President Donald Trump, of all people, is a strong supporter of the latter view: This month, he repeatedly urged the U.S. Senate to pass a bill to make Daylight Saving Time — the time we have from March to early November when the sun rises later and sets later — permanent year-round, going so far as to release the personal cellphone number of permanent Daylight Saving Time opponent Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).
Despite his lobbying, the Senate failed to act. But should it? Is there a better solution, or are we better off keeping the status quo despite the glitches? We’ll discuss this and more below.
It’s time for the daylight saving time debate
As we noted above, a bill to establish permanent daylight saving time — the Sunshine Protection Act — is currently stalled in the Senate after overwhelmingly passing the House this summer. Nineteen U.S. states have also passed laws doing the same thing, although these laws cannot take effect until Congress also takes action. (Two states in the United States, Arizona and Hawaii, currently use permanent standard time. yes allow. )
Supporters say more daylight at night gives Americans more time for after-get off work leisure activities (the golf industry is a big fan), and it might even have some positive effects on crime rates and the economy.
But the utopian ideal of no more darkness before 5pm may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Critics of permanent daylight saving time point out that the U.S. has tried permanent daylight saving time before and received a poor response.
As The Washingtonian reported in 2022, “While 79% of Americans supported the change in December 1973, support dropped to 42% three months later.”
That’s because there’s still limited sunlight, and permanent daylight saving time makes winter mornings very dark—think sunrises along the western edge of the time zone after 9 a.m. When it came into effect in the 1970s, it quickly proved dangerous for children who went to school in the dark.
As Vox reported in 2016 by cartographer Andy Woodruff, the change would see most people’s sunrise conditions noticeably worsen in exchange for an after-hours boost.
If we still want to avoid twice-yearly time changes, though, the opposite solution might be better: permanent standard time giving more people a reasonable sunrise time, and less impact on what people call a reasonable sunset time (really — look at the map in the story here).
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine also considers it the healthiest option, noting that permanent standard time is more consistent with our circadian rhythms.
The most likely option, though, is that we continue to muddle along like this: Dark Nights was a tough political sell, and Congress abandoned its last permanent daylight saving time experiment less than a year later. At least we basically don’t need to manually reset the clock on Sunday morning.
➨ How to spend Halloween quickly. If you’re short on time and/or money but still need a Halloween costume, my colleague Allie Volpe has some tips on how to use your creativity (and wardrobe) to pull something off at the last minute.
- did you know…Are some on the right, including Vice President J.D. Vance, trying to rehabilitate the reputation of President Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after the Watergate scandal and his attempts to cover it up came to light?
- Today’s tidbit: Who is the reclusive neighbor of the Finch family in the classic novel? to kill a mockingbird? (You can find this puzzle and other brain teasers in Vox’s Daily Crossword Puzzle. Find the answer in Monday’s edition.)
- Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked about the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from Cusco as its capital. That was the Inca Empire, which covered much of western South America in the 15th and 16th centuries.