Convenience Big Store: “Let us take back the night”

30 December, 2022

In the headlines

Brazil has begun three days of national mourning after the death of football legend Pelé at the age of 82. Widely considered the greatest player of all time, he scored a record 1,281 goals in 1,363 professional games. "Before Pelé, football was only a sport," wrote current Brazil striker Neymar on Instagram. "He turned football into art." The UK government is considering bringing in coronavirus checks for travellers arriving from China, amid concern that soaring case numbers there could lead to the spread of a new variant. Testing requirements have already been introduced by other countries including the US, Japan, India and Italy. Vivienne Westwood, the pioneering fashion designer who brought punk culture into the mainstream, has died aged 81. She was as down to earth as she was flamboyant, says Jess Cartner-Morley in The Guardian – a "very British kind of genius".

Pelé opens the scoring against Italy in the 1970 World Cup final

Comment

Hong Kong at night: 1,200 times brighter than the unilluminated sky. Getty

"Let us take back the night"

As we know from Genesis, God is "famously keen on maintaining boundaries between domains", says Charles Foster in Literary Review. "He separated the light from the darkness," we are told, "and called the light 'day', and the darkness 'night'." But that's something we humans have been undoing: in much of the world, lights are so ubiquitous that night has effectively been cancelled. The night sky in Hong Kong shines 1,200 times more brightly than if it were unilluminated. Millions will "never see the constellations" central to the stories humans tell about the cosmos. The "gentle" hubris of firelight has been supplanted by engineers planning to put artificial moons in space, pumping out light eight times stronger than the real thing.

Light pollution is a "dangerously under-recognised horseman" of the environmental apocalypse. One third of all vertebrate species and nearly two thirds of invertebrates are nocturnal: "mess with the night" and you jeopardise their existence. We're also destroying our own biological clocks, built around a cycle of night and day that began 4.5 billion years ago. Part of our obsession with banishing the dark is "atavism" – the fear that if the lights go off, we'll once again "be at the mercy of the sabre-toothed tigers". But I think we're also scared of what true darkness "will show us of ourselves". For the sake of our environment, we must challenge our dependence on artificiality. "Let us take back the night," as the author Johan Eklöf puts it. "Carpe noctem."

The great escape

Condé Nast Traveller has tapped its network of globe-trotting adventurers to assemble a list of the 23 best places to visit in 2023. Top destinations include Auckland, New Zealand, which is open to tourists again after the country's stringent Covid restrictions finally ended in September; Galilee in Israel, for its boutique hotels and vineyards; and Mustang in Nepal, for its luxury mountain retreats and Himalayan wonders like the mysterious ancient "sky caves". See the full list here.

Zeitgeist

Here's some jargon you might encounter in 2023, says The Economist. "Productivity paranoia" describes the tensions around working from home, with bosses afraid that workers are shirking, and workers afraid of being seen as shirkers. "Post-quantum cryptography" describes the beefed-up cyber-security systems needed to withstand hacking from ultra-powerful quantum computers. And the "Battery Belt" is a revived Rust Belt – America's old industrial heartland refitted to produce electric cars and other green technology.

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Shopping

This has been the year of the "absurd accessory", says The Cut. Our favourite fashion follies include Julia Fox's handbag crafted out of a pair of jeans; Balenciaga's luxury leather binbag; a cheese-themed hat sent down the runway by Puppets and Puppets; and Loewe's pigeon clutch.

Noted

The Carina Nebula, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope

Every year since 1988, Popular Science has picked out 100 innovations that "make living on Earth even a tiny bit better". This year's top technological accomplishment was the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which has produced "jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways". The list also includes an electric plane called Alice; a 3D-printed replacement ear made from real ear cells; a handheld lipstick-maker that can produce thousands of shades on demand; and a biodegradable coffin that turns the dead into compost. See the full list here.

Art

National Geographic's pictures of the year, chosen from more than two million images across 60 countries, include shots of panda cubs snacking in China, a blazing volcano in the Canary Islands, a red sailing boat coasting between two icebergs in Greenland, and a Nasa rocket awaiting testing in the Florida morning mist.

Quoted

"Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to."