Sound and the city

Published in Curbed by Vox, January 2020. Story link / Archived link.

Sound and the city

Urban silence is increasingly endangered—and primarily available to those who can pay for it

InIn London’s Kew Gardens grows the Encephalartos woodii—a cycad brought from South Africa in 1899. It’s the only member of its species ever found, but my thoughts about the threat to biodiversity from the climate crisis are quickly interrupted by yet another plane droning overhead.

Kew Gardens is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it also sits underneath a flight path leading into Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport. The planes come in over the 261-year-old park at a rapid clip, so low that you can read the writing on the fuselage. Kew is a beautiful place to walk around on a bright November afternoon, but if you’re looking for silence, you won’t find it here.

Cities are getting louder. Noise complaints to New York’s 311 service were on track to reach record levels last year, in part because the city’s airspace has never been more riddled with helicopters. Cars and planes have been engineered to be more quiet, but there are also a lot more cars on the road now, and the number of planes in the sky is expected to double in the next 20 years. As all these engines run more frequently, city dwellers are given fewer hours of respite from sound.

Noise isn’t simply an irritation or an interruption to peaceful moments. Loud sounds stress the body and can lead to a host of serious health problems, like high blood pressure, heart attacks, and strokes. Research shows that noise pollution in the U.S. is more severe in communities with lower socioeconomic status, and in areas populated by people of color.

The United Nations predicts that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, and the noise problem will only worsen as cities become more dense. Urban silence may not become as unique as the Encephalartos woodii, but chances are it will become increasingly endangered—and primarily available to those who can afford to pay for it.

Planes come into Heathrow on alternating flight paths, meaning Kew Gardens and its affluent neighbors enjoy several plane-free hours every day. But in the less well-off areas nearer to the airport, where all the flight paths converge overhead, this is not the case—here, the plane noise is constant. This isn’t just irritating for those who want to enjoy a Sunday stroll: “The impact of noise on children in schools is particularly noticeable on their learning ability. The schools in Hounslow [nearer the airport] are pretty badly affected,” says Peter Willan, chair of the Richmond Heathrow Campaign, an action group working against plans to add a third runway, which would increase the noise problem for hundreds of thousands of people. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends classrooms should be no louder than 35 decibels, which is about the level of a whispered conversation—a jet plane coming in to land right over your head is going to be at least 60 decibels. This constant disruption has been proven to hamper learning: Research from the 1970s in Inwood, Manhattan, found that kids who’d spent six years in classrooms facing an elevated train line were 11 months behind their peers on the quieter side of the same building.

Everyone in the city is bothered by sound to some extent, but whether by design or accident, noise is also an agent of discrimination. Joan Casey, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University in New York, has done several studies on the demographics of noise pollution in the U.S. “We saw there was on average high levels of noise exposure in communities of color, primarily in African-American communities,” says Casey. While the U.S. had a golden era of noise research in the 1970s, there have been no national standards since the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control was dismantled in 1982 and noise pollution became a state matter. “We should start monitoring noise more broadly across the country so that we actually understand what the levels are,” says Casey. “Then we could do more detailed health studies, with the aim to inform policymakers to set noise guidelines.”

Pull up a map of a major city and you’ll probably find that affluent areas are located away from industry, major highways, or other sources of undesirable racket—people with the means to live somewhere quiet have tended to do so. “Although we did find that in some cities, both the poorest and richest neighborhoods had the highest levels of noise exposure,” says Casey, “due to [the latter] wanting to live close to transit hubs.”

While Europe generally adheres to noise guidelines from the WHO, noise pollution is globally under-researched. But you don’t need special tools to tell when you’re entering a neighborhood where quiet is sparse: An increase of just 10 decibels means we experience the volume as doubled. The culprits include power tools, air conditioners, and electronic devices, but the primary cause is transit: Road traffic alone can easily exceed 85 decibels, the level at which long-term exposure can result in hearing damage.

Hearing is a sense we have little control over; unless we wear ear plugs, we’re at the mercy of the soundscape around us. This is likely evolutionary: Sound is a warning to pay attention. But when we’re safe and the noise is constant, this reflex becomes a problem. Noise affects us physically even when we’re asleep.

The Whitechapel Gallery is located on a heavily trafficked road in East London, but Siobhan Wall says the cafe is one of her favorite quiet places to meet in the area. She would know: Wall has written a series of books on where to find urban quiet. The airy, wood-paneled cafe has no music playing, a key requirement for Wall, who has reduced hearing. “It was especially difficult in New York to find restaurants that didn’t play music,” she says. For this reason, Katz’s Deli is one of Wall’s choice spots in the city: “I’d go there after breakfast but before lunch, and it would be really quiet.” Often, though, Wall’s favorites are urban green spaces, such as Snug Harbor on Staten Island, the Kyoto Garden in London, and the botanical garden at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam—places where people from any social group can feel welcome, because anyone can spend time there without also being required to spend money.

Quiet spaces which are free of charge are rare in the city, as urban silence increasingly comes at a cost. For people who have money to spend on the problem, the solutions are often ingenious. In Japan, car-sharing services are reporting a trend where people rent vehicles but don’t drive them, instead using them to work, eat, or nap. Karaoke booths, which are plentiful and also soundproof, have been used in the same way for a lot longer. In major cities all over the world, renting hotel rooms for a few hours in the middle of the day is becoming increasingly commonplace, whether it’s to sleep, to work, or to get some downtime between meetings. Noise-canceling headphones are becoming ubiquitous on public transport, which makes sense: Average noise on some lines of the London Underground and the New York subway regularly exceeds 80 decibels. These kinds of headphones reduce noise by 20 to 45 decibels and are a great tool for protecting your ears—assuming you can afford the $300 price tag.

The price of silence matters because noise is a public health issue—the Quiet Coalition has likened it to secondhand smoke. Hearing loss is the third most common chronic physical condition in the U.S., and an estimated 30 million Americans are exposed to hazardous noise at work. This exposure often comes from professions where noise is part of the package, such as manufacturing, construction, and transport, but even a restaurant can be as loud as a freeway.

The Centers for Disease Control recommends not being exposed to more than 85 decibels during an eight-hour period, but we don’t turn our ears off the moment we’re finished at work. So for many people, once you’ve added a loud commute and trying to sleep in a noisy neighborhood, you get a cumulative effect that will start to impact your health. “Noise increases physiological arousal, which releases stress hormones,” says Stephen Stansfeld, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London. “There’s a risk of high blood pressure, hypertension, heart attacks, and strokes. Recently, evidence has related environmental noise to diabetes, and on what’s called the metabolic syndrome—the body’s chronic response to stress.” Researchers are constantly discovering new consequences: “There’s at least one study that suggests it might be related to depression as well.”

Not all loud sounds are the same: having chosen to hear it can make it a pleasure, while resentment can make a relatively quiet sound trigger the fight-or-flight response. A rock concert can be over 100 decibels, but that’s a breeze to deal with compared to the beeps from a stranger’s cell phone. “Aircraft sound seems to be particularly annoying for people, probably because it’s intermittent,” says Stanfeld. “A background noise, like traffic, doesn’t seem to be quite so disturbing.” But even if you don’t mind it, your body will bear evidence: Stanfeld says that “Noise while you’re sleeping will still affect your blood pressure and heart rate, even if you’re not conscious of it.”

Getting rid of noise can be difficult: To reduce road traffic, you’d need the city to divert traffic paths, for example, or the state to implement quotas or incentives for people to switch to electric cars. But moving the traffic just shifts the problem to a different area, and even if all cars were electric, we’d still get a lot of noise from the tires on the road. So for now, the best way to protect yourself from harmful noise is to change the immediate environment around you—sleeping on the quieter side of the house, for example, or, if you can afford it, implementing sound insulation.

Anthony Chilton, head of acoustics at Max Fordham, an environmental engineering firm in London, says that sound has always impacted property prices: Research suggests that for every decibel increase in noise level, house prices go down. “If people can afford to pay to be away from the busiest roads or train lines, they usually will,” says Chilton. But sound is becoming more of a concern when new houses are being built, especially now that a desire to live near transport links (and a lack of space) is pushing new builds closer to sources of noise.

Modern noise-isolating technology is making it possible to live next to a major train line and still enjoy reasonable quiet indoors: “You can have relatively sealed buildings that isolate noise, but the downside is that you probably need air conditioning,” says Chilton—you can open the windows or have a conversation, but not both. But again, enjoying quiet without overheating is a matter of money. In London, housing developments are often required to mix market-price units with affordable housing, which might not have the same features: “It’s understood that the noise isn’t ideal, so the [market-value] housing will have air conditioning whereas that’s not put into the affordable housing,” says Chilton. “There’s a clear and apparent differentiation between what you get based on what you can afford.”

With cities becoming denser, the need to build more housing will keep brushing up against the challenge of finding quiet places to put it. Often, noise is a warning of pollution—there will be significant overlap between a city’s sound- and carbon-emission maps. “If we could reduce noise, there could be potentially big benefits in terms of carbon emissions as well. You wouldn’t need to seal up the buildings with all that mechanical ventilation and cooling,” says Chilton—these things just cause more noise for the neighbors. “You’re just kicking the problem down the road.”

More cars, more planes, more people—the argument for why the city is getting louder is strong. But it’s not like city life ever used to be quiet. In 1905, the New York Times ran an article bemoaning life in “the noisiest city on earth” due to endless firecrackers, hand organs, milk wagons, and “hucksters and peddlers with cowbell distractions.” In the 1800s, Charles Dickens was “harassed, worried, wearied, driven nearly mad” by street musicians, and the Klaxon car horn was so annoying to the citizens of Chicago, London, and Paris that it was banned in the 1920s.

Matthew Jordan, associate professor of media studies at Penn State University, says that noise, defined as unwanted sound, has always been a problem for people in cities. Jordan isn’t fully convinced the city is actually getting louder, “but the perception of noise has shifted. The more we talk about noise, the more sensitive we get to it,” says Jordan. This may well be true: Over the course of the month I spent researching this story, I became hyper-aware of noise—my focus on sound seemed to make me more sensitive to it. “You have to keep in mind not only the raw sound, but also the perceptual frames that we use to gauge that sound,” says Jordan. He refers to what he calls “commodity quietism”—picture the ads for noise-canceling headphones where the wearer is blissfully removed from the world: “I think the more that we are sold the expectation that we shouldn’t have to experience any unwanted noise, the more we’re bothered by it.”

Any noise can become annoying if we focus on it—Jordan mentions an anecdote by the Roman philosopher Seneca about a master who had his slaves walk on tip-toes so that he wouldn’t hear them, but found that the noise still drove him to distraction. “Part of being in the world is learning from things you don’t expect to happen,” says Jordan. “One way to keep tuned in to the world is by opening ourselves to listening.”

In the age of constant notifications, it’s bold to argue we should be more open to input. But Jordan says it’s a matter of balance: “Everything is always trying to get our attention, and metaphorically speaking, that is noise too.” And those headphones we always wear tend to be playing something—the brain is constantly bombarded and we rarely spend time just being idle. I have an inkling that part of the reason we’re more irritated by noise is that we’ve never been more flooded with sensory input. Maybe we’re simply overwhelmed.

If we’re so bothered by noise in the city, why do we stay here? There are a lot of towns and villages out there where silence dominates the soundscape. Some people don’t have the means or opportunity to move, but even among those who can, many choose to stay in the city because it’s their home, or because they can’t imagine living anywhere else. “I just love the energy and the buzz of it all,” says Gemma Seltzer, an artist and writer whose work focuses on urban silence. “A city allows you to have moments of serendipity [with] the people you’re wandering amongst. You’re both in the present moment and detached at the same time. There’s a sense of possibility.”

But central to this enjoyment of the busyness of the city is the opportunity to get away from it. Seltzer’s work often focuses on where in the city you can access a moment of peace, be it a place or a time of day. “There’s a big appetite in people for recommendations for where you can slip off the main road and find quiet,” says Seltzer. This can mean taking a contemplative walk along the water, or it can be the relief of putting on your noise-canceling headphones in a crowd. Or it can mean taking the activist route: The parents of the kids from Inwood, Manhattan, who fell behind their peers due to train noise went on to sue, and after the classrooms were covered in sound-reducing tiles and rubber pads were installed on the tracks near the school, the kids quickly caught up.

If you can’t get away from noise, it becomes problematic, both mentally and physically. But a bit of noise is part of living in the city. I stopped halfway across a bridge over the Thames one night, looking out at the foggy city full of lights. The loudest sounds were the trains passing behind me, clanging and banging along the tracks, and the waves crashing onto the Embankment. I could hear the busker playing his violin on the Southbank and snippets of conversation as people walked past me. It all came together to form a wide, deep landscape of sound, and while there was nothing quiet about it, I wouldn’t call it noise, either. But it must have been louder than I realized: I couldn’t make out the engine noise of the red buses I could see shooting across Waterloo Bridge, as they were entirely drowned out by the hum.

My house was my marriage

Published in Curbed by Vox, August 2018. Story link / Archive link.

How marriage—and divorce—changed my relationship to home

Living in an expensive city sometimes leads to different life choices

never cared much about buying a home. I know all the reasons why you should if you possibly can, but as I spent my 20s in London, where a house now costs 14.5 times the average salary, it was all pretty academic; it’s simply not a city where most people can afford to buy alone.

And so, in part because I never cared much about getting married either, I rented 10 flats for varying periods over 10 years in London, an accidental minimalist. I loved it because it meant I could pick up and go—just put my few boxes in storage and take off.

“The product of freedom and security is a constant” is a law of science fiction writer Larry Niven’s. ”To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa.” I think about this often. It’s not that I didn’t want security—in my 20s I lived in some of those shitty flats for years, sustaining relationships that created some stability. But that stability never amounted to a sense of home, and for the longest time, I didn’t care. I wasn’t earning much as a freelance journalist, but I was paying my own way, and even when I was in relationships, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

So no one was more surprised than me when, at 32, I got married. I’d known my new husband for four months, and no, no one needed a visa and no one was pregnant. The idea came along one night after the fourth drink, at a bus stop in Stoke Newington. Over the next week, neither of us could think of a reason not to go through with it, so we did. The bride wore shorts, and afterwards we went to the pub; it was sweet and romantic, and I was excited. “I expected something like this from you,” my aunt said when I called my family afterwards to tell them—always a cutting comment to those who fancy themselves independent spirits.

“Is he a kind man?” my mother asked. It was the only question that really matters, and yes, he was. Even now that we are divorced, I wouldn’t change my answer.

Living in an expensive city sometimes leads to different life choices than you might have made had money been less of a factor. I left my beloved flatshare to live with my husband, as moving in together is what you do, right? It’s so expensive to pay two rents. As we bought soft furnishings to make a home out of his bachelor pad, he brought up buying a place. Now that we could join our incomes and actually afford it, it’s what you do, right? Everyone tells you it’s so much cheaper to own than to rent.

I didn’t walk into marriage with my eyes closed, exactly, but I didn’t consider what it meant. Never one to plan very far ahead, I was amazed to discover that my impulsive decision put our relationship into a context I’d never experienced before: It was already determined that we were going to stay together.

So buying a home made sense. We spent a year looking, arranging, and waiting to move into a tiny yet perfect flat, just off the Regent’s Canal. The process was hell because banks hate freelancers, but mostly it was miserable because I had a bad attitude—the bureaucracy of buying property will drive anyone to frustration, but I was graceless in the face of the endless errands to gather tax papers and notarized copies and the sheer hell of the cost of it all.

In an attempt to save money, we went to stay with my in-laws for what was supposed to be a month before closing on the property. A month turned into three and a half. My in-laws were lovely people, but I experienced an unbearable restlessness as the moving-in date kept creeping into the future, “next week, hopefully,” until I didn’t care about any of it anymore—not the house, not the prospect of future security, and, in my darkest moments, not even the marriage. Because if I hadn’t gotten married, I fumed to myself as the weeks dragged on, none of this would be happening.

We moved into the flat just in time for the East London cherry blossom season. I was relieved, but that feeling of finally being at home never came. I did all the things you’re supposed to do—for the first time in my life I bought “investment” furniture. I went to John Lewis, the U.K. department store where you shop when you’re a capital-A Adult, and picked out a classy table lamp. I scouted for bargain midcentury furniture on eBay and bought proper frames for the prints I’d previously hung with tacks. It was all very lovely. Looking back, it felt a bit like living someone else’s life. Then, as the marriage started to deteriorate, I worked to fix it knowing it was half for us, and half for the flat.

I lived in that house for just a year and a half before I moved out. It took us another nine months to sell it, at the same snail’s pace that had me so frustrated on the way in. For months after our relationship ended, my ex and I exchanged countless painfully factual emails, before we finally sold up and could finalize the divorce. A year and a half isn’t a long time, but if you count the buying, owning, and selling, that place was on my mind for three years—about as long as the marriage itself.

I always say we got married in a fever, on a romantic whim. It took me spending three months on the sofa after separating, sideswiped by the turn my life had taken, to realize that whim had come with an unspoken promise. The marriage, and then the house, represented a wild idea: Maybe, just maybe, it is possible to make a decision and have your life be predictable after all.

Every now and again my route takes me past my old flat. Seeing it feels like a window into the past, because that house was my marriage. But buying a house doesn’t make it a home, and having a wedding doesn’t mean you’ll feel married. I’m now in rented accommodation again, living with a man who’s not my husband, but who I find myself planning with as if he were. We’re moving again this summer, which will make for 14 houses in 14 years in London, and I’m free again to do pretty much whatever I want. But something is different—it snuck up on me, and I’m surprised how nice it is to feel at home with someone. Maybe I’ll buy a place again someday, but I know that security has nothing to do with where I live. 

Our fridges, ourselves

Published in Curbed at Vox, July 2017. Original link / Archived link.

Our fridges, ourselves

Moving in with an expat taught me that what we prefer in our homes is culture, not nature

The first time I saw a tumble dryer was on an episode of Baywatch, when the clothes of a would-be drowning victim were put through the wash. To a European kid, this thoroughly unremarkable scene was unthinkable—the clothes came out dry! My family had all the standard home appliances, but dryers aren’t very common in Europe. The idea that you could wash an outfit and wear it again the very same day seemed impossible.

Having lived my whole life in Europe, I’ve never considered air-drying my laundry to be a problem, or even much of an inconvenience. But this winter, my life went through a home-technology revolution: I now live with a tumble dryer. The appliance came with an American called Luke Abrams, who first moved to London four years ago. He went through a rite of passage that every U.S. expat must endure: an encounter with the typical British combo washer-dryer—a two-in-one appliance. It appears to be a stroke of genius until you realize that the dryer part doesn’t really work—and everyone who lives here knows this. I point this out to Luke as he describes his initial frustrations with this particular European quirk. His eyes widen: “No shit it doesn’t work! But when you come from the land of functional appliances, you don’t expect that!” Luke’s exasperated, and I can’t help but laugh—it’s a national conspiracy, but not an intentional one. conspiracy, but not an intentional one

Americans and Europeans have a lot in common, but there are still a million little things that rattle expats and travelers. So what do you do when you move across the Atlantic—do you take your home comforts with you, or do you go native? And why do we like living the way we do, anyway? Having spent the winter setting up house with an American in London, I’ve found many of my own ingrained beliefs thrown into question. There are a lot of decisions to be made when you move in with someone, but this time there’s an added cultural divide—American top sheet or European duvet cover? Preferences are often just habits.

“When you move to a new country, you can either ‘assimilate’ or you can choose to bring the good things from your homeland with you,” says Luke. “Take the good things with you!” Luke eventually convinced his landlord to let him install the full American laundry experience in his first London flat. This means the washer is bigger: “A British washer is like an Easy-Bake Oven: You can’t do anything real with it. It’s appliance theatre,” says Luke, who’s an electrical engineer. He’s impressed with the European condenser dryer, though: It doesn’t need any holes drilled for draining or venting, so you can put it anywhere that has a power outlet—you just empty the water out of a drawer after each use. “It’s a modern engineering miracle… This is mind-blowing as an American. Brits aren’t particularly innovative, but this is damn clever,” he says.

I can certainly see the appeal of a tumble dryer: Britain is a very damp Island, and air-drying laundry in winter can take days. But as a dyed-in-the-wool European, I have to admit I struggle to see why it’s such big deal to Luke.

The differences in European and American home technology become less arbitrary when you consider that the average room size in the U.S. is more than double that of Britain. Since American homes are often larger, appliances can be, too. “Looking at the engineering of [American] appliances, sometimes they seem less efficient—simply because they didn’t need to be,” says Naomi Climer, a fellow and former president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. “[Less] thought has been put into space-saving and efficiency.” So it’s not just the refrigerators themselves that are bigger, Climer points out, but also the behind-the-scenes machinery in the appliances; in Europe, engineers would have made more of an effort to compress everything into a smaller space.

This isn’t just a personal struggle: retailers have faced it, too. When Ikea first launched in the U.S. in 1985, its Swedish sofas were deemed too shallow, kitchen cabinets were too small to fit the local appliances, and people bought the flower vases as drinking tumblers, dismissing the European glasses as something akin to dollhouse furniture.

Culture is usually the driver for engineering, not the other way around, says Climer, a Brit who’s also worked in America. Environmental regulation is the other key restriction for European engineers, who’re constantly working to make appliances greener: “If you’re willing to do a longer wash, you can do it at a lower temperature, which is much more energy-efficient.” This explains why European washing machines take two hours to do a standard cycle, whereas American equivalents do the job in a quarter of the time. It also hints at why the average American household uses about two to three times more electricity than a typical European home, although smaller and greener home appliances are starting to make inroads with environmentally minded consumers in the United States.

As usual, the U.S. is ahead of Europe in adapting the latest tech trend: the connected home. But because everything moves faster now and there’s more competition, the differences between the American and European home tech are likely to be minimal—there will be a shared standard. This kind of international coordination is relatively recent, says Climer, who remembers when professional film cameras would all take different tapes depending on the manufacturer. This sort of thing is unthinkable now. “Smart-home manufacturers [realize] that if they don’t play with open standards, they won’t get a market,” she says. “I think the days of proprietary products are [ending], and people are going to build things that are connected.”

For an American, coming to Europe is usually an exercise in making do with less. But over in the land of abundant home appliances—pressure cookers, robot vacuums, coffee makers, fat-reducing grills—there’s one glaring omission guaranteed to knock Brits (and Australians) off their equilibrium: Americans don’t use electric kettles. “It’s a madness,” says Stuart Granger, an Englishman who’s lived in Washington, D.C., for almost four years. “In the U.K. you can’t find a house without a kettle. It’s literally the first thing on anybody’s shopping list when they [set up] their house,” says Stuart, who lives with his American girlfriend. “So over here, how do you boil water? What do you mean, you put a saucepan on the hob? It’s archaic!” Stuart laughs at the absurdity, but actually, he lives a kettle-free life now: “Yes, I’m at peace with it.”

Unlike many of the cultural differences in home tech, the electric-kettle divide exists for a reason: power output. The U.S. uses 120V as standard while Europe runs on 230V, meaning a kettle boils significantly faster in the land of endless cuppas. “I love the electric kettle,” says Jesse Spielman, an American who’s lived in London for three years. “Now that I drink my own weight in tea every day, I can’t imagine living differently.” Jesse has also learned there are other uses for the kettle: “If I were making pasta, I’d boil the water in the pot, but my [British] ex turned me onto boiling water in the kettle and then pouring it in. It saves a ton of time.”

Stuart’s favorite thing about moving to America has been living with air conditioning: “I can’t imagine life without A/C anymore, especially over here when it gets really hot. It’s just fantastic that you’re always comfortable.” Garbage disposals in the sink are pretty neat too, says Stuart, if a little counterintuitive: “It’s such a convoluted way of not picking up the peelings and putting them in the bin.” Stuart pauses for a moment. “This is weird. I’m singing the praises of America, whereas when I moved here it was the opposite—everything was just odd.” Stuart eventually realized he had to stop comparing, as it started to sound a lot like complaining: “Pointing out differences is fine at first, but after a while you have to shut up. Get over the kettle, and stick a pot of water on.”

Jesse has also adapted to life in Britain, but while he’s polite about it, it’s clear that British home tech really isn’t the main draw. His observations are certainly less enthusiastic: the half-height refrigerators with a single ice shelf, for one, and the separate taps for hot and cold water that means you’re either burning or freezing (in fairness, the locals dislike those too). “And I don’t understand why so many British bathroom light switches are on pull cords. You always have to pull them harder than you think.” This stops me in my tracks—this is odd, and yet I’ve never once thought about it.

Most sci-fi shows have a parallel universe episode where crucial details have been changed—everything you know has been replaced with a different version of itself, triggering a feeling of alienation. In psychology, the “Uncanny Valley” refers to the revulsion triggered by things that look almost human, like overly realistic robots or computer animations. The differences between America and Europe—Hershey’s, not Cadbury; Fahrenheit, not Celsius; Tylenol, not Paracetamol; money in quarters rather than fifths—can be similarly jarring. None of this is a big deal on its own, but when he or she is overwhelmed with a constant barrage of tiny differences all day every day, the expat may be excused for feeling a need to assert that things are different at home. “We call them crisps, not chips!” you may exclaim, but what you’re really saying is, “Life used to make a lot more sense.”

Moving to a different country is one of the quickest ways to learn that so much of what we do, think, and prefer is culture, not nature. Even if you stay put yourself, living with an expat can be a shortcut to the same realization. Often, unusual choices about home tech become possible. This is what happened to Chris Gurney, a Brit who lives in London with his American partner, when they had a discussion about which appliances to prioritize in their small kitchen—they ended up preferring a wine fridge to dishwasher.

Gadgets that initially seemed redundant or even strange can end up hooking you: Luke likes to remind me of how I was initially against his idea of putting a drinks fridge in our bedroom. “How awesome is it?” he says. “You thought I was crazy, but you have cold beverages all the time now!” I nod—it’s pretty great. I didn’t understand the American obsession with ice and refrigeration at first, but living with Luke has showed me there’s a lot to be said for putting a few simple things in place to make your life more comfortable.

For Luke, the bedroom fridge and tumble dryer are actually outliers—he got rid of most of his possessions when he left America. “It’s so much better to have less stuff,” he says. “[In the U.S.] the houses are bigger, so people buy more things; you have walk-in closets so you buy more shirts and shoes, the fridges are bigger so you fill them up with more food.” Luke says he lives just as well now as he did before, but it’s taken him years to feel like this. And yes, says Luke, he realizes he would never have reached this conclusion had he not moved to a different country, where his American habits could be challenged by a different way of life. Now, life’s literally the best of both worlds: “I’m comfortable. I have everything I need, and I got rid of everything else. The stuff I have are all things I need, and that I like.”

The color of your city

Published in Curbed at Vox, November 2017. Original link / Archived link.

The color of your city

As neighborhoods change over time, color is a bridge between tradition and invention

When you think about your city, what colors come to mind? When I think about London my head fills with an image of the gray water of the Thames, under a gray sky in the rain, surrounded by the raw gray concrete of Brutalist architecture. There’s the white of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the distance, and the black edge of the endless, demanding city. This monochrome is either dull or sharp depending on the day, but it’s not the whole story.

Because there’s a third color to London, and it’s the one that gives the city its heart: gold. Go up to King’s Cross, the neighborhood at the northern edge of central London, and it’s right there, alongside the black and white: two Victorian marvels of architecture in golden colors. Looming large on one side is the redbrick beauty of gothic engineering that is St. Pancras station, and on the other side is the plainer King’s Cross station. For me the simpler building is the more elegant of the two, for the main attraction of King’s Cross rail terminus isn’t the wide, sweeping arches. It’s the classic London stock brick: the yellowbrick. There are plenty of grandiose buildings around the city, but plain yellowbrick is the bread and butter of this city. Gold is the perfect color for a place so often covered in fog and rain, providing an uplifting sunny yellow that looks almost better when it’s wet.

But this was never a conscious decision: The gold tones of London were an accident of nature. The yellowbrick is made from London clay, which is rich with minerals deposited by the river Thames on its journey to the sea. When fired, the bricks come out in a range of yellows, from whitish and ochre to brown and purple. London’s ever-present yellow is the result of a Georgian building boom that relied on local materials.

All over the world, the colors of cities can be traced back to similarly unglamorous practicalities. A color scheme that begins with weather and materials becomes habit and tradition. These patterns are then broken by whims: A local personality decides to add a whitewash to his or her brick house and suddenly everyone on the street wants to do it too. The old, grimy bricks are derided and dismissed in favor of more fashionable materials—stucco, paint, wooden shingles—before bricks are eventually rediscovered and celebrated as the original. Nowadays we can choose to build in pretty much any color, material, or style, but a city can only have so many rule-breaking statement buildings before it starts looking like a place without history. As the city changes over time, color can be a bridge between tradition and invention.

Walk around the back of King’s Cross station and you get to Pancras Square, an extensive brownfield regeneration scheme spanning the Regent’s Canal. There are lots of classic yellowbrick buildings there still, as well as several looming wrought-iron frames, the biggest now transformed into a park. These former gasholders are what inspired Eric Parry, founder and principal of Eric Parry Architects in London, when he conceived of the 11-story commercial building I’ve come to look at: 4 Pancras Square. It’s a thoroughly modern building with strong ties to the past: The whole thing shines with a blazing golden color as it’s made from contemporary weathering steel, a material that deepens in color over time without risk to its integrity.

“You get a skin on the material over time. The rust brown is beautiful,” says Parry. He chose to use weathering steel because of its color and the way it expresses material: “The rawness of that post-industrial place seemed to me to give it a sculptural quality, and an integrity that other materials wouldn’t.” Offsetting the bold color are sharp black edges, as well as shading made from the same white glazed ceramic used throughout London’s history in an effort to combat grime. There’s not a brick in sight, but the building has all the traditional colors of London in one grand, modern package. It’s traditional yet cheeky. “Four Pancras Square is of that [London] palette of warmth,” says Parry, referring to the tradition of using brick in golden hues across the city. “Brick is inherently warm. Rust is gorgeously warm. It has this rich quality in terms of chromatics, but also tone and texture.” This is how 4 Pancras Square makes its mark while also fitting in with the nearly 2,000-year-old story that is London: by using the colors that have stood the test of time.

“London is sepia-to-gray. Paris is sepia-to-absinthe. New York is sepia-to-Coca-Cola. That’s it.” Will Self emailed me this—spaced across four lines like a poem—when I asked the writer about which colors he associated with major cities. But I daresay Self full well knows that that is not it, as he wrote a whole book on psychogeography, the idea that the urban environment affects the people who live there.

There’s a myriad of color behind the gray and sepia, and if you pay attention, you’ll soon start to notice that a neighborhood, and even an entire city, has its own color palette. New York is brown, Berlin is red, Paris is aquamarine, and San Francisco is a pastel rainbow, I thought after visiting each of them. Sometimes this impression is based on the color of paint and stone, other times it’s natural elements, and sometimes it’s just a feeling. A city’s color palette may be so subtle that perception differs from person to person, while other times cities have blatantly obvious colors due to deliberate choices: Catania in Sicily is black, courtesy of the volcanic rock used to build many of its buildings. Greek Island towns are white because white reflects the light, and the Chefchaouen area of Rabat in Morocco is blue due to the belief that the color wards off mosquitos.

Color represents a city’s heritage. New York gets its brown color reputation from its classic brownstone buildings, found all over the city but most famously in Brooklyn and Harlem, and on the Upper West Side. Elizabeth Dillon, a principal at the Historical Concepts architecture firm in New York and a fellow of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, says the brownstone tradition started after the great fire in 1835, in an effort to find an affordable material that was more durable than wood. “It became the predominant middle-class building material,” says Dillon. “Marble was a little too rich, and limestone would have to be imported from farther away, so that’s where brownstone came in.”

Brownstone, which traditionally came from upstate New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, is a fluke of nature: It’s a sandstone that’s particularly dark due to its high iron content. Asked how brown fits into New York City architecture today, Dillon says her own instinct when designing a new building is always to examine the surrounding area first: “I want to make sure that we’re proposing something that’s continuous in the spectrum of the history and the local building materials, and that isn’t going to jump out. I think that’s part of working in a city: being a good neighbor.”

This kind of sensitive architecture is less likely to draw attention than the showier projects—Dillon mentions the Zaha Hadid-designed condo in Chelsea as one example of a building that departs from the standard local building materials. But even here, says Dillon, the color tradition is maintained: Hadid’s 520 West 28th Street “is glass, metal, and concrete in dark colors, it’s almost Gaudi-esque. Even though the geometry is different, the color is compatible with the history of the area.”

Laura Carrara-Cagni, a director at Edward Williams Architects in London, says that all towns begin with zero-kilometer material availability: “It starts from, ‘I’ve got this material here, I am using it, and that naturally becomes our identity.’” Then, as time passes and the town develops, the different social layers start to assert themselves and new trends and traditions are born. London may have started with all that yellowbrick, but as air pollution darkened the stone and people wanted something a little less somber, they started importing redbrick to spruce things up a bit, or they added a whitewash render to the brick. “Other people then see this kind of detailing and copy it. That’s how you get neighborhoods with different identities,” says Carrara-Cagni.

You could call these changes the whims of fashion, but as Carrara-Cagni points out, they become part of the culture, and they’re ingrained in how communities grow. “I’ve recently been in Central Asia and looked into the history of the Silk Road. As soon as the transportation between China and Europe was established, the fact that materials were traveling immediately disrupted the very local nature of [building and color traditions].”

This kind of detachment from history can create some jarring results, as seen in cities like Dubai or Doha that have sprung up seemingly overnight. “Astana in Kazakhstan is another city that hasn’t grown in layers like London has,” says Carrara-Cagni. “It appears as if someone looked around the world for buildings they liked and said, ‘I want one of those, one of those, and one of those.’ The city has some incredibly wacky buildings with random colors. It’s [done] in order to stand out from the Russian-inspired plain palette, but it struggles to come together harmoniously.”

This is why Carrara-Cagni is a big fan of gray—the color often criticized as an overused, boring choice in modern cities. It’s overused because it works. “It’s the combination of two complementary colors, so to the eye, gray is a harmony color,” she says. “It’s peaceful. Over gray, you can put any color and it will shine.” When you’re creating something new in an old city where space is at a premium, a color that knows how to get along well with others will be soothing to the eye.

Color is a vital tool for urban preservation. Stephen Smith, a partner at Wright & Wright Architects in London, says that when designing a new library and archive building for Lambeth Palace in South London, every effort was made to continue using the existing colors and materials. Lambeth Palace itself primarily consists of yellow-gray stone and some redbrick, but the primary inspiration for Wright & Wright’s design was the old gatehouse tower in red, black, and burnt brick. The new library and archive that grows out of the palace’s perimeter wall will have clean, modern lines, but the choice of redbrick ties it to the palace’s traditions. Black metalwork, as well as bronze, brass, and golden oak, are added to enrich the scheme. “We’re trying to work with a limited color palette, bringing in richness with texture and patterning,” says Smith, whose practice is known for working in contemporary ways on heritage buildings. “We do a lot of projects where we have to extend, or work within an existing context. You have to take the opportunity to make a contrast, because if you make it too samey you’re not offering a point of difference.”

The materials may change over time, but gold is still a color of choice all over London, and not just for heritage projects. Four Pancras Square’s weathering steel (often referred to as Cor-Ten, its genericized trademark name) has been a popular choice in recent years. Bennetts Associates chose it for a dramatic fly tower for the classic Shaftesbury Theatre in central London; Gpad London saw it as the natural choice to extend a yellowbrick building on Rivington Street in Shoreditch; Stiff + Trevillion used it to create a bold ochre roof section on an otherwise plain office building on Borough High Street in South London. “We’ve used Cor-Ten a couple of times on projects,” says Mike Stiff, Director of Stiff + Trevillion, the London architecture practice he co-founded in 1981. “It’s that notion of decay and oxidation that people find attractive. Cities change with time, don’t they, and that’s what Cor-Ten steel is all about.”

Despite not being a traditional material, weathering steel fits into the landscape of London, says Stiff, in part thanks to that London palette of yellow and red brick. There’s also a lot of off-white stucco in Regent’s Park and Belgravia, adds Stiff, and a patch of black brick around Berkeley Square in Mayfair. And everywhere there’s plenty of Portland stone; the white-gray limestone from Dorset that was used for St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace remains a prime choice for building in the capital because it holds its own even under the flat, gray light of English weather. Stiff + Trevillion chose Portland stone for a new building on Bishopsgate: “It’s in the center of the city, and you almost start from the point that you are going to be working with Portland stone,” says Stiff. This classic white was a natural choice for a building that would rub shoulders with both heritage buildings and the modern highrise that is Tower 42.

While Stiff is critical of many brightly colored buildings outside of central London, he’s not averse to the occasional bolder color choice—when the history of the area supports it. On that note, Stiff + Trevillion’s new design for Beak Street in Soho will be covered in green glazed brick. “Soho is a very tight piece of the city, the streets are very narrow,” says Stiff. You do get these opportunities [in places like Soho] to do something a bit more interesting. There’s a precedent of glazed ceramic brick in that area.” While green isn’t a big color in London architecture, it is arguably an unofficial city color: London is 47 percent green space. As much as any other color, London is defined by the green of its parks, garden squares, and tree-lined avenues.

Color is a significant element in a city’s spirit. Yellow taxis add bright streaks to the corners of New York; buses and post boxes give London a spirited red kick. Pittsburgh has its proud yellow bridges and Toronto loves its blue. In his 2016 New Yorker story “Patina,” Ian Frazier writes about how once he started looking, he realized the green copper color of the Statue of Liberty is repeated all over the city: on fire escapes, facades, and roofs. “New York City’s official colors are orange, blue, and white, but its secret, sustaining color is Statue of Liberty green,” writes Frazier. “Think of all the ideas that have been in people’s heads when they looked at the Statue of Liberty. What color could stand for those ideas? What color is freedom?”

Color is rarely a neutral choice. Revolutions arrive in color: saffron in Myanmar, carnation in Portugal, green in Ireland, red for the October Revolution in Russia; when artists protested Bolshevik rule by painting Moscow’s trees scarlet and violet, Lenin called it “mockery and distortion.” Color affects us mentally and physically in ways that remain surprisingly consistent across borders and social groups. It appears to be a universal language: like the sun, yellow is friendly and stimulating; like nature, green is calm and secure; like fire, red is arousing and aggressive. When a city is dominated by a color, does that mean the people who live there are influenced by its particular energy?

If, like with New York’s brownstones and London’s yellowbrick, the color of the city is decided by nature, we may not have a choice in these subtle influences. But equally often the color is determined by culture: when the Maharaja Ram Singh decided to paint the city of Jaipur pink in 1876, it was to welcome the prince who would become the future king of England—pink was for boys back then. After the American Civil War, a brand-new color was born as a protest: When the North sent black paint to be used in the reconstruction of Charleston, the locals mixed in a little yellow and blue and created Charleston Green.

Sometimes the color doesn’t even have to be repeated through the urban landscape to be part of its spirit—sometimes using it just once is enough to permeate an entire city. Think of the colors of San Francisco and one of them will undoubtedly be that burnt orange—you know the one. But this too was a happy accident, as the Golden Gate Bridge wasn’t meant to be red (gray, black, and silver were all hot contenders). But when the bridge was first being built in 1933, the steel arrived already coated in a red lead primer. Consulting architect Irving Morrow traveled to the site by ferry from the East Bay, meaning that every day he watched as the red steel went up against the green hills and hazy blue sky. This sight was what eventually convinced him that international orange was the right choice. “The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the greatest monuments of all time,” Morrow wrote. “Its unprecedented size and scale, along with its grace of form and independence of conception, all call for unique and unconventional treatment from every point of view. What has been thus played up in form should not be let down in color.”

On a practical level, the color palette of San Francisco is somewhat trickier to pin down. The city is a rainbow, from the murals of the Mission to the endless rows of Painted Ladies. These Victorian houses were chosen as canvases by the Colorist movement in the 1960s, covering the buildings in vivid pastel combinations that emphasize their intricate patterns and textures. One of the people responsible for the way San Francisco looks today is Bob Buckter, the architectural colorist who calls himself Dr. Color. I catch Buckter on the phone one morning as he’s traveling to do a color consultation. But when I suggest the colors of San Francisco are pastels, he calls me out: “Pastel simply means light!” He laughs, apologizing for quashing my theory. “A pastel can be any hue: light gray, pink, peach, green. In San Francisco, the colors are all over the board. Everybody does their own thing.” In fact, Buckter makes sure people do their own thing: his color palettes are custom made for each customer based on her or his tastes. “I think it’s the best thing,” he says. “Individuality is what makes the character of the city.”

Because paint and building materials are only half the story about a city’s color. When asked about the color of San Francisco, Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, starts talking about light: “Most people think of the San Francisco fog as a tone of gray. Then at the same time, as you walk through the neighborhoods and look at the Painted Ladies and that expansive use of color, that’s what seeps into the human consciousness. In a gray atmosphere, those brighter colors will really stand out.”

Some people will be more aware than others of the colors around them, says Eiseman, who’s one of the world’s foremost experts on color. “But even if you’re less aware, you’re bound to be sensitive to it,” she says. “Being in a certain atmosphere encourages and empowers people to use color in a certain way.” The Los Angeles sunshine is so bright it kind of sucks the color out, says Eiseman, freeing you to use bold colors that would look jarring and out of place in a more gloomy place like London. “But you have that great golden color permeation in the atmosphere in London—it keeps the city from getting too somber,” says Eiseman, referring to the yellowbrick. “It provides a sort of light, and in the human psyche it’s viewed as color. You get that sense of warmth.”

In this way, the city’s colors become a vital component of its atmosphere. “People are often drawn to an area because there’s something magical, exciting, comforting—whatever it is that they’re looking for when they choose a city to live in,” says Eiseman. She describes her own move to Seattle: “There was something calming here, an air of serenity in the colors that surround the city that we saw when we moved here; the colors of the downtown area, of the docks where the ferries left, and the water. All of this enters into your consciousness, so when you visit an area it may have an instant appeal, or it turns you off. Sometimes, it just makes you feel very much at home.”

Does the color shape the city, or does the city shape the color? It took me a decade of living in London before the gold at the heart of all that black and white became obvious to me. At the beginning it was just overwhelming monochrome, knockbacks, and exhaustion, because a city as vast as London isn’t something you can wrap your head around in a day or even a year. Few places in the world have the gravitas of London: nearly 2,000 years old, home to almost 9 million people, and a seat of cultural, economic, and political power. Gold is a demanding color, crass and sublime at the same time. It’s in constant opposition with itself, just like London is.

Even if they don’t realize it, the golden light lives in the imagination of Londoners, adding to whatever else they may be feeling about their home and their lives. Even though the golden color of London was a fluke of nature, it continues to influence the city as we’re building it today. We’re carrying on the color traditions of the past, but with a twist, because the city is never finished.

Why Lush Stores Smell Like That

Published in Racked at Vox, April 2017. Article link / Archived link.

Why Lush Stores Smell Like That

You can smell it from a block away, but what’s going on with that scent?

You’ll know the Lush smell — even if you’ve never stepped foot inside a branch, you’re probably familiar with it, as the plume stretches halfway up the street. It hits you like a punch in the face. You’ll be walking along, minding your own business, when BOOM! There it is. The Lush smell is a squeaky-clean flower assassin that slips up your nose and commands your attention. But what is the Lush smell, exactly?

At first whiff, the Lush smell is raw, bold, bright, loud, and unmistakable. I haven’t shopped there in a long time, but every time I pass a Lush — with 932 shops in 47 countries, there are a lot of them — I always have the same thought: peanut butter and banana milkshakes. It’s an odd association, but scent memory is a strange thing: My first Lush was next door to the best shake shop in town. That means that for me, even 17 years later, the craving resurfaces every time that flower bomb explodes in my nose.

In an effort to put my finger on the Lush smell, I spent an hour inside the biggest Lush shop in the world, found on Oxford Street in London. The place is a three-story Alice in Wonderland experience in every sense of the phrase: It’s fascinating and thrilling, and also overstimulating and a touch threatening. It’s very bright and colorful in there, with loud and upbeat music. By the door, a Lush employee whips up foam next to piles of bath bombs under a sign that reads “Great Balls of Bicarb.” Overwhelmed, I make some notes about the smell. “Soap,” I write. It’s definitely soap. “Essential oils. Herbs? Spicy.” This is not going well.

It’s surprisingly difficult to describe a scent. “I always think Lush is like a bakery: There’s this great smell, but you’ll never be able to take it home,” says Janie, who’s a fan. Each product has its own smell; the Comforter bubble bar hints of blackcurrant, and the Sea Vegetable soap is clearly lavender. “It feels a bit like chasing the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow,” says Janie.

But not everyone likes that cocktail. ”The Lush smell feels like an attack on my senses,” says Karima. “It’s so aggressive!”

Lush and its infamous smell has traveled far since the company started out in 1995 in Poole, England. (The founders originally wanted to name it “The Cosmetic Warriors from the Temple of Temptation,” but the name was taken, alas.) A Lush shop resembles a food market: soap stacked high like cheese wheels, bath bombs piled up like apples, and fresh face masks on ice like a deli counter. No, you can’t eat any of it, but everything at Lush is vegetarian and mostly organic, made from fresh ingredients with minimal preservatives, synthetics, and packaging.

It’s the last fact that makes it such a pungent experience, as most of the products are kept out in the open. “The Lush smell is a mixture of our top products,” says Brandi Halls, Lush’s director of brand communications for North America. “When I walk in, I can definitely smell the Avobath bath bomb, the Karma soap, and the Vanillary perfume. These are some of our cult products.” This suggests key notes to the Lush smell include lemongrass and bergamot from Avobath, patchouli and orange from Karma, and vanilla and jasmine from Vanillary.

Halls says Lush sometimes has to take steps to comply with odor regulations. “We’re often asked if we pump the fragrance out in our stores, [but] we actually spend a lot of money on ventilation systems to keep the fragrance in.” Lush does have a sense of humor about its trademark smell, having created several limited-edition products that supposedly embody the shop, like the 29 High Street solid perfume and the Oxford Street soap. “But if you’re new to Lush, the shop [probably smells] like a burst of freshness,” says Halls.

If you like a scent, being overwhelmed by it can be an enjoyable experience. “Sometimes I just go and stand in there to make me happy,” says Gemma, who didn’t use to be a fan of the Lush smell, but came around after learning about the company’s commendable ethics and political outspokenness. “It’s a place I associate with good memories.”

Laura has a similar reaction to the Lush smell. “I’m often daydreaming on the street, or running around in haste,” she says. Then that soapy tang hits her and shakes her up: “Something about [the smell] clears my head of feelings and thoughts.”

Maria Larsson, a Stockholm University psychology professor who focuses on smell and memory, says people can react very strongly and emotionally to odors. This is because signals from the nose make a beeline for the limbic system. “With smell you have an uncensored route to the oldest part of the brain, which is responsible for the most basic survival instinct that all mammals have: the ability to learn from emotional experience.”

Larsson laughs when I tell her about my Lush milkshake association. I’ll probably link the two forever, she tells me. “These types of responses are extremely resistant to the passage of time.”

People have highly individual reactions to smell. One person may love margaritas, while another had a terrible experience doing tequila shots at 21 and can’t go near the stuff. One person may feel nauseated by just a few molecules of odor, while others can handle loads without problem. Former Lush employee Lisa has to be careful around strong smells to avoid triggering migraines, but she says the shop never bothered her. “You don’t really notice the smell when you’re in it,” says Lisa, who has positive memories of her time at Lush. She was encouraged to get customers to sniff the goods. “Our training taught us to use imagery and emotion to describe the smell. Some products smelled like a sunny beach, while other smelled like a dark forest.”

The olfactory sense still remains something of a mystery, especially in terms of how smells trigger such strong feelings. Larsson says people are often unaware of their poor sense of smell, reacting with surprise when she tells them in her smell lab. But our noses are also important for tasting food. “There are just five basic taste perceptions — the rest is picked up by the olfactory nerve,” Larsson says.

This is good to know for when a smell offends you: Just breathe through your mouth. This is what Bernadette does whenever she goes to Lush to buy her favorite shampoo bars. “I locate the bars from outside the shop,” she says. “I grab them, pay, and go. The smell is eye-watering. It’s invasive, like the sound of very deep bass reggae.”

At the Lush emporium on Oxford Street, I keep waiting for my nose to adjust to the smell, but after 30 minutes it still came on strong. I’ve sniffed my way around three floors of this soapy Disneyland, and I’m starting to feel a little loopy. “My heart is like an open highway,” Jon Bon Jovi croons on the sound system, “I just want to live while I’m alive!”

“Yes!” I think to myself, nose deep in bath jelly, “I’m alive!” My memory’s a bit hazy from this point, but I know that I start shopping. I buy some bright purple shampoo and hippie deodorant. I add my name to the campaign to free Andy Tsege from death row. I buy lotion in support of Nanas Against Fracking.

The smell stayed with me for the rest of the day. It stuck inside my nostrils, and I could taste it in my mouth even after I’d eaten. I had a single glass of wine that night before I crashed. Now that I’ve slept it off, I understand: I was high on the Lush smell. It had short-circuited my limbic system, taking the open highway to my heart. I was lush with a little L that day — fresh, green, and drunk. For a moment I was wild and free, and so very fragrant.

At bedtime, nothing soothes like a YouTube video about space 

Published in Well+Good, November 2023. Original article link / Archived article link.

Struggling To Fall Asleep? Watching a Video About Space Could Help You Drift Right Off Into the Dreamy Ether

As I’m getting ready for sleep, the distant murmur of London traffic is a permanent part of the soundscape in my bedroom. Equally omnipresent is talk of subatomic particles and how the sun will swallow the Earth one day; my partner Luke likes to drift off to sleep amid the sounds of “black hole videos,” or videos about space and science. I found it odd at first, but I’ve come to appreciate the roster of pensive astrophysicists who accompany us to bed. Their engaging narratives and cool graphics transport us to the far reaches of the universe and of human understanding, as we shift into unconsciousness—but above all, says Luke: “They soothe me.”

These black hole videos are from the science channels of YouTube, here to educate and entertain. Luke’s favorite is PBS Space Time, hosted by astrophysicist and king of the jokey science T-shirts Matt O’Dowd (“Heat Death is Coming”). Luke also enjoys History of the Universe (“best for sleeping”), Quanta, Sea Space, Cool Worlds (“the best voice”) and Astrum, which recently launched Sleep Space, a podcast sharing intel about space in a “relaxing way,” geared specifically to all the people who, like Luke, use space videos to fall asleep.

“Intellectually, the universe is an escape—a respite from the constant noise and din of our lives,” says astrophysicist David Kipping, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, head of the Cool Worlds lab, and host of the aforementioned Cool Worlds YouTube channel. Our lives here on Earth are full of stress—work problems, niggling relationship worries, money troubles, sadness about the state of the world—and it can all come to a head in the form of anxiety as we’re trying to go to sleep. But with a nighttime trip to extrasolar worlds by way of a space video, these Earthly worries can feel less significant.

Dr. Kipping also thinks that pondering space can spark awe, which can soothe a restless mind. As with art, we’re often drawn to questions of philosophy and science without necessarily any “bread-on-the-table functional purpose,” he says. “When we lie on the grass and look up at the stars wondering about their stories, there’s no foreseeable return on that investment.” And when so many of our daily actions are done with particular future-oriented goals in mind, this kind of aimless pondering can be an especially wonderful and relaxing thing, he says.

The existential nature of space videos (Dr. Kipping has been known to ask questions like, Why is something something rather than nothing?) can further stoke our fascination. “Deep down, I think there’s a sense of wonder within us all about these questions,” says Dr. Kipping. “Contemplating the cosmos stirs our imagination, and inspires and elevates our consciousness. It helps give us some context as to what our lives are really all about.” Considering we live in a moment obsessed with productivity and metrics (we’ve even gamified sleep by wearing trackers that tell us if we’ve done a good job sleeping), space videos can provide some much-needed perspective, which can then help us chill out and get some rest.

“These science shows can really remind us how small we are,” says sleep researcher Mathias Basner, director of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine’s Unit for Experimental Psychiatry, Division of Sleep and Chronobiology. “[They] basically tell you that the Earth is just a tiny freckle in the universe, and you’re just a tiny freckle on Earth.” Acknowledging that reality can “shift your focus away from everyday anxieties and onto something more expansive,” says registered clinical counsellor Nilou Esmaeilpour, founder of Lotus Therapy. “Cosmic events are beyond our control, and accepting that can ease our worries.”

This is especially relevant for people who’ve experienced trauma and who may struggle to practice typical mindfulness exercises to calm their mind before bed, adds Esmaeilpour. “Some people with trauma can find it really hard to sit down and meditate…It can feel threatening to go inside themselves because sitting in silence can bring up disturbing images or thoughts,” she says. “What may be more helpful is to use soothing visuals, which can send a message to their nervous system: ‘You’re okay, you’re safe, and nothing bad is happening.’”

While the general consensus among sleep scientists is that looking at screens in the bedroom before going to sleep is bad (the blue light they emit can be arousing), Dr. Basner caveats that for some people, it’s okay to watch a show before bed if it helps with drifting off. For example, people who live in noisy places often report that a soothing show can help mask unwanted noise and allow them to fall asleep, he says. The important thing is to avoid anything loud or exciting, and make sure to use a timer so it turns off after a while, he adds: “Just like the brain needs to recuperate when we’re sleeping, the auditory system also needs to rest.”

Turning off YouTube auto-play, then, is a must for anyone who uses space videos to fall asleep; you want to watch your selected show and drift off—not worry about what your unconscious mind might absorb from an algorithm left to its own devices. Josh Pudlo, who lives in Connecticut, is especially aware of what he’s absorbing in the moments when he’s not quite awake, but not yet asleep. For him, watching space videos just as he’s falling asleep, while he’s straddling the border between conscious and unconscious, is a part of the appeal: “That’s the moment when your mind seems to be open to the idea of anything and everything being possible; you feel like you’re a part of the universe, of the unknown,” he says.

Josh’s favorite YouTube channel is History of the Universe because of the lengthy, detailed videos. “I’m an extremely vivid dreamer,” says Josh, explaining that watching these videos at bedtime often means he’ll dream about the topics, too. “All of a sudden, I’m traveling across the universe in a dream where there are no laws of physics, so the possibilities are endless,” he says. “Without these videos, my dreams wouldn’t be nearly as expansive and immersive.”

Zac Logsdon, who lives in Oklahoma, began to use space videos to fall asleep after being fed one by the algorithm of his TikTok “For You” page; the app now allows videos to go for as long as 10 minutes, giving physicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox time to ponder the state of our universe. “I don’t have a long attention span, but I was just so drawn in by it, and now, [TikTok] shows them to me all the time,” says Zac, noting that the accidental discovery has been a boon for his sleep. “I have a difficult time shutting my brain off [at night]…My mind races with all the things I need to be doing or problems I need to solve. But watching videos like these helps me realize the insignificance of everything. It allows me to say to myself, ‘This is not a big deal. You’ve got your health, your kids are healthy, you’ve got a roof over your head—go to sleep.’”

For Luke, space videos have become a refuge from a world where people often pretend to have it all figured out. “We know so little, yet as a species, we walk around with such hubris, [telling each other that] if you follow the rules, life will go well,” he says. But in reality, we have so little control over preventing bad things from happening—a fact we’re often reluctant to acknowledge. “We all have a relationship with chaos, but most people just pretend the chaos doesn’t exist,” says Luke. For him, to watch a video about how the Earth will one day be swallowed up by the sun is to place himself in relation to chaos; it’s a way to face the chaos that’s everywhere, but at a safe distance. (After all, we have hundreds of millions of years left.)

Luke’s favorite nighttime YouTube subject is black holes, which reflect the frontier of order and human knowledge—where the laws of physics break down. “My black hole nighttime video routine lets me approach the horizon of knowability with curiosity, and that is empowering,” he says. Ultimately, we’re at the mercy of everything around us; we matter, yet also, we don’t. “Watching these videos makes me feel in calibration with the universe,” says Luke. And with that, he can relax and fall asleep.

“When the tide’s at full force there’s no chance you can swim against it”

Men’s Health, November 2025. PDF here.

Nigel Walley, 61, has been swimming in the Thames since he was a boy and now regularly tackles the iconic river’s tidal section. He explains what it’s like to be in the water as the tide surges. As told to Jessica Furseth .

We went for an hour and a half swim in the Thames the other weekend – I really can’t do that in a pool, it’s so boring. But in the river, it’s just a pleasure. We went up to Kew Bridge and got in when the tide turned, and swam with the tide all the way down to Hammersmith. A lot of it is about managing where you are in the water, as the river does much of the work. A key rule is to make sure you know where you can get out, because when you’re in the Thames, you’re on the river’s territory. 

I’m a Londoner, born and bred in West London. I’m married with two grown kids and I run a tech startup. I still live near the river, in Chiswick, and I’ll swim three seasons out of four, when the water is over 15 degrees. I’ll go in the river two or three times a week, always with friends – it’s crazy to swim alone. 

I mostly swim in the Thames tideway out of Hammersmith – it’s illegal to swim in Central London until you’re west of Putney Bridge. But the Thames is strongly tidal up to Teddington Lock, and the tideway is a difficult bit of water. A lot of people avoid it because the river is strong and surging. There’s a lot of boats and things moored in the river – pontoons, rafts and buoys. Up past the lock, the river is more like a lake. But you really need to keep your wits about you to swim in the tideway.

Swimming the tideway is all about timing. Often we go in at Hammersmith, when the tide’s still coming in. We swim with the tide from Hammersmith up to Chiswick where there’s an ait, an island in the river. If you time it right, the tide dies by the time you get to the end of the ait. We go around it and then the tide starts going out. By the time we’re coming back to Hammersmith, the tide is surging quite strongly.  

If we get the timing wrong, we have to swim the last 100 yards against a tide that’s just turned – it’s amazingly strong. When it’s at full force there’s no chance you can swim against it. One of my earliest memories was seeing a canoeist go under a pontoon in Richmond. He eventually came out the other side, but it was an important lesson in how strong the current is. It’s best not to be anywhere near a moored object, as the river will drag you under.

When I was growing up my parents had a boat on the Thames at Richmond, nothing grand but just something we could take up to Teddington on a Sunday. We’d swim anywhere as kids – there wasn’t the same focus on safety. As I got older we’d have a bit of a swim from Strand-on-the-Green in Chiswick before going to the pub. I was a rower as well, at Thames Rowing Club in Putney. The river has always been part of my life. 

You shouldn’t swim more than ten metres out from the bank in the tideway, and you should never cross the river – this is because of the shipping channel. There’s always boats and rowers in the river and they can’t really see you, and in any case, they can’t stop. You have to stay out of their way. I’ve been lucky that I’ve never had a dicey moment.

There’s a lot of focus on sewage spills into the Thames, so we always check if it’s good to swim. The river has been tangibly cleaner this year since we got the Thames Tideway Tunnel, the sewer diversion around London. But there are still some problem spots. We’re becoming more aware of the Thames as a complex river network.

The river is ours – it’s for all Londoners. One time there was a seal that came and swam with us. That was really special – a seal popping its head up and swimming with you for a bit. That’s how we know the river is mostly healthy. 

The Thames is like a national park that cuts right through the city. There’s something magical about being in the water in the middle of London. On the other side of Chiswick Ait, there are natural riverbanks on both sides and it feels really remote. There’s a real sense of peace, out in the middle of the Thames. We look at cormorants as we swim. And then suddenly, we’re back in Hammersmith again. 

Brev fra Europa

Uncertain States Scandinavia #25 “Europa”, september 2025. Original her (side 2).

Brev fra Europa

Jeg vokste opp i en liten verden, i ei norsk bygd med flere kyr enn folk – naturskjønn, men utrolig kjedelig for meg som tenåring. Vi begynte å lære engelsk på skolen da jeg var ti år, og jeg husker ennå hvor viktig det føltes, å lære dette språket som var nøkkelen til verden. Jeg teipet papir over undertekstene på TV for å oppfordre meg selv til å høre på hva de sa. Uten engelsk, ingen verden.

Jeg reiste fra Norge da jeg var 19, og flyttet til England med to kolli og en studieplass – det var et historisk lykkesøyeblikk, muliggjort av et system satt opp for å oppfordre unge folk til å bevege seg internasjonalt. Dette var rundt årtusenskiftet, mens de fremdeles snakket om «globalisering» som om det var uunngåelig. Vi skulle alle se ut mot verden, og utveksle varer, ideer og mennesker. Jeg var heldig: Lånekassen gav meg utenlandsstipend som dekket alle skolepenger, et studielån som tok seg av boutgifter, og jeg ble uteksaminert med en veldig overkommelig gjeldsbyrde. Foreldrene mine støttet mine internasjonale ambisjoner – de var helt sikkert bekymret, men det holdt de for seg selv, slik at jeg kunne se på verden som en godlynt mulighet full av gode ting som ventet på meg. 

Storbritannia var fremdeles medlem av EU den gang, så det var aldri snakk om grenser eller visum. Det var helt klart en privilegert posisjon – men jeg kjenner så mange som har en lignende historie. Universitetet mitt i England var fullt av europeere som så på utenlandsstudium som mer en en akademisk utdannelse – det var en mulighet for å lære om verden og om oss selv. Det jeg husker best er ikke skole, men oppdagelsen av at ting som jeg trodde var åpenbare og naturlige faktisk bare var kultur. Å bo i utlandet får deg til å se på ting med nye øyne: Er dette bra, eller bare noe jeg er vant til? Er dette noe jeg vil, eller har jeg aldri tenkt over det? Jeg prøver fremdeles å tenke slik.

Jeg har bodd i England i over 20 år nå – jeg kom aldri tilbake til Norge (jeg var nok en dårlig investering for Lånekassen). Men globaliseringa kom aldri – Europa har blitt mer isolasjonistisk, med land som er mer fokusert på sine egne problemer enn «den europeiske storfamilien». Jeg er dobbel norsk-britisk statsborger nå, på grunn av Brexit – jeg har enda ikke helt kommet over sjokket over at åpenhetsprinsippet som var grunnlaget for hele mitt liv, ikke lenger eksisterer, i hvertfall ikke der jeg bor. Jeg hadde ingen anelse om hvor skjøre internasjonale avtaler kunne være før jeg så dem bli skrotet, sånn helt uten videre. Det hadde ikke vært mulig for meg å bli værende i England etter universitetet under dagens immigrasjonsregler, da det ville krevd umiddelbar høytlønnet jobb for å sikre arbeidsvisum. Dette er noe jeg tenker på ofte – hvor stort et tap det er for Storbritannia å ikke lenger la unge europeere komme hit for å «drive dank» – ta sørvisjobber, lage kunst og forme band – slikt som 20-åringer gjør mens de finner ut av livet. Jeg tenker på hvor mange vennskap og ekteskap som aldri blir formet fordi grensene er stengt, hvor mange ideer vi ikke får delt, og hvor mange løsninger vi aldri kommer til å finne fordi vi ikke får sett ting fra andre synsvinkler. Migrasjon har blitt veldig alvorlig og veldig dyrt i Storbritannia, og det har gjort oss fattigere.

I denne utgaven av Uncertain States Scandinavia refererer Terje Abusdal til bevegelsesfrihetens privilegium, som kommer og går. Jernteppet er vekk, men EUs grensekontrollbyrå Frontex blokkerer fortsatt migrasjon fra sør – mennesker mister fortsatt livet i forsøket på å nå et fritt Europa. Dette har alltid vært et kontinent der historien er nær oss – Christian Belgaux snakker om en «Ny morgen i den Gamle Verden» med ekstreme høyrekrefter i tilbakekomst, nye kriger, og som vi ser hos Ada Zielinska og Ingmar Björn Nolting, den daglige hjertesorgen over den politiske uviljen til å takle klimakrisas fulle omfang. 

Prinsippet om bevegelsesfrihet gjør at vi europeere kan flytte oss fritt mellom 29 land uten å føle oss malplassert. Maria Di Stefano gir oss en sterk påminnelse om hvor sjeldent dette er på verdensbasis, i hennes fotografier av tenåringer som nektes europeisk statsborgerskap før de fyller 18 år. Dette gjør at de forblir «utlendinger» i alle sine unge år, og dette vil alltid forme deres selvbilde som europeere, også når de får formalisert denne statusen. 

Å bevege seg gjennom Europa som en person som alltid hører til er et privilegium – jeg forstår dette mye bedre nå, etter at jeg plutselig ble stemplet som «utlending» mens Storbritannia i flere år grublet over hvordan de skulle løse det problemet at de hadde 3,2 millioner europeere boende der, nå i prinsippet uten tillatelse. Mens det foregikk var jeg rasende, men den følelsa som sitter igjen er sorg – over alt som har gått tapt for alle som ikke var like heldige som meg, som opplevde et unikt historisk øyeblikk. Resultatet er at jeg føler meg mer europeisk enn noensinne, og jeg har lyst til å hoppe på et tog, som Amanda Iversen Orlich, og reise sakte slik at jeg kan oppleve hvor stort og variert Europa er. Jeg vil huske hvor heldige vi er, når vi kan krysse en grense og føle oss velkommen.