Daylight Savings Time

Monday

Bill Kauffman

The controversy of Daylight Savings Time

Batavia, New York I bear no ill will against golfers — I triple-bogey easy holes and miss gimme putts with the worst of them — but President Trump’s demand that we eliminate Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a double eagle out of the blue, especially as Trump had earlier advocated a move to year-round DST. Although Benjamin Franklin is often credited as its progenitor, the real father of Daylight Saving Time, according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward, was the golfing British architect William Willett, who deplored “the waste of daylight.” The British Royal Astronomer dismissed Willett’s idea with the counterproposal that “between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.

daylight

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

A Champagne winter

Most readers will come to this column in February. “That’s the dead of winter,” you say (if you are in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). But I write at the absolute nadir of daylight. For some years now, I have kept a daylight diary. I generally start in mid-October and go through the return of daylight-saving time in March. It takes that long to convince me that summer really is on its way back. When I started, I simply noted the time the sun rose, when it set and how much daylight we had that day. I eventually got a little more elaborate, noting the phases of the moon and such, and making very brief annotations about significant events. Every year (so far), it’s been a story with a happy ending.

winter

Wednesday

Cockburn

Congress comes together to hate on Daylight Savings Time

Count Cockburn among the many skeptics of daylight savings time. One minute he's setting his alarm for his usual wakeup call of 1 p.m., the next he's being jolted out of a deep REM cycle at what should be the ungodly hour of noon. Thankfully Cockburn and the many other DST detesters out there have found a champion in Marco Rubio. The Florida senator recently introduced the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Savings Time permanent nationwide (right now only Arizona and Hawaii don't observe). That would mean no more setting back the clocks in November only to jump them ahead in March, no more of those sudden and surprising and sunny springtime evenings.