#night-walk

#night-walk

GLL's decision to cancel its music licence and play royalty-free songs from the Power Music app has sparked outrage among instructors and gym members, who feel it is killing the energy in workouts.

Barefoot trails exist around the world, inviting people to get closer to nature through sounds and sensations. Feeling cool mud squish between toes, stepping on pine needles and exploring meditation caves transforms a routine walk into an immersive experience.

Silent Embrace uses choreography and physical interaction to explore how bodies respond to restrictive spatial conditions, revealing the adjustments required to inhabit spaces not designed for rest.

"I love the way that it allows me to connect as a gallerist with collectors and other artists," Galardi said of Future Fair over a video call.

Traveling with anxiety has shaped my choices, leading me to seek environments that promote relaxation, whether through nature, creative expression, or quiet reflection.

Being watched in public is perhaps a uniquely female experience. Sadly many women can relate to being leered at from car windows or catcalled from scaffolding, with video content being the latest, depressing escalation of this kind of behaviour.

Those coffee shop regulars aren't escaping distractions at home - they're escaping something far more unsettling: the weight of complete silence that their nervous system interprets as isolation. What I couldn't articulate then but understand now is that my home office felt like working in a vacuum. The silence wasn't peaceful - it was oppressive.

Though they're individually tiny, parking spots quietly play a dominant role in shaping urban landscapes. Most US cities dedicate at least 25% of their developable land to them. Some, even more. That land usage doesn't only determine the way a city looks. It also means covering large swathes of urban areas in heat-absorbing asphalt, which contributes to making summers hotter and heightens the risk of flooding since it prevents drainage during storms and heavy rainfall.

Last week, I sat on the couch in our apartment in Itaim Bibi after cleaning the kitchen, prepping Emilia's snacks, and texting my husband about a grocery list. It was past midnight. I wasn't even doing anything special. Just scrolling. I knew the alarm would go off at 7 a.m. and I'd regret it. Yet I stayed up anyway, savoring the quiet like it was contraband.

For most of human history, night arrived as a planetary certainty. Darkness spread across landscapes, and the sky revealed thousands of stars. Today, that sky is disappearing. Artificial light spills upward from cities, scattering through the atmosphere and turning night into a permanent haze. Research mapping global sky brightness shows that more than 80 percent of humanity now lives under light-polluted skies, and the Milky Way has vanished from view for over a third of the world's population.

Erving Goffman, the Canadian sociologist, built an entire framework around this in his 1956 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. His argument was elegant and a little unsettling: social life is theatre. We are always performing. Every interaction has a "front stage" where we manage impressions, modulate tone, and curate which parts of ourselves are visible.

That someone "should get out more" is usually said as a joke, a light comment aimed at someone who seems stuck or overly absorbed in a narrow concern. It can sound dismissive or even sarcastic. Yet what if it contains serious psychological truth? We often praise people for being open-minded, creative, or flexible, as if these are stable personality traits that some individuals simply possess. We admire those who seem to think differently and assume they have access to something rare.

Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tubingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park.