Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars
The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars
The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself?
The sun had already set in Newfoundland, Canada, and Paul Gatto was working late to give me a presentation on headlights. This, it should be said, is not his job. Not even close, really. Gatto, 28, is a front-end developer by day, working for a weather application that’s used by the majority of Canadian meteorologists, he told me on a video call, occasionally hitting his e-cig or sipping on a Miller Lite. As to how he ended up as one of the primary forces in the movement to make car headlights less bright—a movement that’s become surprisingly robust in recent years—even Gatto can’t really explain.
“It is fucking weird,” he said. “I need something else to do with my spare time. This takes a lot of it.”
Gatto is the founder of the subreddit r/FuckYourHeadlights, the internet’s central hub for those at their wits’ end with the current state of headlights. The posts consist of a mishmash of venting, meme-ing, and community organizing. A common entry is a photo taken from inside the car of someone being blasted with headlights as bright as an atomic bomb, and a caption along the lines of “How is this fucking legal?!” Or users will joke about going back in time and Skynet-style killing the Audi lighting engineer who first rolled out LED headlights. Or they’ll discuss ways to write to their congresspeople, like Mike Thompson, House Democrat of California, who recently expressed support for the cause.
At its worst, the forum resembles Grampa Simpson writing a letter to the president to say that there are too many states. (“I am not a crackpot,” Grampa adds.) But at its best, it feels like a balm for those of us who have been pushed to optical-induced madness on the roads. For those who feel like, as headlights get brighter, it’s actually becoming harder to see.
After I posted about the subreddit on X last year, Gatto emailed me, and it wasn’t long before we were on a video call and he was giving a PowerPoint presentation he’d made the night before. It was titled “The Internet-Focused History of FuckYourHeadlights, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Headlights and Start Worrying About Society Itself.”
“First, I’d like to teach you some words,” Gatto said, priming me for a conversation about the minutiae of government policy and auto engineering. There was “obfuscation” (the intentional act of making something hard to understand), “mutual recursion” (when two things are defined in terms of each other, creating a loop), and “Ouroboros” (the snake eating its tail). Around this point, Victor Morgan, who was also on the call, cut in. “Paul,” he said, “where are you going with this, bud?”
Morgan does this kind of thing from time to time. The two are partners—moderating the subreddit together and working in tandem to research headlight arcana—but it’s a good cop–bad cop dynamic. Neatly dressed and carefully spoken, Morgan, 41, is a mechanical engineer and lives far from Gatto, in Greenville, South Carolina. One of the first times the two spoke, it was because Morgan wanted to tell Gatto he didn’t like the subreddit’s name. They’ve since become good friends.
Gatto is the one focused on the bigger picture: digging up publicly available information, refining the messaging of their cause, optimizing the subreddit for search engines (he’s proud of how high up the subreddit appears if you google “bright headlights”). Morgan is the one who sees their ideas through with measurements and engineering: He’s created a device for your rear windshield that pops up a reflective surface when someone’s lights are glaring at you from behind ($70, homemade, questionably legal), and he’s gone to car dealerships to measure the brightness of different headlights. (According to Morgan’s numbers, Teslas and Hondas are among the brightest.)
If you want Rust Cohle–worthy lines about how it’s all connected, you go to Gatto. (“The automakers and the insurers can all be classified as the same financial entity back at this point,” he told me. “They will doctor what they need to, as far as I can see.”) If you want an engineer-worthy dose of hard-nosed practicality, you go to Morgan. (He has a cat whom he just calls “Cat.”) They’re an unlikely pair, but they are not crackpots.
Headlight brightness might almost seem like too random a subject for anyone to be as invested in as they are. But as it turns out, that’s kind of the point. “There’s a lot of issues that I care about,” Morgan said. “This is one that I think is niche enough that I can have an influence on.” Gatto’s motivation comes from the experience of watching his partner, Liz, struggle to recover from being hit by a cab while walking across the street. He sees headlights as “a realistic and tangible attack surface on the current trend toward antihuman design in our world, primarily guided by the auto industry.”
But deep down, what motivates them is the same twitch in the eye that brought me to the subreddit in the first place. “I’m not a very rageful person,” Gatto said, “but for some reason, these lights brought it out of me. And I kind of realized that’s why I had to do something about it. Because no one’s going to come help us.”
There appear to be two types of drivers in North America these days: those who think about headlights only when one of theirs goes out, and those who fixate on them every time they drive at night. If you’re in the first camp, consider yourself lucky. Those in the second camp—aggravated by the excess glare produced in this new era of light-emitting diode headlights—are riled up enough that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives more consumer complaints about headlights than any other topic, several insiders told me.
According to numbers we pulled from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s publicly available data, headlight brightness has roughly doubled since 2015.
And at the same time, the number of demerits issued for lack of brightness have dropped precipitously. In other words: It’s not just your imagination. Headlights are brighter.
It’s not just in the aggrieved drivers’ imaginations. Going by the publicly available data of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the past 10 years—although you probably don’t need convincing if you’ve been paying attention over that span. Something happened out there, and a zap of light causing you to grimace behind the wheel suddenly went from a rarity to a routine occurrence.
As opposed to the sepia-toned halogen lights we had mostly been using for generations of vehicles, LED lights—which are now used for the vast majority of new cars—come out blazing white or blue, like an omnipresent police flashlight shining at you during a traffic stop. And in what can be seen as a flawed attempt to match LED capabilities on other vehicles, it’s also become not uncommon, anecdotally speaking, for people to have their high beams on even on crowded highways and streets—something that’s technically illegal because it’s deemed to be a danger to other drivers. The strange thing is, though, I can’t say I notice much of a difference between one car’s high beams and another’s low beams anymore.
John D. Bullough, a program director at the Mount Sinai Light and Health Research Center, has been studying light and its ramifications on health for the past 30 years, and he’ll tell you that the difference between older light sources and LEDs is night and day. “The first 20 years or so, [lighting] technology was very stable,” he told me over the phone. “In other words, you had incandescent light bulbs at home, and you had fluorescent lights in your office and sodium lights on the streets, and nothing really changed very much. And then, suddenly, the last 10 years of that 30 years have been a whirlwind because of LEDs. I mean, they’ve changed everything. Everything is LED. There essentially aren’t light bulbs anymore.”
LEDs offer benefits over older light sources, which is why they’ve been fast-tracked into near-universal use via government-mandated performance standards. They last longer and require less energy, making them more environmentally friendly, and are more customizable, making them suited for endless purposes. But LEDs are fundamentally different from what came before them—the light can be carefully aimed as opposed to emitted in all directions—and they’re vastly more powerful. And as they were rolled out en masse at a rapid pace, any potential repercussions would have to be discovered on the fly.
“We’re all like human experiments,” said Mark Baker, when I called him to talk about his nonprofit, the Soft Lights Foundation, the mission of which is to advocate “for the protection of people and the environment from the harms of visible light radiation emitted by products that use light-emitting diodes.” Baker’s concern is with the broader integration of LEDs in society, but he shows up regularly in the headlight world, having recently organized a petition that gathered nearly 60,000 signatures demanding that NHTSA limit headlight intensity. Unlike Morgan and Gatto, however, this isn’t a nights and weekends gig for him.
Baker was working as a middle school math teacher in Northern California and thought of himself “as a regular person” before the mass implementation of LEDs. Then the world shifted while he was in traffic one day around 2016. He remembers looking at a Cadillac that had daytime-running LEDs—the non-primary headlights that run at all times on many modern vehicles—and “when my brain saw this light, I couldn’t look away,” he said. “Even though it was intense, I was drawn to it, and I started to feel a presence I’ve never felt, like evil.” As LEDs became more common, Baker became overwhelmed and had a mental breakdown, ending up in the hospital. He was diagnosed with mild autism spectrum disorder—which he says explains his hyper-fixation on bright lights—and couldn’t go back to work because of the LEDs in his classroom.
When I spoke to Baker, 59, he was living in a sparsely lit rural area that he moved to with his partner, where he had been focusing on the Soft Lights Foundation since founding it in 2021. Baker told me he’s heard from a variety of people with various diagnoses—epilepsy, photophobia, migraines, lupus, autism—who struggle with LEDs. “I’ve got a guy that calls me from time to time wanting to commit suicide because of these LED lights in the Blue Ridge [Mountains],” he said. “We know that individuals are highly individualized. Each of us is going to react differently.”
Baker is among a group of people who feel that NHTSA, which is responsible for regulating automotive safety, should have adjusted the rule book to accommodate LEDs before they were allowed in new cars. This was how NHTSA approached previous fundamental changes to headlight technology, Baker points out. As headlights went from circular to rectangular and from sealed beams to replaceable bulbs, the rules and accommodations changed with them. “Well, when LED headlights came out,” Baker said, “they skipped all that. They just started selling cars with the LED headlights.”
It is certainly true that Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 108—NHTSA’s regulation covering all forms of vehicle lighting, conceived in 1968—has not been adjusted to create new restrictions for LEDs. That’s easy to tell because the requirements in the standard haven’t been adjusted at all since 1986. One person I spoke to, who previously worked at NHTSA and discussed their former employer on the condition of anonymity, described 108 as being among the biggest entries in the book, yet also “probably one of the least updated.” (In response to an interview request for this story, NHTSA asked that questions be emailed; in response to the questions, NHTSA provided a broad statement that did not answer specific questions, such as ones about the nature of updating 108. “Although headlighting technology has changed over the years,” the statement read, “NHTSA’s lighting standard has remained constant in limiting the amount of glaring light directed toward oncoming and preceding traffic.”)
Several people I spoke to insisted that the main issue with 108’s guidelines when applied to LEDs is that there’s no maximum brightness for certain areas of a headlight. The guidelines set limits on areas of bulb emissions that tend to cause glare problems for other drivers, but those areas were determined based on the light output of older bulbs. LEDs’ output and maneuverability changed the game. Think of an LED headlight more like a pixelated television or computer screen rather than a light bulb. Because of that design, the luminosity of precise areas of the headlight can be limited while the overall brightness is pushed up, up, up.
Chris Trechter, a lighting-focused engineer who used to work for Magna International, the largest automobile parts manufacturer in North America, told me the company would adhere to 108 in making headlights for clients like General Motors but that the rule is “archaic.” “It does not account for LEDs,” he said, “and there are giant loopholes that allow you to throw basically unlimited light as long as you meet all the other aspects of 108.”
On a recent episode of the Carmudgeon Show podcast, auto journalist Jason Cammisa described a phenomenon occurring with some LED headlights in which there are observable minor spots of dimness among an otherwise bright field of light. “With complex arrays of LEDs and of optics,” he said, “car companies realized they can engineer in a dark spot where it’s being measured, but the rest of the field is vastly over-illuminated. And I’ve had now two car companies’ engineers, when I played stupid and said, ‘What’s the dark spot?’ … And the lighting engineers are all fucking proud of themselves: ‘That’s where they measure the fucking thing!’ And I’m like, ‘You assholes, you’re the reason that every fucking new car is blinding the shit out of everyone.’”
Cammisa, who did not respond to an interview request, compared this situation to the massive dieselgate scandal, in which Volkswagen was caught rigging emissions tests. (Fines levied against VW ended up costing the company around $30 billion.) To Cammisa, deliberately darkening specific areas of LEDs to bypass the testing system demonstrates a craven approach similar to cheating on emissions tests. He’s called it lightinggate. Or headlightgate. He’s workshopping the name.
I reached out to over a dozen car companies for this story, and only one provided an interview: Audi. In subsequently talking to Audi spokesperson Mark Dahnke, I relayed Cammisa’s description of how LED headlights were being deceptively engineered, and Dahnke told me he was “not aware of anything like that.” But Trechter, the former auto lighting engineer, told me Cammisa’s account was “100 percent real.”
So why go through all this trouble just for more light? Cammisa believes it’s an “arms race”—part of a battle between automakers to make their cars seem as state of the art as possible. “‘I get into my Lucid Air, and I have great lighting in every direction,’” he said, taking on the theoretical perspective of a new customer. “‘Oh, my headlights are great!’” Consider it something like the loudness war in music, in which albums were being mixed at increasing volumes, particularly in the 2000s, to make the music more attention grabbing, at the cost of quality. The brightness war, if you will.
Another possible explanation comes via a nongovernmental entity that has become a major force in the automotive world: the IIHS, a nonprofit funded by insurance companies with the goal of limiting loss. In the absence of any real NHTSA presence in the modern headlight conversation, the IIHS’s headlight safety rating has become a North Star for auto manufacturers, ostensibly for advertising reasons.
“It made our life hell to try and make light that bright,” said Trechter. “But GM wanted it for that safety rating, and that’s it.” According to Trechter, the way to get the best safety rating is to exploit the lack of intensity limits on certain areas of the headlight and make the light shine as far down the road as possible. “They would push us to get as much down-road punch as they could get,” he said, in reference to the automakers.
Matthew Brumbelow, a senior research engineer at the IIHS, explained the headlight safety rating in a more nuanced way. While “you can’t get a good rating and have super high glare,” he said, “you also can’t get a good rating and have a dim headlight that doesn’t glare anyone but also is too dim to help people avoid crashes on the road.” Brumbelow said both factors play into their rating but admitted it’s the brightness that they weigh more heavily. “That’s what we’ve seen,” he said. “A huge reduction in crash rates based on more light reaching the road.”
The “brighter is better” mentality is the ultimate thorn in the side of activists like Gatto and Morgan, who view it almost as an insult to their intelligence. Brumbelow pointed to a 2021 IIHS study that demonstrated a 19 percent reduction in nighttime single-vehicle crashes for cars with good headlight safety ratings, but Morgan sees a major issue with that study. “Basically,” Morgan said, “it means that assholes with bright headlights are in less single-car accidents than the people that they blind.”
One logical solution to this debate would be to factor in crashes that have occurred due to excessive glare, but this has proved to be a challenge out of the reach of the IIHS and other headlight experts. If a car is in an accident due to another car’s excessive glare, for instance, the offending vehicle that caused the situation would likely never know it and just keep driving.
The inability to clinically prove the dangers of headlight glare is at the heart of the issue. “You cannot mandate or prohibit something in the U.S. system without meeting a stringent cost-benefit requirement,” said Daniel Stern, chief editor of Driving Vision News and one of the foremost authorities in headlights and headlight policy.
Stern told me about a conversation he once had in the late 2000s with Richard Van Iderstine, then a recently retired automotive safety standards engineer at NHTSA with great rulemaking authority over headlights. Stern and Van Iderstine had met for lunch and continued talking into dinner, duking it out over the finer points of headlight philosophy. Two giants of the headlight world, going head to head. Stern remembers Van Iderstine telling him, “Look, I’m not stupid. I know what good lighting is, and I know what lousy lighting is. … Does glare cause crashes? Of course glare causes crashes. But I couldn’t prove it.” (Van Iderstine could not be reached for comment.)
Finding a way to empirically measure the danger that glare presents to drivers is one problem. Another is that people can’t seem to agree on what the cause of excessive glare actually is. Stern, for his part, noted that the situation is “very, very complex” and “doesn’t have an answer that sounds like yes or no or 42.” That said, he told me he did recently finish a 38,000-word report on headlight glare for a non-U.S. government (he could not say which one) and is adamant that the biggest factor “by far” is headlight alignment—which is to say, quite literally, how accurately one’s headlights are pointed.
This is the second-biggest thorn in Gatto and Morgan’s side. Headlight aim is important—no one is denying that. If any headlight, no matter how bright, is misaligned even slightly upward, it will cause glare for other drivers—and many headlights are poorly aligned out of the factory or become misaligned after an accident or installation error. But to someone like Morgan, alignment is only one part of the equation when headlights have become as intense as they have. “It’s a half-truth,” Morgan said, “without really saying that there’s other solutions here and that if you didn’t have laser-beam headlights, this issue would be less severe.” In his PowerPoint presentation, Gatto had drawn a penis on an image of Stern’s head. “That just kind of appeared there, sorry,” Gatto said.
Headlight alignment is certainly Stern’s primary foe—and he is not a fan of the likes of Baker and Morgan, either, whom he described in an email as having a fervor that “greatly outstrips their topical expertise and understanding, and likely qualifies them for IRS classification as religious entities.” But Stern does list other causes of glare as well. There’s headlight condition (a dirty lens can cause the light to refract in chaotic ways), headlight size (as LEDs become smaller, the “density” of the light increases, making it more intense), and headlight color (the eye is more sensitive to blue and white light, making glare seem more significant in modern LEDs, which are generally made in that color field).
Vehicle size is another issue that comes up regularly, since NHTSA regulations for headlights don’t include a standardized mounting height, even as cars have ballooned in size in recent years. This means a perfectly aligned headlight in a larger car can still wreak havoc on a smaller car: “Where the [midsize] Civic might not give you glare,” Trechter, the former lighting engineer, said, “that F-350 [truck], if you’re sitting in a [sport-size] Miata, is gonna absolutely wreck your eyeballs.”
In NHTSA’s brief statement to me, the only issue the organization brought up directly was aftermarket “LED conversion kits”—when headlight systems designed for halogen lights are swapped with LEDs—which it said are a “major contributor to excessive glare.” Due to the lack of data on what causes glare incidents on the road, it’s difficult to guess how much of a factor aftermarket LEDs are, but one thing’s for sure: They are illegal.
By pointing to aftermarket LEDs, then, NHTSA essentially passes the buck to law enforcement. This is, perhaps not coincidentally, at the same time that traffic violations nationwide are in substantial decline; a New York Times study reported a more than 50 percent reduction in traffic stops in many U.S. cities since the pandemic.
The result of the hydra-headed headlight problem appears to be general paralysis; with numerous routes available to potentially improve the situation, none are really being pursued by automakers or regulators. “In engineering,” Gatto told me, “we talk about fail state. What happens when [a system] fails? Does it fail well, or does it fail horribly?” He added, “If you’re planning for multiple of these fail states all the time, maybe consider what the true impact of this is. … You have to kind of go against the whole ethos in order to actually evaluate: Are these too bright?”
There is one path that certain automakers would like to take to improve headlights—but first it has to make it through NHTSA regulations. Adaptive driving beam technology takes advantage of LED capabilities to adjust the spray of light away from other cars and objects while maintaining high-capacity light on the road. When I got on the phone with the Audi representative, Mark Dahnke, to discuss headlight brightness, it quickly became clear that he was mainly taking the call in the interest of hyping ADB.
“It basically puts other drivers in the shadow of your full high-beam light,” Dahnke explained, “such that they are not blinded while providing not just you with more light but everyone with more light.” Dahnke pointed out that ADB has been rolled out in Europe for some time now and is not in the U.S. solely due to NHTSA restrictions. In February 2022, NHTSA belatedly published a rule to allow ADB, but because of the contradictory way the rule is written, no car company has yet been able to find an engineering formula to make it work. “We’re now three different generations of lighting behind the rest of the world in the U.S.,” Dahnke said, exasperated.
Gatto and Morgan, unsurprisingly, are not fans of ADB. They point out that with the way the technology currently works, the light being strategically dimmed is the high beam, meaning that the low beam will stay as bright as ever. “The adaptive high beam is only going to put more light on the road,” Morgan said, adding that people from Europe post in the subreddit about hating the headlight situation there, too. (In a 2024 European study conducted by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, 81 percent of respondents said headlight glare needed to be reduced via regulation.) ADB, Morgan insisted, is a corporate over-solution to a simple problem. “That’s their panacea,” he said, “and it’s baloney.”
In the course of automotive history, technology has saved countless lives, taking car accidents from a peak of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 1937 to 13.8 per 100,000 in 2022—a 55 percent improvement. That makes it difficult to dismiss the idea that something like ADB could be the solution to the headlight problem. But Gatto feels that he’s dealing with a “philosophical enemy” in the techno-optimist idea that we can innovate our way out of this. “They want to insert this technology to have a maximum amount of trust in it,” he said, “and they believe that any bit of convenience outweighs any drawback they could get from it.”
Paris Marx, a tech critic who focuses on transportation and hosts the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, is all too familiar with the trickiness of this conversation. LED headlight technology, when viewed through the same lens as evolving tech like self-driving cars, presents a vision of a world in which corporations are asking for perpetual forgiveness rather than permission.
“In general,” Marx told me, “we think about the positive outcomes that can be the result of adopting these things, but then thinking about the negative impacts only comes quite a bit later.” Assessing the notion that something as simple as a headlight could get this out of control, he said, “As usual, we’re trying to play catch-up and figure out how we’re going to address the problems that have been created by this thing that we thought was a solution.”
The most compelling argument I heard in defense of brighter lights is that, while glare is clearly a hazard, it may not be as much of a hazard as limited vision on the road. That is to say, brighter headlights—which could illuminate something like a deer on a dark, rural highway from farther away than ever before—may be preventing more accidents than they cause by shining in other drivers’ eyes. You’ll notice every overly bright light searing your brain, but you likely won’t really appreciate the accident you never had.
Despite the increase in headlight brightness, data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that fatal crashes in dark conditions remain relatively stable. In fact, crashes on lighted roads have risen slightly over the past two decades. It raises the question: Is all this extra brightness actually doing anything?
“Is it a problem for people, including myself,” said Brumbelow, the IIHS engineer, “to be on the road and have bright headlights in my eyes and feel like I can’t see? Yes, that’s a problem. But the bigger follow-up question is: Is that my feeling, or is it a reality that I’m at an increased risk of crashing? And that’s really what we’re talking about.”
Still, without concrete numbers indicating one way or another, this argument remains philosophical, and the stalemate continues. Morgan, anyway, is eager to figure this out from an engineering perspective, and he has the pie-in-the-sky idea of setting up some kind of nighttime traffic checkpoint, perhaps with the assistance of police, to assess high-glare events in everyday vehicles. “These are surmountable problems,” he said. “This is not like trying to determine divine intervention. These are problems made by men. We can figure this out. It just requires a little bit of effort.”
But he and Gatto know what they think the solution to all this is, and it’s admittedly the simplest proposal anyone has provided: Make the lights less bright. That’s it. “I’m just at: There’s too much glare in my eyes,” Morgan said, “and I want it to stop.”
At a certain point, I found myself more confused than when I started. There was name calling and corporate-interest lobbying and statistic volleying—often all at the same time. I needed a voice of reason. So I reached out to Ray Magliozzi.
Ray and his brother, Tom Magliozzi, hosted the radio show Car Talk for 35 years, from 1977 to 2012, serving as gurus of the car world and seasoning their advice with appropriately saucy New England–style banter and good humor. Tom died in 2014, but Ray still runs an auto mechanic shop in Cambridge and answers car questions via a blog. I decided to call the question line and ask Ray if he had any wisdom to share about headlights, not really expecting to get a reply.
A few days later my phone started buzzing with a call from a New England area code, and there he was: the wonderful voice from the radio. I told Ray I was shocked to be talking to him, and he didn’t miss a beat: “You called me!”
Magliozzi, 75, is actually fine with the brightness of modern headlights—when they work. Alignment, he noted, is extra important with lights like these, and he abhors the aftermarket LEDs and light bars that people attach to their cars in case “they’re going to encounter a moose or something.” But more than anything else, what bothers Magliozzi about the state of headlights is the increasing number of people who drive with high beams on all the time at night. “I think it’s selfishness to a large degree,” Magliozzi said.
I had talked about this with many people in the headlight sphere: the possibility that the power of LEDs, supposed to be a bastion of safety, was actually contributing to an “I’ve got mine” mentality on the roads, which has become largely identifiable across the driving realm. It’s impossible to prove a causal relationship, but the rise of LEDs has directly coincided with the rise of reckless driving and road rage, as well as a new surge of fatal accidents. “It seems like there’s an anti-collectivist vibe,” was how Gatto put it. “It’s a behavior that’s emerging.”
Some may genuinely not know they’re driving with their high beams on—digital car dashboards have gotten more complex and less intuitive in recent years—but it’s difficult to believe that most permanent high-beam users aren’t doing it deliberately, in an anti-collectivist kind of way. Magliozzi was bummed out about it. “When I learned to drive, 1,001 years ago,” he said, “we were taught to be courteous and polite. And I think we need to get back there.” Maybe that return toward courteousness has to start with automakers and regulatory bodies, however they decide to move forward with the LED headlight dilemma.
The first time I heard Baker, the founder of the Soft Lights Foundation, tell his story about having to essentially drop out of society, I suddenly felt guilty. I may be the type to squint angrily at headlight glare, but at the end of the day, I install the light bulbs available to me and move on with my life. For certain people, it’s clearly a much worse relationship.
I asked Baker what kind of lighting he uses in his day-to-day, and he said he does use LEDs—it’s almost impossible not to at this point—and that he’s found some he’s happy with, like gentle, amber-colored, 300-lumen bulbs for the bedroom. That’s the beauty of LED lights: They can be made for any design or purpose. Sometimes they just have to be adjusted until they’re right.
“But my favorite light is one that I replaced over the dining room table,” Baker said. His partner bought a chandelier-style fixture, and they put an incandescent bulb in it from a stockpiled supply. “It’s great,” Baker said. “I will go over and turn the switch on just to enjoy that light.”