02
Section

After dark

Night Watch

The people who are already awake when we get up.

Bakers, cleaners, night nurses, dispatchers, the woman who walks the bridge at 4 a.m. because that is her job. Interviews conducted between 2 and 6 in the morning.

A single white night-blooming cereus flower open at midnight in desert scrub
Sonoran Desert, Arizona

The Plant That Looks Dead for 364 Nights a Year

The Night-Blooming Cereus opens once, after dark, and is gone by sunrise. Whole towns stay up for it.

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A baker in a flour-dusted denim apron working alone at a wooden bench before dawn
Berlin

The Woman Who Turns the Lights On Before the City Does

At 3:40 a.m. Ingrid unlocks a bakery in Kreuzberg, switches on one light, and makes four hundred croissants in silence.

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View through the windscreen of a Prague taxi on wet cobbles at night, yellow roof lamp lit
Prague

Ninety Minutes in the Back of Pavel's Octavia

The night trams stop at 4:30. Between then and the first metro, the city belongs to a silver Škoda and the man who has driven it for eleven years.

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