“It’s official. Naps make you cleverer.”
Plus: Wham! gets the documentary treatment; and my new job!
It is cheeky of me to begin by just quoting at length from someone else? Perhaps, but this is worth it. The best magazine you have never heard of—it’s a print magazine, but also a website, a newsletter, a festival, and a very durable tote bag (for subscribers)—is The Idler, a British publication dedicated to leisure and taking it easy. Or, as they put it in their manifesto, which you can find on their website:
Nifty, eh?
One thing I like about the vision of Tom Hodgkinson, the founder, is that, unlike simple-minded curmudgeons like me, he is not reflexively anti-technology; rather, when he (and his writers, and the gist of his magazine) opposes technology, it’s because it’s used so often to make us slaves to work and/or the profit motive. But when technology really lives up to its promise to buy us time, he is all for it. It’s the free time that comes first, and everything else is judged according to how it affects our wealth in free time.
As my children will tell you, I am a champion napper (one of them, when little, was asked to draw a picture of Daddy, and he drew me lying down). And it turns out that napping is good for you! Here is a long excerpt from the latest Idler newsletter in my inbox. Read on:
Dear Idlers:
It’s always nice when the science catches up with us idlers.
A new report says that the more you nap, the cleverer you are. The findings were published in a journal with the appealing title of Sleep Health (I must get a subscription).
“We found an association between habitual daytime napping and larger total brain volume, which could suggest that napping regularly provides some protection against neurodegeneration through compensating for poor sleep,” the researchers noted.
The report adds to a growing pile of evidence which suggests that, in the words of neuroscientist Prof Tara Spires-Jones, “sleep is important for brain health”.
Sleep expert Matthew Walker carried out a nap experiment a few years ago. He gave a test to two groups of people. One group had powered on through the afternoon with no nap. The other group enjoyed a long post-prandial doze. The nappers did far better.
"Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took at nap,” commented Walker.
So that’s all clear. But the question remains. How to nap? Where should you take your siesta? And how long should it be?
Speaking personally, I find that I can drop off almost anywhere …—Tom Hodgkinson
Me too, Tom. Me too.
Wake up! I am go-go’ing!
As students in my old Yale class, English 450: Daily Themes, can tell you, I love Wham! I used to show them the video of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” as a prompt for a discussion about how culture becomes dated—or doesn’t. These two geniuses will never get old (even if one of them is sadly no longer with us). They represent a specific ’80s strain of profound silliness the energy and spirit of which we always need more of. So how excited am I for this documentary?
Can you name your state rep?
One of the little remarked-upon aspects of contemporary life is the extraordinary diminution of locally specific knowledge. When I was growing up, my parents could name most, if not all, of the nine members of the Springfield, Mass., city council; that was pretty normal, because the newspaper people got was a local one, and the political dramas that engaged them were as likely to be local as national (whereas today, as one wag put it, those of us who in olden days would have been watching pro wrestling are instead obsessed with national politics, and want the same plot lines). Today, I, a pretty well informed dude, can name only three of my city’s 30 alders—and that’s more than I think most people on my street can name.
And as impoverished as local knowledge is, state-wide knowledge is even poorer; I often thought it would be fun to poll all the local college professors I know and ask them to name their state representative and their state senator. How many of them could. (Could you?)
Yet state politics is where most of our lives get decided, politically speaking. Pot legalization, abortion, speed limits, you name it—state law. So we should all be paying obsessive attention to state politics. Because when we don’t, this is what happens. Here’s a taste:
A first-term House Republican’s success in placing a single sentence in the 832-page state budget, thereby blocking a warehouse distribution project near his neighborhood in Middlebury, has cast a bright light on the dark art of making law and doing favors in Connecticut.
Two more things to read
• I sometimes miss writing a regular column about American religion, in all its wild, foot-washing splendor. I’m so glad Maggie Phillips is on the beat. From her latest Tablet column, on pride in Provincetown:
Just a short distance from Pilgrims First Landing Park, in a church founded by the Pilgrims’ spiritual descendants, LGBTQ+ people of color were hosting a vendor fair featuring adult novelty retailer House of Bawdy. It is easy to forget, given their caricature in the American national imagination as censorious killjoys, that the New England Puritans were in fact radicals. Provincetown, a Portuguese fishing village-turned-artist-colony-turned-gay-friendly tourist spot, is a consequential reminder.
• This one, by Philip Roth scholar Jacques Berlinerblau, in this case writing in Salon about his hunt for the identity of Trump’s “MAGA rabbi,” is a hoot. Excerpt:
His name is Isaac Aretuo (also known as Alex Isaac Aretuo and Alejandro Isaac Aretuo). He is affiliated with Congregation Najamu Ami in Miami, which explains itself this way on Instagram: "Somos una Comunidad Judío Creyente (Yeshua) ישוע Creemos en un solo dios y en Yeshua como el Meshiah" ("We are a Jewish Yeshua Community. We believe in one God and in Jesus as his Messiah.") As far as I can tell, Aretuo refers to himself as a "teacher" or "master" rather than a rabbi. As I predicted (God is my witness here, BTW) he is a Messianic Jew.
My new job
Starting last week, I am vice president and director of open learning at American Jewish University, in Los Angeles. (Learn more about this remarkable school here.) More on our upcoming projects as they evolve. And no, Mom and Dad, we’re not relocating to L.A. I’ll be out there a good bit, but mainly working from the home office in the Eastern time zone.
Duolingo’s vegetarian fail
A vegetarian I know was forced by his online language trainer to translate this sentence of Hebrew, which surely counts as a macro-aggression—or not, depending on the intended definition of “beef”:
Fun fact: the plural of “beef,” in the sense of “cow,” is “beeves.” I try to use “beeves” in sentences every now and again. From an online dictionary, here’s one possible usage: “They carried away bacon, drove away fat hogs and beeves, and robbed the people of every species of moveable property.”
Right, just like that.