How Do You Sleep at Night?

Sleep tracking, Kid Workers, and Fixing Nuclear Bombs by Hand.

Good night, sleep tight, don't let the software bugs bite. Devices. Tracking. Data collection and analysis. Technology dominates our every waking hour, but a new breed of user is trying to change that. They're letting technology dominate their sleeping hours, too. "Mike Skerrett, a 27-year-old television writer in Los Angeles, wears a Whoop band to track his biometrics constantly ... The device, popular for measuring workouts, says it can track rest cycles when worn at night, helping to 'optimize your sleep performance.' He has deployed tactics including blackout curtains and taping his mouth shut to max out his sleep score on Whoop’s app. 'I can see that on days when I tape my mouth during sleep, I have a 7% higher recovery score in the morning than on days when I don’t,' he says. 'I implemented these changes partially to chase the higher score on the app, and, it also does change the feel of the night’s sleep, for the better.'" WSJ (Gift Article): Hard-Core Sleepers Obsess Over Their Snoozing Stats. I happen to share a bedroom with a hardcore sleep tracker. The other night, my wife informed me that she had to go to sleep at 10:34pm for maximum overnight recovery. When I went to bed a couple hours later, she was still up playing Zelda. I decided it best to let sleeping dogs lie.

2

The Night is Young

"At 14, Marcos was maimed while working the overnight cleaning shift at a Perdue slaughterhouse in rural Virginia. He is one of thousands of migrant children living far from their parents and working dangerous jobs. In towns like Marcos’s, the practice is an open secret that everyone lives with." Hannah Dreier in the NYT Mag on the part of the immigrant story that doesn't often come up in heated political debates. The Kids on the Night Shift. "If companies like this looked too closely at who was working, no company would be able to keep going."

3

Waking Nightmare

"'Hi Laurie, it’s Dr. Hadden calling,' he said. 'It’s like 4:30 on Friday. You know, I just got word that you called the office and you’re upset and you’re calling the police. What — what the heck happened? What’s going on? Please, can we talk? Um. If you can, please just give the office a call and, you know — or come back and talk face-to-face. I, I, I don’t — I don’t understand. I just know that — I just got word from the — first, from the secretary, and then from our office manager and the nurse. So I’m very upset. I don’t know what’s going on. So please, please call me back. All right. Take care.' The officers glanced at one another and then at Kanyok. 'F-ck him,' she remembers them saying. 'Let’s go get this pig.'" Getting that pig took a lot longer than it should have. ProPublica and NY Mag: How Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator For More Than 20 Years. Not that it would have made matters any better, but "there was nothing particularly special about Robert Hadden that would make Columbia want to protect him. He wasn’t a prominent physician with a roster of elite clients. He wasn’t attracting millions of research dollars or in demand on the academic lecture circuit."

4

Things You Don't Want To Go Bump in the Night

"In an ultra-sterile room at a secure factory in Kansas City, U.S. government technicians refurbish the nation’s nuclear warheads. The job is exacting: Each warhead has thousands of springs, gears and copper contacts that must work in conjunction to set off a nuclear explosion. Eight hundred miles away in New Mexico, workers in a steel-walled vault have an equally delicate task. Wearing radiation monitors, safety goggles and seven layers of gloves, they practice shaping new warhead plutonium cores — by hand." The AP with a behind-the-scenes look at one hell of crazy job. Inside the delicate art of maintaining America’s aging nuclear weapons.

5

Extra, Extra

Merrick Rolled: "We will not be intimidated. We will do our jobs free from outside interference. And we will not back down from defending our democracy." So said Merrick Garland during a grilling by GOP House members pretending that he's weaponizing the Justice Dept. Here's the latest from the made for TV hearing.

+ Breaking: Anne Frank Had Genitals: "A Texas middle school teacher has been fired after assigning an unapproved illustrated version of Anne Frank's Diary to her eighth grade reading class. Per a report from KFDM, a spokesperson for Hamshire-Fannett ISD, located south of Beaumont, released a statement confirming the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia." This is not a culture war. It's a cult's war.

+ Modi Operandi: "Since Modi came to power in 2014, violence against India’s minorities has dramatically increased, and New Delhi has moved to strip many non-Hindus of protections. The country revoked the partial autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state—and split the entity in half. It passed a law that could deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship, and it has done conspicuously little to stop the killing of members of tribal minorities in India’s northeast." Interesting look at the backstory of the Canada's fight with India. The Killing in Canada Shows What India Has Become.

+ Assad State of Affairs: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will travel to China this week for a bilateral summit with his Chinese counterpart, the presidency in Damascus said in a statement on Tuesday ... Presidents Assad and Xi would hold a Syrian-Chinese summit." Assad has been welcomed back into (one side of) the global family of nations. Depressing.

+ X Marks its Spot: This is becoming a very familiar story. So are the names of the trolls stoking them. A reporter made sure a retired police chief’s death didn’t go uncovered. Then social media attacked her. "The Las Vegas Review-Journal is facing a harassment campaign stoked by Elon Musk, one year after a reporter was killed for his coverage."

+ Heat Seeking Employment: "The White House on Wednesday unveiled a new climate jobs training program that it says could put 20,000 people to work in its first year on projects like restoring land, improving communities' resilience to natural disasters and deploying clean energy."

+ Skirting Justice: "Describing meeting with Giuliani backstage at Donald Trump’s speech near the White House before his supporters marched on Congress in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Hutchinson says the former New York mayor turned Trump lawyer put his hand 'under my blazer, then my skirt.'" Ex-Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson claims Rudy Giuliani groped her on January 6. Could this guy be any more of a creep?

6

Bottom of the News

"The work depicts a meandering stone path, a cerulean pond and a handful of luminescent trees — all elements that were painted in under 30 minutes during the 1983 premiere of what would become the hit PBS show." This rare Bob Ross painting could be yours — for close to $10 million.

+ "Haaning has been ordered by a Copenhagen court to repay most of the money — approximately $70,600 — as well as the equivalent of an additional $11,000 in legal fees." That's what happens when you deliver two pieces of art that are actually blank canvases and call the work, Take the Money and Run.