It’s All Connected

I’m writing a book on the (yes, abstract-sounding) cultural influences on everyday peoples’ economic understandings — what is fair distribution, for whom, why it happens as, why it is alright or not, again for whom.

In one section of one sub-section of one chapter (yes, abstract-sounding, but that is what editing is for) I look at the late night comics (sure we laugh) but also kind of cultural truth-tellers (as comics very often have been).

Now all this may not seem connected but wait, it works for me.

All my remembered life I’ve been awake in the middle of the night. Derek Thompson, terrific, so very accomplished journalist for The Atlantic (and fellow graduate, me too, of Northwestern University), once wrote of something called “episodic sleep,” which I seized upon right away. People will sleep a few hours, get up and work, sleep a few more hours, get up again and work again. Rinse and repeat. Incredibly good job if one can get it.

Appears (writes Thompson) that medieval peasants were that way and so, 2023, am I.

So the connection. Defying all sleep experts, if I’m tossing and turning, I do fire up the laptop (definitely not the phone, I’m happily so very not addicted to the phone).

I do stream the late night people. It’s data…that section of that sub-section of that chapter.

Now John Oliver the journo-comic. He’s so funny, for sure. Knee slap, hand clap funny. He even cracked up the Dalai Lama in that “devil horns” piece from, yeah, Dharamshala. But the thing is. He is smart and he is relevant to real things that affect lives in serious ways and do not always get shown elsewhere.

And by the way my adorable rascal cat is named Oliver. The feline John Oliver Effect, look it up, Wiki.

And Last Week Tonight Season Ten is starting up again very, very soon. Drought over. And more data. All connected.