I’ve written a lot of pieces for Slate since starting there in 2014. Topics I’ve covered include politics, breaking news, sports, language, holidays, and other stuff. You can see my author archive here.
To this day, I am not sure how many consecutive nights I spent awake, but it was at least four. Espresso helped me keep going. So did furiously paced, illogical scribbling in a fat blue pocket notebook. As the sleepless days passed, I experienced the increasingly severe psychological effects common with extended sleep deprivation: I hallucinated, rambled, and lost focus. Toward the end of the ordeal, in New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, my body was giving out, too. While imposing a monologue on my biology teacher—who, I later learned, thought I was tripping on LSD—I blacked out and slumped mid-sentence. This happened more than once on my final day awake. Sleep specialists call these involuntary collapses “microsleeps.” It’s not hard to see why anybody—a high school chaperone, a parent, a doctor—might view a twitching, crumpling, babbling kid like me as some sort of nutcase. But what happened to me could happen to anyone who stays awake that long, voluntarily or otherwise.
Unlike other basic bodily functions, such as eating and breathing, we still do not fully understand why people need to sleep. There are theories—some think sleep may be the process by which the brain shuts down so it can store the day’s memories. Others, like Dr. Joyce Walseben, a psychiatrist and the former director of Bellevue Hospital’s Sleep Disorders Center, point to sleep’s importance in regulating the body’s hormones. But these theories are not complete. […] Sleep deprivation is nearly as misunderstood as sleep itself, but it can physically and mentally harm people in myriad ways.
[…]
Read the rest of this article at The Atlantic. I was interviewed about it on Vancouver radio show The Shift and on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Central Time.
Americans spend more on video games than on tickets to the movies. Grand Theft Auto V was the fastest-selling entertainment product of all time, with sales of $1 billion in just three days.
But when you factor in everything — not just movie tickets, but on demand, rentals, etc. — Americans still spend way more on movies than they do on video games.
See the graphs and read more at Planet Money.
While a few gamblers bet real money on potential Nobel Prize winners, at Planet Money we’re content to merely speculate. We’re particularly interested in who might win the economics prize, which will be announced Monday morning.
The good folks at Thomson Reuters are interested, too. Each year, Reuters publishes a closely watched list of predictions about who might win. Since 2002, this list has successfully predicted the eventual economics laureate(s) five times. This year, it named three groups of economists as favorites.
Read about them at Planet Money.
I am asking this sincerely: Why does it matter who the next Fed chairman will be? What difference does it make if Larry Summers or Janet Yellen or someone else heads the central bank?
More to the point: What does the Fed chairman do? What kind of power does he or she actually have?
To find out, I called Joe Gagnon, an economist who worked at the Fed for nearly 20 years and who now works at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Read a condensed transcript of our conversation at Planet Money.
The distraught mother of a 16-month-old who was shot and killed in Brownsville Sunday said some of the baby’s last moments were spent laughing and hopping on a bed.
In a tearful interview near her home on Riverdale Avenue Tuesday, Cherise Miller said that on Sunday evening she found her boy, Antiq Hennis, bouncing happily on a bed.
“He’s jumping on the bed,” Miller said. “I was just sitting there. I didn’t yell at him. I just sat and watched him.”
Read the rest at DNAinfo, and check out all my pieces for them.
Marinos Vourderis came to New York from Greece with little money and no education in the early 1940s, but in the years that followed, he founded a company whose name became synonymous with New York City summers: Marinos Italian Ices.
Vourderis died of natural causes last Tuesday in his Jamaica Estates home, surrounded by his large family. He was 97.
“He ws able to come here and live the American Dream,” Margaret Hackford, Vourderis’s 57-year-old daughter, said of her father.
[…]
“My father’s greatest saying was that, ‘look at how much I’ve accomplished with frozen sugar and water,’” Hackford said.
Read the rest at DNAinfo, and check out all my pieces for them.
Mohammed Abdou gets paid.
It’s a bright September afternoon, and the sun shines through Mohammed Abdou’s aviators as he sits outside a Harlem barbershop, where the West African regulars smoke and talk smack, and allows himself a rare indulgence: he just chills.
[…]
Abdou, a 28-year-old Malian immigrant from Timbuktu, is always hustling. Where he’ll be on any given day depends on where there is money to be earned. He holds down no fewer than four jobs—He imports jewelry and sells it to storefronts on West 47th Street, near Rockefeller Center. At out-of-state auctions, he buys damaged cars, fixes them and sells them in New York, or if there is an order from Africa, ships them to his brother to be sold in his home country. All of this on top of the bike and pedicab gig. Abdou speaks seven languages—including English, French, Arabic, Songhai and Mandinka—and he is trying to learn an eighth, Spanish. He works in Harlem and in Midtown, in Pennsylvania and in Port Elizabeth, N.J. He has a tendency to scan his surroundings as he talks, as though he’s on the lookout for opportunity.
Two West African immigrants rap with purpose.
Through his shows in New York City, his activism, his music and his speeches that are broadcast on YouTube, Gallice Jr. is part of a tradition and a region where, even though multiple burgeoning democracies have problems, social and government criticism through rap are robust.
Another West African rapper with a message is Bako Back, a New York City cabbie and a member of Malian rap trio Tata Pound.
Bako, whose real name is Sékou Tangara, carries himself with a demeanor and style that resembles popular American M.C.s. At a breakfast-and-burger joint in Harlem, he slouched under a flat-brimmed Yankees cap that he cocked to the side like Jay-Z. He speaks with a confident nonchalance, but he gets earnest when he talks politics. Occasionally, he will flash a wry smile at his own observations.
On his radio program—called African Time, and broadcast on both WPAT 930-AM in New York and on Sud FM in Senegal—[Dame] Babou explains the US political system to his listeners, alongside his regular discussion of Senegalese affairs. He has broadcast from New York since 1993, and over the course of five presidential elections, he has cleared up confusion about many facets of American democracy for his audiences.
“It’s not just giving the information,” Babou says. “It’s translation and explanation.”
Seth Maxon 