Good morning, it’s Wednesday. The middle of the week is upon us already!
Did you know that, on average, Americans spend 28 years, 2 months, and 5 days of their life asleep? Even though life expectancy has been dropping of late – a rather alarming trend – that’s still a pretty hefty chuck of time.
I sort of resent it – imagine how productive and experienced we could be if we didn’t have to spend so much time recharging?! But I do understand the importance of rest and the damage done when we don’t get enough of it.
When you consider how much time we spend horizontal, how we spend the limited waking hours available to us takes on additional meaning and urgency. Sadly, though, a pretty sizable number of those hours – on average 15 years, 3 months, and 7 days – is spent either at work or doing work-related activities.
Work is a necessity for the vast majority of us (those who aren’t born into wealth or lucky enough to make a lot of money early on in our careers so we could retire and live a life of leisure). More Americans are employed pretty much than ever before, given that unemployment rates are historically low.
As we discussed in yesterday’s post about teachers, many sectors are experiencing ongoing labor shortages. There’s more work available out there than there are people willing and legally able to do it. (The politically astute among you will see what I did there, and though I did mean to do it, we can save the immigration and workers’ rights debates for a different day).
Some people definitely have it tougher at work than others – both physically and mentally. That includes the roughly one-forth of U.S. workers who don’t work a standard daytime workday, but rather show up sometime after the rest of us are either packing it in or have long since called it quits.
Some 20 percent of the population that is working full-time is working nights at least a few days a week.
Shift work, as it’s known, is increasingly integral for our global, 24/7 society. We are all interconnected, all the time, and that means that someone has to be up burning the midnight oil.
In some industries, of course, this has long been standard operating procedure – in healthcare, for example; also public safety (firefighting, EMS, and policing); construction, and manufacturing, to a degree. People who plow our roads, pick up our trash, run our electric grid….you get the picture, all of these vital and essential roles – and probably a whole host of others that I’m overlooking – are keeping non-traditional hours.
But, biologically speaking, we as humans are not made to be awake and working in the wee hours. Doing so messes with our circadian rhythm (our 24-hour internal clock), and is not at all good for our health. It definitely makes us more prone to sleep disorders, but also has been shown to make us more prone to a wide range of disorders and diseases – from obesity to cancer.
There are, of course, strategies for coping and managing the negative impacts of shift work. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has an online training course intended for nurses who work long and/or overnight shifts, but it appears it would be instructional for those in other lines of work, too. More resources can be found here.
Generally speaking, it’s even more important for shift workers to try to maintain a healthy lifestyle (exercise, moderate diet, limited to no alcohol consumption, cutting out smoking, etc.) to try to offset the damage done by working overnights. Basically, you want to biohack yourself to any degree possible.
The second Wednesday in May – AKA today – is National Third Shift Workers Day, which recognizes the unique contributions of – and challenges facing – individuals who are toiling away when most of the rest of us are safe at home in bed.
If you happen to be trying to sleep during the daylight hours today, you might find it easier than usual – for the next few days, really – because the sun isn’t going to be gracing us with its presence. There’s a lot of rain and cloudiness in the forecast. Today will bring scattered thundershowers with the potential for gusty winds and hail. Temperatures will be in the high 70s.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden condemned a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel and said people were already forgetting the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.
Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance, Biden tied the anti-Jewish sentiment that led to the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews directly to Oct. 7.
“Now, here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and a half months later, people are already forgetting. They’re already forgetting, and Hamas unleashed this terror,” Biden said.
The Biden administration says it has been “clear” on what kind of Rafah invasion is acceptable. Israel’s counterterrorism mission into the southern Gaza city has blurred those lines.
Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for his reelection.
The United States withheld 3,500 bombs from Israel last week out of concern that they might be used in a major assault against the southern Gaza city, officials said.
As Biden runs for reelection, he’s resurrecting proposals to reshape American life from the cradle to the grave by lowering the cost of child care, expanding preschool opportunities and raising pay for those who care for the elderly.
The initiatives were once part of Build Back Better, Biden’s gargantuan legislative agenda that stalled on Capitol Hill two years ago. Now they’re what Neera Tanden, the Democratic president’s top domestic policy adviser, describes as “unfinished business.”
TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance are suing the U.S. federal government to challenge a law that would force the sale of ByteDance’s stake or face a ban, saying that the law is unconstitutional.
In its lawsuit, ByteDance says the new law vaguely paints its ownership of TikTok as a national security threat in order to circumvent the First Amendment, despite no evidence that the company poses a threat.
TikTok argued “qualified divestiture” is “simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally,” and it therefore would lead to a shutdown of the app in the U.S., cutting off millions of daily users.
Stormy Daniels, whose account of a sexual encounter with Trump is at the core of the first criminal trial of an American president, testified in excruciating detail about how it left her shaking and bewildered, and the hush-money payment that bought her silence.
Daniels described the 2006 encounter in detail and said she thinks she “blacked out” and that Trump did not use a condom. That led Trump attorney Todd Blanche to “move for a mistrial”, saying Daniels’ testimony was “unduly and inappropriately prejudicial.”
The judge scolded prosecutors about the “degree of detail” Daniels went into as she delivered racy, animated testimony in Manhattan court.
Trump’s bid for a mistrial over Daniels’ salacious testimony was denied by the judge, who still noted the former adult film star was a “difficult” witness for prosecutors to control.
Several police officers forcibly arrested an anti-Trump demonstrator yesterday in a park outside the Lower Manhattan courthouse where the former president is on trial.
The judge in Trump’s criminal trial agreed to cancel court proceedings on May 17 so the former president could be in West Palm Beach with his son and family.
Barron Trump’s post-graduation festivities may be missing an important person, as his father reportedly prepares to headline a fundraiser in Minnesota hours later.
The White House condemned the actions of counter-protesters at the University of Mississippi, after videos captured last week showed a crowd of white male students taunting and jeering at a female Black student at a pro-Palestinian protest.
Video clips published by the Mississippi Free Press and The Daily Mississippian showed some who had gathered to counter a pro-Palestinian protest on the school’s campus in Oxford, Miss., directing derogatory, racist and profane remarks at the Black student.
A police consulting firm will review a violent confrontation at the UCLA, where counter-protesters attacked demonstrators at a pro-Palestinian encampment while security and police officers failed for hours to intervene, and made no arrests.
The Faculty Senate at Stony Brook University voted to demand the SUNY school drop all charges against students and faculty arrested at a pro-Palestine protest last week.
The anti-Israel encampment at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan was cleared away yesterday evening, after dozens of protesters were arrested for refusing to shut down their rally.
In a NY Post op-ed, NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks explains why he’s leaning into his congressional testimony today on what he is doing to counter the “vile scourge of antisemitism” in the nation’s largest public school system.
Parents, teachers and advocates want Banks to be held “accountable” for what they say are hollow promises to combat antisemitism in New York City classrooms when he’s grilled by Congress this week.
Columbia Law School Dean Gillian Lester backed the school’s graduates after a group of conservative judges said they wouldn’t hire them following weeks of pro-Palestinian protests on the campus.
Lester said in a statement that Columbia Law graduates are “consistently sought out by leading employers in the private and public sectors, including the judiciary,” Reuters reported.
A furious Mayor Eric Adams contributed $5,000 of his own money toward the reward being offered for information leading to the bust of the anti-Israel “cowards’’ who defaced a local war memorial.
The mayor said that CrimeStoppers has also offered a $10,000 reward.
The fallout continues from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ill-fated remark that Black children in the Bronx don’t know the word “computer.” More here, here, here, and here.
Adams gave Hochul a pass on the gaffe, saying he knows the governor’s “heart,” adding: “I know what she was intending to say, and she was not trying to be disrespectful to the people of the Bronx.”
“I am not the word police. I know the governor’s heart,” Adams, a fellow Democrat, said at a news conference. “The people of the Bronx knew where her heart was.”
New York’s Equal Rights Amendment, which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state, has been ordered off the November ballot after a judge ruled that lawmakers didn’t follow the appropriate procedure in passing it.
The ruling by state Supreme Court Justice Daniel J. Doyle imperils the ERA after he found lawmakers acted on the resolution before receiving an opinion on the constitutional amendment from the attorney general, which was required to be issued within 20 days.
Hochul condemned the ruling, saying: “Our decades-long fight to protect equality and reproductive freedom will not be thrown off track by one extremist judge and I look forward to casting my ballot for the Equal Rights Amendment in November.”
A complaint filed by the Legal Aid Society and others accuses the state prison system of holding mentally ill and disabled people in isolation despite a law against the practice.
New legislation seeks to address a loophole in interactive fantasy sports contests that allows adults under 21 to place money on sporting contests.
The state Office of General Services has discontinued its long tradition of holding periodic auctions of state surplus vehicles and highway equipment at various locations around the state.
Adams said Rikers Island and the department of corrections were “ready” to receive Trump, should the former president and presumptive GOP presidential nominee make history and become the first former White House occupant ever put behind bars.
“Our amazing commissioner, she is prepared for whatever comes on Rikers Island,” Adams said during an unrelated media availability. “I’m pretty sure she would be prepared to manage and deal with the situation.”
Adams paid a surprise visit yesterday to a community center at the Jacob Riis Houses to sample the tap water, following a report raising questions about water quality in POLITICO.
Adams’ administration is moving to take advantage of its newfound ability to inspect and then padlock illicit cannabis shops, thanks to the authority the city was granted in last month’s state budget.
Adams said the “Operation Padlock to Protect” plan, which allows law enforcement to inspect smoke and cannabis shops and padlock locations that are caught unlawfully selling products, will accelerate over the coming weeks.
A state cannabis regulator refused to give an estimate of how many illegal pot shops there are in New York Adams announced a five-borough crackdown. “It’s much larger than we’d like it to be,” Pascale Bernard, an OCM official, said.
José Bayona, founder and executive director at the Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media, reportedly handed in his resignation this week.
A Manhattan federal judge scolded the city for trying to pump the brakes — again — on a long-ago legal settlement that was supposed to have made half of all yellow taxis wheelchair-accessible by 2020.
NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell — already facing accusations of politically-charged social media activities — has canceled a planned appearance at a Queens GOP event advertised in a poster identifying him by rank and featuring a photo of him in uniform.
The social media star Kai Cenat will not be prosecuted on charges of inciting a riot in Manhattan after agreeing to post a public apology and paying for the damage caused when thousands of his fans erupted in a chaotic melee in Union Square last summer.
Longtime NY1 anchor Lewis Dodley, 65, announced his legendary career in front of the news camera will come to a close at the end of this month.
Disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein, 72, was moved back to the West Facility on Rikers Island hours after THE CITY reported he was being kept in a private room inside Bellevue Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit on a floor away from other detainees.
More than 200 Clinton Hill residents crammed into a standing room only meeting early this week to raise their concerns about a compound of sprawling migrant shelters where an estimated 4,000 people now live in a two-block radius.
The Big Apple is home to the most millionaires in the world — despite the recent exodus of wealth spurred on by the pandemic.
Sean Hannity, the prominent Fox News personality, has made the decision to sell his expansive Long Island property for $13.75 million — mere months after revealing his relocation plans from New York to Florida.
A Rochester area nurse has been fined $55,000 after state DOH investigators discovered she falsified the immunization records for over 100 children across the state in a wide-ranging vaccination scheme, including children in Albany County.
Marking a milestone of sorts in the conversion, workers yesterday began putting Market 32 signs on what was the ShopRite supermarket at 1730 Central Ave.
A Rensselaer city court judge who has been on the bench for nearly three decades agreed to resign after being investigated by the state’s watchdog panel for the judiciary for a third time.
Planning Board members have advanced a proposal to build a retail plaza on Colonie’s Wolf Road, months after rejecting the plan due to traffic concerns.
Dozens of water sources in Shenendehowa schools, from water fountains to kitchen sinks, have tested for high levels of lead, according to test results posted on the district’s website.
Panera Bread is removing Charged Lemonades from its menu nationwide as the restaurant chain faces multiple wrongful death lawsuits over the caffeinated drinks.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
