Kathryn Nicolai has gotten really, really good at putting people to sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep has always been something of a superpower for her, so it’s only natural that she built a business around helping other people do it too.
“I always say, I sleep like it’s my job,” she says, laughing.
Nicolai describes herself as an architect of coziness. Her office, with its enormous lounge chair and dangling mobiles and strings of fairy lights, is practically a temple to the feeling.
“If I can make any part of my life feel softer or cuter, I’m going to do it,” she says.
Once a yoga teacher, Nicolai is now the founder of the Nothing Much Happens empire, a podcast, book, and general storytelling machine that helps put millions of Americans to sleep as quickly as possible.
But how did a business based on telling bedtime stories to adults take off?
Nicolai, who will launch an app and release a second book next year, never imagined she’d be a professional writer. It wasn’t until her early 30s, when a close friend was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that she began to think seriously about it.
“Right before she died, she said, ‘You’ve got to make your dreams come true. I won’t be able to do mine,” Nicolai recalls. “And I said, ‘I know.’ And she went, ‘Don’t blow me off. I am telling you something very important right now.’”
Nicolai didn’t even know what her dreams were. “I was just getting to the next day,” she says. “I think that if Renee hadn’t interrupted me, I would have kept doing that for a long time.”
When she actually sat down to think about it, she realized something. What she really wanted, she thought, was to tell bedtime stories to adults.
Empire of rest
Like many kids, Nicolai grew up on stories. Her dad got her into audiobooks as a child, and she played a record that told the story of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase over and over for an entire summer.
As she got older, she turned to meditation and yoga, eventually becoming a full-time yoga teacher. She created and ran her own studio, met her wife and got married, and settled down with their dogs in Michigan.
When she had that pivotal conversation with her friend Renee, she was already spending a considerable amount of time using her voice and presence to help calm people down. But she’d long harbored a secret dream of becoming a writer. Maybe, she wondered, there was a way to combine both passions.
“Your life doesn’t have to make sense to anybody else. If you have a passion, it doesn’t matter if it works. It matters that you pursue it,” she says.
At first, she wanted to tell a story in book form, but the barrier to entering the publishing industry felt high. A podcast seemed more accessible. Anyone with a microphone could have one. Why not her?
At the time, she knew of just one other sleep podcast, which recapped TV episodes. “I really thought, this is quite niche,” she says.
It took her two years to actually sit down to record the first story — a rambling tale about all the smells and sensations you encounter as you make your way home from work in the rain, one that would help take her listeners from the day’s onslaught of information to a quieter place.
She knew it would put people to sleep, because she’d been falling asleep to some version of it herself for years. She released the first episode in April 2018.
At first, the reception started out, well, sleepily. She was checking the download metrics every day: 24, 48, 100. A month in, the numbers ticked modestly upward, to ~1.5k.
Back then, she was still running her yoga studio, teaching five or six times a week, writing stories, and recording the podcast. By the time she’d been putting out episodes for a year, she’d reached 10m downloads, earning money from ads and premium content subscriptions.
“And then I got a literary agent, and then I sold my book in about 35 countries,” she says. “And I was like, okay, apparently this is going to be a thing.”
Americans clearly needed help getting a good night’s rest. And Nicolai wasn’t the only person thinking about how to help people sleep better.
In 2014, the CDC declared insufficient sleep a public health problem. For the one-third of Americans who aren’t getting the recommended seven or more hours a night, that means higher rates of anxiety, depression, heart disease, and obesity, and other conditions.
By 2017, McKinsey & Company released a report suggesting private equity firms look into investing in sleep optimization. There’s a business case to be made for the industry: Studies have estimated the US loses ~$400B a year in productivity due to sleep deprivation.
Over the last 10 years, the sleep industry has exploded. Mattress companies are multiplying, as are wearable tech options like Oura rings that monitor your activity so you can achieve optimal results even when sleeping.
In 2015, Americans spent an estimated $41B on sleep aids. By 2024, that number sat at $67B. Consumers can now buy a whole host of CBD-infused gummies and oils. A few companies even make CBD-infused bedsheets and pillowcases.
Sleep tourism is also now a thing: Hotels are offering pillow menus and retreat weekends. Luxury resorts are offering trip itineraries focused on getting a better night’s rest. Last year, trend forecast agency WGSN labeled “therapeutic laziness,” AKA bed rotting, as one of the year’s top trends.
The bedtime story market is also getting more crowded. When Nicolai started out, there was just one other sleep podcast. Now, there are hundreds, and apps like Calm are getting in on the boom, offering their own stories narrated by celebrities like Harry Styles and Matthew McConaughey.
Nicolai has come a long way from her first episode. Her stories, which are set in a village called Nothing Much, are effective because:
They’re heavy on nostalgia and familiarity.
The overarching activity is soothing and/or enjoyable.
They’re steeped in sensory detail.
As the title suggests, nothing much happens.
She still writes every story herself, all 495 of them now. But it wasn’t until four years into the project that she sold her beloved yoga studio, going all-in on the village of Nothing Much.
“This whole enterprise I was building was about rest. I could not burn my candle at both ends and then try to pretend to know how to help people rest,” she says.
She picked a lane, switched to a weekly episode release cadence, and watched her numbers soar. “Now, 200k [people] might listen to me on a day,” she says. She’s at 200m downloads overall. She employs two of her friends, one of whom does “community care,” AKA customer service, for the villagers (listeners) who span the globe.
Her stories focus on feelings: a morning with the windows open and fresh fall air blowing through, an evening when two friends meet for the first time, a walk through the backcountry after the rain. She’s introduced listeners to librarians, bakers, innkeepers, and a whole host of animals that call Nothing Much their home.
“So many people tell me they wish they could live in the village of Nothing Much,” she says.
In January, Nicolai is launching an app that will help them do that — at least for an hour or two every day.
The great thing about being famous for your voice is that although she has some high-profile fans — literary giant Meg Wolitzer, for one — Nicolai enjoys moving mostly anonymously through a life she calls ridiculously charmed.
She still lives in Michigan and spends her days dreaming up how to expand the village. She has kids' books in mind, and wants to write a book starring two beloved villagers, Marmalade (a cat) and Crumb (a dog). She’d also love to create feel-good sleep content for TV.
“People like me sometimes get called Pollyanna-ish, or told we’re walking around with rose-colored glasses,” she says.
But, she points out, our brains are primed through negativity bias to focus on scary or upsetting things.
“So when you deliberately go out of your way to look for good things, that’s not rose-colored glasses. That’s taking off the gray ones. You’re actually more of a realist than you were before.”
Sounds like a dream to me.
I like to tell people that the night before I stopped sleeping, I slept. Not only that: I slept well. Years ago, a boyfriend of mine, even-keeled during the day but restless at night, told me how hard it was to toss and turn while I instantly sank into the crude, Neanderthal slumber of the dead. When I found a magazine job that allowed me to keep night-owl hours, my rhythms had the precision of an atomic clock. I fell asleep at 1 a.m. I woke up at 9 a.m. One to nine, one to nine, one to nine, night after night, day after day. As most researchers can tell you, this click track is essential to health outcomes: One needs consistent bedtimes and wake-up times. And I had them, naturally; when I lost my alarm clock, I didn’t bother getting another until I had an early-morning flight to catch.
Then, one night maybe two months before I turned 29, that vaguening sense that normal sleepers have when they’re lying in bed—their thoughts pixelating into surreal images, their mind listing toward unconsciousness—completely deserted me. How bizarre, I thought. I fell asleep at 5 a.m.
This started to happen pretty frequently. I had no clue why. The circumstances of my life, both personally and professionally, were no different from the week, month, or two months before—and my life was good. Yet I’d somehow transformed into an appliance without an off switch.
I saw an acupuncturist. I took Tylenol PM. I sampled a variety of supplements, including melatonin (not really appropriate, I’d later learn, especially in the megawatt doses Americans take—its real value is in resetting your circadian clock, not as a sedative). I ran four miles every day, did breathing exercises, listened to a meditation tape a friend gave me. Useless.
I finally caved and saw my general practitioner, who prescribed Ambien, telling me to feel no shame if I needed it every now and then. But I did feel shame, lots of shame, and I’d always been phobic about drugs, including recreational ones. And now … a sedative? (Two words for you: Judy Garland.) It was only when I started enduring semiregular involuntary all-nighters—which I knew were all-nighters, because I got out of bed and sat upright through them, trying to read or watch TV—that I capitulated. I couldn’t continue to stumble brokenly through the world after nights of virtually no sleep.
I hated Ambien. One of the dangers with this strange drug is that you may do freaky things at 4 a.m. without remembering, like making a stack of peanut-butter sandwiches and eating them. That didn’t happen to me (I don’t think?), but the drug made me squirrelly and tearful. I stopped taking it. My sleep went back to its usual syncopated disaster.
In Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq lists the thinkers and artists who have pondered the brutality of sleeplessness, and they’re distinguished company: Duras, Gide, Pavese, Sontag, Plath, Dostoyevsky, Murakami, Borges, Kafka. (Especially Kafka, whom she calls literature’s “patron saint” of insomniacs. “Dread of night,” he wrote. “Dread of not-night.”) Not to mention F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose sleeplessness was triggered by a single night of warfare with a mosquito.
But there was sadly no way to interpret my sleeplessness as a nocturnal manifestation of tortured genius or artistic brilliance. It felt as though I’d been poisoned. It was that arbitrary, that abrupt. When my insomnia started, the experience wasn’t just context-free; it was content-free. People would ask what I was thinking while lying wide awake at 4 a.m., and my answer was: nothing. My mind whistled like a conch shell.
But over time I did start thinking—or worrying, I should say, and then perseverating, and then outright panicking. At first, songs would whip through my head, and I couldn’t get the orchestra to pack up and go home. Then I started to fear the evening, going to bed too early in order to give myself extra runway to zonk out. (This, I now know, is a typical amateur’s move and a horrible idea, because the bed transforms from a zone of security into a zone of torment, and anyway, that’s not how the circadian clock works.) Now I would have conscious thoughts when I couldn’t fall asleep, which can basically be summarized as insomnia math: Why am I not falling asleep Dear God let me fall asleep Oh my God I only have four hours left to fall asleep oh my God now I only have three oh my God now two oh my God now just one.
“The insomniac is not so much in dialogue with sleep,” Darrieussecq writes, “as with the apocalypse.”
I would shortly discover that this cycle was textbook insomnia perdition: a fear of sleep loss that itself causes sleep loss that in turn generates an even greater fear of sleep loss that in turn generates even more sleep loss … until the next thing you know, you’re in an insomnia galaxy spiral, with a dark behavioral and psychological (and sometimes neurobiological) life of its own.
I couldn’t recapture my nights. Something that once came so naturally now seemed as impossible as flying. How on earth could this have happened? To this day, whenever I think about it, I still can’t believe it did.
In light of my tortured history with the subject, you can perhaps see why I generally loathe stories about sleep. What they’re usually about is the dangers of sleep loss, not sleep itself, and as a now-inveterate insomniac, I’ve already got a multivolume fright compendium in my head of all the terrible things that can happen when sleep eludes you or you elude it. You will die of a heart attack or a stroke. You will become cognitively compromised and possibly dement. Your weight will climb, your mood will collapse, the ramparts of your immune system will crumble. If you rely on medication for relief, you’re doing your disorder all wrong—you’re getting the wrong kind of sleep, an unnatural sleep, and addiction surely awaits; heaven help you and that horse of Xanax you rode in on.
It should go without saying that for some of us, knowledge is not power. It’s just more kindling.
The cultural discussions around sleep would be a lot easier if the tone weren’t quite so hectoring—or so smug. A case in point: In 2019, the neuroscientist Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, gave a TED Talk that began with a cheerful disquisition about testicles. They are, apparently, “significantly smaller” in men who sleep five hours a night rather than seven or more, and that two-hour difference means lower testosterone levels too, equivalent to those of someone 10 years their senior. The consequences of short sleep for women’s reproductive systems are similarly dire.
“This,” Walker says just 54 seconds in, “is the best news that I have for you today.”
He makes good on his promise. What follows is the old medley of familiars, with added verses about inflammation, suicide, cancer. Walker’s sole recommendation at the end of his sermon is the catechism that so many insomniacs—or casual media consumers, for that matter—can recite: Sleep in a cool room, keep your bedtimes and wake-up times regular, avoid alcohol and caffeine. Also, don’t nap.
I will now say about Walker:
1. His book is in many ways quite wonderful—erudite and wide-ranging and written with a flaring energy when it isn’t excessively pleased with itself.
2. Both Why We Sleep and Walker’s TED Talk focus on sleep deprivation, not insomnia, with the implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that too many people choose to blow off sleep in favor of work or life’s various seductions.
If public awareness is Walker’s goal (certainly a virtuous one), he and his fellow researchers have done a very good job in recent years, with the enthusiastic assistance of my media colleagues, who clearly find stories about the hazards of sleep deprivation irresistible. (In the wine-dark sea of internet content, they’re click sirens.) Walker’s TED Talk has been viewed nearly 24 million times. “For years, we were fighting against ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ ” Aric Prather, the director of the behavioral-sleep-medicine research program at UC San Francisco, told me. “Now the messaging that sleep is a fundamental pillar of human health has really sunk in.”
Yet greater awareness of sleep deprivation’s consequences hasn’t translated into a better-rested populace. Data from the CDC show that the proportion of Americans reporting insufficient sleep held constant from 2013 through 2022, at roughly 35 percent. (From 2020 to 2022, as anxiety about the pandemic eased, the percentage actually climbed.)
So here’s the first question I have: In 2025, exactly how much of our “sleep opportunity,” as the experts call it, is under our control?
According to the most recent government data, 16.4 percent of American employees work nonstandard hours. (Their health suffers in every category—the World Health Organization now describes night-shift work as “probably carcinogenic.”) Adolescents live in a perpetual smog of sleep deprivation because they’re forced to rise far too early for school (researchers call their plight “social jet lag”); young mothers and fathers live in a smog of sleep deprivation because they’re forced to rise far too early (or erratically) for their kids; adults caring for aging parents lose sleep too. The chronically ill frequently can’t sleep. Same with some who suffer from mental illness, and many veterans, and many active-duty military members, and menopausal women, and perimenopausal women, and the elderly, the precariat, the poor.
“Sleep opportunity is not evenly distributed across the population,” Prather noted, and he suspects that this contributes to health disparities by class. In 2020, the National Center for Health Statistics found that the poorer Americans were, the greater their likelihood of reporting difficulty falling asleep. If you look at the CDC map of the United States’ most sleep-deprived communities, you’ll see that they loop straight through the Southeast and Appalachia. Black and Hispanic Americans also consistently report sleeping less, especially Black women.
Even for people who aren’t contending with certain immutables, the cadences of modern life have proved inimical to sleep. Widespread electrification laid waste to our circadian rhythms 100 years ago, when they lost any basic correspondence with the sun; now, compounding matters, we’re contending with the currents of a wired world. For white-collar professionals, it’s hard to imagine a job without the woodpecker incursions of email or weekend and late-night work. It’s hard to imagine news consumption, or even ordinary communication, without the overstimulating use of phones and computers. It’s hard to imagine children eschewing social media when it’s how so many of them socialize, often into the night, which means blue-light exposure, which means the suppression of melatonin. (Melatonin suppression obviously applies to adults too—it’s hardly like we’re avatars of discipline when it comes to screen time in bed.)
Most of us can certainly do more to improve or reclaim our sleep. But behavioral change is difficult, as anyone who’s vowed to lose weight can attest. And when the conversation around sleep shifts the onus to the individual—which, let’s face it, is the American way (we shift the burden of child care to the individual, we shift the burden of health care to the individual)—we sidestep the fact that the public and private sectors alike are barely doing a thing to address what is essentially a national health emergency.
Given that we’ve decided that an adequate night’s rest is a matter of individual will, I now have a second question: How are we to discuss those who are suffering not just from inadequate sleep, but from something far more severe? Are we to lecture them in the same menacing, moralizing way? If the burden of getting enough sleep is on us, should we consider chronic insomniacs—for whom sleep is a nightly gladiatorial struggle—the biggest failures in the armies of the underslept?
Those who can’t sleep suffer a great deal more than those gifted with sleep will ever know. Yet insomniacs frequently feel shame about the solutions they’ve sought for relief—namely, medication—likely because they can detect a subtle, judgmental undertone about this decision, even from their loved ones. Resorting to drugs means they are lazy, refusing to do simple things that might ease their passage into unconsciousness. It means they are neurotic, requiring pills to transport them into a natural state that every other animal on Earth finds without aid.
Might I suggest that these views are unenlightened? “In some respects, chronic insomnia is similar to where depression was in the past. We’d say, ‘Major depression’ and people would say, ‘Everybody gets down now and then,’ ” John Winkelman, a psychiatrist in the sleep-medicine division at Harvard Medical School, said at a panel I attended last summer. Darrieussecq, the author of Sleepless, puts it more bluntly: “ ‘I didn’t sleep all night,’ sleepers say to insomniacs, who feel like replying that they haven’t slept all their life.”
The fact is, at least 12 percent of the U.S. population suffers from insomnia as an obdurate condition. Among Millennials, the number pops up to 15 percent. And 30 to 35 percent of Americans suffer from some of insomnia’s various symptoms—trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, or waking too early—at least temporarily. In 2024, there were more than 2,500 sleep-disorder centers in the U.S. accredited by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Prather told me the wait time to get into his sleep clinic at UCSF is currently a year. “That’s better than it used to be,” he added. “Until a few months ago, our waitlist was closed. We couldn’t fathom giving someone a date.”
So what I’m hoping to do here is not write yet another reproachful story about sleep, plump with misunderstandings and myths. Fixing sleep—obtaining sleep—is a tricky business. The work it involves and painful choices it entails deserve nuanced examination. Contrary to what you might have read, our dreams are seldom in black and white.
Whenever I interviewed a clinician, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, or any other kind of expert for this story, I almost always opened with the same question: What dogma about sleep do you think most deserves to be questioned?
The most frequent answer, by a long chalk, is that we need eight hours of it. A fair number of studies, it turns out, show that mortality rates are lowest if a person gets roughly seven hours. Daniel F. Kripke, a psychiatrist at UC San Diego, published the most famous of these analyses in 2002, parsing a sample of 1.1 million individuals and concluding that those who reported more than eight hours of sleep a night experienced significantly increased mortality rates. According to Kripke’s work, the optimal sleep range was a mere 6.5 to 7.4 hours.
These numbers shouldn’t be taken as gospel. The relationship between sleep duration and health outcomes is a devil’s knot, though Kripke did his best to control for the usual confounds—age, sex, body-mass index. But he could not control for the factors he did not know. Perhaps many of the individuals who slept eight hours or more were doing so because they had an undetected illness, or an illness of greater severity than they’d realized, or other conditions Kripke hadn’t accounted for. The study was also observational, not randomized.
But even if they don’t buy Kripke’s data, sleep experts don’t necessarily believe that eight hours of sleep has some kind of mystical significance. Methodologically speaking, it’s hard to determine how much sleep, on average, best suits us, and let’s not forget the obvious: Sleep needs—and abilities—vary over the course of a lifetime, and from individual to individual. (There’s even an extremely rare species of people, known as “natural short sleepers,” associated with a handful of genes, who require only four to six hours a night. They tear through the world as if fired from a cannon.) Yet eight hours of sleep or else remains one of our culture’s most stubborn shibboleths, and an utter tyranny for many adults, particularly older ones.
“We have people coming into our insomnia clinic saying ‘I’m not sleeping eight hours’ when they’re 70 years of age,” Michael R. Irwin, a psychoneurologist at UCLA, told me. “And the average sleep in that population is less than seven hours. They attribute all kinds of things to an absence of sleep—decrements in cognitive performance and vitality, higher levels of fatigue—when often that’s not the case. I mean, people get older, and the drive to sleep decreases as people age.”
Another declaration I was delighted to hear: The tips one commonly reads to get better sleep are as insipid as they sound. “Making sure that your bedroom is cool and comfortable, your bed is soft, you have a new mattress and a nice pillow—it’s unusual that those things are really the culprit,” Eric Nofzinger, the former director of the sleep neuroimaging program at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school, told me. “Most people self-regulate anyway. If they’re cold, they put on an extra blanket. If they’re too warm, they throw off the blanket.”
“Truthfully, there’s not a lot of data supporting those tips,” Suzanne Bertisch, a behavioral-sleep-medicine expert at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, told me. That includes the proscription on naps, she added, quite commonly issued in her world. (In general, the research on naps suggests that short ones have beneficial outcomes and long ones have negative outcomes, but as always, cause and effect are difficult to disentangle: An underlying health condition could be driving those long naps.)
Even when they weren’t deliberately debunking the conventional wisdom about sleep, many of the scholars I spoke with mentioned—sometimes practically as an aside—facts that surprised or calmed. For instance: Many of us night owls have heard that the weather forecast for our old age is … well, cloudy, to be honest, with a late-afternoon chance of keeling over. According to one large analysis, we have a 10 percent increase in all-cause mortality over morning larks. But Jeanne Duffy, a neuroscientist distinguished for her expertise in human circadian rhythms at Brigham and Women’s, told me she suspected that this was mainly because most night owls, like most people, are obliged to rise early for their job.
So wait, I said. Was she implying that if night owls could contrive work-arounds to suit their biological inclination to go to bed late, the news probably wouldn’t be as grim?
“Yes,” she replied.
A subsequent study showed that the owl-lark mortality differential dwindled to nil when the authors controlled for lifestyle. Apparently owls are more apt to smoke, and to drink more. So if you’re an owl who’s repelled by Marlboros and Jameson, you’re fine.
Kelly Glazer Baron, the director of the behavioral-sleep-medicine program at the University of Utah, told me that she’d love it if patients stopped agonizing over the length of their individual sleep phases. I didn’t get enough deep sleep, they fret, thrusting their Apple Watch at her. I didn’t get enough REM. And yes, she said, insufficiencies in REM or slow-wave sleep can be a problem, especially if they reflect an underlying health issue. But clinics don’t look solely at sleep architecture when evaluating their patients.
“I often will show them my own data,” Baron said. “It always shows I don’t have that much deep sleep, which I find so weird, because I’m a healthy middle-aged woman.” In 2017, after observing these anxieties for years, Baron coined a term for sleep neuroticism brought about by wearables: orthosomnia.
But most surprising—to me, anyway—was what I heard about insomnia and the black dog. “There are far more studies indicating that insomnia causes depression than depression causes insomnia,” said Wilfred Pigeon, the director of the Sleep & Neurophysiology Research Laboratory at the University of Rochester. Which is not to say, he added, that depression can’t or doesn’t cause insomnia. These forces, in the parlance of health professionals, tend to be “bidirectional.”
But I can’t tell you how vindicating I found the idea that perhaps my own insomnia came first. A couple of years into my struggles with sleeplessness, a brilliant psychopharmacologist told me that my new condition had to be an episode of depression in disguise. And part of me thought, Sure, why not? A soundtrack of melancholy had been playing at a low hum inside my head from the time I was 10.
The thing was: I became outrageously depressed only after my insomnia began. That’s when that low hum started to blare at a higher volume. Until I stopped sleeping, I never suffered from any sadness so crippling that it prevented me from experiencing joy. It never impeded my ability to socialize or travel. It never once made me contemplate antidepressants. And it most certainly never got in the way of my sleeping. The precipitating factor in my own brutal insomnia was, and remains, an infuriating mystery.
Sleep professionals, I have learned, drink a lot of coffee. That was the first thing I noticed when I attended SLEEP 2024, the annual conference of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, in Houston: coffee, oceans of it, spilling from silver urns, especially at the industry trade show. Wandering through it was a dizzying experience, a sprawling testament to the scale and skyscraping profit margins of Big Sleep. More than 150 exhibitors showed up. Sheep swag abounded. Drug reps were everywhere, their aggression tautly disguised behind android smiles, the meds they hawked called the usual names that look like high-value Scrabble words.
I’ve never understood this branding strategy, honestly. If you want your customers to believe they’re falling into a gentle, natural sleep, you should probably think twice before calling your drug Quviviq.
I walked through the cavernous hall in a daze. It was overwhelming, really—the spidery gizmos affixed to armies of mannequins, the Times Square–style digital billboards screaming about the latest in sleep technology.
At some point it occurred to me that the noisy, overbusy, fluorescent quality of this product spectacular reminded me of the last place on Earth a person with a sleep disorder should be: a casino. The room was practically sunless. I saw very few clocks. After I spent an afternoon there, my circadian rhythms were shot to hell.
But the conference itself …! Extraordinary, covering miles of ground. I went to one symposium about “sleep deserts,” another about the genetics of sleep disturbance, and yet another about sleep and menopause. I walked into a colloquy about sleep and screens and had to take a seat on the floor because the room was bursting like a suitcase. Of most interest to me, though, were two panels, which I’ll shortly discuss: one about how to treat patients with anxiety from new-onset insomnia, and one on whether hypnotics are addictive.
My final stop at the trade fair was the alley of beauty products—relevant, I presume, because they address the aesthetic toll of sleep deprivation. Within five minutes, an energetic young salesman made a beeline for me, clearly having noticed that I was a woman of a certain age. He gushed about a $2,500 infrared laser to goose collagen production and a $199 medical-grade peptide serum that ordinarily retails for $1,100. I told him I’d try the serum. “Cheaper than Botox, and it does the same thing,” he said approvingly, applying it to the crow’s-feet around my eyes.
I stared in the mirror. Holy shit. The stuff was amazing.
“I’ll take it,” I told him.
He was delighted. He handed me a box. The serum came in a gold syringe.
“You’re a doctor, right?”
A beat.
“No,” I finally said. “A journalist. Can only a dermatologist—”
He told me it was fine; it’s just that doctors were his main customers. This was the sort of product women like me usually had to get from them. I walked away elated but queasy, feeling like a creep who’d evaded a background check by purchasing a Glock at a gun show.
The first line of treatment for chronic, intractable sleeplessness, per the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I. I’ve tried it, in earnest, at two different points in my life. It generally involves six to eight sessions and includes, at minimum: identifying the patient’s sleep-wake patterns (through charts, diaries, wearables); “stimulus control” (setting consistent bedtimes and wake-up times, resisting the urge to stare at the clock, delinking the bed from anything other than sleep and sex); establishing good sleep habits (the stuff of every listicle); “sleep restriction” (compressing your sleep schedule, then slowly expanding it over time); and “cognitive restructuring,” or changing unhealthy thoughts about sleep.
The cognitive-restructuring component is the most psychologically paradoxical. It means taking every terrifying thing you’ve ever learned about the consequences of sleeplessness and pretending you’ve never heard them.
I pointed this out to Wilfred Pigeon. “For the medically anxious, it’s tough,” he agreed. “We’re trying to tell patients two things at the same time: ‘You really need to get your sleep on track, or you will have a heart attack five years earlier than you otherwise would.’ But also: ‘Stop worrying about your sleep so much, because it’s contributing to your not being able to sleep.’ And they’re both true!”
Okay, I said. But if an insomniac crawls into your clinic after many years of not sleeping (he says people tend to wait about a decade), wouldn’t they immediately see that these two messages live in tension with each other? And dwell only on the heart attack?
“I tell the patient their past insomnia is water under the bridge,” Pigeon said. “We’re trying to erase the added risks that ongoing chronic insomnia will have. Just because a person has smoked for 20 years doesn’t mean they should keep smoking.”
He’s absolutely right. But I’m not entirely convinced that these incentives make the cognitive dissonance of CBT-I go away. When Sara Nowakowski, a CBT-I specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, gave her presentation at SLEEP 2024’s panel on anxiety and new-onset insomnia, she said that many of her patients start reciting the grim data from their Fitbits and talking about dementia.
That’s likely because they’ve read the studies. Rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, that vivid-dream stage when our eyes race beneath our eyelids like mice under a blanket, is essential to emotional regulation and problem-solving. Slow-wave sleep, our deepest sleep, is essential for repairing our cells, shoring up our immune systems, and rinsing toxins from our brains, thanks to a watery complex of micro-canals called the glymphatic system. We repair our muscles when we sleep. We restore our hearts. We consolidate memories and process knowledge, embedding important facts and disposing of trivial ones. We actually learn when we’re asleep.
Many insomniacs know all too well how nonnegotiably vital sleep is, and what the disastrous consequences are if you don’t get it. I think of the daredevil experiment that Nathaniel Kleitman, the father of sleep research, informally conducted as a graduate student in 1922, enlisting five classmates to join him in seeing how long they could stay awake. He lasted the longest—a staggering 115 hours—but at a terrible price, temporarily going mad with exhaustion, arguing on the fifth day with an imaginary foe about the need for organized labor. And I think of Allan Rechtschaffen, another pioneer in the field, who in 1989 had the fiendish idea to place rats on a spinning mechanism that forced them to stay awake if they didn’t want to drown. They eventually dropped dead.
So these are the kinds of facts a person doing CBT-I has to ignore.
Still. Whether a patient’s terrors concern the present or the future, it is the job of any good CBT-I practitioner to help fact-check or right-size them through Socratic questioning. During her panel at SLEEP 2024, Nowakowski gave very relatable examples:
When you’re struggling to fall asleep, what are you most worried will happen?
I’ll lose my job/scream at my kids/detonate my relationship/never be able to sleep again.
And what’s the probability of your not falling asleep?
I don’t sleep most nights.
And the probability of not functioning at work or yelling at the kids if you don’t?
Ninety percent.
She then tells her patients to go read their own sleep diary, which she’s instructed them to keep from the start. The numbers seldom confirm they’re right, because humans are monsters of misprediction. Her job is to get her patients to start decatastrophizing, which includes what she calls the “So what?” method: So what if you have a bad day at work or at home? You’ve had others. Will it be the end of the world? (When my second CBT-I therapist asked me this, I silently thought, Yes, because when I’m dangling at the end of my rope, I just spin more.) CBT-I addresses anxiety about not sleeping, which tends to be the real force that keeps insomnia airborne, regardless of what lofted it. The pre-sleep freaking out, the compulsive clock-watching, the bargaining, the middle-of-the-night doom-prophesizing, the despairing—CBT-I attempts to snip that loop. The patient actively learns new behaviors and attitudes to put an end to their misery.
But the main anchor of CBT-I is sleep-restriction therapy. I tried it back when I was 29, when I dragged my wasted self into a sleep clinic in New York; I’ve tried it once since. I couldn’t stick with it either time.
The concept is simple: You severely limit your time in bed, paring away every fretful, superfluous minute you’d otherwise be awake. If you discover from a week’s worth of sleep-diary entries (or your wearable) that you spend eight hours buried in your duvet but sleep for only five of them, you consolidate those splintered hours into one bloc of five, setting the same wake-up time every day and going to bed a mere five hours before. Once you’ve averaged sleeping those five hours for a few days straight, you reward your body by going to bed 15 minutes earlier. If you achieve success for a few days more, you add another 15 minutes. And then another … until you’re up to whatever the magic number is for you.
No napping. The idea is to build up enough “sleep pressure” to force your body to collapse in surrender.
Sleep restriction can be a wonderful method. But if you have severe insomnia, the idea of reducing your sleep time is petrifying. Technically, I suppose, you’re not really reducing your sleep time; you’re just consolidating it. But practically speaking, you are reducing your sleep, at least in the beginning, because dysregulated sleep isn’t an accordion, obligingly contracting itself into a case. Contracting it takes time, or at least it did for me. The process was murder.
“If you get people to really work their way through it—and sometimes that takes holding people’s hands—it ends up being more effective than a pill,” Ronald Kessler, a renowned psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard, told me when I asked him about CBT-I. The problem is the formidable size of that if. “CBT-I takes a lot more work than taking a pill. So a lot of people drop out.”
They do. One study I perused had an attrition rate of 40 percent.
Twenty-six years ago, I, too, joined the legions of the quitters. In hindsight, my error was my insistence on trying this grueling regimen without a benzodiazepine (Valium, Ativan, Xanax), though my doctor had recommended that I start one. But I was still afraid of drugs in those days, and I was still in denial that I’d become hostage to my own brain’s terrorism. I was sure that I still had the power to negotiate. Competence had until that moment defined my whole life. I persuaded the doctor to let me try without drugs.
As she’d predicted, I failed. The graphs in my sleep diary looked like volatile weeks on the stock exchange.
For the first time ever, I did need an antidepressant. The doctor wrote me a prescription for Paxil and a bottle of Xanax to use until I got up to cruising altitude—all SSRIs take a while to kick in.
I didn’t try sleep restriction again until many years later. Paxil sufficed during that time; it made me almost stupid with drowsiness. I was sleepy at night and vague during the day. I needed Xanax for only a couple of weeks, which was just as well, because I didn’t much care for it. The doctor had prescribed too powerful a dose, though it was the smallest one. I was such a rookie with drugs in those days that it never occurred to me I could just snap the pill in half.
Have I oversimplified the story of my insomnia? Probably. At the top of the SLEEP 2024 panel about anxiety and new-onset insomnia, Leisha Cuddihy, a director at large for the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine, said something that made me wince—namely, that her patients “have a very vivid perception of pre-insomnia sleep being literally perfect: ‘I’ve never had a bad night of sleep before now.’ ”
Okay, guilty as charged. While it’s true that I’d slept brilliantly (and I stand by this, brilliantly) in the 16 years before I first sought help, I was the last kid to fall asleep at slumber parties when I was little. Cuddihy also said that many of her patients declare they’re certain, implacably certain, that they are unfixable. “They feel like something broke,” she said.
Which is what I wrote just a few pages back. Poisoned, broke, same thing.
By the time Cuddihy finished speaking, I had to face an uncomfortable truth: I was a standard-issue sleep-clinic zombie.
But when patients say they feel like something broke inside their head, they aren’t necessarily wrong. An insomniac’s brain does change in neurobiological ways.
“There is something in the neurons that’s changing during sleep in patients with significant sleep disruptions,” said Eric Nofzinger, who, while at the University of Pittsburgh, had one of the world’s largest databases of brain-imaging studies of sleeping human beings. “If you’re laying down a memory, then that circuitry is hardwired for that memory. So one can imagine that if your brain is doing this night after night …”
We know that the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, our body’s first responder to stress, is overactivated in the chronically underslept. If the insomniac suffers from depression, their REM phase tends to be longer and more “dense,” with the limbic system (the amygdala, the hippocampus—where our primal drives are housed) going wild, roaring its terrible roars and gnashing its terrible teeth. (You can imagine how this would also make depressives subconsciously less motivated to sleep—who wants to face their Gorgon dreams?) Insomniacs suffering from anxiety experience this problem too, though to a lesser degree; it’s their deep sleep that’s mainly affected, slimming down and shallowing out.
And in all insomniacs, throughout the night, the arousal centers of the brain keep clattering away, as does the prefrontal cortex (in charge of planning, decision making), whereas in regular sleepers, these buzzing regions go offline. “So when someone with insomnia wakes up the next morning and says, ‘I don’t think I slept at all last night,’ in some respects, that’s true,” Nofzinger told me. “Because the parts of the brain that should have been resting did not.”
And why didn’t they rest? The insomniac can’t say. The insomniac feels at once responsible and helpless when it comes to their misery: I must be to blame. But I can’t be to blame. The feeling that sleeplessness is happening to you, not something you’re doing to yourself, sends you on a quest for nonpsychological explanations: Lots of physiological conditions can cause sleep disturbances, can’t they? Obstructive sleep apnea, for instance, which afflicts nearly 30 million Americans. Many autoimmune diseases, too. At one point, I’ll confess that I started asking the researchers I spoke with whether insomnia itself could be an autoimmune disorder, because that’s what it feels like to me—as if my brain is going after itself with brickbats.
“Narcolepsy appears to be an example of a sleep disorder involving the immune system,” Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders at UCSF, told me.
What? I said. Really?
Really, he replied. “There are few things I know of,” he said, “that are as complicated as the mammalian immune system.”
But insomnia-as-autoimmune-disorder is only a wisp of a theory, a wish of a theory, nothing more. In her memoir, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, the novelist Samantha Harvey casts around for a physiological explanation, too. But after she completes a battery of tests, the results come back normal, pointing to “what I already know,” she writes, “which is that my sleeplessness is psychological. I must carry on being the archaeologist of myself, digging around, seeing if I can excavate the problem and with it the solution—when in truth I am afraid of myself, not of what I might uncover, but of managing to uncover nothing.”
I didn’t tolerate my Paxil brain for long. I weaned myself off, returned to normal for a few months, and assumed that my sleeplessness had been a freak event, like one of those earthquakes in a city that never has them. But then my sleep started to slip away again, and by age 31, I couldn’t recapture it without chemical assistance. Prozac worked for years on its own, but it blew out whatever circuit in my brain generates metaphors. When I turned to the antidepressants that kept the electricity flowing, I needed sleep medication too—proving, to my mind, that melancholy couldn’t have been the mother of my sleep troubles, but the lasting result of them. I’ve used the lowest dose of Klonopin to complement my SSRIs for years. In times of acute stress, I need a gabapentin or a Unisom too.
Unisom is fine. Gabapentin also turns my mind into an empty prairie.
Edibles, which I’ve also tried, turn my brain to porridge the next day. Some evidence suggests that cannabis works as a sleep aid, but more research, evidently, is required. (Sorry.)
Which brings me to the subject of drugs. I come neither to praise nor to bury them. But I do come to reframe the discussion around them, inspired by what a number of researcher-clinicians said about hypnotics and addiction during the SLEEP 2024 panel on the subject. They started with a simple question: How do you define addiction?
It’s true that many of the people who have taken sleep medications for months or years rely on them. Without them, the majority wouldn’t sleep, at least in the beginning, and a good many would experience rebound insomnia if they didn’t wean properly, which can be even worse. One could argue that this dependence is tantamount to addiction.
But: We don’t say people are addicted to their hypertension medication or statins, though we know that in certain instances lifestyle changes could obviate the need for either one. We don’t say people are addicted to their miracle GLP-1 agonists just because they could theoretically diet and exercise to lose weight. We agree that they need them. They’re on Lasix. On Lipitor. On Ozempic. Not addicted to.
Yet we still think of sleep medications as “drugs,” a word that in this case carries a whiff of stigma—partly because mental illness still carries a stigma, but also because sleep medications legitimately do have the potential for recreational use and abuse.
But is that what most people who suffer from sleep troubles are doing? Using their Sonata or Ativan for fun?
“If you see a patient who’s been taking medication for a long time,” Tom Roth, the founder of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Henry Ford Hospital, said during the panel, “you have to think, ‘Are they drug-seeking or therapy-seeking ?’ ” The overwhelming majority, he and other panelists noted, are taking their prescription drugs for relief, not kicks. They may depend on them, but they’re not abusing them—by taking them during the day, say, or for purposes other than sleep.
Still, let’s posit that many long-term users of sleep medication do become dependent. Now let’s consider another phenomenon commonly associated with reliance on sleep meds: You enter Garland and Hendrix territory in a hurry. First you need one pill, then you need two; eventually you need a fistful with a fifth of gin.
Yet a 2024 cohort study, which involved nearly 1 million Danes who used benzodiazepines long-term, found that of those who used them for three years or more—67,398 people, to be exact—only 7 percent exceeded their recommended dose.
Not a trivial number, certainly, if you’re staring across an entire population. But if you’re evaluating the risk of taking a hypnotic as an individual, you’d be correct to assume that your odds of dose escalation are pretty low.
That there’s a difference between abuse and dependence, that dependence doesn’t mean a mad chase for more milligrams, that people depend on drugs for a variety of other naturally reversible conditions and don’t suffer any stigma—these nuances matter.
“Using something where the benefits outweigh the side effects certainly is not addiction,” Winkelman, the Harvard psychiatrist and chair of the panel, told me when we spoke a few months later. “I call that treatment.”
The problem, he told me, is when the benefits stop outweighing the downsides. “Let’s say the medication loses efficacy over time.” Right. That 7 percent. And over-the-counter sleep meds, whose active component is usually diphenhydramine (more commonly known as Benadryl), are potentially even more likely to lose their efficacy—the American Academy of Sleep Medicine advises against them. “And let’s say you did stop your medication,” Winkelman continued. “Your sleep could be worse than it was before you started it,” at least for a while. “People should know about that risk.”
A small but even more hazardous risk: a seizure, for those who abruptly stop taking high doses of benzodiazepines after they’ve been on them for a long period of time. The likelihood is low—the exact percentage is almost impossible to ascertain—but any risk of a seizure is worth knowing about. “And are you comfortable with the idea that the drug could irrevocably be changing your brain?” Winkelman asked. “The brain is a machine, and you’re exposing it to the repetitive stimulus of the drug.” Then again, he pointed out, you know what else is a repetitive stimulus? Insomnia.
“So should these things even be considered a part of an addiction?” he asked. “At what point does a treatment become an addiction? I don’t know.”
Calvinist about sleep meds, blasé about sleep meds—whatever you are, the fact remains: We’re a nation that likes them. According to a 2020 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, 8.4 percent of Americans take sleep medications most nights or every night, and an additional 10 percent take them on some. Part of the reason medication remains so popular is that it’s easy for doctors to prescribe a pill and give a patient immediate relief, which is often what patients are looking for, especially if they’re in extremis or need some assistance through a rough stretch. CBT‑I, as Ronald Kessler noted, takes time to work. Pills don’t.
But another reason, as Suzanne Bertisch pointed out during the addiction-and-insomnia-meds panel, is that “primary-care physicians don’t even know what CBT-I is. This is a failure of our field.”
Even if general practitioners did know about CBT-I, too few therapists are trained in it, and those who are tend to have fully saturated schedules. The military, unsurprisingly, has tried to work around this problem (sleep being crucial to soldiers, sedatives being contraindicated in warfare) with CBT-I via video as well as an online program, both shown to be efficacious. But most of us are not in the Army. And while some hospitals, private companies, and the military have developed apps for CBT-I too, most people don’t know about them.
For years, medication has worked for me. I’ve stopped beating myself up about it. If the only side effect I’m experiencing from taking 0.5 milligrams of Klonopin is being dependent on 0.5 milligrams of Klonopin, is that really such a problem?
There’s been a lot of confusing noise about sleep medication over the years. “Weak science, alarming FDA black-box warnings, and media reporting have fueled an anti-benzodiazepine movement,” says an editorial in the March 2024 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry. “This has created an atmosphere of fear and stigma among patients, many of whom can benefit from such medications.”
A case in point: For a long time, the public believed that benzodiazepines dramatically increased the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, thanks to a 2014 study in the British Medical Journal that got the usual five-alarm-fire treatment by the media. Then, two years later, another study came along, also in the British Medical Journal, saying, Never mind, nothing to see here, folks; there appears to be no causal relationship we can discern.
That study may one day prove problematic, too. But the point is: More work needs to be done.
A different paper, however—again by Daniel Kripke, the fellow who argued that seven hours of sleep a night predicted the best health outcomes—may provide more reason for concern. In a study published in 2012, he looked at more than 10,000 people on a variety of sleep medications and found that they were several times more likely to die within 2.5 years than a matched cohort, even when controlling for a range of culprits: age, sex, alcohol use, smoking status, body-mass index, prior cancer. Those who took as few as 18 pills a year had a 3.6-fold increase. (Those who took more than 132 had a 5.3-fold one.)
John Winkelman doesn’t buy it. “Really,” he told me, “what makes a lot more sense is to ask, ‘Why did people take these medications in the first place?’ ” And for what it’s worth, a 2023 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people on stable, long-term doses of a benzodiazepine who go off their medication have worse mortality rates in the following 12 months than those who stay on it. So maybe you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Still, I take Kripke’s study seriously. Because … well, Christ, I don’t know. Emotional reasons? Because other esteemed thinkers still think there’s something to it?
In my own case, the most compelling reasons to get off medication are the more mundane ones: the scratchy little cognitive impairments it can cause during the day, the risk of falls as you get older. (I should correct myself here: Falling when you’re older has the potential to be not mundane, but very bad.) Medications can also cause problems with memory as one ages, even if they don’t cause Alzheimer’s, and the garden-variety brain termites of middle and old age are bummer enough.
And maybe most generally: Why have a drug in your system if you can learn to live without it?
My suspicion is that most people who rely on sleep drugs would prefer natural sleep.
So yes: I’d love to one day make a third run at CBT-I, with the hope of weaning off my medication, even if it means going through a hell spell of double exhaustion. CBT-I is a skill, something I could hopefully deploy for the rest of my life. Something I can’t accidentally leave on my bedside table.
Some part of me, the one that’s made of pessimism, is convinced that it won’t work no matter how long I stick with it. But Michael Irwin, at UCLA, told me something reassuring: His research suggests that if you have trouble with insomnia or difficulty maintaining your sleep, mindfulness meditation while lying in bed can be just as effective as climbing out of bed, sitting in a chair, and waiting until you’re tired enough to crawl back in—a pillar of CBT‑I, and one that I absolutely despise. I do it sometimes, because I know I should, but it’s lonely and freezing, a form of banishment.
And if CBT-I doesn’t work, Michael Grandner, the director of the sleep-and-health-research program at the University of Arizona, laid out an alternative at SLEEP 2024: acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. The basic idea is exactly what the name suggests. You accept your lot. You change exactly nothing. If you can’t sleep, or you can’t sleep enough, or you can sleep only in a broken line, you say, This is one of those things I can’t control. (One could see how such a mantra might help a person sleep, paradoxically.) You then isolate what matters to you. Being functional the next day? Being a good parent? A good friend? If sleep is the metaphorical wall you keep ramming your head against, “is your problem the wall?” Grandner asked. “Or is your problem that you can’t get beyond the wall, and is there another way?”
Because there often is another way. To be a good friend, to be a good parent, to be who and whatever it is you most value—you can live out a lot of those values without adequate sleep. “When you look at some of these things,” Grandner said, “what you find is that the pain”—of not sleeping—“is actually only a small part of what is getting in the way of your life. It’s really less about the pain itself and more about the suffering around the pain, and that’s what we can fix.”
Even as I type, I’m skeptical of this method too. My insomnia was so extreme at 29, and still can be to this day, that I’m not sure I am tough enough—or can summon enough of my inner Buddha (barely locatable on the best of days)—to transcend its pain, at once towering and a bore. But if ACT doesn’t work, and if CBT-I doesn’t work, and if mindfully meditating and acupuncture and neurofeedback and the zillions of other things I’ve tried in the past don’t work on their own … well … I’ll go back on medication.
Some people will judge me, I’m sure. What can I say? It’s my life, not theirs.
I’ll wrap up by talking about an extraordinary man named Thomas Wehr, once the chief of clinical psychobiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, now 83, still doing research. He was by far the most philosophical expert I spoke with, quick to find (and mull) the underlayer of whatever he was exploring. I really liked what he had to say about sleep.
You’ve probably read the theory somewhere—it’s a media chestnut—that human beings aren’t necessarily meant to sleep in one long stretch but rather in two shorter ones, with a dreamy, middle-of-the-night entr’acte. In a famous 2001 paper, the historian A. Roger Ekirch showed that people in the pre-electrified British Isles used that interregnum to read, chat, poke the fire, pray, have sex. But it was Wehr who, nearly 10 years earlier, found a biological basis for these rhythms of social life, discovering segmented sleep patterns in an experiment that exposed its participants to 14 hours of darkness each night. Their sleep split in two.
Wehr now knows firsthand what it is to sleep a divided sleep. “I think what happens as you get older,” he told me last summer, “is that this natural pattern of human sleep starts intruding back into the world in which it’s not welcome—the world we’ve created with artificial light.”
There’s a melancholy quality to this observation, I know. But also a beauty: Consciously or not, Wehr is reframing old age as a time of reintegration, not disintegration, a time when our natural bias for segmented sleep reasserts itself as our lives are winding down.
His findings should actually be reassuring to everyone. People of all ages pop awake in the middle of the night and have trouble going back to sleep. One associates this phenomenon with anxiety if it happens in younger people, and no doubt that’s frequently the cause. But it also rhymes with what may be a natural pattern. Perhaps we’re meant to wake up. Perhaps broken sleep doesn’t mean our sleep is broken, because another sleep awaits.
And if we think of those middle-of-the-night awakenings as meant to be, Wehr told me, perhaps we should use them differently, as some of our forebears did when they’d wake up in the night bathed in prolactin, a hormone that kept them relaxed and serene. “They were kind of in an altered state, maybe a third state of consciousness you usually don’t experience in modern life, unless you’re a meditator. And they would contemplate their dreams.”
Night awakenings, he went on to explain, tend to happen as we’re exiting a REM cycle, when our dreams are most intense. “We’re not having an experience that a lot of our ancestors had of waking up and maybe processing, or musing, or let’s even say ‘being informed’ by dreams.”
We should reclaim those moments at 3 or 4 a.m., was his view. Why not luxuriate in our dreams? “If you know you’re going to fall back asleep,” he said, “and if you just relax and maybe think about your dreams, that helps a lot.”
This assumes one has pleasant or emotionally neutral dreams, of course. But I take his point. He was possibly explaining, unwittingly, something about his own associative habits of mind—that maybe his daytime thinking is informed by the meandering stories he tells himself while he sleeps.
The problem, unfortunately, is that the world isn’t structured to accommodate a second sleep or a day informed by dreams. We live unnatural, anxious lives. Every morning, we turn on our lights, switch on our computers, grab our phones; the whir begins. For now, this strange way of being is exclusively on us to adapt to. Sleep doesn’t much curve to it, nor it to sleep. For those who struggle each night (or day), praying for what should be their biologically given reprieve from the chaos, the world has proved an even harsher place.
But there are ways to improve it. Through policy, by refraining from judgment—of others, but also of ourselves. Meanwhile, I take comfort in the two hunter-gatherer tribes Wehr told me about, ones he modestly noted did not confirm his hypothesis of biphasic sleep. He couldn’t remember their names, but I later looked them up: the San in Namibia and the Tsimané in Bolivia. They average less than 6.5 hours of sleep a night. And neither has a word for insomnia.
Joselyn Chimbo knows how to read because her grandmother came to the United States, a move that allowed Joselyn access to education, books, and the freedom to learn. Joselyn's grandmother didn't have that freedom, she says, boxed out of literacy because her family couldn't afford to pay for her to access it.
“Literacy was withheld from Indigenous communities like my grandmother’s as a tool of oppression,” Joselyn writes. "Those left illiterate were exploited and experienced a lack of economic and social mobility due to the massive cost of an education.
Because of that history, 17-year-old Joselyn, from New York, is advocating for the right to read so young people like her will continue to have the freedom to read a wide and unlimited array of books, offering them access to information and perspective on the world. Joselyn is the grand prize winner of the New York Public Library's National Teen Art Contest, part of their annual Freedom to Read campaign necessitated by the “alarming rise in book bans and challenges around the country.”
According to PEN America, there were more than 10,000 bans on more than 4,000 books in the 2023-2024 school year. Of these banned or challenged books, most feature LGBTQ characters or characters of color. Since 2021, PEN America has documented more than 16,000 book bans in public schools, which it calls a level of “censorship” not seen since the 1950s, during the McCarthy-era Red Scare.
As a reminder of the importance of the freedom to read, Joselyn's award-winning painting depicts matriarchs and their children — a testament to the women in her family who made sacrifices so she and future generations would have access to education. She also painted a young girl reading “a book that opens to a shadow of orange and red dust representing knowledge,” Joselyn wrote in her artist statement. Together, these women represent “a generational connection and how we should foster and grant the ability to learn and read to all ages.”
“I was interested in creating an art piece specifically on the topic of the freedom to read because it can connect back to the art I usually enjoy making,” Joselyn tells Teen Vogue. “The art I am used to creating is centered around my culture, as well as my identity.”
Joselyn's work will be featured in an upcoming edition of NYPL’s Teen Voices magazine and will be exhibited this summer in the flagship New York Public Library location. Joselyn won the grand prize, and the Library named 17 additional winners, young artists from across the country who submitted work representing what the power of reading means to them. And she'll use the award toward continuing her own education.
“Winning NYPL’s National Teen Art Contest means a lot to me because I’m able to share my work with others, as well as use the award grant to fund my supplies for my freshman year of college,” Joselyn says.
Here, see Joselyn's painting, grand prize winner of the National Teen Art Contest, exclusively premiered in Teen Vogue.
In the last year, Saru Jayaraman has been asked to tip baristas in Berkeley. She’s been asked to tip a florist in New York City. And, at the airport, she’s been asked to tip by a self-serve checkout kiosk manning a concession stand, no human employees in sight.
“Who exactly am I tipping?” she asks.
It’s exhausting, but she sees the upside.
For decades, Jayaraman has advocated for fair wages for restaurant employees. And tipping fatigue is helping to garner a groundswell of support for her cause.
For the last two years, we’ve been talking about tip fatigue. There are reams of data to back up what feels like an onslaught of asks: a Bankrate survey found 2 in 3 Americans feel negatively about tipping. Seven out of 10 Americans think tipping is expected in more places than ever, according to the Pew Research Center. More than half of Americans believe businesses are swapping out employee salaries for tips, passing responsibility for workers’ wages onto the customer.
It’s exactly that problem that Jayaraman is fighting against. In 43 states, there’s an exemption called the subminimum wage that means if your employees make over the federal minimum wage in tips, you can pay them less because the tips will make up the difference.
“It’s a disease that comes from corporate greed,” she says. “These corporations are trying to fool all of us into thinking it’s okay for them not to pay people.”
Wage wars
Jayaraman spent her childhood in India, swathed by the smells of her great-grandfather’s restaurant. When she was a teen, her parents immigrated to the U.S., and she eventually attended Yale Law School.
She’s never worked in a restaurant, but when 73 employees of the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center were killed on September 11, she was asked to help start a relief fund and center for displaced workers and the victims’ families.
Over time, that effort evolved into One Fair Wage, a national organization run by Jayaraman that advocates for the elimination of a subminimum wage.
It started a fight that would come to define her life. “It very much has become my life passion,” she says.
Current tipping culture is offering her an unexpected assist, raising awareness for how opaque tipping can be.
For one, there’s no way to tell if employers are using tips to offset their employees’ wages. And two, there’s no way to tell if the money you’re paying when you hit “20%” on the screen is making its way to employees at all.
And in tandem with post-pandemic economic recovery, and a proliferation of companies trying to get in on the subminimum wage, One Fair Wage is scoring some wins.
They’re on the ballot this year in Massachusetts, Arizona, and Michigan, and Washington D.C. and Chicago last year passed ordinances requiring restaurants to follow the minimum wage regardless of tips on top. (Square reports 60% of restaurants in Chicago are already doing this, despite a five-year phase-in grace period.)
“The Chicago restaurant industry has not tanked,” she says. “Business is booming.”
Why we tip
Tipping began with the best of intentions. Back in the Middle Ages, it was a way for feudal lords in Europe to show their appreciation for their vassals and serfs.
Wealthy American tourists, traveling to Europe on steamer ships, brought it back with them in the 1850s. After slavery was abolished in 1865, employers used tips as a way to justify paying no wages to newly freed slaves who found work as servers, barbers, and porters.
In 1938 when the U.S. set the first nationwide minimum wage, the exemption for tipped workers was codified into law. Employers didn’t have to pay their workers the same as everyone else if they earned tips. There’s still a federal subminimum wage today in 43 states. It’s $2.13 an hour.
Americans have hated tipping for almost as long as they’ve practiced it. In 1899, the New York Times called it the “vilest of imported vices.” William Scott, in The Itching Palm, called it “a moral disease.”
They still do:
35% of Americans think tipping culture is out of control, according to a 2024 Bankrate survey
25% of U.S. customers will actually tip less when presented with suggested tip amounts on a touch screen
Research from Cornell University indicates people tip not from generosity but to avoid feeling guilty or ashamed of contravening a social norm
29% of Americans see tipping as an obligation, according to Pew, rather than a choice (21%)
So why has tipping been so polarizing? In part, because it draws on our basest — and most inhumane — instincts. Some research shows quality of service doesn’t determine a tip — inherent bias does. White servers make more than servers of color and younger servers make more than older ones.
“Living on the largesse of customers also means living on the biases of customers,” Jayaraman says.
Despite all that, research from servers themselves shows that they’ll pick voluntarily tipping every time.
Cortney Norris, an assistant professor of hospitality at Oklahoma State University, says the idea of controlling one’s own destiny every day is a powerful one.
When she interviewed servers for her research, many said they’d forgo even the automatic gratuity on large parties, opting instead to gamble for the possibility of more.
“They feel they have autonomy over their income: I can do a really great job, pull out the charm, and I can make a lot more money than whatever it is they’ll pay me an hour.”
It leaves Norris wondering, what can we implement that’s fair?
“It’s the only industry where the customer supplements employee wages,” she says.
Boiling point
For years, restaurants have experimented with no-tip policies, largely without success. In 2015, Union Square Hospitality Group and Shake Shack owner Danny Meyer announced he’d get rid of tipping at all his restaurants. Losing staff and facing down the aftershocks of the pandemic, he walked those policies back five years later.
Jayaraman argues eliminating tipping at a few restaurants, even influential ones, isn’t enough because it creates an uneven playing field. Her solution to a system that’s been broken for 200 years? Change the law.
Jayaraman’s views are controversial. The National Restaurant Association, the trade organization that lobbies for the $551B restaurant industry, has worked tirelessly to keep the subminimum wage as is.
“We have our work cut out for us,” NRA president Michelle Korsmo told Bloomberg in May. “The important thing for us is to get out early and say that this business model for the restaurants that employ it, it actually allows for them to keep prices on the menus lower and provide a really well-paying job.”
The NRA has 40k+ members from 500k of the ~750k restaurants across the country.
(A New York Times investigation last year found the group, which represents owners and operators, was using unwitting workers’ own money to lobby for keeping their own wages down.)
Each side flings data back and forth. The association argues raising wages will mean raising prices, which will deter restaurant-goers and ultimately lead to fewer tips and lower earnings.
Jayaraman says in California, one of the seven states that pays all workers against the same minimum, that hasn’t happened.
The NRA says since Washington D.C. adopted a higher minimum wage, full-service restaurants have cut 2.8k+ jobs.
For her part, Jayaraman calls the group “the other NRA.”
Will we ever agree? Probably not.
“We’re starting to ask ourselves more questions as consumers about where this is going and why,” Norris says.
“Tipping fatigue is the start of this journey to change.”
But in the meantime… how much do we tip?
Early this week, Diane Gottsman sat at home in San Antonio, Texas, with her poodle Marty and her maltipoo Wilson, watching a technician setting up her new computer.
It took hours to get the machine up and running properly. He struggled with a finicky wifi connection, and kept Marty and Wilson company when someone else dropped by and Gottsman had to answer the door.
When he finished, Gottsman handed him a $20 bill.
“When we do something, it should feel good to us,” she says. “Did I have to give him anything? No. Would I have felt bad if I didn’t? No. It was a form of gratitude.”
Gottsman is a national etiquette expert and the founder of The Protocol School of Texas, and she suffers from tip fatigue just like anyone else. But she has no qualms about hitting “no tip” when the screen spins toward her and the prompts offer their gentle nudge.
Despite the proliferation of asks, Gottsman says, it’s important to remember that tipping is discretionary.
Whether it’s coming from a coffee shop regular or a feudal lord, at its best it’s an opportunity to say thank you for your service.
There is, Gottsman says, another reason behind years of tip fatigue. We’re using more services more often.
“Years ago, we didn’t take our pets to the groomer, we took them outside with the hose,” she says.
When a client asked angrily whether he had to tip each of the four times he frequented his local coffee shop in a day, Gottsman gently suggested he invest in a Keurig.
The philosophy that animates Ira Glass’s This American Life can be summed up by a simple come on: “Let me tell you a story.” News, almost by definition, rarely conforms to what Aristotle deemed the essential element of storytelling: plot. It consists of dispatches from geographically disparate locales and varying worlds (politics, foreign affairs, finance, sports), and it doesn’t adhere to a scenario.
Of late, the proliferation of offerings from online outlets has increased choices while fragmenting audiences, creating an age of hot takes and short attention spans. It’s hard to get consumers of TV and radio news to stay tuned. “Having a plot is a way to make people stick around and provide something that feels satisfying,” Ira Glass noted. “That’s the thing about it that’s helpful. If you have a plot, the story can be mundane. It can be incredibly everyday. But people just want to find out what’s gonna happen, and they’ll hang around.”
Not only this, but plot—or narrative, as its sometimes more grandly called—offers an antidote to the political and cultural polarization changing audience habits. As Glass put it: “The primary problem you have in doing a story about any of the big, emotional issues of our time—was the election stolen, does the vaccine work, what to think of Donald Trump, climate change—is that everybody already knows what they think. If you start any story, everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’ There’s an enormous hurdle to get over to get people to listen past even the first thirty-five seconds. What do you do? By having characters, scenes, and surprising moments and just letting the thing unfold, you can catch people up in the lives of the people you’re documenting. And then they’ll keep listening to hear how things work out.”
The apotheosis of the This American Life approach is its November 15, 2019, episode, “The Out Crowd,” winner of the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for audio journalism. When the staff of TAL began to put together this show, which focuses on how the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy affected asylum seekers trying to cross into the United States, the basic facts of the matter were already familiar. “We knew this had gotten coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and on the networks,” recalled Glass. “It’s out there—if you follow this. But all of the stories felt academic.” The goal was to capture the human dimensions of a policy that had stranded thousands in desolate shelters deemed unsafe by the US State Department.
“The Out Crowd” opens with a fourteen-minute prologue reported from a tent city in Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. In it, Glass introduces listeners to an unlikely protagonist—a nine-year-old Honduran refugee named Darwin who along with his mother is hoping to get to America. “I feel like if you said at the beginning that this was a show about immigration, nobody would listen,” said Glass. “The fact that the first few minutes of the show can just be a portrait of this completely charming kid, everybody’s favorite kid—you wanna hear more. Then you pull the camera back. Then you reveal: OK. Here’s what the show is about today.”
Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire.
The show is about the difficulties facing people like Darwin and his family. Some of these difficulties arose from Trump’s policies. As outlined by the Los Angeles Times reporter Molly O’Toole (TAL partnered with the newspaper on this episode), the United States was not just building a physical wall at its southern border but also a bureaucratic one. “We’ve been asked to do affirmative harm to people,” one asylum officer says in explaining rules that send even qualified migrants back to the dangers they are fleeing.
Meanwhile refugees faced a more imminent peril: as they awaited a resolution to their cases, cartel members bent on kidnapping them for ransom lurked just beyond their camp gates. To illustrate this part of the tale, Glass introduced Emily Green, a reporter for Vice, who’d latched onto some terrifying audiotape—cell phone recordings of negotiations between cartel members and the American sister of a Honduran businessman abducted near his border camp. The hostage was ultimately freed, but the exchanges spoke to why some migrants, among them Darwin’s mother, might choose what to most people would be an unthinkable option: sending her son on alone to the United States.
“She doesn’t want to let him go,” Glass concludes, “but given how things play out, she’s not sure what else to do.”
In the spring of 2020, when the Pulitzer committee presented its award to This American Life, it amounted not just to a recognition of “The Out Crowd” but of Glass’s philosophy. The prize saluted what the Pulitzer committee termed the value of “revelatory, intimate journalism.” As Glass sees it, work like “The Out Crowd,” unlike that of journalists who maintain traditional reportorial distance, does something rare. It encourages audiences to feel.
“A lot of so-called conventional sorts of reporting that aren’t built around narrative can end up treating people in sort of an anthropological way,” he said. “The reporters are just outside anthropologists who are coming in to diagnose questions like, ‘Have people been hurt by the economy?’ Their reporting doesn’t include the possibility of relating to the people. I think the fundamental advantage of narrative is that you can create a context where it’s possible to imagine being someone different from yourself.”
Over the years, This American Life has applied the technique to countless important subjects. In “The Giant Pool of Money,” an episode that aired in 2008, reporter Adam Davidson and producer Alex Blumberg make the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the mortgage bubble comprehensible to just about anyone. In “The Night in Question” in 2015, reporter Dan Ephron and producer Nancy Updike unravel the previously inexplicable motives behind the assassination of Israeli prime minister Itzak Rabin.
The method also works for subjects that on the surface seem less profound. In “129 Cars,” a 2013 episode produced by Glass and Robyn Semien and reported by, among others, Sarah Koenig and Brian Reed (the mind behind S Town), TAL explores the lengths to which the staff of Town and Country Jeep Chrysler Ram in Levittown, New York, goes to hit its monthly sales quotas. (To get psyched, one salesman reads Sun Tzu’s The Art of War at his desk.) In “#1 Party School,” TAL examines the party-till-you puke ethos of students at Pennsylvania State University while annotating the psychological damage they inflict on themselves and the property damage they do to the town of State College.
“There is nothing in the journalism playbook to prevent a determined liar from getting one over now and again. It is partly because seekers of the truth expect the same in others.”
Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China.
Daisey, with the assistance of an interpreter named Cathy who becomes a major character in the story, had recently toured the facility, and he assured Glass of the accuracy of his descriptions of the brutal working environment. After vetting the basic facts about Apple’s production process, TAL aired his allegations.
“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” opens with the arrival of Daisey and Cathy at Foxconn. It’s the kind of simple, arresting scene typical of This American Life:
I get out of the taxi with my translator, and the first thing I see at the gates are the guards. And the guards look pissed. They look really pissed, and they are carrying guns.
More worrying than the guns is what Daisey describes next—the makeup of the labor force:
In my first two hours of my first day at that gate, I met workers who were fourteen years old, thirteen years old, twelve. Do you really think that Apple doesn’t know?
Everywhere Daisey looked, he claimed to have seen evidence of corporate disregard for worker welfare. Some laborers shake from exposure to n-hexane, a toxic chemical used to clean the screens of Apple devices. An elderly ex-worker proffers a hand mangled, Daisey says, during the manufacturing of an iPad case. Because there are few iPads in China, Daisey shows the worker his. The man’s eyes light up. According to Daisey, he told Cathy: “It’s a kind of magic.”
“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” is mesmerizing and flawlessly produced. It became the most-downloaded episode of This American Life. There was only one problem. In almost every salient detail, the story was a fabrication.
Glass might never have learned that he’d been bamboozled had not Rob Schmitz, at the time a reporter for Marketplace in Shanghai, listened to “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” and realized that key parts of it (Chinese private security guards are prohibited by law from carrying firearms) are untrue. At the suggestion of an executive at American Public Media, the then-distributor of both Marketplace and TAL, Schmitz called Glass, and Glass engaged him to investigate the entire broadcast.
Glass starts the March 16, 2012, This American Life, titled “Retraction,” by apologizing for airing “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” The fault, he says, is not so much in Daisey as in himself. He didn’t press the monologist regarding a vital piece of intelligence—contact information for Cathy. “He had a cell phone number for her, but it didn’t work anymore. He said he had no way to reach her. Because other things Mike told us about Apple and Foxconn seemed to check out, we saw no reason to doubt him, and we dropped this. That was a mistake.”
“Times changed, and I became less interested in doing memoir, because memoir is sort of everywhere. Basically, the internet happened.”
Just how big a mistake becomes plain when Glass cues up act one: Rob Schmitz’s probe of Daisey’s story. “I decided to track down his translator,” the Marketplace reporter begins. “I could pretend finding her took amazing detective work. But basically, I just typed ‘Cathy and translator and Shenzhen’ into Google. I called the first number that came up.” Cathy answered. Schmitz met Cathy in Shenzhen, where the bulk of Daisey’s story unraveled. Child laborers? The translator says she and the monologist never saw any. Workers suffering from chemical poisoning? “No. Nobody mentioned n-hexane.” The man with the gnarled hand. “No, this is not true. Very emotional. But not true.”
Schmitz’s deconstruction of Daisey’s piece (he uncovered at least thirteen lies) remains one of the most unsettling segments ever broadcast on This American Life. No sooner did it conclude than Glass introduced an even more harrowing segment—an interview with Mike Daisey, who expresses only one grudging regret: he is sorry he permitted a program dedicated to journalism to air a piece written for the stage.
Everything I have done making this monologue for the theater has been to make people care. I’m not going to say I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater to achieve its dramatic arc, and of that arc and that work, I am very proud, because I think I made you care, Ira, and I think I made you want to delve.
As far as Daisey is concerned, the issue was one of inaccurate labeling. Glass didn’t buy it.
I understand you believe this, but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people go to see a person talk. People take it as literal truth. I thought the story was true.
For all that, the host seems less outraged than hurt.
I have such a weird mix of feelings about this, because I simultaneously feel terrible for you. And also, I feel lied to. And also, I stuck my neck out for you . . . I vouched for you. With our audience, based on your word.
For This American Life, Daisey-gate was a mortifying embarrassment. At first, a majority of critics went easy on the program. Seventeen years into its run, it had built a lot of goodwill. David Carr of the New York Times saw Ira Glass as the victim: “There is nothing in the journalism playbook to prevent a determined liar from getting one over now and again. It is partly because seekers of the truth expect the same in others.” James Fallows of The Atlantic praised Glass’s retraction, terming it “a superb unraveling of Daisey’s inventions” and an “exploration of real journalistic values and the difference between fact and metaphor.” Soon enough, the criticism hardened.
Some felt that the host’s mea culpa was pat. Responding to his comment about having “a weird mix of feelings” concerning Daisey’s deceits, David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun wrote, “Despite all the feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa feelings, feeling bad after the crime isn’t enough. Talking about your feelings and beating up the lying liar the way Glass did without offering specific actions is more performance and self-absorption than it is genuine contrition.”
More substantially, a few attacked the central idea of This American Life—narrative journalism. In an essay for The Baffler, Eugenia Williamson wrote, “Daisey exposed the fact that the aesthetics and conventions of the narrative journey Glass has patented . . . were never designed to accommodate harsh . . . truths . . . Daisey’s lies . . . exposed the limitations of This American Life’s twee, transporting narratives, the show’s habit of massaging painful realities into puddles of personal experience, its preference for pathos over tragedy.”
In the end, This American Life survived Mike Daisey. “Immediately after that we started working with professional fact-checkers,” said Glass. Also, the Daisey scam occurred as TAL was phasing out what had long been a staple—monologues by people like Daisey. In its early years the program had often featured works by the comically arch Sarah Vowell and the adventurous Scott Carrier. Later the lineup regularly included the twistedly fatalistic David Rakoff, the twistedly sweet David Sedaris, and the twistedly awkward Mike Birbiglia.
But by midway into the millennium’s second decade, Glass had decided that the genre was overexposed. “Times changed, and I became less interested in doing memoir, because memoir is sort of everywhere. Basically, the internet happened. People documenting their own lives on social media happened after that. The idea of, ‘Let’s document people’s everyday lives’ became less interesting.”
As for the larger issue of narrative journalism, not only was Glass not deterred by the harsh assessments of “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” but he upped his bet on the form. “When I talk to journalism students they sometimes freak out when I say, ‘You’re gonna do a story with a plot.’ But all a plot means is: This happened. Then this next thing happened. And that caused this next thing to happen. That will be the thing that’s the spine. Then we can digress from there to talk about feelings and make jokes and describe things and have ideas about the world. But the fundamental thing will be: Here’s Point A. Here’s Point B. Here’s Point C. And that’s a powerful force. That’s part of what gives it such satisfaction at the end.”
This is the electronic media movement that Glass started, the one that is attracting not just mainstream journalism outfits like the New York Times and giving birth to podcasting pioneers—among them former TAL producer Alex Blumberg—but inspiring all those young imitators with iPhones and websites who, in the ultimate tribute to Glass, believe they do a better job than he does.
In Gilbert, Arizona, a town known for its safety and affluence, the existence of a teen gang called the Gilbert Goons went largely unnoticed by authorities until a tragic event unfolded. It wasn't until one boy was dead and seven others were charged with murder that the community began to grapple with the reality of youth violence within its borders.
Gilbert, a town with a reputation for being a prime place for early retirement, raising a family, and trick-or-treating, prided itself on its low crime rate. According to FBI statistics, it had one of the lowest crime rates for a town of its size in 2022. The town, with a population larger than Boise or Salt Lake City, maintained its status as a town rather than a city, preserving its image of a close-knit community. However, this image was shattered late last October.
On a Saturday evening, teenagers in Gilbert were looking for a party. Disappointed with one party, a flyer on Snapchat led them to another in Queen Creek, an upscale neighborhood adjacent to Gilbert. The flyer promised a wild "Halloween costume rager," and soon, teenagers started arriving in various vehicles, dressed in costumes ranging from cowgirls and ballerinas to soldiers and mobsters. The party featured alcohol, beer pong, and marijuana.
Among the attendees was Preston Lord, a sophomore known for his school spirit. He and his friends from the basketball team felt out of place at the wild party and mostly stayed in the garage. As the night progressed, tension escalated when a teenager filmed two partygoers arguing, prompting Treston Billey, dressed in a white pin-striped suit, to demand the video be deleted. The atmosphere became charged with anticipation of a fight.
Lord and his friends decided to leave, followed by a group of older boys dressed as gangsters. The confrontation escalated when the older boys taunted the younger group and began a physical assault on Lord, who was eventually knocked to the ground and brutally beaten. Despite attempts by partygoers to revive him, Lord never regained consciousness and died two days later. The coroner ruled his death a homicide.
The incident led to a series of shocking revelations. A video of Lord's body circulated among teenagers, and messages discussing the assault appeared in group chats. The Queen Creek police, handling their first homicide case since the department's formation in 2022, began an investigation.
Gilbert, once a small town with about five thousand inhabitants in 1980, had grown rapidly due to suburban developments, becoming the fastest-growing municipality in the country during the 1990s. Despite its growth, the town maintained an image of safety and affluence. However, this image concealed a darker reality of escalating teen violence and gang activity.
The Arizona Republic reported that Lord's death was not an isolated incident but part of a troubling trend involving the Gilbert Goons, a group of upper-middle-class teenagers responsible for violent attacks in the area. Despite high school students being aware of the Goons, the Gilbert police had no documented incidents associated with the group name. The newspaper detailed numerous violent attacks by the Goons, with many incidents captured on video and shared online.
In January, a mother of three gave a tour of Gilbert, highlighting its rapid development and the proliferation of shopping centers. She and other parents had become deeply concerned about the rising violence, participating in online discussions and community meetings to address the issue. The community's frustration grew as weeks passed without arrests, leading to public calls for justice and accountability.
The Gilbert Goons, a loosely organized group of about two dozen teenagers, mostly white and wealthy, had been involved in numerous assaults. Their actions were often recorded and shared online, contributing to a sense of invincibility. Despite this, police initially treated the beatings as isolated incidents, with little coordination or recognition of the broader pattern of violence.
The death of Preston Lord marked a turning point. Police investigations intensified, and public pressure mounted. The Goons were eventually designated as a criminal street gang, and law enforcement made several arrests. Seven teenagers faced first-degree murder charges, along with additional charges for aggravated robbery and kidnapping. If convicted, they could face life in prison.
The community of Gilbert, once known for its safety and affluence, was forced to confront the reality of youth violence within its borders. The image of a close-knit, safe town was irrevocably altered, revealing underlying issues of parental neglect, rapid development, and a lack of effective law enforcement. As the community grapples with the aftermath of Lord's death, the need for comprehensive solutions to address youth violence and restore a sense of safety remains paramount.
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Keith Gill, widely known as Roaring Kitty, made his first on-camera appearance in over three years in a livestream on Friday. This event led to significant volatility in GameStop’s stock price, which fell over 40% from the morning's peak. The trading was halted eight times within an hour as the stock price fluctuated during Gill's nearly hour-long stream.
Gill, a central figure in the 2021 meme-stock surge, reiterated his confidence in GameStop’s strategy and new CEO, Ryan Cohen, during the livestream. He confirmed that screenshots posted on his Reddit account earlier in the week, showing a brokerage account with over five million GameStop call options, were authentic. "GameStop becomes a bet on the veterans, you know—in particular, of course, [CEO] Ryan Cohen,” Gill stated. “I think we’ve seen enough from him to think he’s got a good head on his shoulders.”
Gill's influence on GameStop began in January 2021 when his Reddit posts and livestreams fueled interest among meme-stock traders, pushing the retailer’s stock price up by over 1,000%. After a three-year hiatus, Gill's return was marked by cryptic posts on Twitter that ignited another rally, doubling GameStop's share price at its peak.
When Gill announced his livestream, GameStop’s share price surged nearly 30%, making him a billionaire on paper based on his call options' value. However, the stock dropped by 25% before the stream and fell another 12% during it, erasing his earlier gains. Gill addressed reports that E*Trade might ban him from the platform, showcasing his continued monitoring of his account.
On May 12, Gill posted a meme on his Twitter account that seemed to signal a call to action. The following day, GameStop’s stock rose by more than 50%, reflecting his considerable influence. Gill, known for leading the meme-stock movement on Reddit, became a key figure for amateur investors. His May 12 tweet, his first in nearly three years, spurred a stream of posts that many interpreted as endorsements of GameStop.
Gill’s holdings, revealed in a June 2 Reddit post, included $115.7 million in GameStop stock and $65.7 million in call options. Despite the stock's volatility, Gill remains significantly invested. His livestream, though bizarre with a fake head bandage and arm sling, confirmed his ongoing commitment to his positions.
While promoting stock is not illegal, Gill’s public disclosure of his holdings invites regulatory scrutiny. "You can’t trade and tweet," warned Lisa Bragança, a former SEC branch chief. In 2021, Gill testified before Congress, denying any intention to manipulate GameStop’s stock for personal gain.
The Massachusetts securities regulator is now investigating Gill's recent conduct. The SEC has not commented on the investigation, but a former chair suggested Gill's actions might not be tolerated. Gill’s livestream included a disclaimer advising viewers not to treat his opinions as investment advice, yet his influence on GameStop’s stock price is evident.
Legal experts note that determining whether Gill violated securities laws depends on his trading history and intentions. His actions, like posting about his positions and influencing stock prices, will be scrutinized. When his call options expire on June 21, Gill faces a decision that could impact his legal standing and financial outcome. Securities law requires advance disclosure of stock sales by individuals in his position.
Gill's case raises questions about the boundaries of market manipulation in the age of social media influencers. The SEC may use this opportunity to set a precedent, aiming to deter similar conduct. Former SEC chair Jay Clayton suggested that the agency seeks to prevent further market volatility caused by influential individuals like Gill.
Gill’s story highlights the evolving challenges regulators face in managing modern market dynamics influenced by social media. The outcome of his case could shape future enforcement and the behavior of market influencers.
Jason DeFord, known to his fans as Jelly Roll, emerged from Antioch, Tennessee, defying the odds stacked against him. A mixtape rapper with a criminal past, Jelly Roll spent years in the southern rap circuit, battling both competitors and addiction. His journey took a transformative turn when he shifted to country music, finding his true voice and openly singing about his pain. At 39, Jelly Roll has become a symbol of redemption and success, inspiring millions, including rock legend Jon Bon Jovi.
The Transition
Jelly Roll's career was at a crossroads when he decided to venture into country music. His rap career had been marked by struggles and personal battles. However, his transition to country allowed him to express his struggles through a different medium, connecting deeply with an audience that related to his raw and honest storytelling.
In a recent conversation with Jon Bon Jovi, Jelly Roll expressed his gratitude and excitement for the newfound clarity in his music. "I feel even better. I’m feeling comfortable in my voice, in the songs I’m writing, and I’ve never been more clear on who I’m singing to," he said. This clarity, he noted, came from realizing his music resonated with hardworking, blue-collar Americans.
Health and Well-being
Jelly Roll has also made significant changes to his lifestyle, prioritizing his health for the first time in his life. He quit drinking as much, improved his diet, and incorporated regular exercise into his routine. These changes have not only improved his physical health but also his mental clarity and singing voice. "I didn’t know you could think this clearly," he laughed, highlighting the positive impact of his healthier habits.
Musical Evolution
Jelly Roll’s music defies traditional genre boundaries. His sound is an amalgam of country, rock, and rap, creating a unique and powerful style. This blend of genres was evident in his recent performance at Stagecoach, where he received rave reviews.
Despite his success in the United States, Jelly Roll has faced challenges in taking his music overseas due to legal issues stemming from his past. He remains hopeful that these hurdles will be overcome soon, allowing him to share his music with a global audience.
Personal Life
Jelly Roll’s journey has been marked by personal milestones, including his recent elopement to Las Vegas, reminiscent of Jon Bon Jovi's own spontaneous wedding decades earlier. This personal connection added depth to their conversation, highlighting the parallels in their lives and careers.
Industry Insights
Jon Bon Jovi offered Jelly Roll valuable advice on maintaining his voice and managing the fast-paced music industry. "Don’t feel bad about asking for help," Bon Jovi advised, sharing insights from his own experiences. He emphasized the importance of seeking support and staying grounded amidst the chaos of a successful music career.
Future Plans
Looking ahead, Jelly Roll is focused on completing his next album, with plans to release it by the end of the year. Despite having released 29 projects throughout his career, he considers this upcoming album his sophomore effort under his current label. His independent spirit remains strong, having retained ownership of his music even as he partners with major labels for distribution and radio promotion.
Jelly Roll’s unique sound and compelling story have positioned him as a rising star in the music industry. His ability to blend different musical styles and his honest, heartfelt lyrics continue to resonate with fans across the country. As he prepares for his first headlining arena tour, Jelly Roll’s journey from the streets of Antioch to the stages of America’s biggest venues serves as a testament to his resilience and talent.
His ongoing conversation with Jon Bon Jovi, a music icon in his own right, underscores the respect and admiration Jelly Roll has earned from his peers. As Bon Jovi aptly put it, "You are Jelly Roll. You have a unique sound, which I think is great because it’s an amalgam of all those things."
Jelly Roll's story is one of transformation, perseverance, and ultimate triumph, inspiring fans and fellow musicians alike. His journey is far from over, and with his upcoming album and tour, Jelly Roll is poised to reach even greater heights.
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The quest for longevity and good health is as old as humanity itself, but in recent years, it has taken on a new intensity. Peter Attia, a prominent figure in the field of longevity, challenges the notion that our bodies and minds must inevitably deteriorate in our final years. In his book "Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity," Attia argues that with the right approach, we can maintain our vitality well into old age.
Attia's philosophy is rooted in the belief that science, technology, and targeted efforts can address the challenges of aging. He emphasizes the importance of proactive measures such as regular exercise, healthy eating, sufficient sleep, and nurturing relationships. According to Attia, these lifestyle choices can significantly impact our health span, the period of our lives when we are healthy and free from debilitating illnesses.
One of Attia's key messages is the need to become "athletes of life" by taking care of our bodies and minds throughout our lives. He suggests specific exercises and activities to maintain muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness, highlighting the importance of staying active as we age.
However, Attia's approach has sparked controversy, with critics questioning the validity of his recommendations. Some argue that his intensive regimens may be excessive and unnecessary, advocating instead for a more balanced and holistic approach to aging. Others caution against the pursuit of longevity at all costs, emphasizing the importance of accepting the natural process of aging.
Despite the debate, Attia's message resonates with many who are seeking ways to improve their health and quality of life as they age. His focus on evidence-informed medicine and practical, actionable advice has attracted a large following, inspiring people to take control of their health and well-being.
As we navigate the complexities of aging, Attia's insights remind us of the importance of living a fulfilling life, regardless of our age. While we may not be able to control the passage of time, we can strive to make the most of each day, ensuring that we live with purpose and vitality for as long as possible.
Victor Lustig, a master con artist from Austria-Hungary, weaved a life of audacious scams throughout Europe and the United States in the early 20th century. Nicknamed "the man who sold the Eiffel Tower twice," Lustig's exploits captured headlines and cemented his place as one of history's most cunning tricksters.
Early Days and Shifting Gears
Born in 1890, Lustig displayed a quick mind from a young age. However, his talents turned towards deception by his teens, leading him to card games and other hustles. After leaving school, he honed his skills, becoming fluent in multiple languages and adept at reading people.
Lustig's initial cons targeted wealthy travelers on Atlantic liners. He'd pose as a businessman or producer, swindling unsuspecting victims out of cash. World War I disrupted these operations, prompting Lustig to seek new opportunities in the United States. By this time, he had earned a reputation amongst law enforcement for his clever scams, including one where he tricked a bank into giving him money for fake bonds.
The Eiffel Tower Scheme
In 1925, Lustig stumbled upon a newspaper article discussing the high maintenance costs of the Eiffel Tower. Seeing an opportunity, he hatched a daring plan. He forged government documents and posed as a high-ranking official tasked with secretly selling the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal.
Lustig invited a group of scrap metal dealers to a posh hotel, convincing them the sale was confidential due to public sentiment. He carefully observed the group, identifying Andre Poisson, a businessman eager for prestige, as his prime target.
Lustig played on Poisson's insecurities, portraying himself as a corrupt official seeking a bribe to finalize the deal. Believing he was securing a lucrative opportunity, Poisson paid a hefty sum to Lustig, who promptly vanished with the money.
Confident that Poisson would be too embarrassed to report the crime, Lustig even attempted the same scam later that year with another group of dealers. However, this time, the authorities were alerted, forcing Lustig to flee back to the U.S.
The "Rumanian Box" Scam
Another of Lustig's infamous cons involved a specially designed mahogany box he called the "money box" or "Rumanian Box." He claimed it could duplicate any currency placed inside, taking just six hours. The box had compartments and levers, creating an illusion of a complex machine.
Lustig would convince his mark to insert a specific bill, then secretly swap it with a genuine one hidden within the box. After a supposed "printing" process, Lustig would accompany the mark to a bank to verify the duplicate. Confident in the device's legitimacy, the mark would then be willing to pay a hefty sum for it. Lustig would often pack the box with additional real bills before disappearing, leaving the victim with a worthless device.
Later Years and Downfall
Lustig's audacity even extended to attempting a con on Al Capone. He approached the notorious gangster with a seemingly risky scheme, requesting a small investment. After a staged failure, Lustig convinced Capone to give him a sum of money to "tide him over," further solidifying his image as a trustworthy associate.
However, Lustig's most elaborate scheme involved a large-scale counterfeiting operation in the 1930s. He partnered with others to create counterfeit bills and distribute them through a network of couriers. The influx of fake money eventually drew the attention of federal agents.
Lustig's downfall came from a disgruntled mistress who tipped off authorities. He was arrested and later escaped prison, only to be recaptured. Lustig was sentenced to Alcatraz Island for counterfeiting and died of pneumonia in 1947.
Victor Lustig's life of crime may be a cautionary tale, but his cunning and elaborate cons continue to fascinate even today.