Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation, Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, May 14, 2014

For some, sleep loss is a badge of honor, a sign that they don’t require the eight-hour biological reset that the rest of us softies do. Others feel that keeping up with peers requires sacrifice at the personal level—and at least in the short-term, sleep is an invisible sacrifice.

The problem has accelerated with our hyper-connected lives, but it isn’t new. Purposeful sleep deprivation originates from the lives and adages of some of America’s early business tycoons.

The Secret History Of The Word ‘Cracker’, Gene Demby, NPR, July 1, 2013

It was in the late 1800s when writers from the North started referring to the hayseed faction of Southern homesteaders as crackers. “[Those writers] decided that they were called that because of the cracking of the whip when they drove slaves,” Ste. Claire said. But he said that few crackers would have owned slaves; they were generally too poor. (That of course, doesn’t mean they weren’t participants in the South’s slave economy in other ways.)

Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks. But he wasn’t sure how it happened. (I’m hazarding a guess here, but this would have been during the height of the Great Migration, as millions of black people from the South were moving to the North and West and fleeing Southern racism. They might have carried cracker with them as a shorthand for whites back in the Jim Crow South.)

Sex Work or Human Trafficking? Race and Imperialism in CNN Report From Cambodia, Anne Elizabeth Moore, RH Reality Check, May 13, 2014

Chemaly correctly sets allegations of human trafficking against a backdrop of global capitalism and misogyny. Human trafficking is a gendered and classed notion, certainly—these are stories, especially in Cambodia, about women’s economic opportunity. Yet overlooking that these allegations are also about race allows us to miss how anti-human trafficking initiatives really work under globalization: as acts of cultural imperialism, of which misogyny is only a part (although a large one).

CNN covers up the impact of these human trafficking abolitionists in failing to distinguish between consensual sex work and human trafficking. The lack of distinction is unfortunately common at anti-trafficking NGOs.

Photo credit: Unattributed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.