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Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.
It will be an event in which all Americans unite: As people turn back their clocks before bed this evening, or wake up to do it tomorrow morning, they’ll be groaning about it. And with good reason.
“As far as we humans know, we are the only species that chooses to fight against our biological presets, regularly changing our clocks, miserably dragging ourselves into and out of bed at unnatural hours,” writes Rachelle Wilson Tollemar, an Indigenous scholar of environmental humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Indigenous societies follow natural rhythms of light and darkness, heat and cold, activity and rest, she explains. For them, daylight comes and goes daily, in amounts that shift throughout the year – and with it, activities and productivity also change.
Capitalist societies resist nature’s tendencies, seeking to make people, particularly 9-to-5 workers, work the same number of hours each day of the year and shifting the clocks to try to make that more palatable. But even then, Tollemar observes, that change ignores millions of care workers and others whose toil continues regardless of the position of the Sun in the sky or the hands on the clock.
And yet we Americans will again step to the clocks to manually bend time around ourselves.
This week we also liked stories about 25 years of human habitation in the International Space Station, the growing understanding of autism, and people who don’t identify with any gender at all.
One last note: If you find our work valuable, please support us. We’re giving all our donors a free e-book of our recent series looking at bold solutions to the affordable housing crisis.
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