Today, we look at how Texans are battling snow and blackouts, make a big pitch for napping, and talk to an Indigenous activist about what Biden should prioritize.

I live in Texas, where cold weather has pummelled the state for days. Last week, six people died after a 133-vehicle pileup on a stretch of icy highway in the northern part of the state. In the last two days, millions of people have had to confront sporadic or complete blackouts, their homes chilling as temperatures reach the negatives. And statewide, unhoused people are left to seek crowded shelters and warming centers, which are often inaccessible in the ice and snow, or risk sleeping outside. So far, two people have died.

In lieu of adequate structural support, mutual aid groups, churches and other organizations have stepped in to help unhoused people find shelter in hotels and other facilities, and help people without electricity stay warm. The state is asking people with electricity, myself included, to do our part by decreasing the burden on Texas’ failed energy grid. In some areas where the blackouts have hit water treatment plants, local governments are asking people to forgo bathing.

We’re all in this together, we’ve been told, and it gives me hope to see organizers and community members stepping up to help more vulnerable people. But Texans shouldn’t have to be the ones to pay the price for this institutional failure, which stems from the state’s refusal to share the federal government’s power grid, and their deregulated system.  State leaders are slowly starting to take responsibility for what’s happening – Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has gone from alleging that the Texas power grid wasn’t compromised, to declaring reform of the Texas power grid system as an emergency item for the current legislative session. But how many people must suffer, and for how long, before elected officials realize that these extreme weather crises are here to stay, and that it’s their imperative to not just respond to the crisis, but be on the offensive and lead the way through them? Texans deserve better.

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

😴 In defense of laziness

“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway,” wrote Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, in 1883. This delusion, he continued, is “the love of work.” 

Progress, Lafargue claimed, emerged not from relentless labor, but from the sort of creativity that is free to surface when one is allowed to relax. He cites the ancient Greeks as having the correct attitude toward work: contempt. 

Now, new research has proved once again what we all know. Napping is healthy! It is linked to better mental agility and lower inflammation. 

Modern Greeks have, in fact, preserved the nap. (They have this norm in common with many countries who do not share America’s culture of unrelenting work.) Journalist Dan Buettner dubbed the Greek island of Ikaria, “the island where people forget to die.” Their secret? Moderate work, a robust social life, healthy local food, sex and naps. 

Naps work well because there is no relentless drive to work, and, among the self-sufficient islanders, few bosses. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here?” a local physician asked a researcher. “No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.”

A number of recent books contrast the importance of sleep with its low esteem in our culture. The brilliant 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores sleep as the last site of refusal of round-the-clock exploitation, and Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the U.S. Military shows how psychiatry used sleep to manipulate and treat veterans – who then fought back for control over their sacred somnolence. 

At Day's Close: Night in Times Past reveals how sleep used to be different (to the surprise of many reviewers, it turns out some Europeans used to have two sleeps per night). And a brilliant novella by author Karen Russell paints a world in which lethal insomnia has become a horrific plague, and the last healthy people donate sleep to the ailing.

But reclaiming rest is only possible if we reduce the amount of work everyone has to do, and to do that, we have to change the way we value labor. Some thinkers are hard at work putting work in its place. 

Scholar Kathi Weeks argues in The Problem with Work that we should pursue a post-work society where value is placed on care instead of labor. Writer and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe’s new book, Work Won’t Love You Back, criticizes the popular exhortation to “do what you love” as a con that works to capitalists’ benefit.  

Once we see that we are not our work, our imaginations can run wild. The labor movement, with the slogan, "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will" fought bloody battles to get the 40-hour work week. Why not aim next for a 32-hour work week, as some have tried in New Zealand? Or five-hour work days? 

After all, as David Graeber showed in “Bullshit Jobs,” we’re not exactly working long hours doing things that need doing. With fewer hours of work, we could give more hours to care, community, learning, fun and the things that generally make life worth living. And that extends, of course, to naps.

— Sarah Leonard (@sarahrlnrd)

✊ An Indigenous activist’s message for Biden

President Biden has spent his first few weeks in office rolling out new initiatives. But what should he focus on next?

For Allie Young, director of grassroots initiative Protect the Sacred, the answer is clear: helping tribal communities nationwide. Protect the Sacred focuses on preserving Indigenous culture and language, and protecting the elders who hold the ancestral knowledge. Young, who is Diné, meaning “the people” in Navajo, founded the group in March as a social media campaign, as a way to engage Navajo youth to help educate their families about COVID-19 and slow the spread of the virus as it tore through Navajo Nation.

“We should always be prioritized because we are the first peoples of this land,” Young told AJ+. “And when it comes to COVID-19, our elders and our cultures are at risk. And we've done work over the decades to preserve that knowledge, which is knowledge that is essential to the fight against climate change ... we have a lot to offer to this country.”

Senior producer Raji Ramanathan spoke with Young about what Biden could do for Native communities. Here are the main takeaways.

Three demands for the Biden administration

Young said that Protect the Sacred expects Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan to address Indigenous communities.

She said those anticipated plans include:

• Improving the fraught relationship between the federal government and tribal communities – especially after the damage done by the Trump administration

• Refocusing on the social movement for the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which has stalled out in the Senate

• Protecting Mother Earth through climate change initiatives, especially through work with Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM), who Biden has nominated for interior secretary

Getting Native communities their due

“The Trump administration didn't want to include tribal communities in the initial stimulus package. And if it weren't for women like Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, who fought for our inclusion, we wouldn't have gotten the CARES Act funding that has helped us,” Young said. “The pandemic has exposed a lot of broken infrastructures within our communities that should have been dealt with through our relationship with the federal government in our treaties. And so I expect the Biden-Harris administration to turn attention to that.”

Fixing a rocky relationship

Young criticized the lack of Native leadership throughout the existence of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, founded in 1824. This has resulted in a weak relationship between the bureau and the people it ostensibly serves.

She notes that Biden’s inauguration did not include a land acknowledgement, which highlighted a relationship between the federal government and tribal communities fraught with ignorance and misunderstanding.

Prioritizing progress regardless of party

Having a Democrat in the Oval Office doesn’t guarantee that tribal communities will get the attention they need. Obama delayed making a decision on whether to stop the expansion of the pipeline through the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The Army Corps of Engineers delayed construction in December 2016, after months of protests led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Young said Native activists will continue to pressure the federal government, just as they did at Standing Rock, and now during the pandemic.

Young also emphasized that amid the start of a new administration, calls for unity cannot proceed without accountability, including holding responsible the politicians who contributed to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. 

“I want to speak as not only a Native American in this country, but as a person of color. I want this country to unite and I want us to begin the journey towards healing, but we cannot heal unless there's accountability,” Young said. Accountability is an important step toward ending social injustices, “and we can't let folks who are opposed to that win.”

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

Watch Ramanathan’s interview with Young here.

Zooming in on the violence of racial capitalism during the pandemic. [Current Affairs]

The Twitter censorship story you haven’t heard about. [Columbia Journalism Review]

Viral “Karen,” who reported a Black man while he was bird watching in Central Park, gets her charges dropped. [New York Times]

The women of Congress tell their stories from January 6. [The 19th]

Another reason to step away from Amazon’s Ring home security devices. [The Intercept]

Check out Real/Imagined, a new online storytelling series of feminist writing from across the Asian American diaspora. [Asian American Feminist Collective]

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