Black Markets, Christopher Nolan, Summer of Love
Links and recommendations + the best sleep upgrade I've ever had
You can now catch my latest conversation with journalist Meghan Daum and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, Ph.D. on the Open Therapy podcast.
Links for Spotify and Apple Podcast.
My review of “The Odyssey” (2026):
What Christopher Nolan Couldn’t Bring Himself To Do
The Best Sleep Upgrade I’ve Ever Had:
I’ve been using Eight Sleep for more than a year.
As far back as I can remember I’ve had difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. I solved the first issue years ago by placing my phone on the other side of the room and reading a book before bed each night until my eyes get tired. Usually I fall asleep within 15 minutes.
But staying asleep remained an issue—until I bought an Eight Sleep pod in December of 2024. Prior to that, I’d heard a million ads on podcasts etc. and tuned it all out. Huge mistake on my part. Now I’m mad I didn’t get one way sooner. When I used to wake up in the middle of the night, the problem was always temperature. I’d be too warm, or (less frequently) too cold, and struggle to find a comfortable temperature to fall asleep.
The Eight Sleep Pod fixes that. It adjusts the temperature of the bed automatically. It’s incredible. Your core body temperature needs to drop 2 to 3 degrees for deep sleep to happen. The Pod cools or heats each side of the bed on its own, and it adjusts through the night.
The Eight Sleep Pod is the real deal. It personalizes the temperature of my bed in real-time, so I get uninterrupted, high-quality sleep.
The product has gotten better since I first bought it. I recently learned that most Formula 1 drivers now use it. These are professional race car drivers whose careers depend on split-second reactions. When people like that use the same sleeping technology, that tells you something.
Members see up to 34 percent more deep sleep on average. Individual results may vary, but mine have not. I travel a lot for work, and, sleeping in hotels, I find myself thinking “Damn I miss my Eight Sleep.”
Exclusive Offer for My Readers
Use my code ROBHENDERSON at eightsleep.com/robhenderson for up to $350 off the Pod.
Your future well-rested self will thank you.
Links and recommendations:
Psychological Dissociation and Big Five Personality by W. Keith Campbell
The DSA sweet spot: highly educated, downwardly mobile by Nate Silver
Astonishing Change in the Data on Parenthood by Roy Baumeister
Money Talks: The Price of Status by Nick Maggiulli
How to Read the Classics: “Critical Reading” or “Respectful Attention”? by James Hankins
Follow me on Instagram here. The platform is less volatile and more chill than Twitter/X, so I post some spicier excerpts from my readings on my IG stories
You can follow me on TikTok here
Three interesting findings:
1. Just over half of single women believe they and their peers are happier than married women. They’re wrong, at least on average: Married women are more likely to report being “very happy” with their lives than single women, and the same goes for men. (source). You have been carefully conditioned to ask “Does marriage predict happiness or are happy people more likely to get married?” You’ve also been carefully conditioned to never ask “Does money make people happy or are happy people more likely to have higher earnings?”
2. The young people who joined the Summer of Love were not typical of their generation. Most young people in the 1960s did not practice free love, use drugs, or protest the Vietnam War. In a 1967 poll, 63 percent of people in their twenties said couples should wait until marriage to have sex. That was almost the same as the public as a whole. In 1969, 88 percent of people ages twenty-one to twenty-nine said they had never used marijuana. Three-quarters also opposed leaving Vietnam at once, again close to the national average.
Young people were not especially liberal, either. Among those who attended college from 1966 to 1968, 53 percent preferred Richard Nixon or George Wallace in the 1968 election. Among those who attended from 1962 to 1965, the figure was 57 percent, about the same as the final election result. (source). Our collective cultural memory is shaped more by elites than by ordinary people.
3. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. (source). Power laws strike again.
The paperback version of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is now available.
If you have gained any value from this newsletter and want to support my work, please buy a copy today. For yourself. For a friend or a loved one. If you can’t afford it, please support your local library.
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Audible (I narrated the audiobook myself)
When a Dem college grad woman thinks she and her unmarried peers are happier than married women, she might well be correct that SHE herself is less unhappy single than she would be if she was married, since she’d more likely be in an unhappy marriage. Because of her own ingratitude for civilized benefits, and unrealistic demands for equality in a life which is unfair, she’s not the kind of person who is ever “happy”—activist life & condemning others is more important. Life is too serious to be happy.
I’d guess Republican grad women are more often married, & more often more happy. Which increases the anger of the unmarried, less happy Dem women.
Gratitude for the good things one enjoys seems crucially important to happiness. Life, reality, really is unfair. But no system of justice can compensate the ugly folk, the low IQ dumb folk, the sick or disabled folk. Yet such folk are often accepting of their bad luck, and focus on things they can do for themselves, which give them some accomplishment, and often such folk are grateful their own situation is not worse. Like being born outside of America.
Being happy usually allows one to be better at meeting & dealing with other people, which is usually a big part of making more money.