24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

The right to two days off each week has been around for only a hundred years or so, and a lot of people campaigned tirelessly to establish it. We need it. We earned it. So why are we giving it up so easily?

The Appalachian town of Green Bank, known as the quietest town in America, has banned cell phones and Wi-Fi entirely.

Annie Dillard is: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Because it won’t be long before everyone will be online, with the potential to access all human knowledge, to facilitate cross-disciplinary thinking on a scale we’ve never seen. But along with the potential that comes with this leap for our species, we need to ask some extremely important and urgent questions. How do we ensure that when the rest of

Unplugging for a full day each week is a punk-rock reaction to our always-on, 24/7 world.

loved the way that films are called “movies”: they “move” people, letting us experience things together, reminding us of our common humanity, as we laugh,

Not too long ago, you could smoke in grocery stores and movie theaters, on planes, in hospitals, and even in elementary schools. The fact that smoking was so common made it harder to see how dangerous it was. As physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee documents in his history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, at the time, blaming cancer on

Evolutionarily speaking, the prefrontal cortex is more recent than the amygdala, which is sometimes called the reptilian part of the brain.

In addition to a chief executive officer (CEO), for example, what if corporations appointed a chief ethics officer and a chief empathy officer, who can act as thoughtful, conscious brakes, so that the leadership has the time to consider the impact of developing technologies and their effects on diverse populations, one, five, ten years out. What go