New York and New Jersey have just passed laws banning children under 14 from tanning in indoor salons. But soon that may seem very timid, indeed. Look for federal agencies and state attorneys general to start going after indoor tanning salons like they once pursued Big Tobacco. If Sun-Haters truly get their way, look for warning signs on beaches, and lawsuits against beach resort owners who don’t provide sufficient warnings. And where will it end? Must there be warnings on private swimming pools? Outdoor patio furniture? The entire system of national parks?

  Will there be lawsuits claiming “secondhand sun”—to which children are unwillingly exposed at school?

  In the shorter term, expect cries for clarity in the definitions and regulations regarding SPF and UPF. At the moment, those SPF numbers on the sunscreen bottles that we take very seriously refer only to the multiple of time it will take to produce a minor sunburn. (If it would normally take you ten minutes to burn, wearing sunscreen with an SPF of 15 will let you take two and a half hours to get it. But you will still get it, if you don’t reslather, and the skin damage will be just the same.)

  The litigation is already starting. In 2006, Californians filed a class action lawsuit against sunscreen-makers, claiming that the protection assurances were substantially overblown. What is “safe and effective” use of protection against a known cancer-causer, anyway?

  The focus on sun danger may coincide with the increasing concern about global warming—which, by the way, some say has exacerbated the skin cancer problem by rethinning the ozone layer. Sadly, in the coming decades, we are likely to get hotter without any corresponding comfort that at least we’re getting tanner.

  Moms in America used to say, “Go get some fresh air.” Now they say, “Don’t forget to put your sunscreen on.” Good Day Sunshine just ain’t what it used to be.

  30-Winkers

  Everyone knows you’re supposed to get eight hours of sleep. Even as the nutrition experts go back and forth on how many carbs we’re supposed to have, and the alcohol experts go back and forth on whether we should drink red wine—the Sleep Experts have been singing the same song for 150 years: People need seven and a half to eight hours of sleep per night.

  Well, we’re failing. The average American now sleeps less than seven hours a night, which is a drop of about 25 percent since the early 1900s. Thanks to twenty-four-hour-a-day electronics, and expectations, we’re awake more than any Americans in recorded history.

  Indeed, the number of people who sleep fewer than six hours per night is rising fast—from 12 percent of American adults in 1998 to 16 percent in 2005. That’s something like 34 million people who are burning the midnight oil. Or midnight laundry machines. Or midnight Internet solitaire. Or just plain tossing and turning.

  Source: National Sleep Foundation, 2005

  It is tempting to think of 30-Winkers as somehow tougher than the rest of us, and some of them definitely cultivate that impression. Margaret Thatcher was said to sleep only five hours a night. Madonna insists she sleeps only four hours a night. Thomas Edison railed against the self-indulgence of sleeping more than five hours a night, and told his staff to do the same. (This is the same staff, though, that said Edison actually slept a lot more than he admitted.) And a good friend of mine in college, money wizard Jim Cramer, never slept more than four hours a night, giving him an edge on some otherwise very competitive folks at Harvard.

  Honestly, though, can you think of any activity besides sleep deprivation that functions both as a form of torture for enemy prisoners and a badge of honor for super-strivers? You’ve envied people who say they hardly sleep. If nothing else, in the race for more of everything, they have attained more time. An extra ninety minutes per day adds up—that’s 10 percent more awake time per day—or an extra 8.2 years for someone who could expect to live to, say, 82. Through less sleep you could have the life experience of someone aged 91. Now that’s tempting.

  But the truth is, most 30-Winkers are neither quite so proud nor so hardy. While some are budding young surgeons, or Wall Street climbers making themselves available all day both in the U.S. and Asia, most people who under-sleep for work are night-shifters or emergency service workers, like paramedics or utility linemen, and they are at high risk of injury, accidents, and health problems without the promise of lucrative earnings.

  And more generally, most people who are up in the middle of the night are up because they can’t sleep, not because they don’t want to. Short sleep is actually statistically correlated with poor health, worry, stress, and low income. Men sleep less than women—although women, especially younger women, are more likely to say they didn’t sleep enough. (Fully 76 percent of women aged 18–34 say they experience daytime sleepiness at least once a week.) In the only big sleep study to include substantial numbers of African-Americans, black men were found to sleep a full hour less than average, and with significantly poorer sleep quality than either black women or whites.

  30-Winkers on the rise will have tragic, if predictable, outcomes. In the 2005 Sleep in America poll, 60 percent of participants said they have driven drowsy in the last year, and 37 percent say they’ve nodded off or fallen asleep behind the wheel. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says drowsy driving is responsible for over 50,000 traffic accidents a year, including over 1,500 fatalities. Famous disasters like the Exxon Valdez grounding and the recent Staten Island Ferry crash were apparently caused by drivers asleep at the wheel.

  Less sleep also means less productivity. Two in 10 American adults say sleepiness caused them to make recent errors at work. Productivity costs have been estimated at $50 billion.

  And bad sleep threatens domestic harmony. Thirty-nine percent of sexually active American adults—including 64 percent of women aged 35–44—say they pass up sex for sleep. One in 4 adults says their spouse’s or partner’s sleep problems keep them awake, too. And what with men awake more than women, one can only expect greater trouble in terms of online porn, online gambling, and general disharmony when the husband wants company and the wife wants rest.

  But perhaps the most surprising implication is the vicious-cycle link between sleeplessness and obesity. Being overweight can cause sleep problems, including clogged airways that constrain breathing. But because a lack of sleep actually triggers the hormones that boost hunger and appetite, sleeping too little can also raise your chances of getting fat. According to the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research at the National Institutes of Health, sleeping just six hours per night raises your risk of developing obesity 23 percent. Sleeping just four hours per night raises it 73 percent.

  Too bad Americans don’t treat their insomnia with a five-mile run. That would seem to solve both problems.

  Some lawmakers are starting to make insomnia their business. New Jersey criminalized “drowsy-driving” in 2003—calling it akin to drunk-driving—although other states have been slow to follow.

  The private sector is leaping on the chance both to help people sleep at night and help them stay awake during the day. The sleeping pill industry is having a field day: The new, nonaddictive Ambien did a record $2 billion worth of business worldwide in 2004, with the number of people aged 20–44 who use sleeping pills doubling between 2000 and 2004. From the stay-awake side, caffeine-packed energy drinks are the fastest-growing sector of the nearly $100 billion domestic beverage industry; between 2005 and 2008, those drinks are expected to bring in more profits than all regular soft drinks and sports drinks combined. And of course, Starbucks, whose house blend has about twice as much caffeine as the leading grocery store brand Folgers, has so deeply permeated American culture that you can barely walk a block without stumbling onto one.

  If you can’t sleep at night or stay up during the day, a company called Metronaps is offering sleep pods in airports, office buildings, and other public spaces. Sure, it’s weird to visit Z-land amid strangers in bright daylight—after all, sleep is supposed to be a very private habit. Well, yes—but lack of sleep is a very public problem.

  And so while it is hard to imagine a public health campaign to Get More Sleep—the late-night jokes would be too easy, the perky spokespeople too hard to find—perhaps it is time for an American Siesta. Sure, it seems to go against Americans’ hardy work ethic, but that ethic was conceived before there was 24/7 e-mail and online shopping. Now, if positioned as a public safety and productivity issue, the case for a midday break could be quite strong. And there have been famous nappers. Winston Churchill worked late into the night but took a serious, pajama-cloaked nap in the afternoon. Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were said to be big fans of the nap. Is America ready to give over “Early to Bed, Early to Rise,” in favor of “If You’re Tired, Just Close Your Eyes”?

  America has a big choice ahead—either enjoy the extra time awake, and figure out new and more productive activities for it; or say we can’t afford not to sleep eight hours, and figure out how to get it. Either way, it’s no small matter. Our health and life could depend on it.

  THE INTERNATIONAL PICTURE

  As tired as Americans may be, the rest of the world is hardly doing any better.

  According to a sleep survey conducted by ACNielsen in 2005, 7 out of the 10 night-owl nations are Asian. Note that America doesn’t even make the top ten.

  Sizable numbers of the populations in Taiwan (69 percent), Korea (68 percent), Hong Kong (66 percent), Japan (60 percent), Singapore (54 percent), Malaysia (54 percent), and Thailand (43 percent) regularly go to sleep after midnight.

  Populations in Portugal (75 percent), Spain (65 percent), and Italy (39 percent) also reported regularly turning in after midnight. All three nations are known to integrate the siesta into their daily routine, perhaps accounting for these late-night hours. Ironically, the siesta culture has become such a challenge to productivity in Spain that, in 2006, the government launched a national campaign requiring all federal employees to take no more than forty-five minutes for lunch.

  In addition to being night owls, Asian nations make up half the early-bird nations as well—those who wake up before 7 am. Again, America is not known for its early birds.

  Majorities of Indonesians (91 percent), Vietnamese (88 percent), Filipinos (69 percent), Indians (64 percent), and Japanese (64 percent) rise before 7:00.

  The other populations rounding out the top ten are Denmark (66 percent), Germany (64 percent), Austria (64 percent), Finland (63 percent), and Norway (62 percent).

  What accounts for all this sleep deprivation? Although people all over the world say “Habit” and “Work Schedule” drive their sleep behavior, one-third of Americans also cited “Family/Children”—compared to just 17 percent of Europeans, and 16 percent of Asians. Over half of Europeans said work was the culprit, while most Asians cited habit.

  When it comes down to total sleep hours, Americans are more and more tired—but they cannot claim to be the most fatigued. That distinction goes to the Japanese—fully 4 out of 10 sleep less than six hours a night. And who gets the most sleep? New Zealanders and Australians, where 28 and 31 percent, respectively, get more than nine hours of sleep a night.

  Southpaws Unbound

  The Rise of Left-Handers in America

  America is moving to the left.

  Left-handed, that is.

  While our right-and-left politics have stayed pretty much frozen, there has been a surge in left-handedness. And unless the gene pool is undergoing a hidden transformation, the likelihood is that this lefty rise is related to the societal changes that are at the core of today’s microtrends.

  Two hundred thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens were creating mankind’s first spears and bone needles, some of them were using their left hands. The fossilized teeth of Neanderthals—complete with marks showing which side of the mouth their owners favored—suggest that a bunch of them were left-handed. And among early cave painters, about 50,000 years ago, nearly 1 in 4 was left-handed—about the same proportion of left-handed painters today.

  But despite the couple hundred thousand years we’ve had to look into it, we haven’t really nailed the causes or effects of handedness.

  Some scientists claim left-handedness is genetic, pointing to evidence that it runs in families. (Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and Prince William are all left-handed, as was the Queen Mother.) Others say left-handedness is caused by trauma and stress in the womb, pointing to the fact that twins—as well as people with high prenatal exposure to sex hormones like testosterone—have higher southpaw rates.

  Then there are conflicting studies on the effects of left-handedness. Some studies say it shortens life; some say it doesn’t. Some studies say left-handedness increases the risk of breast cancer and/or decreases the risk of Alzheimer’s; others say it doesn’t. At least one study has found that left-handed people earn more than righties, especially among college graduates; another study found that lefty and righty earnings are equal.

  Scientists can’t even agree on whether “lateralization of the brain” is uniquely human. The latest findings suggest that chimps favor their right hands, and that there are “minority-sided” fish, who swim the opposite way from the rest of their schools when a predator fish shows up.

  But amid the confusion about the impact of left versus right, there’s one thing that is almost certainly true: The number of left-handed people in the world is on the rise, and it is likely to keep growing. It’s currently estimated at 1 in 10. Look for an increase to possibly twice that rate—and I think it’s because of a new approach to parenting.

  For centuries, left-handedness has been out of favor. Through the Victorian age and the early twentieth century, lefties were almost impossible to find, because suppressing emotion, difference, and individuality was the order of the day. Indeed, in most cultures in the world, the left side of things has generally been associated with evil, sin, and inferiority. Just look at how we talk about it. The English word “sinister” comes from the Latin word for “left.” The French word for “left,” gauche, means “awkward,” even in English. In Chinese, the adjective “left” means “improper,” and in Norwegian, the expression venstrehandsarbeid (left-hand work) means “something that is done in a sloppy or unsatisfactory way.” (The opposite is also true. “Right” means “just” in English. Droit is “law” in French. Recht is “authority” in German and Dutch. Diestro is “skillful” in Spanish.)

  The anti-left bias comes from, or is reflected in, the fact that in the New Testament, the devil sits at God’s left hand, whereas the blessed sit to His right. In Islam, too, left-handedness is a curse—just before the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini “proved” that the Shah was cursed by pointing out that his firstborn son was a lefty.

  And so left-handedness has been routinely discouraged, or even beaten out of people. China and the Netherlands were particularly aggressive in “hand reorientation” until the twentieth century, and until the 1960s in the U.S., elementary school teachers—most famously in Catholic schools—slapped left-handed children for trying to write with their left hands. Ronald Reagan, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig were young lefties said to be forced by teachers to switch for writing.

  But in recent generations, this has all changed. Forcible switching has come to be seen as painful and unnecessary, and now what used to be abhorred in kids is suddenly respected. Just look at the shift in America among people alive today. According to a UCLA study done in 1993, the percentage of Southpaws born in the 1960s was over twice what it was for people aged 60 or above.

  Source: Hugdahl, K., Satz, P., Mitrushina, M., Miller, E. N. (1993) “Left-Handedness and Old Age: Do Left-Handers Die Earlier? ” Neuropsychologia, Vol. 4, pp. 325–33

  This means that the “natural” state of left-handedness is some 16 percent or higher—not 10 percent as is generally thought.

  I think the Southpaw rise represents a shift in how we are raising our children, and how we let their individuality come out to help them reach their true potential. At some point, these days, a parent realizes his or her child is tending left. The parent panics. Will the child be made fun of? Struggle with writing? Be left out? In the past, the parent would have done everything possible to exorcise the tendency. But today? Today, more and more parents shrug their shoulders, saying it’s okay, maybe even something special. Or their attempts to discourage it are milder, and therefore fail. This is not an isolated reaction. It’s part of the larger trend toward celebrating, rather than suppressing, individuality in kids. From giving children extra time to develop into kindergarteners to accommodating their vegetarian appetites, parents today are taking their cues from children, rather than the other way around. It’s even related to the greater freedom young people have today to express their sexual and/or gender identity. Left-handedness is just the tip of the iceberg—in today’s world, parenting is about letting your child develop into his or her own person, not about trying to stamp him or her into a mold of conformity.

  All this is in addition to the fact that we’re likely to see more lefties being born to begin with. Lefties are disproportionately represented among twins—whose numbers grew by more than half between 1980 and 1997. They are also more likely to be born to older Moms—according to one researcher, children born to Moms over 40 are 128 percent more likely to be left-handed than kids born to Moms in their 20s. As everyone knows, Moms over 40 are way up—their childbearing nearly quintupling between 1980 and 2004.

  I suspect the lefty boom will bring a surge in the promotion of sheer creative energy, driven by an idea that is at the heart of this book—that small groups of people, sharing common experiences, can increasingly be drawn together to rally for their interests. Lefties in particular represent innovation and self-expression. Einstein was a lefty. So were Ben Franklin and Isaac Newton.