Quartz: It took a century to create the weekend—and only a decade to undo it

We abuse time, make it our enemy. We try to contain and control it, or, at the very least, outrun it. Your new-model, even faster phone; your finger on the “Close” button in the elevator; your same-day delivery. We shave minutes down to nano-seconds, mechanizing and digitizing our hours and days, paring them toward efficiency, that buzzword of corporate America. [...]

The clock became the ubiquitous new boss. Previously, workers tended to complete their work organically, in accordance with natural laws: the sherman’s tasks beholden to the tides; the farmer’s to the seasons. But with industrialization, clocks now determined the task, and the measure of productivity was how much labor could be wrung out of a worker over a period of time. Time had a dollar value, and became a commodity, not to be wasted. “Time is now currency: It is not passed but spent,” wrote historian E. P. Thompson. [...]

Low-paid workers were actually willing to lose out on a much-needed day’s salary in exchange for a day of freedom, so deeply felt was the need for two days’ reprieve. It’s a trade-off most of us make all the time: time versus money. Do I pay the parking ticket or challenge it and lose an afternoon to the process? The financial hit of that lost Monday was real, so when the paid half-Saturday was offered, most workers were glad to accept the compromise. Saint Monday faded from tradition, and the half-Saturday holiday became the standard in Britain in the 1870s. [...]

The weekend skipped across the globe over the next several decades. By 1955 the two-day weekend was standard in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and short Saturdays were common across Europe. By the 1970s, no European country exceeded a 40-hour workweek—many worked less—and all observed the weekend.

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FiveThirtyEight: Macron Won, But The French Polls Were Way Off

Emmanuel Macron’s 32-percentage-point victory in France’s presidential election runoff may end up being touted as a triumph for French pollsters, who consistently gave him a huge advantage. But it shouldn’t be. The polls leading up to the contest between the centrist Macron and his far-right opponent were the least predictive in French history, underestimating Macron’s support, rather than Marine Le Pen’s, to the surprise of some. [...]

The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss. In the eight previous presidential election runoffs, dating back to 1969, the average poll missed the margin between the first- and second-place finishers by only 3.9 points. [...]

All that said, even the biggest polling miss France has ever seen isn’t a totally shocking result. With a limited sample size of previous elections (as is often the case), there’s a decent chance that the true margin of error of the final polling averages will be underestimated (i.e., you underestimate how many results are in the tail ends of the distribution). Before this year, there had been only eight previous French runoff elections with polling during the final two weeks of the campaign. That’s why I noted on Friday that the true margin of error in the French runoff polling was likely somewhere between 10 and 12 percentage points even though there had never been a runoff in which the polling average had missed by that much.2 [...]

Indeed, the French presidential election is the sixth consecutive European election in which the populist right-wing candidate or party underperformed its polling. This includes Le Pen in the first round of France’s presidential election. Of the European elections that have involved a far-right wing candidate or party and have taken place since Trump won the White House in November 2016, the only candidate or party to win when polling projected a loss was left-wing Austrian presidential candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. (Van der Bellen beat the far-right, candidate Norbert Hofer.)

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Politico: French parties’ Macron dilemma: Beat him or join him?

Both the Socialists and the conservative Républicains can’t hide their deep divisions over what to do after their own electoral defeats: Should they join the 39-year-old president-elect — or fight him? [...]

That runs contrary to the official line of the Républicains, who have found a new temporary leader in François Baroin, the mayor of Troyes and briefly an economy minister under Sarkozy. Baroin has been tasked with leading the party’s parliamentary campaign and he is trying to keep it from falling apart. His aim is to secure an absolute majority of seats for the Républicains, force Macron to choose a conservative prime minister — a role Baroin would like for himself — and then try to set their own legislative agenda. [...]

Things aren’t any clearer in the Socialist camp, where the same dilemma is tearing the party apart. Some government members such as junior foreign minister Jean-Marie Le Guen are eager to join Macron — following the example of Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, one of the new president’s early supporters. And former PM Manuel Valls has called for the party to be squarely in the “presidential majority.” [...]

What will make it harder for conservative bigwigs to decide is that Macron isn’t expected to announce his choice for prime minister until Sunday at the earliest — once he takes over as president. Some Républicains want to make sure that Macron is serious about his intention to govern with people of all stripes. They would be reassured by him choosing a PM from the center-right, as Macron himself hails from the Socialist camp.

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CityLab: An Old Segregation Battle Meets the ‘Muslim Ban’

On Monday, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on President Donald Trump’s revised executive order banning the entry of visitors from six Muslim-majority countries, and temporarily suspending refugee admissions. The government’s counsel argued to reinstate the ban, which has been blocked by lower courts, citing a 1970 Supreme Court ruling that essentially condoned Jackson, Mississippi’s refusal to integrate its public swimming pools.

To understand the link between the two cases, let’s step back for a moment into post-Civil Rights Act America, when public pools were arenas for the backlash against integration. In Jackson, instead of integrating its pools, as the law required, the city council decided to close them down entirely. Their argument, that racially diverse pools would jeopardize public safety, was a common stance of municipalities holding on to the last dregs of segregation—and it’s one that endures today. In 1960s Jackson, African American residents sued, and when the lower courts ruled in favor of the city, the matter was taken up by the Supreme Court.  [...]

Today, the Trump administration is asking the court to apply that same standard: judging the travel ban on its face while ignoring the president’s motives for signing it. In International Refugee Assistance Project ("IRAP") v. Trump, civil liberties lawyers representing the plaintiffs have pointed to the president’s explicit call for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and his allies’ statements confirming that goal. In their view, this is clear evidence that the order has been fueled by an animus against Muslims, rather than a benign concern for national security—and that’s why it should be blocked. Lower courts have agreed.

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Jacobin Magazine: Lessons From the French Election

The result is apparent from the numbers: at least 25% abstention and 8.8% blank votes. In total, one-third of the electorate said that they were being forced to take an impossible choice. This was a little less than 1969 (when the total abstentions and blank votes reached 35.6%). This time we can note the particular indication represented by the record level of blank votes, almost doubling the previous highest levels in 1995, 2012, 1969, and 2002. While abstention is both a social phenomenon (the marginalization of popular layers) and an index of political dissatisfaction, the blank vote is a conscious political act, proper to an often educated and politicized population. For some time, the idea that the blank vote should be fully counted as a separate choice has been gaining strength: the 2017 presidential contest incontestably reinforces this demand yet further. [...]

So there is no use in leveling accusations against those who thought they had nothing to choose between globalization and national exclusion. Rather, the blame is to be sought among those who have eroded the sense of conflict that historically separated the Left and the Right, and which revolved around the question of freedom and equality. So long as we prefer competitiveness, flexibility, budget balancing, the state of war, and the state of emergency, we end up feeding the idea that the Left and Right have joined together in accepting the norms of competition and governance. [...]

In getting close to 44% of registered voters’ backing, certainly he is not the numerically weakest in the annals of the presidential contest (see table below). He is well above Georges Pompidou in 1969 or Jacques Chirac in 1995. But he is far from the 60% Chirac got in 2002. Indeed, if we take into account the share of François Fillon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters that transferred to him against Marine Le Pen (around half, in each case) he did not get much beyond the electoral feat he pulled off the first round. He may well, then, be the president with the most fragile basis for the so-called “honeymoon” that used to be promised to the newly elected.

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Quartz: The psychological effects of growing up with an extremely common name

If the purpose of a name is to signify an object, a very common first name seems like a pretty ineffective signifier. When people on the street say my name, I often don’t bother to turn around, knowing that there are probably other Sarah’s in close proximity. And so I think of “Sarah” less as a name that’s specific to me and more as a general descriptor—another word for “woman” or “girl,” or something else that applies both to me and to a lot of other people, too. [...]

“I think in past generations, parents were much more concerned about their kids’ names fitting in. But in the past 20 years, the focus has been 100% on standing out,” Wattenberg says. “Parents are really, really worried about their kids being ordinary.”

Wattenberg attributes the cultural shift to several factors, including the introduction of baby-name statistics and the cable TV explosion, which let people see a wider variety of names. But the most important change was the dawn of the digital era. “Two aspects of the internet had a big impact,” Wattenberg says. “All of us were choosing user names and becoming accustomed to the idea that a name has to be unique to be usable.” Search engines also changed the way we think about names. “It used to be that if there was a Sophie Adamson, there would be 100 other Sophie Adamson’s and she’d never know about them. But now parents type a name into the search engine, see the name is ‘taken,’ and panic.” [...]

And so giving your child a classic, common name can be a way to steer clear of cultural stereotypes and unjust discrimination. Historically, Wattenberg says, research has shown that people find familiar, easy-to-pronounce names to be likable and trustworthy. When you hear from a person with a name like Dave or Jen or Mike, “you’re more likely to answer their email, more likely to swipe right on Tinder,” she says.

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