Extra Credit Assignment

 How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives

It's one of those things that you don't think about, until you do, and you feel stupid for how long it took you to recognize something that was right in front of you this entire time. 

I'm talking about the article "How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives" by Jill Lepore for The New Yorker. This article is about why the week is divided up into 7 parts, the historical and cultural significance. It also discusses how the 7-day week is deeply ingrained various parts of society and we don't even realize it, whether its religion, TV programming and as expected work schedules. I did not know that the 7-day week had tried to be replaced, from the French revolutionaries to the Bolsheviks, but since the 7-day week was and is something, we are all so used to, it has been virtually impossible to challenge it. What I particularly found beautifully haunting in this article was the ending "Elisabeth Achelis died in her sleep on Sunday, February 11, 1973, at the age of ninety-three. This year, the anniversary of Achelis’s death fell on a Thursday, an irregularity that she would have found intolerable."