What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Lectures#
One a week, and none of them long. Each ends with a single claim put plainly enough to be argued with, and the Nap Lab later that week is where you get to argue with it. Every one comes with a deck.
What is a nap
Sleep is not one thing but a sequence, and a nap is an entry into it — where you stop decides what you get
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Twenty minutes or ninety
Why nap length is not a preference — sleep inertia, and the dead zone between the two lengths that work
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
The coffee nap
Caffeine takes about as long to arrive as a short nap takes to finish, and that coincidence is the whole trick
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Why 2pm
The afternoon dip is not caused by lunch — it is a scheduled trough in the circadian rhythm, and it arrives whether or not you eat
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
How the Industrial Revolution killed the nap
Daytime sleep did not fall out of fashion — it was scheduled out, by clocks, factory discipline and artificial light
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Siesta, 午休, inemuri
Three societies that kept a place for daytime sleep, and the very different things each of them permits
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
The politics of the office nap
Rest at work is distributed the way status is — who can be seen sleeping, and who would lose something by it
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Nap pods and sleep as a product
Rest returns to the workplace as equipment and subscription — what gets solved when a need becomes a purchase, and what gets avoided
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Infants, elders, shift workers
The three groups with the clearest physiological claim to daytime sleep, and how differently each is treated for taking it
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Measuring the nap
Wearables report sleep stages they cannot see — what the devices actually measure, and how far the number on the screen is from it
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Naps and memory
Sleep does not merely rest the brain, it files what happened — and the timing relative to learning is what decides the benefit
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Design an institution that permits napping
The synthesis — everything the course established, turned into a policy that has to survive someone who does not want to adopt it
Week 12 · 24 May 2027