Today, we look at how Olympic athletes are protesting Israeli occupation, consider Americans’ struggle with vacation time, and offer a summer reading list.

Solidarity with Palestine has entered the judo ring at the Tokyo Olympics. So far, two competitors set to face Israeli athlete Tohar Butbul have pulled out of their matches, at least one of them citing Israeli’s occupation of Palestine. 

The withdrawals began last week, when Algerian athlete Fethi Nourine withdrew from the Olympic Games completely ahead of a match with Sudanese athlete Mohamed Abdalrasool. The winner of the match was to go on to face Butbul, allowing Abdalrasool to advance. But on Monday, Abdalrasool didn’t show up. 

Nourine’s reason for dropping out was explicit: “[I] decided to withdraw out of conviction, because this is the very least we can offer the Palestinian cause,” he told ​​Algeria's Echourouk TV, per CNN. “This is my duty,” he continued, to “send a message to the whole world that Israel is an occupation, a lawless country, a country without a flag." 

In response, the International Judo Federation suspended Nourine and his coach, and the Algerian Olympic committee withdrew their accreditations. 

The Guardian reported that the International Judo Federation and Sudanese Olympic officials have yet to announce why Abdalrasool didn’t show. According to the Associated Press, Abdalrasool himself has yet to make a statement. Butbul, however, said his team was told that the Sudanese athlete had a shoulder injury, “a reason that didn’t exactly convince Butbul or the Israeli team,” AP reported.

Pro-Palestine protests aren’t infrequent in the sport of judo. In 2019, Nourine also quit the World Judo Championships ahead of another match with Butbul. During the 2016 Olympics, an Egyptian athlete declined to shake hands with an Israeli athlete after their match. And at the 2004 Olympics, an Iranian world judo champion pulled out of the tournament ahead of his first match, stating, “Although I have trained for months and was in good shape, I refused to fight my Israeli opponent to sympathize with the suffering of the people of Palestine and I do not feel upset at all.”

— Samantha Grasso (@samjgrasso)

🌴 The case for vacation by the numbers

Despite mounting evidence that taking vacations makes people happier, healthier and better at their jobs, many Americans remain chained to their worksites.

The United States is the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that does not require employers to provide workers with annual paid leave — so many employers don’t. Twenty-three percent of Americans have no paid vacation days at all. Even workers who do have paid time off don’t use it. Americans failed to use 768 million days of paid time off in 2018, and over half (55 percent) did not use all of the paid leave to which they were entitled.

But American workers don’t hate fun; they lack power.

In 2018, 61 percent didn’t take vacation for “fear of looking replaceable.” Sixty-two percent of Americans worry that their boss will judge them for requesting time off for mental health care. “Many are afraid they’ll be perceived as a slacker, get passed over for job promotions or that someone might be angling for their job,” writes psychotherapist Bryan E. Robinson.

These are rational fears. Most U.S. companies have “at-will” employment, which means most workers can be fired for almost any reason or no reason at all. As Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. of the Society for Human Resource Management explained in response to a recent query, “Yes, your employer could fire you for using all of your vacation days, … there are no federal or state laws mandating employers even offer paid vacation leave, so company policies and internal practices are the rules of the land."

Even white-collar workers who can theoretically afford a vacation spend too much time at work. A 2015 survey of office workers revealed that 87% put in more than 40 hours of work per week, and nearly a quarter put in more than 50. Workers feel pressure to justify their salaries, demonstrate their commitment to an employer and conform to a company’s culture. Some have come to see overwork as a kind of circular badge of honor: I work all the time because my job is important, and my job is important because I work all the time. A 2018 survey revealed that 56 percent of Americans didn’t take a vacation because they felt their workload was “too heavy.” As New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki wrote in 2014, “Overwork has become a credential of prosperity.” In 2017, two in three Americans (66 percent) reported working while on vacation.

The pandemic actually made overwork worse. In large cities throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East, those who could work from home during the crisis put in nearly one more hour per day on average in 2020, according to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Yet the average American took only 4.5 days of vacation between March and July 2020.

Working longer hours and taking less time off is detrimental to human health and happiness. Americans spend between a quarter and a half of their waking lives at work, which can strain relationships, as well as cause stress and anxiety and make it harder to exercise and eat well, all of which can lead to weight gain and interfere with sleep. A 2015 study found that people who worked more than 55 hours per week were 33% more likely to have a stroke than those with a standard workweek.

To boost health and happiness, a number of countries are considering shortening the workweek. It’s already customary for many Europeans to take July or August off. Imagine what we could do with more time: the loved ones we could see and care for, the places we could visit, the oceans we could swim in, the trails we could hike, the meals we could share around a grill, campfire or kitchen table. American media outlets tend to emphasize the business case for taking time off; it prevents burnout and makes workers more focused and productive, but it’s the human case that matters. We deserve pleasure, leisure, adventure and novelty, not just mere survival. And our most intimate relationships, with ourselves and each other, require time to deepen and grow.

“We all need time off to recharge, but we’re not taking enough of it,” said Ashley Whillans, author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. Whillans achieved this epiphany through painful experience: she started writing her book one solitary Christmas after missing her cousin’s funeral for a work trip. Our lives and time are our own; it’s time to reclaim them.

— Raina Lipsitz (@RainaLips)

📚 Summer reading that transports

Beach reads have a destination. They must be conducive to their atmosphere (hot, breezy, sweaty, smell of salt, sound of waves) and transporting in their own right. They are aspirational, dreaming books, many of them thrillers. You lose yourself in their exquisitely crafted worlds. The beach lowers your resistance further, a ritualized stripping down at the edge of your environment, removed from obligation and work. The moments where we lose (or loosen) the thread of our own lives are great for finding and following new plots. That’s what these novels deliver.

My Cousin Rachel (1952) – Daphne du Maurier

I don’t wish to give away an ounce of the plot which, from its first chilling line, is a marvel of suspense. The story is narrated by a young man living lavishly off his guardians on the Cornish coast, who slowly becomes acquainted (first in letters, later in person) with an enigmatic cousin Rachel. As he draws nearer to Rachel, or she to him, the woman approaches an apotheosis of beauty, brilliance, and indomitable reserve – until our narrator grows suspicious and her carefully crafted image scatters like pearls set loose from their string. Then romance and mystery wrestle for the heart of the reader, with Du Maurier firmly in control.

Out (1997) — Natsuo Kirino

A propulsive crime thriller, and best-seller in Japan, told in close third from the perspective of multiple women who work the night shift at a boxed-lunch factory in the suburbs of Tokyo. The women become co-conspirators after one of them murders her husband and the others agree to dispose of his body. It’s a gruesome book full of dark humor and the horror of misogyny. 

Nova (1968) — Samuel R. Delany

Ostensibly the story of a rag-tag band of space explorers roped into their wealthy captain’s obsessive search for an elusive fuel source known as Illyrion, the novel’s strengths are really character and imagination rather than plot. The main threads of the story follow a talented itinerant musician, a novelist in search of a historical subject out of which to compose his masterpiece, and the aforementioned captain who himself is fueled by vengeance. 

The Exception (2004) — Christian Jungersen

I checked this out from the library a few years ago and it blew me away; I’ve intermittently thought I should buy a copy 'cause it’s one of the few thrillers I wouldn’t mind reading again, even knowing how it turns out. The premise is that a few women who work at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide begin receiving anonymous death threats. They archive and study evil for a living but as the novel progresses it becomes clear that this knowledge can only take them so far. 

Writers & Lovers (2020) — Lily King

Sometimes when you are on the beach, you want to read a book that takes place on Earth and doesn’t try to thrill you with mysteries larger than whether the narrator will manage to sell her novel. This book, Lily King’s fifth, was published last year to major acclaim, you can buy it in most airports, and it lives up to the hype. Its one flaw is an excess of dashing, talented and sometimes one-dimensional male suitors for our enterprising author-narrator, but that might be an asset once you reach critical levels of vitamin D.

— Hannah Gold (@togglecoat)

How a fake farm called Beefy King (and many others) got a PPP loan. [ProPublica]

A CEO cops to driving up tuition prices, is now sad about it. [Wall Street Journal]

Gary Younge on the grim futility of Baltimore’s war on crime. [London Review of Books]

Digital Corbynism, or the invention of a new party politics. [Dissent]

Bobby Shmurda’s celebratory post-prison interview with Desus and Mero. [The Fader]

Watch teens from Seward, Alaska, (pop. 2,773) absolutely lose it as their hometown Olympian Lydia Jacoby takes the gold in the women’s 100-meter breaststroke. [Twitter/NBCOlympics]

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