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Last week’s New Yorker had a cartoon (which I can’t find online) which showed a guy in a nice, swank office and his feet on the desk talking to an associate with the caption “And sometimes I have to settle for no nap at all.” This cracked me up because, well, like President Richard Nixon, I have a penchant for a little mid-afternoon recharging of the batteries. I used to be embarassed about this, but more and more evidence shows just how important sleep is to optimal productivity and cognitive functioning. Ezra summarizes a New York Magazine article on the latest pro-sleep research here, and this really caught my eye:

...in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis...the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable.