This piece got a reasonable amount of attention around the idea of its title that you don’t need to sleep for eight hours, but I found the far more interesting component of it to be the research into how people used to sleep in the past, and how it’s changed. This was all new to me:

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

(via HN)