Good evening, current affairs listeners. My name is Nathan Robertson. I am the editor of Current Affairs Magazine, and I am here tonight with my co-editor, newsletter editor Nick Slater. Hello, Nick.

Hi-ho. I am here with senior editor Breonna Renix.

Hello, everyone.

And we have a very special guest on the program this evening. Megan Day. She is a staff writer at Jacobin Magazine.

She is also published in New York Times, The Guardian, Vox, Verso, Mother Jones, and many other places. And she is the author of the book, Maximum Sunlight. But we are here to talk to Megan Day tonight about an article she's just written for Jacobin called One Year Off Every Seven Years, which is an article in praise of the sabbatical.

And I just want to read the opening paragraph for our listeners before I ask Megan about the thrust of the article. She starts, Our World is a Marvel. There's a place in the Alhambra called

the Court of the Myrtle's, where at night the

moon reflects off a pond teeming with goldfish and lights up the impossibly ornate fretwork

on the arches above. With knowledge, materials, and time, a person can create their own new

orchid hybrid, never before seen on earth, or fashion a wooden automaton, topped with a hand-carved

figurine that twirls or dances on command.

Most people don't spend very much of their time engaging with the world's wonders.

Instead, most people work, and when they're done working, they attend to unnecessarily arduous life maintenance tasks,

and if they happen to have time left over, they're often too exhausted to do much besides watch

television or sleep. This is a travesty. So, Megan, why are you writing about the wonders of the world?

Yeah, it's a good question. I figure if you open the piece, you're not entirely sure why I'm just

praising our world for being so marvelous. But what I'm actually getting at is the idea that people should

have time to explore this world and that people currently don't have time to do that. Whether it's

in small ways like, you know, learning a craft or as I mentioned in the piece, some other things

you could do with your time like looking into the archives to flesh out your family tree. Or,

of course, there's just the

stuff like spending time with your kids as they're growing up. A lot of people don't have time to

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