(Bloomberg) --
“What is a weekend?” the archly oblivious Dowager Countess of Grantham inquired in the first season of the British television show Downton Abbey, set just before the First World War. (RIP the inimitable actor Maggie Smith, who died last month.) As an organizing principle of our lives, the weekend is both socioeconomic — a function of modern capitalism — and personal.
The architect and historian Witold Rybczynski traced the evolution of the modern weekend to England in the latter part of the industrial revolution. Before the 19th century, work and leisure were less compartmentalized. Sunday was the only official weekly holiday, but festivals and fairs often interrupted work, and day laborers had more control over their schedules than factory workers later would. By the 1870s, the English work week had settled into more of a routine, and labor organizers in northern factories had won a half-day holiday on Saturday afternoons, ending a long tradition of hungover Monday absenteeism.
The weekend came later to the US, Rybczinski wrote, but gained momentum faster. A mill in New England implemented a weekend in 1908 to allow Jewish workers to celebrate the Sabbath, and in 1926 Henry Ford closed his company’s factories on Saturdays. (Ford hoped that spare time, along with higher wages, would encourage consumers to spend more, including on new cars.) Spurred on by the Great Depression, the US further enshrined the weekend by defining a 40-hour work week in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.
After that, the weekend globalized along with the economy. China established a two-day weekend in 1995, and in 2013, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the Maldives joined much of the Middle East in switching from a Thursday/Friday to a Friday/Saturday weekend, to overlap with the West. But just as the world was lining up its schedules, the internet, and then the smartphone, arrived to upend our notions of time and space again. The boundaries between work and leisure, so recently negotiated, began to dissolve.
Our weekends may be more porous and stressful now, but there’s still something magical about them — the way the hinge of the week swings open, and time escapes its regular pattern. Between seeing friends and family, catching up on work, and preparing for the week ahead, we may not have much more truly free time than we do during the week. But weekend time is more elastic. No matter how busy we are, we can find more room to think, and to let our thoughts travel.
Bloomberg News is a 24/7 global operation, finely tuned for swiftness and accuracy. Breaking news doesn’t stop when the markets close, and neither do we. But we realized we’ve been missing something. We don’t pause as often as we could to step back and look further in every direction, to try and see the whole picture at once, and to help you do the same.
That’s why I’m so excited to introduce you to Bloomberg’s new Weekend Edition. Every week, we’ll bring you a collection of ideas — essays, reviews, interviews and stories — that explore the fascinating places where finance, life and culture meet, and transport you in surprising and valuable ways.
To help you weave more reading and thinking time into your days, we’ve created a companion playlist for you to listen to while you’re doing other things. Each Saturday morning, we’ll send you an email guide to that week’s stories (sign up here). And in a few weeks we’ll debut a new Sunday newsletter, The Forecast, to prepare you for what might happen in the week ahead and beyond. Our goal is to send you into Monday refreshed, full of new energy and ideas.
Like the weekend itself, our new edition will be a work in progress. We want to hear from you. What do you think? What else would you like to see?
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