Benjamin Reiss is a professor of English at Emory University. The author of The Showman and the Slave and Theaters of Madness, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

"Humans have slept since the dawn of our species. And yet the way humans sleep across history has changed dramatically, most disastrously in our own modern era. For the last two centuries sleep, the industrialized West has reduced sleep to one narrow definition: hours of unbroken slumber, in a private chamber, alone or with at most one additional partner. And this artificial cultural definition is now spreading around the world. We've gained much from this sleeping revolution--privacy and security and independence--but along the way added a whole new host of problems: the explosion of sleep disorders, sleep anxieties, and life-style diseases connected to exhaustion and sleeplessness; the devastating rise in addiction to both sleeping pills and caffeine; the nightmarish nightly-battles faced by parents enforcing artificial 'bed times' for children. Our modern world may be founded on taming sleep; and yet our collective exhaustion reveals the extraordinary costs we've all paid"--