While You Were Sleeping

Every morning you wake up to a world that was built for you overnight. The food on the supermarket shelf. The package on the doorstep. The power still running. The internet still loading. The emergency room that was there at 3 AM.

You didn't see any of it happen. Fifteen million Americans did. They were awake while you slept, running the infrastructure, making the decisions, absorbing the costs that the daylight world never has to pay.

While You Were Sleeping is an investigative journey into the overnight economy - the world that exists in the hours between midnight and dawn. Investigative journalist Blake Mercer spent eleven months conducting forty-six overnight site visits across America, talking to the workers nobody talks to: the slaughterhouse line worker making her twenty-four thousandth cut of the shift at 3 AM; the data centre technician who fixed a routing anomaly that could have disrupted the eastern internet in eleven minutes; the overnight emergency physician making life-and-death decisions at the precise hour when the human brain is scientifically at its worst; the sort worker processing six hundred packages per hour in Memphis so your order arrives by Wednesday.

The overnight economy is not a footnote. It is a civilization running in parallel to yours, at costs - to bodies, to health, to families, to the quality of decisions made in the cognitive nadir of the deep night - that the daylight world has never adequately acknowledged.

This book changes that.