The Atlantic on the origins of the weekend and of the purely historical reasons we have five-day weeks.

Do we? Only five?

Plus the ways you may and some are changing things:

If it’s man-made, can’t man unmake it? For all the talk of how freeing it’d be to shave a day or two off the five-day workweek, little attention has been paid to where the weekly calendar came from. Understanding the sometimes arbitrary origins of the modern workweek might inform the movement to shorten it.

Where the Five-Day Work Week Came From – Philip Sopher, The Atlantic (21 August 2014)