Books
The One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka: Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, science, society, and how to live a good life. His thesis is that modern agriculture throws us out of balance with nature and creates more problems than it solves. He begins by describing his methods of "do-nothing" farming: eschewing weeding, plowing, pesticides and many other erstwhile essential activities, but still achieving as high a yield as any modern farm. Then, he expands into a wider commentary about the world. It's radical stuff, but I strongly recommend it if you like to think about how mindfulness applies to culture, society, and the systems we’ve built to prop them up. It was given to me as a counterpoint to Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, but I found that they actually agreed upon a lot, which I’ll be writing more about soon.
TV
Insecure, Season 2: Insecure shares similarities with Girls; it follows a group of young adult millennials around a famous big city and has a soundtrack that makes you think, how have I not heard this song anywhere before? And it’s at least as smart and funny as Girls was without ever being 10% as obnoxious or infuriating. I can’t believe Issa Rae didn’t get nominated for an Emmy. If you haven’t seen it, go watch, laugh, and learn.
Music
Time (Tale of Us Edit), by Hans Zimmer: I played this track on repeat over four straight days, and I can’t remember the last time I did that. Hearing it tucked into Kidnap Kid’s Anjunadeep Edition episode in August made me re-watch Inception at the first opportunity. Still one of my favorite movies, and this gentle house rework of the soundtrack’s big number made me feel like what it was like to see it for the first time.