I read a lot. Here's my best-of list for the past month.
VOTE!
This is not a thing to read, but a thing to do. Get out there next Tuesday (11/6) and vote.
Check your registration, find your polling place, and get voting reminders from vote.org
See what your ballot will look like on voting day and research the candidates and ballot questions at Ballotpedia
Public Health
The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani — This amazing book chronicles the AIDS epidemic as a public health crisis from an insider’s perspective. H/t to Carissa, who recommended the book to me years ago.
Environment & Climate Change
How to Shift Public Attitudes and Win the Global Climate Battle (Yale Environment 360)
Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040 (The New York Times)
Orca 'apocalypse': half of killer whales doomed to die from pollution (The Guardian)
International Turtles, National Laws (Hakai Magazine)
Redrawing the Map: How the World’s Climate Zones Are Shifting (Yale Environment 360)
Urban Planning/Transit/Walking
Art & Debt
“But the Trump era isn’t one of extreme order. Rather, it is hysterically surreal – wildly disorganized and abusively unpredictable, with hirings and firings and public displays of rage and porn stars and, occasionally, the darkest comedy.”
— from Alissa Quart’s essay Hysterical surrealism? A pop culture for our age of economic insecurity (The Guardian)
After you read that, watch Sorry to Bother You and read Dolan Morgan’s Investment Banking in Reverse.
Buddhism
“Sages, too, endure the same mundane circumstances as we—they fall sick, suffer injuries, meet with unwelcome changes—but their wisdom sees past the incidental to the universal, to the certainty of change that is best coped with by equanimity. Wisdom does not alter the world; it lets the sage transcend the world.”
— from Longing for Certainty: Reflections on the Buddhist Life by Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano