This week I finished: Animal Liberation Now!, by Peter Singer: Since I last ate meat in 1990 and any dairy or other animal products about ten years ago (I don't remember when), I can't remember first reading this book, but this new version is well updated. Now I've met Peter, spoken a few times, and read The Life You Can Save. I love how readable his writing is (also his speaking, as I saw him speak at his farewell conference at Princeton last week among other philosophers and they overwhelmingly spoke in academic-ese, which was hard to understand). The reasons not to eat factory farmed meat are more than abundant. I can see people eating meat as hunter-gatherers, but we don't live that way. Unless…

This week I finished: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg: Approaching a quarter-million burpees without missing a day in over a decade, among other habits, I always enjoy reading about habits. This book is engaging. Duhigg tells stories, presents science, and builds engagement over the course of the book well. I still haven't found someone who treats how not to stop habits as well as my technique in starting sidchas in my video in Life Changing Habits. Also, that starting habits that stick is a skill that the more you do the better you get at it. I see changing habits, breaking old ones, and recognizing you don't have to keep at old ones…

This week I finished: Cadillac Desert: The American West And Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner: A powerful book about how Manifest Destiny manifested in the American west. Diverting rivers and depleting aquifers created some of the biggest bureaucracies and, as the book puts it, the biggest socialist projects for people claiming to loathe socialism. From this 2011 review from the Environmental Law Institute: "The year before Reisner’s untimely death at age 51, Cadillac Desert was 61st on a list of the 100 best nonfiction books in English in the 20th century, as compiled by a panel from the Modern Library, a division of Random House. It was a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and inspired an award-winning documentary by the same…

You know several legumes that don't need cooking, like string beans, garden peas, snap peas, peanuts, and snow peas. The bulk section of my coop also sells chickpea flour, which I believe is just ground uncooked chickpeas. At least I've put raw chick peas in a blender and gotten chickpea flour out of it, though not as fine as the store sells, and blending them is loud. I tried blending other beans that way---I think navy beans---and it wrecked my gastrointestinal track for a day or two. I don't recommend trying it. I think some beans uncooked are poisonous. Yet some don't need cooking. I searched "legumes that don't need cooking" and found nothing that shared what legumes don't need cooking. The links I found…

This week I finished: Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl: one of my favorite books since I first read it, probably in the early 2000s. I hadn't read it in maybe ten years, which means since starting working on sustainability leadership. I find it more valuable than ever. It's perfectly relevant to our situation today. The book led me to develop the approach to difficult times: "However difficult my current situation, it's not as bad as Auschwitz and Frankl, in Auschwitz, wrote about bliss and love. He was no more or less human than I am. If he could find bliss and love there, I can find meaning and reward here." While I lose sight of this view at times, for the most part,…