What if Wikipedia's Random Article function had an infinite visual scroll like TikTok? This site is my go-to when I feel like mindless scrolling without the brain rot or enervation of modern social media. You'll be exposed to, well, everything: animal species, town names, diseases, athletes, works of art, celestial bodies. It's harm reduction at its most mind-expanding.

I love works that dive deep into a topic, because you learn so many incidental things along the way. My first exposure to this idea was Mark Kurlansky's works like Salt and Cod. (Bet you can guess what they were about.) But what if that premise is that the standard narrative of the incremental development human civilization—clans to tribes to cities to nations—is deeply flawed?

The Dawn of Everything covers all sorts of historical threads I never knew existed, from the Native American influence on the Enlightenment to how some civilizations intentionally backtracked from the advanced societal forms we've seen as inevitable. Once you spend 700 pages with scholars tearing apart centuries of received wisdom, it certainly inspires you to think more critically about the connections (or lack thereof) that we take for granted.

The closest I get to farming is a few tomato plants and raspberry bushes in the backyard. But I'm captivated by Offrange, a publication by a company that makes accounting software mostly for agriculture businesses. It's top-quality journalism, with equally beautiful layout. And I learn about all sorts of things I'd never contemplated, such as how animals walking around are good for grassland, or using robot bees for pollination. It's so refreshing to consider the challenges and solutions that, quite literally in many cases, touch grass.