Native American Books, Palestinian Music & True Size
#101
Happy Tuesday,
And welcome to the Cultural Reads newsletter with book, music, and movie recommendations from around the world.
In this newsletter: Kenyan Music, Native American Books, Brazilian Photography, Palestinian Music, Thai Movie & Countries True Size.
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🎧 Top 15 Kenyan Musicians
My friend Udulele, an incredible Kenyan artist, helped me put together a Top 15 Best Kenyan Music.
He also just dropped a new song, Wololo, and it’s powerful. Below, he shares the story behind it—a song owned by the people.
📙 Best Native American Books (USA)
In my Best Indigenous Books post, I intentionally left out Native American writers—because their work deserves a spotlight of its own.
Today, that spotlight's here: a carefully curated Top 10 Best Native American Books, created in collaboration with Indigenous Bookshelf.
📷 Sebastião Salgado (Brazil)
I greatly admired Sebastião Salgado—an economist turned world-famous photographer—known for The Salt of the Earth and his reforestation work in Brazil. He passed away on May 23rd, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of art and activism.
I recently visited his Amazonia exhibition in Brussels—not knowing he would pass just a week later. It’s a powerful, immersive experience, accompanied by Jean-Michel Jarre’s Amazonia album, created by the pioneering artist who helped bring the synthesizer into the mainstream. For those interested, here’s the photo book.
🌍 Countries True Size (Global)
Did you know Africa is 14x larger than Greenland, despite looking smaller on most maps? This is due to the Mercator projection, which is great for navigation but distorts country sizes.
Want to see the true size of continents and countries? Check out True Size, an interactive tool for comparing real sizes. Thanks to Recomendo.
🎧 Ahmed Eid (Palestine)
After co-founding the acclaimed German band Bukahara, Palestinian artist Ahmed Eid now goes solo—singing in Arabic and blending soul, folk, and deep groove.
His debut EP Aghani Akhira (Last Songs), shaped by the Arabic rhythms of his childhood and his travels across North Africa and Europe, dives into themes of identity, memory, and liberation.
→ if you like Ahmed’s raspy voice, check out Mohamed Lamouri and Ridan.
🎞️ How To Make a Million Before Grandma Dies (Thailand)
I loved this tearjerker—rated an impressive 8/10 on IMDb—after several Chinese-Dutch friends recommended it, saying they could really relate due to the cultural similarities.
This touching (and often funny) drama follows M, a young man who decides to care for his dying grandmother in hopes of inheriting her house. What begins as a selfish plan slowly turns into something far more meaningful. You can watch it on Netflix.
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Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor is a newsletter by Judson Vereen, an American artist and writer based in São Paulo, Brazil. You may find him reciting his own poetry, long-form travel sketches, personal essays, surrealist prose and series such as 1000 words: Prose to paintings, where he gives interpretive text to works of art. Expect personal, unflinching, revelatory essays that function as works of art themselves.
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