Most movie marathons fail for the same reason: they are built around one theme and nothing else. You pick five action films, or a decade’s worth of a single director’s work, and by the third film, your attention starts to drift. A better approach treats a marathon like a well-composed playlist, blending genre, country, runtime, and mood so that each film earns its place in the lineup rather than just filling a slot. Traditional movie browsing does not help much here either, since most platforms sort by “trending” or “top rated” instead of how a film will actually feel sitting next to the one before it. Once you start planning with these four variables in mind, choosing what movies to watch stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling like curating your own festival.
Why Movie Marathons Need Strategy
Watching three or four films back-to-back is a bigger commitment than it looks. Streaming data backs this up as over 70% of OTT viewers report binge-watching regularly, and entertainment and movie content now account for roughly 34.57% of all OTT consumption. That is a lot of screen time, and much of it is unplanned. Viewers load up a watch movies queue based on whatever looks good in the moment, then hit a wall of fatigue halfway through.
Fatigue usually comes from sameness, not length. Three thrillers in a row start to feel like variations of the same film, even if the plots are different. Pacing and variety matter just as much as quality. This is where a bit of upfront planning changes the entire experience. Instead of reacting to fatigue, you build in enough contrast to avoid it altogether.
Mix Genre for Better Pacing
Alternating genres is the simplest way to keep a marathon feeling fresh. Drama, comedy, action, and thriller each hit different emotional notes, and switching between them gives your brain a break from processing the same kind of tension or humor for hours.
A few combinations that work well together:
Drama, then comedy: A heavier film followed by something lighter resets the mood before it gets too heavy to enjoy.
Action, then slow-burn thriller: High energy followed by tension keeps engagement up without exhausting the viewer.
Comedy, then international drama: A shift in tone and setting adds variety without jarring the viewer.
The goal isn’t randomness. It’s contrast with a purpose, so each film feels like a deliberate shift rather than a random pick.
Explore Movies from Different Countries
International cinema has moved from niche interest to mainstream demand. Streaming platforms have seen a clear rise in appetite for non-English originals, with titles like Dark and Money Heistpulling in massive global audiences well beyond their home markets. Local-language storytelling is resonating broadly, not just with niche audiences.
Adding a foreign film to your marathon does more than diversify your watchlist. Different countries bring different pacing conventions, visual styles, and narrative structures. A South Korean thriller builds tension differently than a Scandinavian one. A Thai drama lingers on character in ways that many American productions skip past. Mixing in these perspectives keeps your marathon from feeling formulaic, and it’s often the easiest way to watch new movies that wouldn’t otherwise show up in your recommendations.
Consider Runtime in Your Selection
Runtime is the most overlooked variable in marathon planning, and it has an outsized effect on how the whole session feels. Four back-to-back 150-minute epics is a very different commitment than two long films paired with two under 100 minutes.
Think of runtime as an energy budget:
Open with a mid-length film (90–110 minutes) to ease into the marathon.
Save your longest, most demanding film for when attention is highest, usually earlier rather than later.
Close with something shorter and lighter, so the marathon doesn’t end on fatigue.
This kind of pacing keeps retention high through the last film instead of letting momentum collapse in the final stretch.
Match Movies to Your Mood
Genre, country, and runtime all matter, but mood is what ties a marathon together emotionally. Two comedies can have completely different tones: one is broad and silly, the other is dry and melancholic. Matching mood means paying attention to atmosphere, not just category.
Ask yourself what emotional arc you want across the marathon. Do you want to build tension and release it? Stay light throughout? Move from heavy to hopeful? Treating mood as its own selection criteria, alongside genre and runtime, creates a marathon that feels like one connected experience rather than four unrelated screenings.
A Practical Framework for Planning Your Marathon
Here’s a simple way to put all four variables into practice:
Pick your anchor film first. This is the movie you are most excited about; build everything else around it.
Choose a contrasting genre for the next slot. Avoid repeating the same tone twice in a row.
Add one international title. Use it to break up the pacing and bring in a different storytelling style.
Balance your runtimes. Alternate longer and shorter films rather than clustering them together.
Check the mood arc. Make sure the emotional flow across the lineup feels intentional, not random.
Finalize your list and queue it up. Browse and watch movies online on platforms like 9nung, which make it easy to filter by genre, country, and runtime when building out a varied lineup.
A sample lineup might look like: a mid-length comedy to start, a longer international drama as the anchor, a fast-paced action film to re-energize, and a short, mood-matched drama to close things out.
Start Your Next Marathon Smarter
A great movie marathon isn’t about finding four good films. It’s about finding four films that work well together. Mixing genre, country, runtime, and mood turns a random watchlist into a curated experience that holds attention from start to finish. Next time you are planning a marathon, skip the single-genre binge and build something with more range. Head over to 9nung to browse titles across genres and countries, and put this framework to the test on your next watch.
Digital ownership is changing how games fit into everyday life, from the way players collect virtual items to how online communities organize themselves. Decentralized gaming brings blockchain networks, digital wallets and player-run economies into that mix, creating new possibilities along with unfamiliar costs and risks. The technology can sound abstract, but its effects are becoming visible in games people already play.
What makes a game decentralized
A conventional online game runs on systems controlled by its publisher. The company manages accounts, stores player data and decides what happens to every virtual item. If the servers close or the terms change, players usually have little control over the outcome.
Decentralized games move at least some of those functions to a blockchain. A character skin, collectible or parcel of virtual land may exist as a token associated with the player’s digital wallet. Smart contracts, which are programs that run on a blockchain, can process trades or distribute rewards according to published rules.
Decentralization exists on a spectrum. Some projects place assets on a public network while keeping gameplay on private servers. Others give token holders a vote on updates, community funds or marketplace policies. Very few games are entirely independent of a central development team.
The concept has been taking shape for years. Early reporting on blockchain gaming applications discussed developers experimenting with verifiable items and digital economies as far back as 2017. Since then, the focus has widened from collectibles to community governance, portable identities and user-created content.
For players, the practical distinction comes down to control. Check which features actually operate on a blockchain, who can change the rules and what would remain accessible if the developer stopped supporting the game.
Where digital ownership meets real money
A tradable game item can carry financial value outside the game itself. Players might sell a rare cosmetic item through a marketplace, move a supported asset between compatible apps or earn tokens for completing particular activities. This creates a closer connection between entertainment and personal finance than most traditional games offer.
That connection also appears in chance-based platforms that process deposits and withdrawals through digital currencies. Readers researching that specific category can use Webopedia’s crypto gambling hub to compare reviews, welcome offers and explanations of blockchain betting. Such services require the same caution as any activity involving real money, plus extra attention to wallet security, platform rules and local age restrictions.
Price volatility adds another complication across decentralized gaming. An item valued at $50 one week could be worth much less the next, even if nothing inside the game changes. Transaction charges can also turn a small purchase into an expensive one when a network is busy.
Treat any money committed to a game as entertainment spending. Before connecting a wallet, find out whether purchases can be reversed, which fees apply and how withdrawals work. Keep records of transactions and avoid assuming that a scarce digital item will appreciate. Ownership may be recorded on a blockchain, but demand still depends on the game retaining an active audience.
The appeal goes beyond collecting tokens
The strongest decentralized games give people a reason to participate beyond the possibility of earning money. Players stay for expressive design, social interaction and satisfying mechanics. A token may support those experiences, but it can’t replace them.
Portable digital identity is one promising idea. A wallet can act as a sign-in method and hold proof that a player attended an event, finished a challenge or supported a project early. Communities can also use tokens to vote on creative proposals. For example, a group might choose which artist designs a seasonal environment or how a shared fund supports community tournaments.
Low-friction mobile formats have helped introduce blockchain-linked rewards to broader audiences. The popularity of tap-to-earn games shows how a simple repeated action, social sharing and a rewards system can attract large groups quickly. Yet high sign-up numbers don’t always produce a lasting culture. Repetitive play and rewards with limited use may lose their appeal once the initial novelty fades.
Look for evidence of a functioning community before committing significant time. Active discussion boards, regular development updates and clear moderation policies are more meaningful than follower counts alone. A game with modest financial features and an engaged creative audience may have greater staying power than one built around constant token promotion.
AI is becoming part of the system
Artificial intelligence is starting to overlap with decentralized gaming in several practical ways. Developers can use generative systems to produce dialogue variations, adapt non-player character behavior or help creators draft virtual objects. Blockchain records may then identify an asset’s creator, document its ownership history or manage payments when other players use it.
This combination raises difficult questions. If an AI tool creates a costume from a text prompt, the game still needs rules governing training data, commercial rights and revenue sharing. A public ownership record doesn’t settle whether the original material was used with permission.
The current Web3 and AI research points to applications in personalized experiences, autonomous digital agents and content creation. In a future role-playing game, for instance, an AI-controlled character could remember earlier interactions while a blockchain account stores selected achievements. The result could feel more consistent across different sessions or connected virtual spaces.
Players should check what information an AI feature collects before using it. Voice clips, chat logs and behavioral data may reveal more than a wallet address alone. Review privacy settings, limit optional data sharing and use a separate screen name when public activity doesn’t need to connect with your offline identity. Technical novelty shouldn’t obscure ordinary questions about consent and data retention.
The trade-offs players should understand
Decentralized gaming asks players to take on responsibilities that publishers normally handle. Losing access to a wallet can mean losing associated items. Approving a harmful smart contract may allow it to transfer assets without another confirmation. Customer support might have no technical ability to undo the transaction.
Start with a separate wallet containing only the funds or items needed for a specific game. Never share its recovery phrase and verify the official website through the project’s established channels. Before approving a request, read the permissions instead of treating the prompt like a routine login screen.
Environmental impact is another consideration, although blockchain networks vary widely in energy use. Proof-of-stake systems generally require far less computing power than older proof-of-work designs. Players can check which network a game uses and whether the developer publishes specific information about its infrastructure.
A peer-reviewed overview of blockchain-powered gaming also examines barriers such as scalability, security and user experience. These issues shape ordinary play. Slow transaction processing can delay access to an item, while complicated wallet steps can make onboarding frustrating for newcomers.
No technical architecture guarantees a healthy game economy. Developers still need fair rules, reliable moderation and a sustainable source of revenue. Players should be wary when rewards depend heavily on a constant flow of new participants or when the project says little about the entertainment itself.
How to judge a decentralized game
Begin with the game, not its token. Watch unedited gameplay, read independent player discussions and see whether the main activity looks enjoyable without financial rewards. If the experience only makes sense when prices rise, its design may be serving speculation more than play.
Next, identify what you’ll actually own. Some tokens contain the full asset, while others point to files stored elsewhere. If an external server disappears, the blockchain record may remain even though the image or interactive content does not. The project should explain this distinction in plain language.
A useful review also covers the practical details:
Which company or team maintains the game?
Has its smart contract code received an independent security audit?
What transaction, marketplace and withdrawal fees apply?
Can you play without purchasing a token?
What personal data is tied to your public wallet activity?
Give a new platform time before spending heavily. Create an account, test its free features and observe how the team responds when technical problems occur. A functioning withdrawal process and clear support channel tell you more than an ambitious development schedule.
Decentralized gaming will likely settle into daily culture through small, useful features instead of one dramatic shift. A portable collectible, a community vote or a verifiable creator payment may eventually feel as ordinary as cloud saves do now. The games that last will make those systems understandable while giving people a compelling reason to keep playing after the novelty has worn off.
You probably gave away more personal information today than you realise. Maybe you ordered lunch through an app or logged into Instagram while waiting for it to arrive. You may have also replied to a work email or watched a video on YouTube before bed. None of those things feels particularly private because they are simply part of a normal day.
Now imagine someone keeping a record of it all. Where you went or what you bought. Who you spoke to or what you searched for. Which products caught your attention or even the things you almost bought. That thought can feel uncomfortable but most of us rarely think about it until something happens.
It Usually Takes One Small Incident
Consider the familiar experience of searching for something online only to see advertisements for it everywhere. You look up running shoes because you have started thinking about getting back into exercise. Then your social media feed seems to know about your new interest while an email arrives offering a discount on sportswear.
You mention the shoes to a friend over coffee only to wonder whether your phone was listening. It probably wasn’t the microphone spying on your conversation, as the explanation is often much less dramatic. Your online activity can give platforms enough clues to make accurate assumptions about your interests.
And this is where digital privacy becomes less abstract. Privacy isn’t only about protecting yourself from hackers. It is also about having some control over the trail you leave behind while living an ordinary life.
Your Phone Has Become a Diary You Carry Everywhere
Think about what is sitting inside your phone right now. It probably contains everything from photographs you would never post publicly to banking apps and years of emails. Your phone may also know where you have been recently or websites you visit regularly. Losing it can therefore feel very different from losing a wallet.
A wallet might contain your cards while a phone can contain the keys to other parts of your life. This is why using a different password for important accounts matters. If the same password protects your email or social media, one compromised account can create problems.
You don’t need to become a cybersecurity expert to avoid this. A password manager can help store passwords without forcing you to remember dozens of complicated combinations. Even a free password manager can help if it stops you from reusing the same password everywhere.
The Problem With Convenience
The strange thing about digital privacy is that the habits that put it at risk are often the habits that make life easier. You click “Sign in with Google” because creating another account sounds tedious. You accept cookies because you want to read an article. None of these decisions feels significant on its own.
The problem is what happens when you make hundreds of them over several years. Think about all the apps you have installed since you first bought a smartphone. How many do you still use? How many still have access to an account you created years ago? How many have your old email address? Digital clutter can also mean having too many forgotten accounts scattered across the internet.
Privacy Is Also About Your Future Self
Another reason to take this seriously is your future self. The information you share today can outlive the reason you shared it. You might sign up for a website for a discount. You might create an account to download something. You may barely remember doing any of it five years later.
But the internet is good at remembering everything. Digital privacy has become crucial in how we interact with online audiences but this does not mean you need to stop using online services. It just means becoming slightly deliberate about what you share. Ask yourself if an app needs contact access on your phone. Think about whether you would be comfortable seeing it again much later before posting something personal. That last question is surprisingly useful.
The People Around You Matter
Digital privacy is also about respecting the people around you. Consider a situation where you take a photograph at a friend’s birthday. You post it online because everyone looks great but someone in the background may not want their face online. Or perhaps a colleague appears in a photograph taken at work and would rather not have it publicly associated with them.
These situations rarely involve malicious intent but they happen because sharing has become so effortless. The same thing applies to private messages. A screenshot can turn a conversation meant for one person into something hundreds can see. The old distinction between a private moment and a public one has become much harder to maintain.
Privacy Is Becoming an Everyday Habit
The interesting thing about digital privacy is that it has moved far beyond technical experts. You don’t need to work in IT to care. You don’t need to have something to hide. You need to recognise how much of your ordinary life now exists online. Everything from your photographs to work has become part of a digital version of your life.
That version deserves attention too. The goal is not to avoid technology because it is too embedded in modern life to avoid. The goal is to use it with awareness because privacy is not about keeping a secret. Sometimes it is about deciding who gets to know something about you.
Long before Shilajit came in glass jars with lab certificates and fulvic acid percentages, it belonged to the mountains. Chris Simon, founder of One Life Foods, has watched it travel from relative obscurity to one of the strangest success stories in modern wellness.
Picture an older man leaving a village beneath the Pir Panjal early in the morning. There is no production line waiting for him, no extraction facility and certainly no GPS coordinates being passed between procurement departments. He knows the mountains because he has spent a lifetime around them, and he knows where to look because that knowledge has been learned over years rather than downloaded onto a phone. The journey might take hours, and in some regions collectors travel considerably further. The work is seasonal, physical and dependent on knowing the landscape. Raw Shilajit isn’t sitting there conveniently in black puddles waiting to be spooned into jars. What comes away from the rock can contain sediment, grit and debris, and the material carried back from the mountain still has a long way to go before anybody should be putting it into a cup of tea. So imagine the old man returning later with a modest amount of dark, Shilajit-bearing material gathered from the rock. Considering the effort involved, it probably doesn’t look terribly impressive, but the collecting is only the first part. Traditionally, the raw material is mixed with water so that the soluble fraction can be separated from stone, grit and other insoluble matter. It is allowed to settle, filtered, sometimes filtered again and again, and then gradually concentrated until the familiar dark resin remains. The precise process varies considerably between regions and producers, but the principle itself is remarkably simple: collect it, separate it, purify it, concentrate it, and wait. Some of the finished material might remain nearby, and the collector may keep a little for himself. The rest might be sold onwards, passing through several hands before it reaches a processor, an exporter, a brand and eventually a customer thousands of miles away. By the time it gets there, the old man and his mountain have usually disappeared from the story.
I first saw Shilajit in 1994
My own introduction to Shilajit came long before I ever imagined selling it. I was about 16 and, if I remember correctly, we were listening to what was, to us at least, a new phenomenon (the Wu-Tang Clan) when my friend’s grandad appeared, brew in hand, with a small piece of what we mistakenly thought was hash in the other. My friend’s grandad was a Pakistani migrant and he always had plenty of tales to tell. Today’s tale was about this mysterious black gold: a strange, sticky substance that looked nothing like the vitamins or medicines I recognised from my mum’s supplement shelf at home. To him, it was black gold. More memorably, he told us it was the secret to youth. At 16, I wasn’t thinking about analytical chemistry, heavy metals or the quality of human clinical trials. I just remember being fascinated by it. It felt mysterious, although not mysterious in the way products are deliberately made mysterious now, with Himalayan graphics, Sanskrit lettering and slightly breathless stories about ancient warriors. It was mysterious because I’d never seen anyone drop what looked like a piece of tar into a cup of tea and sip it as though it might solve all his problems. Then life moved on, as it tends to. I encountered Shilajit again in 2012 and this time started paying proper attention. By 2018 I’d introduced it to the One Life Foods range, but hardly anybody cared. That probably sounds strange today, when Shilajit can appear in your social feed several times before breakfast, but selling it back then usually involved explaining what the word meant before you could even begin explaining why somebody might want it. I nearly stopped selling it. Then, somewhere around 2020, something changed. People started arriving already knowing the name. Instead of asking, “What’s that black stuff?”, they were coming to us specifically looking for Shilajit. Over the following few years, the product I’d once struggled to explain became part of the global wellness conversation. Today you can buy Shilajit as resin, capsules, powders, gummies, drops and blended drinks. It gets discussed alongside creatine, testosterone support, adaptogens, nootropics and longevity supplements, while social media has supplied it with an entirely new mythology of its own. The substance hadn’t suddenly appeared, we had.
Long before the wellness industry
As we explain in our guide to Shilajit, its traditional history is considerably older than its current popularity. Scientific literature describes it as a naturally occurring brown to blackish-brown material associated with mountain rock, particularly across the Altai mountains, Himalayas and Hindu Kush, and it has a longstanding place within Ayurvedic and Siddha traditions. Historical texts place it within the broad concept of rasayana, traditionally associated with rejuvenation and maintaining vitality. I think that history matters. If people have used something for generations, it’s worth paying attention to, and Shilajit clearly had a place in these traditions long before the wellness industry got hold of it. But age alone shouldn’t be used as proof that every claim made for it is true. For that, I’d rather look at what has actually been studied in people and what the evidence can reasonably support. It may be less romantic, but I’d rather know what it can actually do than what somebody says it has done for centuries.
We do now have genuine human research on Shilajit. At One Life Foods, we recently went through the published human research we could locate and found 16 oral human studies in which the effects of Shilajit could be interpreted reasonably directly, alongside other research involving formulations, topical preparations and older studies that were considerably more difficult to interpret. There are randomised controlled trials among them, which is encouraging. There are also small studies, uncontrolled studies and trials using particular standardised preparations that shouldn’t automatically be treated as evidence for every black resin with the word Shilajit printed on the label. So, as is often the case, the interesting position sits somewhere between dismissal and evangelism. There is science, and some of it deserves to be taken seriously. There is also an awful lot the science hasn’t settled yet.
Then the world discovered it
There is something slightly absurd about the journey Shilajit has made. A substance associated with remote mountain communities and old systems of medicine now has to survive the logic of the modern internet, which means it needs a headline, a percentage, and a benefit people can instantly understand. Even better if the percentage is larger than the one claimed on another brands website. And so a remarkably complicated natural material becomes compressed into a handful of phrases: 80% fulvic acid. 85+ minerals. Lab tested. Testosterone boosting. Ancient superfood. The details are considerably harder to fit on the front of a label, and suddenly the mountain itself isn’t quite enough.
Once something becomes globally desirable, its supply chain changes too. What may once have been a relatively small local trade can develop into networks of collectors, middlemen, processors, exporters, laboratories, wholesalers and brands. That isn’t automatically a bad thing. Commercial demand can provide income to remote communities, whether that’s in the Himalayas, Hindu Kush or Altai. The wider Himalayan trade in medicinal and natural materials has long been economically important to rural households, and research from Nepal has documented substantial increases in both the volume and value of commercially traded medicinal products over time.
Scale can improve things as well. Processing can become more controlled, traceability can improve, finished products can be screened for contaminants, and laboratories can tell us things that the person collecting material on a mountain could never reasonably be expected to know. Romanticism is all well and good until somebody asks how much lead is in the black gold. Modern analytical chemistry certainly has its uses.
What does Shilajit look like at scale?
The image most people have of Shilajit is probably one collector and one mountain. Once you start producing it in any real volume, things can look very different.
Raw material may be brought together from multiple collectors and different sites before larger processors extract, filter and concentrate substantial batches. From there, it can pass through several more hands before eventually being packed under the name of a brand that may never have met the people who collected it, or even visited the region it came from. That doesn’t automatically make the finished product worse. A small supply chain can be badly run just as easily as a large one can be well run. What matters is whether you can still work out where the material came from and what happened to it along the way. Where exactly was it collected? Who collected it? Was material from different locations mixed together? How was it purified? Was too much heat used? Was anything added? Who tested it, what did they actually test for, and was the lab sample supplied by the manufacturer or taken independently from stock that genuinely reached the brand? Those are the questions I’d be asking.
And then come the fakes
A product like Shilajit almost invites imitation. It’s dark, it’s sticky, its natural consistency varies and most customers have never seen the raw material in their lives. Even people who have taken Shilajit for years can’t look at a spoonful of black resin and possibly determine its chemical composition.
The famous home authenticity tests don’t solve much either. Something dissolving in warm water doesn’t prove it’s genuine Shilajit, and neither does stretching it, freezing it or holding a flame against it. Lots of dark substances can be persuaded to behave fairly convincingly in a kitchen.
This isn’t merely hypothetical. In 2026, the official food-control laboratory CVUA Stuttgart reported results from 12 Shilajit products it had analysed. In three of them, investigators said there was reasonable suspicion that Shilajit was absent or present only in traces. Several showed signs of strong heating, four had elevated mineral-oil saturated hydrocarbons relative to orientation values used for other foods, and one sample was judged unsafe because of its mineral-oil aromatic hydrocarbon content. Perhaps the most revealing part wasn’t even the chemistry. Nine of the products were marketed as “lab tested”, yet CVUA Stuttgart considered eight of those claims misleading after looking at what had actually been tested and what the products contained. That’s worth remembering because “lab tested” isn’t a result. It’s the beginning of a question.
The percentage problem
Fulvic acid has become one of Shilajit’s great marketing battlegrounds. One jar says 40%, another says 60%, and somebody else appears with 80%. The natural reaction is obvious: eighty must be better than sixty. Except analytical chemistry has an irritating habit of ruining simple comparisons. Different analytical methods can define, separate and quantify fulvic fractions differently, and results may also be expressed on different reporting bases. Unless you know how a figure was produced, two impressive-looking percentages aren’t necessarily measuring precisely the same thing in precisely the same way.
We’ve spent rather too much time looking into this at One Life Foods. Possibly enough that “Shilajit geeks” is now a more honest description than “Shilajit experts”. Our own testing uses an IHSS-aligned approach implemented under ISO 19822:2018, and we’ve published the analytical methods alongside the results. That isn’t because we believe one lab number proves a product is premium. It’s because a percentage without the method behind it can tell consumers much less than they are encouraged to think.
Shilajit is also not simply fulvic acid with good branding. Its composition varies according to its source, local geology, processing and purification. And recent research comparing samples from different geographical origins has found substantial variation in their elemental profiles. (PubMed) Nature, inconveniently, doesn’t manufacture to a marketing specification.
What happens when demand reaches the mountain?
This is the part of the Shilajit boom I find most interesting, and probably the part the industry knows least about. What happens at the other end of the supply chain when millions more people suddenly want something that comes from remote mountain environments? There is an obvious temptation to tell a very simple story: Western consumers discover ancient substance, demand explodes, mountains are stripped bare. It makes for a good headline, but I’m not convinced we know enough to say that.
There isn’t good published evidence, at least that I’ve been able to find, quantifying global Shilajit reserves or showing exactly what current harvesting is doing to those reserves across the different regions where it occurs. There are places where collectors can’t simply go wherever they like; protected areas, permits and local restrictions can limit where material is collected, and the rules vary considerably from one region to another. But that still doesn’t tell us whether deposits are becoming harder to find, how quickly they replenish, or what increasing demand is doing to the resource itself. We just don’t have particularly good answers to those questions yet.
There is, however, plenty of research showing what can happen when commercial demand grows for high-value Himalayan natural resources. Studies from Himalayan regions have documented increased collection, pressure on wild resources and the difficult balance between conservation and the livelihoods those resources support. Shilajit isn’t a medicinal plant, so I wouldn’t use that research as evidence that the same thing is happening here. But it does raise questions that I think the Shilajit industry ought to be asking. Does a collector have to travel further today than he did 20 years ago? Are good deposits becoming harder to find? How has the price of raw material changed? Does higher value encourage people to harvest more carefully because the resource matters more, or more aggressively because there is more money to be made? And when genuine material becomes expensive or difficult to obtain, does that create an incentive for inferior material to find its way into the supply chain?
Then there’s the question of money. How much does the person doing the difficult work on the mountain actually receive compared with the eventual price of a jar in London or Los Angeles? I’d like the Shilajit industry to talk about those questions more. Including us.
Progress isn’t the enemy of tradition
It’s easy to become sentimental about the old way of doing things. An elderly collector, a mountain village, water, sunlight and patience. It sounds idyllic, and in some respects it probably was.
But “traditional” doesn’t automatically mean safe, sustainable or superior. Raw Shilajit can contain unwanted environmental contaminants, and geological materials can naturally contain potentially harmful elements. Published analyses have found considerable variability between samples, with researchers identifying lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel, thallium and other elements across different raw materials and commercial products. That is precisely why proper purification and meaningful analytical testing matter.
The answer isn’t to reject modern processing. It’s to stop pretending that modern processing and ancient tradition have to be enemies. I’d rather buy material from a properly paid collector whose knowledge is respected, maintain meaningful traceability through the supply chain, purify the material carefully and then subject the finished product to modern analytical testing. There is no virtue in leaving a contaminant in something because removing it would somehow be insufficiently romantic.
At the same time, efficiency shouldn’t become an excuse to erase provenance, rush purification or treat a mountain resource as though it were an infinitely scalable industrial ingredient. If Shilajit really is going to become a global product, there has to be a middle ground where the knowledge that came before us isn’t discarded simply because the machinery has improved.
The secret to youth, thirty-two years later
I sometimes think back to that conversation in 1994. The first person who introduced me to Shilajit didn’t talk about testosterone trials or fulvic acid. There wasn’t a certificate of analysis, and he certainly didn’t tell two 16-year-olds what percentage of the hydrophobic fulvic fraction had been isolated using an internationally recognised analytical method. He called it black gold and told us it was the secret to youth.
More than thirty years later, the wellness industry is, in many ways, still selling essentially the same promise. We’ve simply found considerably more complicated ways to say it. Some of those complications are useful. We know more about Shilajit now. There is human research worth taking seriously, even if there is much more still to learn. Analytical science can tell us more about composition and contamination, and responsible producers can provide levels of testing and transparency that simply weren’t available to the person collecting the material generations ago. But something can also get lost when an old material becomes a global trend. Behind the polished jar, the discount code, the influencer and the spectacular percentage is still a substance that has to come from somewhere. Somebody has to find it, somebody has to collect it, and somebody still has to bring it down from the mountain.
That might be the part of the Shilajit story worth remembering most. The old collector probably doesn’t know his product is trending. The mountain certainly doesn’t.
Chris Simon is the founder of One Life Foods. He first encountered Shilajit in 1994 and has worked commercially with it through One Life Foods since 2018, with a particular interest in sourcing, analytical testing and the gap between supplement marketing and what the evidence can actually support.
Every week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with several tracks that catch our attention, then round up the best songs of each month in this segment. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best songs of September 2026.
Fine – ‘Everything in the shade’
Hushed and minimal as it is, ‘Everything in the Shade’ is nothing if not steadfast in its expression of love. What Fine Glindvad blurs on the deceptively simple first single from Jazz dreams are the markers around it: “This is promise, not a lie,” goes its chorus, but what is the promise exactly? Besides “to be the rain on the hill,” the answer is open to the imagination. The Danish singer-songwriter thanks her lover for “our time,” but there are no tangible signs of temporality here; “I’m here,” she proclaims, while unburdening herself from any sense of place. It’s less hazy than the delicate tunes on 2024’s Rocky Top Ballads, but still, Glindvad seems to manifest her presence in the form of a protective spell, buttressed by gentle piano, viscous bass and drums, and an impossibly smooth guitar solo.
Julia Jacklin – ‘If I Had the Hand of God’
On ‘If I Had the Hand of God’, the fantasy of divine power doesn’t involve curing disease, resurrecting the dead, or splitting the Earth into two. Julia Jacklin doesn’t yearn for superhuman strength – only the kind that others of her species seem to naturally possess, like the guts to “take a breath and call my dad” or understanding when to let a partner go. Musically, the song doesn’t assume some dramatic, Almighty form; its ambling groove has the feel of strolling around with a tightened fist. The chorus allows Jacklin’s voice to soar, a subtle dynamic shift that seems to bring her closer to the heavens. When it simmers back down, you might feel a little more relaxed.
Lily Konigsberg – ‘Free Byrd’
You may know Lily Konigsberg as a member of the art-punk band Palberta or from her solo records, but the arrival of ‘Free Byrd’ – her first release in four years – invites comparisons to her former collaborator, Water From Your Eyes/This Is Lorelei’s Nate Amos. Until not so long ago, Amos’ second most identifiable project was My Idea, his duo with Konigsberg, but know he’s probably best known as This Is Lorelei, having put out his cleanest and brightest LP a few weeks before Konigsberg’s return. ‘Free Byrd’, too, is leaner and catchier than anything in the songwriter’s discography, and no less direct in its lyrics: “I’ve been meaning to say/ I know that you want me but I’m going away.” The feeling she’s describing is, of course, timelessly bittersweet, but the song itself is too infectious to overlook.
Perfume Genius – ‘Natural High’
Two years ago, we named Fashion Club‘s A Love You Cannot Shake our Album of the Year, and its Perfume Genius duet ‘Forget’ was its indisputable highlight. Now, Fashion Club’s Pascal Stevenson is credited as a producer on ‘Natural High’, the fantastic first preview of Mike Hadreas’ latest project, a collaborative music and dance work between him and choreographer Kate Wallich. Unspooling over six minutes, the track doesn’t rely on Hadreas’ usual recipe of catharsis: majestic melodies crossed with glorious dissonance. Instead, it swims in a pool of transcendence (“Totally wired/ I’m untied, clear eyed”) – before making its perfectly timed transition to a dance workout, where the natural high translates, vocally, to Hadreas’ resplendent falsetto. “Scenes can shift immediately just because I feel like it,” he remarked in press materials, and the one that marks ‘Natural High’ is pure, brilliant instinct.
Sophia Stel – ‘I Do’
the greatest album of all time is imminent. That’s the tongue-in-cheek title of Sophia Stel’s debut album, which arrives mid-October, but with ‘I Do’, the Vancouver electronic artist has a case for at least one of the most quietly infectious songs of 2026. Suspended in a state of nocturnal reverie, the track finds the singer so infatuated she’s “wondering about a ring,” trying to counter accusations of cold-heartedness with a warm, straightforward pop tune. By the end, Stel recognizes her own delusions of grandeur, accentuating her loneliness. Still, she goes out with another powerful declaration, lowercase as it may sound: “Let’s stay awake til we’re on fire.”
The War on Drugs – ‘Who’s That’
Two verses. That’s how long it takes for the War on Drugs’ first song in four years to start getting truly existential: “Where do I belong?/ Will it change with time?” Adam Granduciel wonders, suddenly broad questions in a tapestry of poetic metaphors. Maybe it’s his unguarded self speaking, or maybe it’s his only his depression, baby. Throughout the song, Granduciel finds a dozen ways to personify it, the unknowable force that keeps creeping up with torrents of doubt. “I keep moving to the inside,” he sings, yet the band makes his internal world sound as vast and beautiful as any cosmic landscape.
There’s so much music coming out all the time that it’s hard to keep track. On those days when the influx of new tracks is particularly overwhelming, we sift through the noise to bring you a curated list of the most interesting new releases (the best of which will be added to our Best New Songs playlist). Below, check out our track roundup for Friday, October 2, 2026.
DIIV – ‘Trillions’
According to a press release, ‘Trillions’, the new single from DIIV’s upcoming album ZIRP!, belongs to “a new genre for music’s optimized VC-funded super deluxe remixed AI-enhanced algorithmically perfected wild west 2020s, where a million streams is great, a billion even better, and a trillion well within reach.” That’s funny. At the same time, ‘Trillions’ is the advance single that most sounds bears the mark of the album’s producer, A.G. Cook. It comes paired with a video directed by Jaxon Whittington.
Noah Kahan – ‘Draw You Out’
Noah Kahan has offered up his contribution to the upcoming The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping soundtrack. ‘Draw You Out’ hews close to Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Can’t Catch Me Now’ (for the film’s predecessor The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) in terms of both its stripped-back arrangement and thematic alignment with the series. It was co-written and co-produced by Aaron Dessner. “Music is such a massive part of the Hunger Games in a lot of ways,” Kahan shared. “To be able to speak to what the director sees in these characters, what Suzanne Collins wrote these characters for, and to try to match that is a big task – but a really fun challenge. I just can’t believe that I get to be a part of it.”
IDER – ‘F**k Without Feelings’
IDER have kicked off a new chapter with their vibrant new single, ‘F**k without Feelings’, out now via Nettwerk. “It’s about catching feelings when it’s supposed to be ‘casual’; a classic situationship that leaves you more riled up than anything else,” the duo explained. “We wanted the song to sound joyful and full of life whilst we scream ‘mother**ker’. It’s very freeing.”
Ninajirachi – ‘CSIRAC’ (Dylan Brady Remix)
100 gecs’ Dylan Brady has flipped Ninajirachi’s ‘CSIRAC’, the latest in a string of remixes from Ninajirachi’s debut album. “I had so much fun making this remix,” he said of the track, which was teased at the Australian producer’s headline performance for triple j’s One Night Stand. “Nina’s music is so amazing.”
brakence – ‘crystallized’ and ‘death rolL’
brakence has announced a new album, marroW, which will arrive on October 23 through Columbia. Along with the news, the Columbus digicore artist has dropped two singles, ‘crystallized’ and ‘death rolL’.
The Big Moon – ‘F.O.R.E.V.E.R’
The Big Moon have previewed their forthcoming album Forever with the quasi-title track. “F.O.R.E.V.E.R is about comparing the interconnectedness of everything in the universe with our tiny lives here on earth and remembering that however small you feel, you still have an effect,” the band reflected. “You are still part of something much bigger than you and your body and whatever you might be wrapped up in.”
Jessie Marcella – ‘Aventurine’
Leeds-based producer and composer Jessie Marcella has dropped an expansive new single, ‘Aventurine’, which features additional production from Bicep. “Raw and euphoric, Aventurine is inspired by the immense power, unpredictability, and awe-inspiring scale of the ocean,” Marcella explained. “Standing before something so vast triggers a profound shift in perspective, a freeing reminder of our own smallness that transforms existential awe into a surge of inspiration. Structurally, the track’s soaring builds and wall-of-sound drops channel the ocean’s unstoppable force, mirroring the rush of crashing waves and the feeling of surrendering to something bigger than yourself. Named after the crystal associated with luck and opportunity, Aventurine serves as a sonic catalyst for throwing yourself into the unknown…a track built on a simple truth: against the scale of the sea, nothing matters anyway. So give life everything you’ve got.”
Hope Winter – ‘So Easily’
Hope Winter has unveiled a poignant ballad, ‘So Easily’, alongside a music video. “‘So Easily’ is a continuation of the narrative that I began telling in ‘If You Ever Loved Me’ and a song I wrote on my own sat at the piano in my bedroom, something I’ve done since I was 7 years old,” the London-based singer-songwriter. “It’s one of many ballads I’ve written over the years, something that feels very much part of my process as a songwriter.”
Dakota Johnson may have been born into wealth, but she’s also building a successful and lucrative career. Over the last few years, she has seamlessly moved between commercial and independent movies to establish a filmography that highlights her undeniable skill.
As a result, her net worth should be substantial by now, right? Here’s what we know about the actor’s earnings.
The bulk of it comes from her work as an actor. Johnson is the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. She made her screen debut as a child alongside her mother in Crazy in Alabama, back in 1999. That said, she waited until adulthood to pursue the craft more seriously.
Johnson started to populate her resume with supporting roles in 2010. She appeared in The Social Network, followed by Beastly, 21 Jump Street, The Five-Year Engagement, Need for Speed, and the short-lived sitcom Ben and Kate, among others. Her career took a turn when she landed the role of Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey. The movie was a worldwide hit, and Johnson reprised the role in two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed.
During this period, she also branched out into different genres. You might have seen her in the crime film Black Mass, psychological drama A Bigger Splash, or romantic comedy How to Be Single.
After wrapping up the Fifty Shades trilogy, Johnson gravitated toward more unusual projects. She played an ambitious young dancer in Suspiria, appeared in the ensemble mystery Bad Times at the El Royale, and starred in the adventure drama The Peanut Butter Falcon. Her subsequent credits include Our Friend, The High Note, The Lost Daughter, Cha Cha Real Smooth,Persuasion, Am I OK?, and Daddio.
In 2024, she returned to blockbusters with Madame Web. Her more recent work includes Materialists and Splitsville.
Besides acting, Johnson worked as a model and collaborated with various brands. She also co-founded the production company TeaTime Pictures and ventured into directing. Fans could recently watch her in Taylor Swift’s music video for Patient Zero.
Dakota Johnson Salary
Actor salaries are rarely public, but we do know that Johnson made around $250,000 for Fifty Shades of Grey. While that was low by Hollywood standards, the film was a box office hit, so her salary for the sequels increased to over seven figures.
For Madame Web, she is rumoured to have received $5 million. Her fee for independent films is likely to be much lower, depending on the project.
Dakota Johnson Highest Grossing Movies
Johnson’s highest-grossing titles are the three Fifty Shades films. The first made over $569 million worldwide, with the sequels earning big, too.
This year, you can see Dakota Johnson in erotic thriller Verity, opposite Anne Hathaway. The movie is currently in cinemas. Next up, she’ll star in drama The Three Incestuous Sisters.
Noah Kahan has released ‘Draw You Out’, his contribution to the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. Aaron Dessner co-wrote and co-produced the track at New York’s Long Pond Studio and Nashville’s Gold Pacific Studios and East Iris Studios. Check it out below.
“Music is such a massive part of the Hunger Games in a lot of ways,” Kahan said in a press release. “To be able to speak to what the director sees in these characters, what Suzanne Collins wrote these characters for, and to try to match that is a big task – but a really fun challenge. I just can’t believe that I get to be a part of it.”
Ninajirachi has shared a remix of the I Love My Computer track ‘CSIRAC’ by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady. The Australian producer teased the track at her headline performance for triple j’s One Night Stand. Check it out below.
In a press release, Brady said he sought to recontextualize the “clubby, drummy, DJ moment” that Nina Wilson captured with the original ‘CSIRAC’. “I had so much fun making this remix,” he added. “Nina’s music is so amazing.”
Earlier this year, Ninajirachi teamed up with Porter Robinson for ‘WannaCry’. More recently, she enlisted Madeon for a remix of ‘iPod Touch’.
In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on October 2, 2026.
Greg Freeman, All Set the Bone
Greg Freeman has followed up last year’s Burnover with a raucously ambitious new album, All Set to the Bone. Divided across four sides, it serves as a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension,” according to Freeman, pulling together “inhuman events” into a “perfect tsunami.” Produced by John Congleton, it features the Vermont singer-songwriter’s longtime collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah, as well as new ones including Florry’s Joey Sullivan, The Rockin Worms’ Carney Hemler, Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace. “It should never feel comfortable,” Freeman remarked. “Every album should scare you.”
Wishy aim to cure lovesickness with Nature’s Pill, a record as heartfelt as it is blissfully melodic. It arrives on the heels of 2023’s Mana and Paradise EPs, their debut LP Triple Seven in 2024, and 2025’s Planet Popstar EP. “The songs were still flowing, but this album was more intentional,” the band’s Nina Pitchkites said in a statement. “There was also some pressure of knowing we were working toward a definitive project,” Kevin Krauter added, “It gave these songs a more cohesive world to exist in, even if that world is a Pandora’s Box of everything.”
The trio of Grouper’s Liz Harris, Scott Simmons, and Jed Bindeman are back with their first album in a decade, Linda’s Head. The follow-up to The Original Faces, released via Kranky, includes the previously released singles ‘Dead Shark II’ and the title track, which showcase the record’s intersecting shoegaze and twee sensibilities. As beautifully intimate as it is impenetrable, it’s the perfect addition to your fall listening rotation.
Florist’s Emily Sprague has unveiled a new solo album, Cyano. Though it follows a string of releases, including Memory / Mount Vision (2017 / 2019), Hill, Flower, Fog (2020), and Cloud Time (2025), it marks the artist’s first LP on lead vocals. The record began taking shape during a solstice trip to an Icelandic fjord, but it was later completed in a single month. “There’s a few different allegories that Cyano can be for,” Sprague told Post-Trash. “One of them is an internal world. One of them could be our world or an external world. I was thinking about what happens when a society or a planet tries to recover and heal from being destroyed by people not being able to communicate with each other and not being able to get through to each other or have empathy for each other.”
Miranda Lambert, Crisco; Johnny Marr, The Age of Everything; Deerhoof, Divine Schism; Victoria Monét, Frequency of Love; Stef Chura, Dancing Alone on the Concrete; The Album Leaf, A Body of Voices; Trusselina, The Point’s a Truss, My Trusselina; Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Ruin: It’s Just Not Music; Fat Dog, Cancel Me (I’m Tired); Charlotte Greve, Waterbodies; iiisa, tanto te he querido; Kodaline, We Were Only Young; Sons of Sevilla, Vacations; Alyssa Weinberg, Pieces of Light.
Greg Freeman has followed up last year’s Burnover with a raucously ambitious new album, All Set to the Bone. Divided across four sides, it serves as a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension,” according to Freeman, pulling together “inhuman events” into a “perfect tsunami.” Produced by John Congleton, it features the Vermont singer-songwriter’s longtime collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah, as well as new ones including Florry’s Joey Sullivan, The Rockin Worms’ Carney Hemler, Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace. “It should never feel comfortable,” Freeman remarked. “Every album should scare you.”
Wishy aim to cure lovesickness with Nature’s Pill, a record as heartfelt as it is blissfully melodic. It arrives on the heels of 2023’s Mana and Paradise EPs, their debut LP Triple Seven in 2024, and 2025’s Planet Popstar EP. “The songs were still flowing, but this album was more intentional,” the band’s Nina Pitchkites said in a statement. “There was also some pressure of knowing we were working toward a definitive project,” Kevin Krauter added, “It gave these songs a more cohesive world to exist in, even if that world is a Pandora’s Box of everything.”
The trio of Grouper’s Liz Harris, Scott Simmons, and Jed Bindeman are back with their first album in a decade, 
Florist’s Emily Sprague has unveiled a new solo album, 