Grokkist Newsletter #70
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
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Grokkist Press
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Less aloneMaker's Forge
🧳 Baggage
Baggage, a short film from the Aardman Animation Studio Academy, follows three girlfriends checking in at the airport — but one is carrying a little more than the others. It reimagines airport security as a scan for self-doubt, asking what we carry, what we hide, and what might happen if i
Make senseEntangled Vale
🌸 Why a Haiku Isn't Just 5-7-5
What are we really translating when we borrow a structure from another language? It seems simple — three lines, seventeen syllables — but Japanese syllables don't map onto English ones, and strict adherence often misses the point: the heart of haiku is extreme minimalism, not math. An invi
Make senseEntangled Vale
🌀 The New Vertigo Years
The years 1900–1914 were a time of existential whiplash — the 'vertigo years,' as historian Philipp Blom called them. As cities became metropolises, people's sense of self fractured under overstimulation; nervous exhaustion became the ailment of the age, X-rays the new magic trick, electri
ImagineMaker's Forge
🧲 Internet Fridge Magnet Poetry
'Welcome to the internet's fridge wall! Drag words around to make poems! Have fun and be nice.' A charming shared fridge-magnet poetry site — the main wall is gloriously congested, but you can make your own, and there's even a Grokkist wall to play around on.
Move meHearthlands
🎸 Dual Swing Guitar
Two early-jazz devotees from Osaka revive a now-rare tradition: the dual swing guitar style. With vintage tones and impeccable timing, Yuji Kamihigashi and Hirofumi Asaba breathe new life into this Gershwin standard — a small, joyful act of keeping something beautiful alive.
Grokkist Newsletter #69
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
🍾 A Day in the Life of a Bottle Collector
At Denmark's Roskilde Festival — so large it temporarily becomes the country's fourth-largest city — everything runs on rhythm, revelry and refundables. Amid the beer cans and bass drops, another system quietly sustains it all: hundreds of bottle collectors, mostly from Romania and West Af
ImagineMaker's Forge
🇨🇭 The Swiss Passport, a Design Marvel
The design studio behind Switzerland's new passport treated it as a chance to showcase both technical prowess and aesthetic vision — a security document that's also a love letter to Swiss topography. Each page features 3D-rendered cartographic landscapes; under UV light, alpine contour lin
Surprise meSoma Isles
🐾 The Animal Verbs We Use on Each Other
What do we mean when we say someone is prowling? Or that they hawk, badger, ape, hound, or parrot? Why do so many animal verbs describe things people do to each other, and not kindly? Amie Souza Reilly sits with the quiet discomfort of being watched, first by neighbours and then by languag
Surprise meHearthlands
🗺️ The True Size Of…
Greenland is not the size of Africa — Africa is over 14 times bigger — but you wouldn't know it from most classroom maps, thanks to the Mercator projection distorting sizes to preserve shape. This interactive map lets you drag countries around the globe to compare their actual size: an ins
WonderMaker's Forge
🏺 Ceramics and the Art of Ma
The quirky ceramic sculptures of Japanese artist En Iwamura feel like emissaries from a parallel dimension — wobbly, cheerful and deeply intentional. Rooted in haniwa burial figures, Zen gardens and Jomon pottery, his work explores the Japanese concept of Ma: the negative space between thi