Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Contributors · Writer
The house byline of Grokkist Press: Snackables, the Grokkist letter, and the things we make together.
You'll get the Press emails only when Grokkist Press publishes. Add Danu's monthly letter too if you like.
Surprise meSoma Isles
'We live in a culture dominated by text and images — not listening… we value most what is easiest to encode.' Ted Gioia imagines a world where we invented recording before the printing press: songs would be the cornerstone of the humanities, bards would be authority figures, and we'd still
ImagineSoma Isles
Music is math, and everything is also everything else. What can you draw with a waveform? A game of continuous pitch-bending: take an image, trace its upper and lower halves as audio envelopes, and now you have shapes that sound like things. This one starts with a fish, contains real squir
Move meEntangled Vale
A short parable about a small tribe deep in the Guyanese rainforest whose word for 'person' also means 'singer.' They believed all creatures speak in their own languages — even trees — but only people can truly sing. 'I sometimes imagine the moment when they first encountered people who ha
Bi-weekly newsletter for grokkists who insist on relating to the world with curiosity and care. Each edition contains the latest from the Grokkist Press, events and highlights from our community, and a care package of snackable outside links selected to nourish your curiosity.
WonderEntangled Vale
Three Ravens is an English myth-and-folklore podcast on heritage crafts and forgotten arts. This episode traces the 3,000-year legacy of the handheld fan — from China, Japan and Africa to the European craze — its religious uses, hidden compartments, and secret language. Everyone once carri
WonderEntangled Vale
For anyone drawn to solitude, off-grid living, dark retreats or the monastic life — not so much a rejection of society as a reclaiming of silence and self. Beatriz Flamini, a mountain-refuge caretaker who took to living in a camper van but found the outside world wouldn't leave her alone,
ImagineSoma Isles
Law — like borders — is completely imaginary but very real. If you find something delicious about self-serious, highly-paid people arguing with great precision over what a potato is, enjoy this VAT case on whether Walkers' 'Sensations Poppadoms' count as snack food (taxed) or not (exempt).
WonderEntangled Vale
Exactly what it says: an interactive map for exploring the interesting places near you that are listed on Wikipedia. There are so many more than you'd imagine — a lovely reminder that life is always going on around us, layered with history we walk past every day.
Bi-weekly newsletter for grokkists who insist on relating to the world with curiosity and care. Each edition contains the latest from the Grokkist Press, events and highlights from our community, and a care package of snackable outside links selected to spark your curiosity.
Less aloneEntangled Vale
'Being stuck is the psychological equivalent of standing knee-deep in a fetid bog, bog in every direction, bog as far as the eye can see.' There's power in naming, and Adam Mastroianni has built a hilarious and painfully accurate taxonomy of intellectual stuck-ness — from 'gutterballing' t
WonderEntangled Vale
Borders are endlessly fascinating because they're both completely imaginary and painfully real. WonderWhy inventories the most complex borders on Earth — from garden-variety second-order enclaves (a country inside a country inside the original country) to an island that changes nationality
WonderUnfolding Realm
Maria Popova's beautifully written history of the collective nouns for birds, with vintage illustrations by Brian Wildsmith. 'Language is the birthplace of the imagination and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the terms f