Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Contributors · Writer
The house byline of Grokkist Press: Snackables, the Grokkist letter, and the things we make together.
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GroundedSoma Isles
A case for a religion that doesn't ask you to believe the right things but to show up and practice. Modern Quakerism is almost purely orthopraxic: sit in silence, pay attention, speak only if something real needs saying. At its centre is a simple claim — there's a part of you that already
WonderEntangled Vale
TVGuessr drops you into live TV streams from around the world and asks you to name the country of origin. A small, oddly absorbing window into how ordinary broadcasting looks and sounds elsewhere.
ImagineMaker's Forge
French illustrator Romain Joly plays with simple elements — drawing, photography, everyday objects — turning them into visual jokes or nudging them into new forms. A reminder of how little it takes to make the familiar suddenly strange and delightful.
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
Surprise meMaker's Forge
'Iran has been trapped in a cycle of self-love and self-hate for centuries, and nothing captures that contradiction like The Blind Owl.' Banned both before and after 1979, the novel follows a troubled painter through a surreal, fragmented narrative. Amir Ahmadi Arian traces its strange aft
Move meSoma Isles
Artist Steve Parker's Funeral for a Tree, made after a 65-year-old live oak in his yard died of oak wilt. He cut the trunk into circular slices and turned them into playable records encoded with birdsong from the species that once roosted in its branches — a slow memorial where wood, air a
Make senseEntangled Vale
'Your inability to focus isn't a moral failing. It's a design problem.' Humans have fretted about declining literacy for centuries — from Thomas More to penny dreadfuls to comic books. Carlo Iacono argues the real issue isn't screens but the environments built around them: notifications, i
ImagineEntangled Vale
A four-minute mockumentary having fun with 'enshittification': the slow degradation of digital platforms as companies shift from delighting users to maximising extraction. Released alongside the Norwegian Consumer Council's report Breaking Free, it sketches how the pattern shows up across
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak pushes past the 'Neanderthals were basically us' rehabilitation to something more unsettling: what if they were genuinely different — different minds, different relationships to territory and meaning? He suggests their disappearance followed a collapse of
Surprise meEntangled Vale
A podcast in which a journalist investigates entrepreneurship in the AI age by trying to run a real company staffed by fake (AI) people. Somewhere between investigative journalism and deadpan performance art — no breathless futurism, no moral panic. It quietly shows how much of 'running a
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Many world-changing innovations don't begin as grand visions of progress — they begin as small acts of care for a specific human constraint. Here: a surgical nurse's chemical-burned hands. Her boss commissioned custom rubber gloves to protect them; only later did anyone notice infection ra