Grokkist Newsletter #74
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
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ImagineSoma Isles
🎵 The Marble Machine
Music meets engineering. Wintergatan's Marble Machine is a hand-cranked wooden device where 2,000 steel balls cascade through levers and funnels to pluck bass strings, strike vibraphones and drive percussion — music as kinetic poetry. Frontman Martin Molin has since spent years documenting
Surprise meEntangled Vale
👑 Royal Sex: The Cleopatra Episode
Betwixt the Sheets, hosted by historian Kate Lister, delights in the hidden, bawdy and playful side of the past. Its Royal Sex mini-series asks how monarchs' sex lives shaped history; in the Cleopatra episode, Lister teams up with Egyptologist Sarah Parcak to peel back the myth — was Cleop
Make senseHearthlands
🧭 A Map of the Manosphere
The 'manosphere' is less a community than a tangled web of subcultures — pick-up artists, incels, 'alpha' lifestyle gurus, men's rights activists — sharing a misogynistic framework yet often antagonistic towards each other. This explainer walks through the factions, the myths and metaphors
WonderSoma Isles
🦴 How to Grow Human Bones
The first recorded bone graft happened in 1668, when a Dutch doctor placed a piece of dog skull into a soldier's shattered head — it worked, but the church excommunicated the soldier for being 'part dog.' The real turning point came when a marine geologist peered at coral through an electr
GroundedSoma Isles
🐻 Live Nature Cams Around the World
Sometimes the best way to remember you're part of something bigger is simply to watch. Explore.org hosts hundreds of livecams beaming the world's beauty to your screen: salmon leaping into the jaws of Alaskan grizzlies, elephants at an African watering hole, service-dog puppies tumbling in
Grokkist Newsletter #73
A steady rhythm of curiosity and care, delivered every two weeks.
Surprise meMaker's Forge
🎓 The Crisis of Expertise
Dismissing populists as 'stupid' misses the point. The rejection of expert authority is often less about facts and more about pride, status, and the refusal to be talked down to — a performance of dignity. 'You cannot fact-check your way out of status competition.' Drawing on Dostoevsky an
Move meMaker's Forge
🕯️ Slow Light
A stop-motion short about a man whose eyes perceive reality only seven years after it unfolds. Time becomes a prison — memory bleeding into the present, leaving him forever behind. 'In a world where light travels too slow, the truth always comes too late.' A meditation on how regret can fr
ImagineHearthlands
🐕 At Crufts
Crufts is a four-day migration of 24,000 dogs into a Birmingham conference centre, where the stakes are low (£200 for Best in Show) but the commitment is absolute. Rosa Lyster captures the strangeness and splendour — Samoyeds in hotel lifts, Afghan hounds at late-night parties, a zebra cro
WonderMaker's Forge
🌈 Synesthesia Suite
Synesthesia — where the senses mingle — comes in many forms; composer Mary Bichner sees colours when she hears music. In Synesthesia Suite she invites the rest of us in, mapping each musical key to its corresponding hue and synchronising a live score with a dome of shifting, radiant visual
Move meEntangled Vale
🦆 Duck Relativity
A minute-long duck-toy duet about being big or small drifts into a list of things that can't be measured — kindness, courage, curiosity, patience, resilience, generosity. With simple rhymes, warm harmonies and a duck called Paul, it feels like stumbling across a lost fragment of childhood