Grokkist Press
Reading Room
Snackables
Things we found elsewhere and pass on: a film, a tool, an essay, a corner of the old internet. A few lines on why, then off you go. New ones join the shelf as we find them, newest first.
10 May 2026
Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr
Read the note ↗10 May 2026
A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac
Read the note ↗10 May 2026
Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim
Read the note ↗10 May 2026
A conversation with Clive Marlowe, who spent 15 years covering the same roles in The Mousetrap. He reflects on the strange psychology of always waiting in the wings — living with uncertainty, stepping suddenly into the spotlight, letting go once the moment passes — opening into candid terr
Read the note ↗10 May 2026
A cow tips the scales at the edge of society — a wry, wordless six-minute animation about balance, precarity and where we each sit on the edge of things.
Read the note ↗19 Apr 2026
Kristie De Garis writes from two decades of trying to get better — cutting foods, changing habits, tightening routines — while the body doesn't follow the expected arc. She describes the work of staying level in a body that requires constant effort just to stay the same, inside a culture t
Read the note ↗19 Apr 2026
Louis Theroux has spent decades sitting with people most of us would keep at a distance and gently asking them to explain themselves. What he keeps finding isn't unbridgeable otherness but something more unsettling: familiar motives, loosely held, rarely examined. Echoing Arendt's 'banalit
Read the note ↗19 Apr 2026
A deceptively simple web game: you're shown a colour for a few seconds, then asked to recreate it from memory. Five rounds, much harder than it looks — a small, humbling lesson in the gap between seeing and remembering.
Read the note ↗5 Apr 2026
A librarian's reading of Cleo Wade's What the Road Said, in which a child meets the road and asks the question at the edge of any beginning: how do you move forward when you don't know the way? The road offers no map — only companionship in motion, and a way of trusting that direction can
Read the note ↗5 Apr 2026
The illustrator and brand designer Nathan Yoder begins and stays with the hand: pencil and pen on paper, line by line, before anything becomes digital. His process page treats that as a chosen constraint, each piece emerging through accumulation — marks building into form, decisions made s
Read the note ↗22 Mar 2026
Lessons from Edward Gibbon and his history of Rome's collapse. Decline, as Gibbon tells it, isn't just geopolitical but psychological, even spiritual — a civilisation continuing outwardly while 'a pervasive nihilism can incapacitate a people from within'. Not doom-saying so much as pattern
Read the note ↗22 Mar 2026
A former New York City pickpocket, Wilfred Rose, returns to the subway where he worked, narrating how he did it and what it cost him — how to read a crowd, choreograph attention, pass without notice. Alongside the craft is the other side: arrests, family, loss, and a habit he describes as
Read the note ↗