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The Grokkist letter Once a month. Danu's letter, what's alive in the community, the Snackables. The Press New writing as it's published, and letters from the editor.

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The Grokkist letter is Danu's monthly letter about the whole Grokkist community: what people are making and thinking about, gatherings coming up, and a handful of Snackables, small good things worth your time.

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WonderEntangled ValeSnackables

🍳 A Field Guide to the True American Diner

A masterful, amusing and delightfully concise piece of 'thick description' that goes right inside what the true American diner experience is all about. If we pay close attention as this writer does, the seemingly mundane world around us becomes a place of everyday wonder and understanding.

Grokkist Press

28 October 2022 · 1 minute

A field guide to the true American diner

theawl.com

A masterful, amusing and delightfully concise piece of 'thick description' that goes right inside what the true American diner experience is all about. If we pay close attention as this writer does, the seemingly mundane world around us becomes a place of everyday wonder and understanding.

In good company

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Keep reading

Nearby on the shelf.

Surprise meWild Margin

🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen

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

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedSoma Isles

🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time

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

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedEntangled Vale

👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing

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

Grokkist Press · 1 min