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Surprise meMaker's ForgeSnackables

🔍 Agatha Christie Suspected Everyone

A lively, wide-ranging analysis of what makes an Agatha Christie — the novels, the genre, and the writer herself — and how to make sense of their enduring popularity. Her small, well-to-do communities are 'rife with suspicion, infidelity, unease, and a sort of indefinable evil that permeat

Grokkist Press

11 November 2022 · 1 minute

Agatha Christie suspected everyone

newrepublic.com

A lively, wide-ranging analysis of what makes an Agatha Christie — the novels, the genre, and the writer herself — and how to make sense of their enduring popularity. Her small, well-to-do communities are 'rife with suspicion, infidelity, unease, and a sort of indefinable evil that permeates almost everybody,' leaving the profession of murder, tellingly, to those who run the society in which the servants merely serve.

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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