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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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Surprise meHearthlandsSnackables

🗺️ How Many Continents Are There?

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones — the two very silly, very rigorous Englishmen behind Map Men — take a question you thought had an obvious answer and cheerfully dismantle it. Joyful, fast, and secretly educational, right down to the jokes in the credits. Since I first shared them, the Ma

Grokkist Press

19 April 2022 · 1 minute

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones — the two very silly, very rigorous Englishmen behind Map Men — take a question you thought had an obvious answer and cheerfully dismantle it. Joyful, fast, and secretly educational, right down to the jokes in the credits. Since I first shared them, the Map Men have rather taken off: their debut book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong, landed in late 2025, became a Sunday Times bestseller, and was named a Waterstones Best Nature & Travel Writing book of the year.

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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