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.
2 Jun 2024
A relatable mini-memoir on how following the news went from a mark of the respectable adult to self-destructive behaviour — 'like pressing a button that caused one to get punched in the face over and over again by a cartoon glove marked DREAD.' Casey Plett suggests anxious people may be se
Read the note ↗2 Jun 2024
The History of the 90s podcast traces the invention of the travelling music festival, from Lollapalooza to Lilith Fair — a circus that would roll into town and leave the local consciousness forever altered. An optimistic moment in music that aimed to expand minds, tastes and possibilities,
Read the note ↗2 Jun 2024
A juggling enthusiast's deep dive into how juggling has been depicted in animation over the last century — and the question that really fascinates him: not why it's animated unrealistically, but why it's been so consistently unrealistic for 100 years. What starts as mild frustration morphs
Read the note ↗19 May 2024
'You have to listen to the metal as you're hitting it, and enjoy the rhythm of the making.' A short tour of Manchester silversmith Ndidi Ekubia's studio and the process and meaning behind her fluid, functional silverware — where craft becomes a kind of dialogue between hand, hammer and mat
Read the note ↗19 May 2024
Baltimore public artist Graham Coreil-Allen works to make cities more inclusive and livable through placemaking and civic engagement. New Public Sites explores the history, design and poetry of place while inviting you to practise 'radical pedestrianism' — travelling on foot through infini
Read the note ↗19 May 2024
A deep, wide-ranging interview with educator and futurist Zak Stein, who argues that all our present global crises have their roots in a crisis of education. Long but engaging throughout — highlights include how 'testing ruins lives,' why our broken system depends on heroic teachers, the v
Read the note ↗19 May 2024
Nature published an in-depth study of toxicity in online conversations across multiple platforms and decades. The patterns are strikingly consistent: regardless of platform or era, the biggest factor shaping the health of discourse is how polarised people's opinions are. Toxicity doesn't s
Read the note ↗19 May 2024
A thriving collection of hundreds of great poems, lovingly curated by Manila-based poet T. De Los Reyes. Each selection draws from experiences of gratitude and joy, grief and loss, and the deep well of being human — with annotations and ruminations from a curator who finds herself 'in conv
Read the note ↗5 May 2024
It's getting easier and easier to reconstitute an entire AI person from digital scraps of our speech, faces and communication patterns. For philosopher Daniel Dennett, the problem is like counterfeit money: just as fake currency undermines trust in a financial system, artificial personas e
Read the note ↗5 May 2024
A large-scale analysis of 73,921 films from the last 80 years on how often, and when, they do a 'title drop' — a character saying the title of the movie they're in. About a third of all films do it in some form; 11.3% do a 'real' one where the protagonist looks at the camera and declares t
Read the note ↗5 May 2024
Transcendent. Taut harmonies and sparse instrumentation give way to swelling orchestral accompaniment as the crowd gets involved in a big way. As one commenter puts it: 'Jacob Collier plays his two favourite instruments — the guitar and the audience.' A reminder of what live music can do w
Read the note ↗5 May 2024
Most nuclear states name their weapon systems with alphanumeric codes or technical acronyms (B61, THAAD). South Asia's strategic arsenal is different — its nomenclature intertwined with the region's religious, historical and cultural context, a linguistic choice deployed by elites to shape
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