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.
29 Oct 2023
A delightful extended metaphor for how to encounter other people. We're not just layers of experience that can be peeled away one at a time, like onions. Some parts of us are brittle and flaky when you try to pull them apart — experiences that are folded over each other, flattened out, and
Read the note ↗2 Oct 2023
A raw, rambling and intelligent personal reflection on earnestness — what I would call sincerity. 'A friend once told me that one of the best things I did for him was just ramble excitedly about life when we met for coffee while he was feeling depressed; he found my enthusiasm infectious.
Read the note ↗2 Oct 2023
It's communication (isn't it always?). In particular, the kind of project failure that is standard in organisations running on a constipated emotional culture of fear and suppression — where everyone is rationally protecting their own position and not voicing what's really on their mind. A
Read the note ↗2 Oct 2023
For The Wild is a media organisation focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism — a podcast, films and zines amounting to 'an anthology of the Anthropocene.' Why not st
Read the note ↗2 Oct 2023
A playfully provocative call for 'every curious human to do science and post it on the internet,' with a so-true-it-hurts analysis of establishment science. 'Professions are bundles of weak-link interventions; they keep out quacks, but they also keep out revolutionaries. They enforce stand
Read the note ↗9 Sep 2023
There's a Death Cab for Cutie lyric: 'every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time.' Life is inherently volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and while we all implicitly know this, we still fear uncertainty and strive to create order out of chaos — 'our way of organizing the cacophony
Read the note ↗9 Sep 2023
'Our computers made us think like them… break the silo.' Capacities is an intriguing personal knowledge management tool that offers to create a network of thoughts by connecting objects the way we naturally structure information. If you're the sort of person who gets excited by bullet jour
Read the note ↗9 Sep 2023
Tenochtitlan was once the largest city in the Americas and capital of the Aztec Empire, until its conquest by the Spanish in the 1500s. Modern-day Mexico City is built on top of its ruins, using stone repurposed from temples demolished after the city's capture. Thomas Kole has combined dro
Read the note ↗9 Sep 2023
A scripted comedy that updates the time-honoured tradition of farcically absurdist British radio-plays for the podcast age. In the small village of Piffling, siblings Rudyard and Antigone Funn battle to keep their ramshackle undertaking business afloat after a slick new competitor arrives
Read the note ↗9 Sep 2023
Hannah Arendt said that irony is a kind of action, because it represents an unwillingness or inability to put up with nonsense. At the Legal Lullabies website you can close your eyes, drift away, and join the 1% of technology users who claim to have read the full terms and conditions of In
Read the note ↗12 Aug 2023
A fun and factual five-minute explainer on why leaves falling on train tracks create a slimy black sludge that bonds to the rails, making it hard for trains to slow down — and the complicated, expensive logistics of what to do about it. The Half as Interesting channel specialises in this k
Read the note ↗12 Aug 2023
It hadn't occurred to me to have a favourite punctuation mark until a friend declared hers to be the em-dash in a list of 'odd favourites.' It's mine too. And, as this article makes clear, how oddly expressive of one's character it is: 'the dash often serves as the butterfly leaf on the di
Read the note ↗