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.
8 Feb 2026
Adam Neely turns what could've been a cranky 'AI is bad' rant into a rich meditation on what music means — to artists, listeners and communities. A careful walkthrough of the culture forming around tools like Suno: why so many musicians recoil, why some lean in, and where the real stakes l
Read the note ↗8 Feb 2026
A century before your favourite productivity guru, neuroscience pioneer Santiago Ramón y Cajal handed out devastatingly precise diagnoses for what ails the creatively ambitious but motivationally cursed — six 'diseases of the will,' a lovingly savage taxonomy of minds that can't get out of
Read the note ↗8 Feb 2026
A neat fix for a problem every podcast listener knows: you hear something worth remembering, but by the time you try to capture it the moment's gone. Screenshot your player (with a visible timestamp), email it in, and within a minute you get back the clip and a full transcript — no app, no
Read the note ↗8 Feb 2026
A cute and vaguely ominous short film that begins with the familiar ritual of counting sheep — and then lets the sheep grow progressively more surreal as sleep takes hold, each one a little more distorted than the last. It lives in that liminal drift where the mind does its strange work on
Read the note ↗25 Jan 2026
Kahneman gave us fast intuition vs. slow reason. Mathematician David Bessis gently rebels, pointing at what's missing: System 3, the inner bridge where intuition and logic learn to talk to each other. 'When my intuition tells me A and my reason tells me B… that's the moment to resort to Sy
Read the note ↗25 Jan 2026
An ethereal star-spirit journeys back to Istanbul for one final celebration — her birthday, with her grieving family. Tender and imaginative, the animated short follows her through winding streets and unexpected detours, holding a liminal moment between worlds where sorrow and love sit tog
Read the note ↗25 Jan 2026
A disgruntled 79-year-old is gaming UK business-rate exemptions by breeding snails in vacant office blocks (snails are molluscs, molluscs count as aquaculture, farms don't pay rates). That's just the start — there's a claimed mafia connection, an ex-con mollusc wrangler, and councils he ke
Read the note ↗25 Jan 2026
In his photographs of Chongqing, Ximeng Tu captures both a rapidly changing skyline and the emotional terrain of transformation. Grand infrastructure looms over street vendors and stray stairways; green space yields to grey. In the gaps, he finds people improvising daily life in the midst
Read the note ↗25 Jan 2026
An anxious little octopus watches the colourful world from the safety of her shell. She wants to explore, but fear holds her back — and it's only through small moments of safety and spark that she finds the courage to step into the current. For anyone who hesitates to fully swim, a gentle
Read the note ↗21 Dec 2025
A stop-motion short about a worm stuck in a soulless remote job — equal parts funny and uncomfortably accurate about corporate claustrophobia. Pairs well with The Cat Empire's Wild Animals, a musical antidote whose chorus ('Don't let them kill the wild animals inside of you') picks up wher
Read the note ↗21 Dec 2025
When Tonga's undersea internet cable was severed by a 2022 volcanic eruption, the island was suddenly snapped off from the digital world — banks froze, remittances halted, families couldn't reach loved ones. The way Tongans responded, falling back on radio, oral communication and local res
Read the note ↗21 Dec 2025
Yoshie Shiratori escaped four times from some of Japan's most secure prisons, each time through sheer ingenuity and a refusal to be broken — in one case corroding his handcuffs by spitting miso soup on them daily, then dislocating his shoulders to squeeze through. Every wild detail is hist
Read the note ↗