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.
12 Oct 2025
Jack Cox's obsessive practice involves sculpting hyper-realistic human heads — lumpy, fleshy, heavy with gravity. The short film trails him through his cramped New York studio and out into the street, which he treats as a way to gather a 'sociological understanding of humanity.' Its style
Read the note ↗12 Oct 2025
A translator who may have written more than he ever translated, Zabihollah Mansouri was one of the most widely read literary figures in Iran — yet many of the works he 'translated' were wildly embellished, or entirely invented. Amir Ahmadi Arian traces his improbable legacy into a meditati
Read the note ↗12 Oct 2025
Martin Wittfooth's large-scale oil paintings depict glowing animals — lions, deer, birds — rendered with classical technique in atmospheric, often post-apocalyptic settings. Fire, flood, decay and detritus coexist with symbolism drawn from myth and ritual. His work reflects on cycles of de
Read the note ↗28 Sep 2025
Love isn't just about finding the right person, but about learning to live more fully with yourself and the world you create together. Chusana Prasertkul traces the arc of her 17-year relationship — from falling for her partner's soul, to discovering her own, to shaping a shared life that
Read the note ↗28 Sep 2025
Danish is famously mocked by its Scandinavian neighbours for sounding like its speakers have a potato lodged in their throat. But how did it get that way? This deep-dive from NativLang tours Old Norse and a cascade of phonological changes — vowel collapse, the distinctive stød, the rise of
Read the note ↗28 Sep 2025
William Kentridge's work is an ongoing conversation with memory, history and the messy act of making — best known for stop-motion charcoal drawings that erase and redraw themselves into being. His nine-part film series Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot, made in his Johannesburg studio during t
Read the note ↗28 Sep 2025
What's it like to spend a week serving popcorn in a Glasgow multiplex? It might look like mindless work, but Lucy Fitzgerald's diary reads more like the thick description of ethnography. 'Every customer interaction is a vignette of personhood: psychological insight moored by food.' Between
Read the note ↗7 Sep 2025
How certain is 'likely'? What about 'possible'? In Cold War intelligence briefings, such phrases — what CIA analyst Sherman Kent called 'lurking weasels' — meant wildly different things to different people: one official read 'serious possibility' as 20%, another as 80%. Adam Kucharski trac
Read the note ↗7 Sep 2025
Steve Mould has a knack for turning everyday curiosities into miniature engineering lectures. Here he shows how wire electrical discharge machining (wire EDM) erodes metal with pinpoint accuracy, creating cuts so fine they're measured in microns. A masterclass in how science turns physical
Read the note ↗7 Sep 2025
'There is no capitalism without functioning financial services. And there are no financial services without the ability to price and manage climate risk.' Collapse-awareness can feel abstract; this offers a starkly tangible preview. When a New Zealand insurer raised premiums for flood-expo
Read the note ↗7 Sep 2025
Barcelona-based artist Vorja Sánchez blends fantasy with scientific wonder, drawing on ancestral myths and the organic forms charted by 19th-century biologists. His 'Interventions' series animates mist and clouds as ghostly beings — eyes, tendrils and bodies emerging in near-transparent wh
Read the note ↗7 Sep 2025
Impressively concise writing and directing are on display in this single-scene short, where a woman arrives at the beach to celebrate an anniversary with her wife. Their conversation, framed against the surf and sunset, feels warm and ordinary — until it opens into something deeper: a medi
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