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.
27 Jul 2025
In Aotearoa New Zealand, tangi are traditional Māori funerals that mix deep ceremony with everyday acts of service. What starts as Liam Rātana's memory of digging his first grave becomes a meditation on the physical, emotional and cultural weight of the role — a window into tikanga around
Read the note ↗27 Jul 2025
A wiki for world-changers — less manifesto, more how-to — covering everything from organising a protest to surviving burnout. You can dip into comms strategies, facilitation tips, or the fine art of not accidentally replicating the very systems you're resisting. Collaborative, scrappy and
Read the note ↗27 Jul 2025
French street artist Mantra creates large-scale murals of insects, birds and natural specimens with near-photographic detail — often depicting creatures as preserved specimens, accurate down to the wing veins and antennae. A decorative commentary on biodiversity loss and the way urban spac
Read the note ↗13 Jul 2025
For anyone still wrestling with self-doubt in spaces that weren't built for them. Reshma Saujani reframes imposter syndrome not as a personal failing but as a scheme rooted in systemic bias — tracing its cousin to 'bicycle face,' a fake medical condition invented in the 1890s to scare wome
Read the note ↗13 Jul 2025
A wide-ranging reflection on the strange theatre of the placebo — how it works because of what we project onto it. Placebos aren't lies, Rob Horning suggests, but collaborative fictions: their magic lies in context, ritual and the choreography of care. He goes further — what if art, advert
Read the note ↗13 Jul 2025
Adam Mastroianni takes a hard look at peer review — the backbone of how science claims to know what's true — and argues that after sixty years it has largely failed its own experiment: missing errors and fraud, slowing progress, pressuring scientists to play safe. But he invites us to trea
Read the note ↗13 Jul 2025
'A world where everyone leaves their mark is a world full of craters.' Chats with the Void is a small comic about existentialism and skulls by Seattle-based artist Skullbird — featuring, in their words, 'shameless amounts of colorful talking animals.' Gentle, funny, and quietly profound.
Read the note ↗13 Jul 2025
A short animation of a samurai whose meditation is disturbed by an annoying fly. Peace, it suggests, doesn't have to mean being somewhere with no noise, trouble or hard work — it can mean being in the midst of those things and still calm in your heart.
Read the note ↗29 Jun 2025
Baggage, a short film from the Aardman Animation Studio Academy, follows three girlfriends checking in at the airport — but one is carrying a little more than the others. It reimagines airport security as a scan for self-doubt, asking what we carry, what we hide, and what might happen if i
Read the note ↗29 Jun 2025
What are we really translating when we borrow a structure from another language? It seems simple — three lines, seventeen syllables — but Japanese syllables don't map onto English ones, and strict adherence often misses the point: the heart of haiku is extreme minimalism, not math. An invi
Read the note ↗29 Jun 2025
The years 1900–1914 were a time of existential whiplash — the 'vertigo years,' as historian Philipp Blom called them. As cities became metropolises, people's sense of self fractured under overstimulation; nervous exhaustion became the ailment of the age, X-rays the new magic trick, electri
Read the note ↗29 Jun 2025
'Welcome to the internet's fridge wall! Drag words around to make poems! Have fun and be nice.' A charming shared fridge-magnet poetry site — the main wall is gloriously congested, but you can make your own, and there's even a Grokkist wall to play around on.
Read the note ↗