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 Jun 2025
Two early-jazz devotees from Osaka revive a now-rare tradition: the dual swing guitar style. With vintage tones and impeccable timing, Yuji Kamihigashi and Hirofumi Asaba breathe new life into this Gershwin standard — a small, joyful act of keeping something beautiful alive.
Read the note ↗15 Jun 2025
At Denmark's Roskilde Festival — so large it temporarily becomes the country's fourth-largest city — everything runs on rhythm, revelry and refundables. Amid the beer cans and bass drops, another system quietly sustains it all: hundreds of bottle collectors, mostly from Romania and West Af
Read the note ↗15 Jun 2025
The design studio behind Switzerland's new passport treated it as a chance to showcase both technical prowess and aesthetic vision — a security document that's also a love letter to Swiss topography. Each page features 3D-rendered cartographic landscapes; under UV light, alpine contour lin
Read the note ↗15 Jun 2025
What do we mean when we say someone is prowling? Or that they hawk, badger, ape, hound, or parrot? Why do so many animal verbs describe things people do to each other, and not kindly? Amie Souza Reilly sits with the quiet discomfort of being watched, first by neighbours and then by languag
Read the note ↗15 Jun 2025
Greenland is not the size of Africa — Africa is over 14 times bigger — but you wouldn't know it from most classroom maps, thanks to the Mercator projection distorting sizes to preserve shape. This interactive map lets you drag countries around the globe to compare their actual size: an ins
Read the note ↗15 Jun 2025
The quirky ceramic sculptures of Japanese artist En Iwamura feel like emissaries from a parallel dimension — wobbly, cheerful and deeply intentional. Rooted in haniwa burial figures, Zen gardens and Jomon pottery, his work explores the Japanese concept of Ma: the negative space between thi
Read the note ↗1 Jun 2025
A clear-eyed reflection on journalism's mythos and its limits. Sam Kahn grew up chasing the dream of the capital-J Journalist who could unearth injustice and spark reform by the force of well-crafted prose — but traces how that ideal folded into 'the view from nowhere,' the myth of the neu
Read the note ↗1 Jun 2025
Hundreds of one-minute, handheld videos of parks — just that. No narration, no viral hooks, just people showing up to record their local patch of grass and sky. A collective love letter to public space that feels like the kind of internet we once hoped for: idiosyncratic, heartfelt, deeply
Read the note ↗1 Jun 2025
Aby Warburg is best known as a boundary-breaking art historian who saw visual culture as a long memory across time. But in 1921, during a stay in a psychiatric hospital, he penned an extraordinary document — part confession, part cosmology — grappling with the idea that he might be a werew
Read the note ↗1 Jun 2025
Most of us have needed to convert a file and ended up on some sketchy site full of ads, limits and upsells. VERT is different — open-source, private by default, and thoughtfully designed. It handles images, audio, documents and video, with most processing done locally in your browser. No a
Read the note ↗1 Jun 2025
Another deeply good use of the internet. Wildlife rehabilitators wrap owls in fabric so they can be weighed, treated and fed — otherwise the owls get in a flap. The result: loads of pictures of owls in towels. 'We like to see owls in towels, because it means people are helping owls. No ads
Read the note ↗18 May 2025
Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom once suggested up to half of all depression might really be a crisis of meaning — an existential sickness. 'If nothing matters, it should not matter that nothing matters… and yet, somehow, it does.' This piece weaves through philosophers, psychotherapists and poets
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