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Make senseEntangled ValeSnackables

🎧 The Work of the Audiobook

A look inside the exploding popularity of audiobooks, which now make up as much as half of a book's sales. Much as TikTok is changing songwriting, audiobooks are changing the way fiction is written, so it sounds better in the ear — placing increasing importance on narration, though narrato

Grokkist Press

25 June 2023 · 1 minute

The audiobook boom is changing how writers work

lareviewofbooks.org

A look inside the exploding popularity of audiobooks, which now make up as much as half of a book's sales. Much as TikTok is changing songwriting, audiobooks are changing the way fiction is written, so it sounds better in the ear — placing increasing importance on narration, though narrators are usually paid per finished hour and receive no royalties. A return to the oral tradition, but at 1.5x speed. And what about AI narration?

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Surprise meWild Margin

🗞️ The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Nicholas Carr traces a recurring fantasy of modern life: that each new communication technology, from the telegraph to the internet, would produce wiser citizens and healthier democracies — and how each expansion of information instead bred new forms of confusion and overload. At its centr

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedSoma Isles

🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time

A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac

Grokkist Press · 1 min

GroundedEntangled Vale

👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing

Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim

Grokkist Press · 1 min