Hi! Welcome to the twenty-fourth issue of The Good Side of the Internet! Super glad to have you here. For a brief run-down on what all the hullabaloo is about, please visit the About page for this publication.
This newsletter has been split into two sections. The first is external links that I truly adored, sometimes with my own little endorsements. The second is similar, but within Substack. There once was a third, compiling all the recommended readings on over the last month. I’ve since discontinued the mini-TGSotI, so all links can be found in one place, right here.
All of these are Highly Recommended (by me). Please do heed the trigger warnings if they’re present. For access to paywalled essays, feel free to reach out. I’m always open to discuss/debate/listen to your opinions about any of these links and would probably ascend to a higher plane of joy.
Happy reading!
PS: For (mostly) weekly sometimes-nonsensical-sometimes-profound-sometimes-toopersonal micro-essays, poetry, and song recommendations, I’d be happy to have you over at .
TGSotI Reviewed
When I blush, I get so red that people point it out. What should I do? | Jessica DeFino, The Guardian
Hi Ugly,
In the past year I have stopped wearing makeup and am feeling a lot more confident in living life with my natural face. The only issue is that when I get embarrassed or offended I tend to blush and go bright red. People then exclaim, “You’re going red!” which makes it even worse. I used to cover my skin with foundation, which was a comfort blanket. I feel the only way to hide this is to wear foundation, but I don’t want to go back. Please help!
– Flushed Out
We should all be so lucky, Flushed Out! People pay $25bn a year to look like you.
The Texan Doctor and the Disappeared Saudi Princesses | Heidi Blake, The New Yorker (tw: alcohol & substance abuse)
Four daughters in the royal family were kept drugged and imprisoned for almost two decades. A physician who tried to free them speaks out for the first time.
The Language of Stamps in the 19th Century | National Geographic, video
Popularized by young couples in the Victorian period, stamps were once used to symbolize a number of romantic messages. From a heartfelt "I am always thinking of you" to a wishful "When are you coming to see me?", many secret conversations were had thanks to stamps.
A Head Is a Territory of Light | Tan Tuck Ming, The Yale Review
The first neurologist I see is convinced that I know his son. I’m seventeen, and his son, a few years older than me, apparently went to the same high school. It is only when the doctor gives a milky smile—the squareness of his jowls and the lips that seem to move only horizontally—that the face of the boy he is talking about flashes in my mind. The neurologist tells me that nothing irregular showed up on the scan he ordered, but he has tracked the dysfunction to a part of the brain stem, the little adapter cable from the mind to the spinal cord. He shows me an informational diagram of a brain during a migraine, pointing at the slow wave of unusual activity rippling through it, the blood vessels twisting erratically.
Ten Love Letters to the Earth | Thich Nhat Hanh, Emergence Magazine
Dear Mother Earth,
Every time I step upon the Earth, I will train myself to see that I am walking on you, my Mother. Every time I place my feet on the Earth I have a chance to be in touch with you and with all your wonders. With every step I can touch the fact that you aren’t just beneath me, dear Mother, but you are also within me. Each mindful and gentle step can nourish me, heal me, and bring me into contact with myself and with you in the present moment.
Victoria’s Secret marketing exec on reimagining a ‘canceled’ brand in the UK market | Kendra Barnett, The Drum
After a fall from grace in 2019, Victoria’s Secret is rebounding with a more inclusive message and stronger, more local targeting tactics in the UK market.
A szív kertje (The Garden of Heart) | Oliver Hegyi, Short of the Week, video
“Creativity takes courage” – Henri Matisse’s words feel especially fitting when watching Olivér Hegyi’s surreal yet deeply relatable short, A szív kertje (The Garden of Heart). Focusing on a young artist grappling with low self-esteem during an interview at the Academy of Fine Arts, this raw and heartfelt animation serves as a powerful reminder that creating meaningful art requires vulnerability – a trait this film embodies in abundance.
Why did Oasis break up? A timeline of Britpop’s most painful fallout | Mark Beaumont & Ed Power, The Telegraph
Threats have been made, personal insults exchanged, plums thrown… The Gallaghers’ sibling rivalry may be over, but how did it begin?
200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness | Maria Popova, The Marginalian
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction | Ursula K. Le Guin, Still Moving
In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn't even work hard at it-- much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else's field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour work week.
Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn't have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn't the meat that made the difference. It was the story.
BONUS:
Breathing with the Forest | Marshmallow Laser Feast, Emergence Magazine
We imagine ourselves as sealed-off individuals, but we are inextricably embedded in a web of life. Our bodies are porous, suffused with the world around us, home to thousands of microscopic symbiotic inhabitants; with each breath, we exchange parts of ourselves with the wider world. Our connection with trees is particularly intimate—oxygen they exhale flows into our lungs and through our blood, coursing from the heart outward through fractal-like branching arteries to feed every cell in our bodies.
Breathing with the Forest is an experience of deep continuity and reciprocity with a Capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea) in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. Inviting us to see inside its hidden pathways, this multimedia journey brings us into relationship with the rhythmic interchange of breath that keeps the forest—and us—alive. Entering the forest, we step out of our separateness to embody something much more than human.
In-house Links
This section contains links to pieces from different Substack publications.
Comic Relief from
bokeh effect from
Maybe Forever from
That’s a wrap for February ‘25! Feel free to make me the happiest person alive by reaching out to discuss any of it. For weekly poetry and song recommendations, plus a sometimes-nonsensical-sometimes-profound-sometimes-toopersonal micro-essay, we’d be happy to have you over at
.If you’d like, please share this with your friends. Or your mother. Or on your Instagram story that you share a Spotify link on once in six months. Or anybody who you think would enjoy it. I am deeply passionate about telling people what to read.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month!