January ‘24
The Eleventh Side
Hi! Welcome to the eleventh issue of The Good Side of the Internet, and happy new year! 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, but I’ve discontinued the mini-TGSotI, so all links can be found in one place, right here.The ones with the little asterisk next to them come 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!
TGSotI Reviewed
“Let Movies Be Movies” Begs the Question - What Are Movies?* | The Swaddle
Once the ‘toxic’ trend of cancel culture underwent collective reconsideration, it gave birth to its current off-spring, stan culture. The current milieu, characterized by a heightened sensitivity to unfavourable commentary has epitomised the rhetoric of “let movies be movies.” The pushback against critique has not only attempted to sideline any voice of disapproval but has also evolved into disconcerting acts of abusing, threatening, and even doxing critics.
TGSotI Review: Another month, another certifiable banger from The Swaddle. I love the examination of this increase in backlash to critique, the lack of room for level-headed discussions about subjectivity and objectivity in art in the face of stan culture, and just what sinister connotation exists behind the phrase ‘Let movies be movies’. Highly Recommend!
Murmurations | swissmiss
A Work of Love | Orion Magazine
Before gay marriage was legal, illustrator John Megahan was called to work on a revolutionary secret project: bringing to life, in painstaking scientific detail, the queer lives of the animal world.
TGSotI Review: From the Longreads review - The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.”
“Intimacy in the Telling”: A Conversation with Maggie Smith* | The Rumpus
Proximity contaminates, warned the Roman poet Ovid. In his book on the art of love, Ovid urged others not to look at the source of passion. Writer Maggie Smith resists this strategy of avoidance in her poems and essays. Maintaining that tenderness is messy, love is painful, and life cannot afford to look away from the fire in the living room, Smith studies herself from the interior in her bestselling memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria, 2023).
TGSotI Review: I fell in love with Maggie Smith’s work for the first time when I came across her poem Good Bones (which I’ve spoken about in
here. Since then, every poem of hers that I have sought out or stumbled upon have been absolute delights to read. This interview – where she speaks about writing trauma in real time, the usage of ellipsis, the relation to the unsaid in her works, and the inherent lyricism of the memoir – was so so lovely. Highly Recommend!Damages | The Atavist
An ob-gyn in Virginia performed unnecessary surgeries on patients for decades. When his victims learned the truth, they fought back.
TGSotI Review: An in-depth investigative piece about women’s agency over their own bodies and medical malpractice, with shocking and disheartening revelations at every turn.
Hungry for Education* | The Swaddle
If you want to know the story of education in the country, look at the food in the mess halls. Student roll call lists show who is enrolled, but dining halls show who was truly meant to enrol. Last month, a student at IIT-Bombay was fined a hefty fee of Rs. 10,000 for protesting against vegetarian separation in the dining hall. The institute’s disproportionately harsh response to a peaceful act of protest is telling of the fact that notions of food “purity” in the country extend far beyond respecting individual preferences.
TGSotI Review: Back in September last year, I had shared this piece from The Swaddle, about the IIT crisis. Hungry for Education is another critical examination of the culture at these institutions, and how, even after entering the college, doors remain closed. Exploring caste dynamics, ‘scientific temper’, what the ‘desired elite’ look like, and the real issue - who are these institutes meant for? Highly Recommend!
Ahead of Time - On Poetry and Mourning | The Yale Review
Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone. When my sister would come home from college, I would sometimes go into her room and just sit there, hoping she would ask me about what felt at the time to me like the major dramas of my life (I would have been fourteen, fifteen). I was too shy to raise them with her. Now she was drifting away and I was in that same room, holding a book of hers from those same years, her notes inside, and all I could do was read to myself.
TGSotI Review: Heartbreaking and beautiful - Kamran Javadizadeh looks at the passing of his sister, the years and the treatments leading up to it, with poetry and pain. Seamlessly intertwined with his family’s experience of moving from Iran to California in his childhood, holding the image of his young daughter up to the one of his dying sister, poems from Langston Hughes, Shelley, and Sharon Olds, and the Persian practice of asking Hafez what the future holds.
On Beauty and Violence* | Guernica
And now I do the thing I have always hesitated to do — no longer defending, but attacking.
TGSotI Review: From the Longreads review - It can be appealing to try to blow the dust off the old you and reinvent yourself in a place where you’re a stranger. As N.C. Happe recounts her move to Canada in this beautiful but sometimes difficult read for Guernica, she recalls her Minnesota childhood and her father’s dark moods and explosive temper alongside the casual—and sometimes invited—violence of the playground. Cinematic details make this essay an immersive read. You can hear a dying deer bleat and imagine its accidental and untimely death. You can feel the author’s cracked dry lips; you can taste the copper when they bleed. “The realization dawned: violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere,” she writes. “For me, it took leaving the country to learn this. For the doe from my childhood home, it had been as simple and as quietly done as jumping a fence.” What Happe shows us through this thoughtful piece is that while sometimes you can jump the fence and leave home, you might be surprised by what you’re unable to leave behind.
Your Brain on Books: You Are What You Read | Tufts Magazine
Picture yourself as I think of you at this moment, sprawled on a beach towel with your summer reading finally beside you—the latest Nora Ephron, perhaps, or A Thousand Splendid Suns (and, of course, Tufts Magazine). You may not realize it as you shake the sand off the page and prepare to enter the world of print, but you and your brain are about to embark on a life-altering journey. In part, the journey is an intellectual one. As the French novelist Marcel Proust observed a century ago, reading is a kind of sanctuary where human beings have access to thousands of different realities they might otherwise never encounter or understand. Each of these new realities can transform your life without your ever leaving your sandy retreat. But the journey also has a deeply important biological dimension. Cognitive science is shedding light on how our brains reshape themselves as they learn to use the relatively recent invention known as reading. Together, these intellectual and biological processes allow us to grow as readers throughout our lives.
TGSotI Review: I never realised just how much happens in our brains when we read, and how ill-equipped we actually are for all of that to happen. Thoroughly fascinating, and very informative.
BONUS - Cat Singing Blues
In-house Links
This section contains links to pieces from different Substack publications. Again, the ones with the asterisk are personal favourites.
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How it Feels to Brainstorm from
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The Thing That Is Silence from
In Proportion from
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That’s a wrap for January ‘24! 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 article, 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!