May ‘24

The Fifteenth Side

Hi! Welcome to the fifteenth 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

thodi

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!

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TGSotI Reviewed

1. I Tried to Forget My Whole Life. I’m Glad I Failed. | John Paul Scotto, Longreads

   The hindsight of an adulthood autism diagnosis.

2. Parallel Lives | website

   just start scrolling…but not too fast, if you want to read the details…see the age of people at every year in history…

3. What’s With All the Tradwife Content?* | Rohitha Naraharisetty, The Swaddle

   The manosphere is a well-established space: it consists of men’s rights activists, incels and pick-up artists, that is, men who specialise in teaching other men how to “pick-up” women. What they all have in common is a shared resentment of women who don’t oblige their desires or fantasies – in other words, women who may not be attracted to them, or who express any kind of independence of agency. The manosphere reveres a specific type of “alpha” man: Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and closer home, Beer Biceps, Fin-fluencers and startup founders. These men aren’t always politically united, but they’re always presenting themselves as symbols of strength and authority: physically, intellectually, and financially. With the manosphere having persisted for so long, it’s only a matter of time before the yin to its yang comes along: the tradwife. She’s the alpha male’s perfect companion and the feminist’s perfect foil. She’s not a “Stacy,” as the incels put it, because she’s chaste, loyal, and submissive. She’s not a feminist because she’s relinquished her independence and has fully embraced domesticity.

4. ‘Did Something Happen to Mom When She Was Young?’ | Jessica Bateman, POLITICO

   The hidden history of the Cold War adoption complex.

5. People Probably Like You More Than You Think | Harvard Business Review

   Do people understand the impressions they make on others or do their anxieties lead them to assume the worst? Across nearly 10 years of research and tens of thousands of observations, the authors have come to this answer: people underestimate how much others like them, and this bias has important implications for how people work together.

6. The devastating poetry of Tamil women who fought in Sri Lanka’s civil war* | Frances Harrison, Himal Southasian

   In exile from Sri Lanka and marginalised abroad, women who once fought in the country’s civil war are almost completely silenced – but through poetry some have found a way to speak out, to remember, to protest, to mourn and to heal

7. The Irrevocable Condition | Hannah Paige, The Rumpus

   Molly McCully Brown writes that all bodies know they have a home inside of them. Birds can fly thousands of miles and land in the exact same pond that they left the previous season. Humans still don’t understand how this is feasible. It’s not so easy for us to demonstrate Brown’s truth. When I woke up on the first morning after moving into my new apartment, I heard birds through my front window, and I knew I was home.

BONUS 1: An artist's understanding of identity and gendered spaces | Devi Seetharam | TEDxKCMT

BONUS 2: WHAT is LOVE

BONUS 3: Lost Sheep | Paper Stop Motion Short Film by Lukas Rooney

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In-house Links

This section contains links to pieces from different Substack publications. Again, the ones with the asterisk are personal favourites.

1. Gwendolyn Brooks's "To the Young Who Want to Die" from

   Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse
   *

   Gwendolyn Brooks's "To the Young Who Want to Die"

2. To be the one that nurtures from

   Human Stuff
   *

   To be the one that nurtures

3. An Argument for Deep Water Swimming from

   Chloé in Newsletter

   An Argument for Deep Water Swimming

4. mermaid in manhattan from

   Dirtbags Through the Ages

   mermaid in manhattan

5. Voices in the mind, echoes in the body from

   Letters from a Muslim Woman

   Voices in the mind, echoes in the body

6. The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life from

   The Convivial Society
   *

   The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life

7. A study of the heart by

   Kristin Posehn
   for
   Both Are True
   *

   A study of the heart (guest post)

8. Age-Fluidity from

   Out of the Blue
   *

   Age-Fluidity

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That’s a wrap for May ‘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

thodi

.

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!

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