Hi! Welcome to the ninth 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, but I’ve decided to discontinue 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
What Does A Happily Ever After Look Like?* | Alice Liang, The Pudding
Over the last few years, romance made its way back to my consciousness, both the result of love saturating my real life and a desire for escapist hope in the bleak pandemic months. I’ve discovered many romance plots that reflect women navigating career choices, friendship, and sexuality. Having more books that featured protagonists of color, navigating their experiences and finding joy at the end of it all, painted fuller possibilities for my life. This trend of approachability has been most clear to me in the changes in romance novels’ cover art. What comes to mind when imagining the archetypical romance novel might be either a scantily clad man clutching a fainting lady, or a colorful pop illustration with big block text.
TGSotI Review: Another month, another masterpiece from The Pudding. This one gathers and analyses jacket covers of romance novels from the 1950’s to 2021 on separate metrics of raunchiness, illustration, and diversity. You can check out the examples that support the comparisons using the sliders provided, and the methodology used to conduct the research. It also has a fun feature to add any book that stands out to your TBR list. As always, super interesting, super illuminating, and super fun. Highly Recommend!
To the Groundskeeper of Lodi Garden | Tania Malik, Off Assignment
Whenever we ran into each other during the couple of years I spent back home, it was always the same—you strolling toward us when we came into view as I pulled out my earbuds. Follow the ko-kila call of the rufous treepies, you coaxed; watch out for the pack of stray dogs who would bark ferociously apropos of some perceived threat but retreat quickly; wander around the crenelated monuments of glazed cerulean tiles where the lime-green parakeets swoop down from the laurel figs; step off the bridge and look for the white-throated kingfisher that is a sparkle of electric blue searching for insects and frogs by the banks of the lake. Tread surely toward the heart of the park, you urged.
TGSotI Review: A personal history that’s seamlessly interwoven with beautiful descriptions of the Lodi Garden in New Delhi in the form of a letter. I’m so endeared by the anthology this essay is a part of titled Letter to a Stranger, and this particular one revolves around the themes of home, belonging, and the maze-like route to peace of mind.
The Protagonist Is Never in Control* | Emily Fox Kaplan, Guernica (tw: abuse)
As a child, you learned that, in the scariest stories, the protagonist never had the power. But now you’ll understand, in life and in your craft, that the protagonist is never in control. Only the narrator is.
TGSotI Review: The moment I read this, I knew I had to share it with you all. An incredibly personal piece that’s so stark in its narration, somehow made even more impactful by its second-person perspective. I felt the rage and the sadness, the resolve and the foreboding, and this is truly one of the best personal essays I’ve come across. Highly Recommend!
The Glitch Gallery (website)
Welcome to the Glitch Gallery, an online exhibition of pretty software bugs! This is a museum of accidental art, an enthusiastic embrace of mistakes, a celebration of emergent beauty. Below you can browse the exhibits in our collection. Keep scrolling down to see them in more detail!
The big sleep: a photography book captures subjects in slumber (photography collection)
‘About five years ago I was trying to realise a way where the approach towards the trigger would somehow be directly reflected in the image. How can the pressure craft the physicality upon the trigger that generates the exposure? I had this old exercise pull-up bar. I would physically pull myself up while squeezing the cable release to make an image. A step further was to somehow dismiss the awareness of the approach, so sleep became the plot but photography is the story.’
Mary Oliver on the Mystery of the Human Psyche, the Secret of Great Poetry, and How Rhythm Makes Us Come Alive* | Maria Popova, The Marginalian
In her altogether magnificent 1994 book A Poetry Handbook, Oliver teases apart the mechanisms by which poetry enchants us, exploring the magic of rhythm as not only the fire in the belly of poetry but also a gateway into a profound human longing.
TGSotI Review: A lovely compilation of excerpts from Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, all of which shift something within you and make you let out a huge sigh after reading them. I truly love her poetry, and this examination of her prose on the subject was an absolute delight to consume. Highly Recommend!
Migratory Flights | Dženana Vucic, Sydney Review of Books
In Bosnia, I learned to speak my mother tongue, albeit haltingly; to drink coffee short and strong and sweet; to cook grah with Vegemite in place of suho meso. I learned, too, that I had been gone too long, that I could not stay.
TGSotI Review: Spanning war and its generational impacts, home and its geographical elusiveness, all following the migratory patterns of birds surrounding Bosnia and the southern hemisphere, this personal essay is a first hand narration of the author’s own experiences with navigation of identity, family, and motherland, but also a frank report of violence and life in Bosnia, Berlin, and Australia.
Mere Belief | Sallie Tisdale, Harper’s Magazine
Memory is mostly accurate, most of the time. We agree on the general picture of what happened far more often than we don’t. In this sense, what I remember of the past is basically true. But for a writer, the details are everything. What shifts are often the small details.
TGSotI Review: This memoir explores the function of memory in the writing of a memoir - a literary Matryoshka doll. Traversing the subjects of memory reliability, the scientific basis of how the brain stores memories, how much of memoir can be fabricated and how much of it is actually remembered, and Ebbinghaus’ “curve of forgetting” which plots the rate at which we forget, it utilises personal history itself to shed light on the style of literature.
It's not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird. | Rob Price, Business Insider India
With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they're posting much more often. The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it's the content of the posts that's shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world's strangest social networks.
The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever | Charlotte Alter, TIME
In a neat little neighborhood in Venice, Calif., there’s a block of squat, similar homes, filled with mortals spending their finite days on the planet eating pizza with friends, blowing out candles on birthday cakes, and binging late-night television. Halfway down the street, there’s a cavernous black modern box. This is where Bryan Johnson is working on what he calls “the most significant revolution in the history of Homo sapiens.”
TGSotI Review: I inhaled this profile with a sort of horrified fascination. What a terrible way to live; but also, what an interesting thing to read about. It made me consider what exactly seems so fascinating about the idea of living forever, and give thanks for all the functioning systems within my body.
BONUS–
In-house Links
This section contains links to pieces from different Substack publications. The reason I’ve demarcated it is because there’s more room for interaction with the authors here. Again, the ones with the asterisk are personal favourites.
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To move toward fully living from
Distractions from
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That’s a wrap for November ‘23! 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. This is a fresh-out-of-the-oven publication, and I am deeply passionate about telling people what to read.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month!