The Internet Personified: Monday Link List

All the reading you need to procrastinate your work week

Hello my darling dolphins!

Starting this week, I’m doing a new thing which is retiring my regular links at the bottom of each post and instead putting them all into one glorious edition which I will attempt to send you once a week (the day might vary and also depending on the week, some weeks are slow—for me, I have v specific interests—so it might also be a ten day thing). This is because even though my open rate is super high (yay us!) not that many of you are clicking on the links. Maybe it’s because my essays are too long? Maybe you think you’ll come back to them and don’t? WHO KNOWS.

literally me reading the internet every morning with all my tabs open

I personally LOVE link round-ups, I subscribe to several newsletters that do the same thing, so here we go, for fellow aficionados, and everyone else, I have a long thing lined up for this week as well, so you can ignore this and just wait for the next.

And if you can’t read past the paywall, use 12 feet, which usually works for most things.

• 50 of the weirdest corners of the web: As advertised: a list of the “weirdest” corners of the internet, which aren’t weird so much as slightly obscure. Radiooo is on it, which is a website I enjoy.

• A writer attends the Frankfurt Book Fair: Two words: “yikes” and “don’t.”

• The wild quest to invent a fake Indian Cricket League: Do you remember this story from a few years ago where a bunch of people in a random Indian village pretended like they were in a big stadium and played fake matches which they streamed? The real story is a lot more murky.

• Orange is the new yolk: On why we like our eggs to look a certain way. My best line from the article was this one: “Egg carton marketing, which is at best opaque and at worst a pernicious lie, would have us believe that the hens who imparted these eggs to the bourgeois grocery shopping class are twirling through pastoral fields like Maria in The Sound of Music.”

• One big article about how this woman’s friends’ babies were ruining their relationship which maybe weren’t that strong to begin with and a nice measured response. Anyway, I feel like this skews very much US, since I haven’t faced the same problems in India and in Germany, kids are just brought along to gatherings as a matter of course.

• Hurts so good: On why so many young women were using their chronic illnesses as a way to get likes on TikTok and similar.

• La Dolce Vita: And my favourite read of the week, an apprentice chef works in a “home style” kitchen in Italy and learns many things. This story has all the tones of a coming of age movie set in the summer, complete with a plucky heroine.

  That’s what I’ve got! If you liked this issue or any of my others, please buy me a coffee. Your support is the wind beneath my wings etc.

Of course, chime in with your own recs in the comment section.

Have a great week! See you v soon in your inboxes with more regular programming.

xx

m