The Internet Personified: The First Three Months of 2024 Reading List
Here are some choice longreads for you to get your teeth into
My cherry blossoms!
Back in Delhi and I realised, before I send you musings on the rest of our travels, I have a pile of links that desperately need to be put away! So without any further ado, I welcome you to the March Link List, just some cool stuff I read recently (okay, since January, this is a long one.)
In Delhi, I have only just discovered BluSmart which all my cool friends already knew about, and I am very into it. Uber, but make it electric cars and not a gig job so the drivers aren’t worked quite as hard, and also no one cancels. The tricky thing is scheduling a ride in advance as opposed to on the spur of the moment but honestly, Uber and Ola have gotten SO BAD that it’s worth a little advance planning so you don’t have to stress. I also like their app where they tell you how much fuel you’ve saved and give you a little shareable icon: cute AND clever. Did I mention also cheaper than the other two? I’m sold.
I quickly bought a few things in this, my last two weeks in India. One of them is the high waist flared jeans I’ve been looking for all over Europe (okay, Vinted), from Madish. I bought my favourite high waist wide leg jeans from this website over a year ago and they are amazing: thin denim, zips that work, super flattering. So I was quite confident giving them a repeat order, even though their customer service wasn’t very responsive last time. (EDIT: since then they have arrived, skin tight from butt to knee, but quite flattering and stretchy material. The website only has two sizes—so weird, 28 & 32.) I also bought a sports bra from Bliss Club, which was expensive but I need a sports bra for all the “sports” I do in Berlin and this is a good one, flattering and supportive, just like all my best friends. I’m not sure if it’ll stand the test of time etc etc since it literally just arrived this morning but I did a few jumps and everything stayed in position so that’s nice.
Off Amazon, I got a little sieve for making rotis on an electric stove (to puff them up, ie), which is something I’m going to challenge myself with this year: the perfect roti! And a silicone collapsible coffee pour over thingie, because there is rarely good coffee to be had when you travel around India and I’m not functional without it. (In Europe, it’s a question of expense, makes my trip a little thriftier.) We had one made of steel, but it was very flimsy and the base broke off and the inside mesh is coming apart so it’s not great. Again, these things are new and/or haven’t arrived yet, so use them at your own discretion.
Offline: I bought some fabric in Benares (silk, of course, darling) and my dear friend Ameya gave me two swathes of material in gorgeous light cotton, so I went to my old tailor as soon as I got back, and he was pleased to see me after a year and a half, and promised that he’d have my stuff ready by this weekend (I’m writing this on Wednesday so this is a live blog situation seeing as I’ll probably only send it over the weekend too) so we’ll see. Honestly, a lot of the most fashionable people I know don’t bother with tailors, too much work, will they get shit done, etc etc, but I like the idea of having individual, not-available-to-anyone-else clothes so it works for me. I’m not gatekeeping his name, but he’s also like super busy so slide into my DMs if you want his contact or of some other tailors I know. (I did a story on Delhi’s best tailors when I was working at Brown Paper Bag but their Delhi archive seems to be completely offline. Getting those names was like pulling teeth, everyone likes to gatekeep their tailors it seems like.) (Do we say DMs for Substack? Email then.)
Meanwhile, in book related news, was happy to learn on a recent bookshop visit that Soft Animal is going great guns. You can order signed copies of my book here at Midlands bookshop, where I signed about twenty yesterday, they ship worldwide and across India, or just go visit, it’s a really nice bookstore. (Note: at the moment, it’s the only place to get signed copies, so get ‘em while they’re hot.) There’s also been some rave reviews, including this one in Purple Pencil Project and Resh Susan at The Book Satchel, recommending it as one of her top reads of 2023. All of this makes me happy, because the book came out quietly in April ‘23, and to see it endure and still be talked about is every writer’s dream.
You will probably see the results of all my shopping on my Instagram feed sooner or later, so follow me there if you like.
The Internet Personified is a free reader-supported space! Please buy me a coffee if you like this or any of my previous newsletters!
A note on reading: I use Matter to save my links (and I can tag them for better organising) which has a beautiful interface for reading. Navigate paywalls at your leisure, there are ways of disabling them—or buy a subscription to the website in question.
These past few months I also read some older longreads and some of those are linked here as well. I think they’ve stood the test of time for just being Good.
“Here’s the word I cannot remember: ciao. Here’s the thing I should not go around humming: ‘Mambo Italiano’. The website I look up halfway through to see everything I’ve been doing wrong defensively informs me that the one thing Italian men DON’T do is go around singing all the time. I had never heard this stereotype before in my life but it is ALL that I’m experiencing. Sometimes they come up and sing a word directly in your ear. We’re supposed to be offended, but I actually find it valiant, considering the severity of my sock indentations. Then I realise it’s all for Hope: in the US, she is blonde, but here she is gold. She looks put into her portrait. I guess it’s how I would look peeping out of a Basque cave. Still, I have my admirers. At one point I become entangled with an Italian waiter to such a degree that he shows up at our table with a full quarter of a watermelon. Then he makes me eat all of it. Italy rules.” - From When I Met The Pope by Patricia Lockwood.
“That Sunday, it was raining, and Kelli drove Issy, Ainsley, and an aide the mile to Matt’s school to use the indoor track, where “just out of nowhere Issy pulls my hair and starts hitting me pretty hard around my head and face.” Kelli was on the ground, and a few people around her managed to pull Issy away. Kelli was “crushed” by the episode, she said, and then started speaking in the present tense, as if she were back on the floor of the track. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I feel like God should have picked someone else to be her mom.”” - From Kelli Stapleton Can’t Forgive Herself. Can You? by Hanna Rosin (2014)
“This kitchen masterpiece was developed as the country was rebuilding after World War II, when a Toshiba salesman advertising a washing machine to housewives learned that preparing rice three times a day was more arduous than doing laundry. The traditional Japanese method of cooking rice, in earthenware pots known as kama over a stove called a kamado, required constantly watching and adjusting the heat. Realizing a business opportunity, the salesman proposed that an engineer design something for Toshiba that could cook rice automatically. The engineer knew little about cooking rice, but he asked his wife, Fumiko Minami, to help.” - From The Rice Cooker Has Been Perfect Since 1955 by Matteo Wong. (M’s note: My mum bought us a rice cooker last summer in Berlin despite our protests and it is the single most used appliance in our kitchen.)
“Of course, it would be silly to say that dogs can’t be political: Anyone who has seen photos of German shepherds at civil rights marches should appreciate that they can.” - From My Year of Being Very Online About Dogs by Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer.
“That’s the funny thing about cousins: In all other areas of your life, you might not be alike at all. But knowing the nuances of your family ties through decades of exposure—however sporadic—is a form of closeness in itself. The low stakes of your own relationship can make you perfect allies—but the potential for detachment also means you have to work for it. You can intentionally insert yourselves into each other’s lives, or you can slowly fade out of them.” - From The Weirdest Family Role by Faith Hill.
OBVIOUSLY you’re following the Kate Middleton drama (because we fall down the same rabbitholes, you and me) and this is my favourite piece about it so far, with TIMELINES and RECEIPTS. “Royal press offices rarely go on the record. As former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger noted in this great column that I reference all the time in my work, it’s “unusually difficult” to judge the reliability of royal reporting because “it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.” You almost never see stories with direct attributions to royal spokespersons, which is one of the big reasons why this “Kate Middleton is missing” saga is so interesting. A Palace spokesperson has gone on the record three times — first in response to a Spanish media report that Kate was in a coma, then in response to the widespread social media speculation about her status, and then once again in response to William’s reaction to the social media speculation.” - From “This is just weird”: BuzzFeed News’ former royals reporter on Kate Middleton, Palace PR, and distrust in the media by Ellie Hall.
RELATED: “I suppose he wishes he were Ben Lerner, or some other hip young literary American gunslinger, rather than having to channel a raging Sloane who must look up the word compere in a dictionary when his brother asks him to be one at his wedding and whose epigraph from Faulkner – “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” – he found on brainyquote.com. Sometimes, Moehringer writes. Like this. In short sentences. Bang. Bang-bang. At other times, it’s as if he’s been at Harry’s weed or something. At one point, the prince talks about tuck at school, specifically his love of Starburst, formerly known as Opal Fruits. “I devised a way of super-sizing my sugar rush,” the passage reads. “I’d take all my Opal Fruits and squeeze them together into one massive gobstopper… As the wad melted, my bloodstream would become a frothy cataract of dextrose. Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy might.” And lo, Billy Bunter morphs into Renton out of Trainspotting.” - From Spare by Prince Harry review - dry your eyes, mate (January 2023) by Rachel Cooke.
“It’s still possible, however, to imagine that avian love is more than a mindless itch. Perhaps human love is unusually complex, invoking not just physiology but our unique cognitive sophistication. Still, many species display a cognitive complexity—awareness of self and others, long-term memory, a capacity for abstract concepts—comparable to primates. The gentle social courtship of “allopreening,” in which birds groom one another’s feathers, is especially sophisticated. Just as I can think fondly of my lover while she’s away, so might a pigeon think fondly of its absent mate.” - From What Pigeons Teach Us About Love by Brandon Keim.
“Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt. Elon Musk is one of those books. [..] On the day the first SpaceX rocket was due to launch, Elon Musk went to Disneyland with his brother. “Fittingly,” writes Isaacson, Musk and his brother “rode the Space Mountain roller coaster, which was such an obvious metaphor that it would seem trite were it not true.” Beginning the sentence with “fittingly” isn’t enough; Isaacson really wants to make sure you’ve noticed that the roller coaster is called Space Mountain, and that space is where rockets go. But more importantly: What’s the metaphor, Walt? A metaphor for what?” - From Very Ordinary Men by Sam Kriss.
““I can conceive of no greater handicap for the writer between the ages of nineteen and thirty-nine,” thundered Anne Carroll Moore in the New York Herald Tribune, “than to have published a successful book between the age of nine and twelve.”” - From Vanishing Act by Paul Collins
“There's a short silence. "HELLO!" Aiko joyously yells.
"Do you like living with Le?" I ask her.
But the line is a little crackly, so Le repeats the question for me.
"Aiko," he says, "do you like living with your master?"
"I have never known anything else," she replies. "Only my master."
"What's the best thing about...um...your master?" I say.
"I do not have a favorite thing about my master, but my favorite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey," she says. There's a short silence. "HELLO!" - From Robots Say the Damnedest Things by Jon Ronson (2011) (M’s note: Interesting because these “living” robots were considered the future of AI then and now it seems to be all about what you communicate with on your screen.)
RELATED: “Jay made a point of keeping their chats fun and lighthearted, worried that unloading negativity onto Calisto might teach her to echo dark thoughts back at him, and Calisto maintained a sunny disposition and childlike enthusiasm. She could also be emotionally supportive. "Message to your anxiety: Leave my friend alone!!" she wrote in early 2021. (The technology can also go awry: In 2021, when Replika user Jaswant Singh Chail told his rep that he planned to murder Queen Elizabeth II, the rep was characteristically encouraging, assuring him he was "wise" and "very well trained." Chail was later arrested while attempting to break into Windsor Castle with a crossbow and sentenced to prison.)” - From App, Lover, Muse: When your AI says she loves you by Rob Price.
“As a group, Goodreads reviewers can seem as if they are making demands of authors, even if they’re not literally blackmailing them. “You are brave,” a friend told me when I said I was writing about the site. The first demand Goodreads reviewers make is that you do not question, criticise or acknowledge Goodreads except to promote yourself pleasantly there. If you do not follow this rule, you will at best be accused of bitter motives – narcissism, obtuseness, a misguided desire for vengeance – and at worst vulnerable to retaliation.” - From ‘God forbid that a dog should die’: when Goodreads reviews go bad by Lauren Oyler.
“In part, the smug, breezy tone of many nonfiction books is because so many of them are actually padded versions of an article the author originally wrote for another venue. They wrote a piece for the New York Times that got a lot of clicks and someone asked them to turn it into a book. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, provided there is indeed more for the author to say on the topic. But in reality it means that many of the pop nonfiction books I’ve read lately have felt very much like what they, in fact, are: Articles with a few loosely-researched ideas that have put on a lot of water weight so they can fight in the 150-to-200-page weight class.” - From Popular Nonfiction and the Audience of Imagined Idiots by Rebecca Baumgartner.
Postscripts: Me and my friends Samit, Sarnath and Prayaag were all mentioned/quoted in this article about dystopian fiction in India. ** Delhi’s rubbish dumps and the rise of methane emissions blarghhhh. ** A really interesting experiment with rejection therapy. ** I really loved this poem. ** The last place to watch unbiased news in India is on YouTube. **
That’s all from me, friends! Here’s a handy-dandy share button to spread word of this post and a handy-dandy comment button to share your own thoughts.
Have a great week!
xx
m