2026-04-12

The Art of Pooping

Podcast #1,112: You’ve Been Pooping Wrong — Here’s How to Do It Better | The Art of Manliness #bowel

Full transcript: The Art of Manliness - You’ve Been Pooping Wrong — Here’s How to Do It Better

Harvard gastroenterologist Dr. Trisha Pasricha is the author of You've Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. Today on the show, Trisha and I have a fun and frank conversation about the art and science of bowel movements, including the color of healthy stools, how often you should be pooping, if laxatives are safe to use, the food to eat that's even better than prunes for getting things going, why you feel the urge to go poop at Barnes and Noble, the wonders of the bidet, the danger of using your smartphone on the toilet, how to get more comfortable pooping in a public restroom, and more.

I had not realised kiwis (which are a part of my daily diet here) have some great benefits to pooping.

But I will say there are a lot of ways that you can improve your bowel habits, become less constipated just by changing things about what you're eating and what you're doing, and even the position of how you're sitting on the toilet. I mean, it's very common that people don't wanna take medicines, but you can take things as natural as, like, kiwis. Right? Like in our grandparents' times, people were taking prunes, and prunes are incredibly effective.

But I have never successfully convinced a college student to take prunes. It's like 1 of those things that people just don't reach for anymore these days. But kiwis have been shown in multiple randomized controlled trials, 2 kiwis a day, that they are as effective as prunes, but they also don't cause bloating. Like a lot of these, like, fiber supplements and prunes can cause, kiwis don't seem to do that. So it's a pretty simple fix that's relatively effective, all things considered.

And and it's not really a laxative. It's actually just something that's high fiber, got a lot of nutrients, and is good for you in other ways.

Some of the explanations are really good and clear

Host

Gotcha. So what what happens to our stool whenever we get diarrheas? Why does the body decide this stuff needs to be liquid and get out fast? Like, what's happening there?

Guest

Yeah. There's lots of different causes. But in terms of your anatomy, your small bowel, which is that first part of the tube after your stomach, the main point of your small bowel is to absorb all the nutrients. And it's sucking out everything that it wants and breaking it down. And then the stuff that it can't break down, which is usually like the fiber, which we actually don't possess the enzymes to break down.

It makes its way to our microbiome in our colon. Well, the colon has several jobs. 1 of them is to suck water out of the stool as it passes through. And stool passes a little bit more slowly through the colon, so your colon has a lot of time to get that water up. But if something happens that triggers that poop to move forward, and sometimes it's stress, stress can cause our colon to suddenly start to contract.

That means we haven't had time to remove and absorb all the water out of it yet, so it's gonna gush out like diarrhea when we're stressed. Spicy food does that. Spicy food sends this signal down to say, okay. Evacuate everything we have. That too will make whatever comes out to be a little bit fiery, a little uncomfortable, and it'll also be pretty liquidy.

And then there's other things like infections or just depending on how things are going with with other aspects of your life, travel and exercise, those things can also help speed things up. But before, you've really had a chance to absorb all the water.

and this one about constipation

Host

Gotcha. And constipation is just the reverse. It's been in the colon too long, so all that water's been sucked out.

Guest

Yeah. Exactly. And there's a ton of different reasons why we things slow down and why we can get constipated. And and and you're right. The longer we sit there, the longer that stool is just your colon is gonna keep doing its job, and it's gonna keep making it harder and harder, which is why I sometimes think the most important thing people can do who are constipated is just as soon as they hear that call, feel that urge, respond because it's not gonna be the same poop later on.

Host

What causes constipation? You said there's lots of potential sources.

Guest

Yeah. Well, when someone comes into my clinic and they have constipation, I I try to explain the way the colon works in terms of trying to get toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube. So sometimes the issue is that we're not squeezing that toothpaste tube. And that means that maybe there's something that's stopping the colon from contracting so much. We need to do that.

We need to generate pressure in order to push the stool outwards. And maybe the problem is actually not that we're not squeezing the tube, but that the toothpaste itself is rock solid. And sometimes that happens because maybe we're not getting enough fiber. Maybe we're not drinking enough. Maybe there's something else that's making that stool really, really hard.

But then the third and I think most underappreciated part of the problem is that, yeah, we're squeezing hard enough. The toothpaste is super soft, but we forget to take the cap off the toothpaste tube. And then we're just pressing up against this pelvic floor that is not cooperating. And that is very common. That happens to about 1 in 3 people who have constipation and who have tried different laxatives and different things and they failed.

And basically what that means is that our pelvic floor, which is this set of more than a dozen muscles sitting there at the bottom of our rectums, and they need to coordinate in this really highly orchestrated dance. Some need to contract at the right time, some need to relax. And for a lot of people, the sphincters that are supposed to be relaxing actually contract when we bear down. If you think about it, we're like generating all this pressure to try to push our poop out, and people's sphincters contract. And and that's very paradoxical.

It's not supposed to do that. So sometimes when you've tried everything, the most obvious answer is actually something that doesn't involve anything related to your colon, but actually it's all the muscles in your pelvis that's the problem.

2026-04-13

Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

Why do people resist the boring read? Melvin Lerner had a theory. He published a book in 1980 called The Belief in a Just World, and his argument was that most of us walk around with a bone-deep need to believe that people Get What They Deserve. If someone is rich, they must be smart. If they’re smart, their decisions must make sense. And if their decisions look dumb, well, you must be the one who’s missing something. It’s a warm blanket of a worldview. It just doesn’t survive contact with reality.

There’s something else going on, too, and it’s less intellectual // more animal. We see patterns everywhere. We see them when they’re not there. Kahneman built half his career on this - we are so desperate to find signal in the noise that we’ll construct entire narratives out of nothing, and a narrative where the powerful guy is playing 12 moves ahead is just a better story than one where he fucked up because that’s what people do.

Ube is the next matcha

The next matcha: coffee chains bet on ube’s viral appeal

Fun fact, I had ube ice cream at an NYC outlet in Chinatown like several years ago. Then, I found it in a late-night beverage truck in Bengaluru's HSR neighborhood a year ago.

UK café chains are betting on ube, the vibrant purple yam native to the Philippines, to replicate the viral success of matcha among younger, higher-spending consumers.

The ingredient’s purple hue has been critical to its adoption by mainstream brands seeking social media success, according to Kiti Soininen, a food and drink analyst at Mintel. “The unusual and vibrant colour is at the heart of it, just as it was in helping matcha and Dubai chocolate go viral,” she said.

The push into ube comes as brands are “constantly looking for the next matcha,” said Lisa Harris, co-founder of food consultancy Harris and Hayes. The Japanese green-tea-based drink has grown in popularity globally over the past decade but rapid increases in consumption and a bad harvest last year are putting pressure on supply and driving up prices.

The contradictions of wokeness

Full transcript: https://www.debugjois.dev/apps/transcript-reader#t=9696b6681f98cbd9

The tweet length answer is that these periods of awokening happen when there's a big crisis for elites, where they are expecting a certain life and it seems like they won't be able to live that life. one thread that cuts across all four awokenings is that they tend to occur during these periods of elite overproduction. So elite overproduction is a term that's taken from sociologist Jack Goldstone and historian Peter Turchin. And it refers to a condition where society is producing more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites, then we have the capacity to actually give them the elite lifestyles and positions that they're expecting. So you have growing numbers of people who did everything right.

They got good grades, they went to college, they went to the right colleges, they studied the right majors. And they're expecting six figure salaries and to be able to have a house and to get married and settle down and have kids and a standard of living that's close to or better than what their parents experienced. And all of a sudden they're not able to do any of that. When you have growing numbers of people in that kind of a condition, what they tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them and try to tear down some of the existing elites to make space for people like themselves. So that's at their core, what I argue is happening in awokenings.

The 2 factors that cut across all Awokenings are the elite overproduction and this other factor, popular immiseration. So elite overproduction, one reason why that's not enough to predict awokenings, why it's not sufficient, is because often when elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. And that's because there's this phenomenon where the fortunes of elites and non elites tend to operate countercyclically. When elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. No one's breaking out a tiny violin and going, Oh, poor elite guy.

He has to live a normal life and get a normal job like everyone else. Oh, let me play you a Sam song, right? So if times are pretty good for everyone else but bad for elites, no one cares. But there are these moments when the trajectories get collapsed, when things have been kind of bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites too, those are the moments when awoken things happen. Because the frustrated elite aspirants not only have a motive, but they also have a means to really mess with the system because there's this huge base of other people in society who are also really frustrated with the way things are going, who also have a bone to pick with the people who are kind of running the show.

And so they have more leverage. These frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage over the system than they otherwise might.

Host

Do you think the New York Times doesn't give a shit about George Floyd until he's been killed by the state? Or is it that the audience won't pay attention until that's the case?

Guest

I think it's kind of both. And part of the reason it's both, actually, I talk about this a bit in the book is that the people who produce and consume these narratives are increasingly the same people. It's the same slice of society that's producing almost all of this work in the symbolic professions. And they're almost the exact same as the audience that's consuming them in terms of where they live, the professions they work in, what their values are, the kinds of educational background they have, and so on. It's this really incestuous relationship increasingly between writers and audiences where they're virtually identical.

So I think it's the case that a lot of the writers don't really, and editors and stuff, don't really have their finger on the pulse of normies. But I think it's also true that the audience of The New York Times doesn't particularly care about normies and their problems either.

But that said, I also tried I think a lot of the anti woke kind of culture warriors are going to have a tough time really mobilizing the book the way they might hope, both because it has a lot of very critical things to say about the anti woke kind of people and the game that they're playing as well. I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them and their behaviors and actions. And the book also, the reality is a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory or feminist standpoint epistemology or postcolonial theory, these modes of scholarship deeply inform my own thinking, including on these questions about power and ideology and how they relate to each other. In a deep sense, what the book is doing is taking the arguments from these literatures to what I perceive to be their logical conclusions, which should lead us to ask of our own ostensibly emancipatory ideologies whether or not they might also reflect our class interests, whether or not they actually represent the values and interests of the people that we're trying to help. And whether or not, like like there's no reason to think that our own belief systems are exempt in a lot of these other related literatures and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them, but in fact, to show how they can be valuable.

And so in this and a lot of other ways, I think the book is not easily digestible into the culture wars and the ways that people might hope.

2026-04-15

Shitty Flow and Zombie Flow

Pluralistic: In praise of (some) compartmentalization (14 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:

I. Engagement without a clear goal;

II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;

III. Losing track of time.

I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)

Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."

Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.

Books on Loneliness

Why loneliness, a recurring theme in literature, is difficult to comprehend

Books covered:

• The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

The philosophical and personal narrative by British author Olivia Laing in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone draws from the time she lived in New York. She writes, “Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person.” We immediately get a sense of what to expect — an analysis of where loneliness stems from and its consequences, which linger in one’s mental health and very existence.

Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny explores the many layers of loneliness through fictional characters. The Booker-shortlisted novel traces the journeys of two individuals, Sonia and Sunny, negotiating distance, displacement, and belonging. Yet, this is not an entirely bleak story. Desai, who won the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, weaves in moments of hope as her character Sonia embarks on a path of self-reflection and discovery.

While some narratives trace loneliness with philosophical distance, others plunge into its most unsettling depths, as Gail Honeyman does in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

Loneliness is not always contemplative — sometimes it is isolating, corrosive, and dangerously silent. The novel begins on a bleak note. Eleanor Oliphant, a socially awkward and isolated woman living in Glasgow and working a routine office job, insists she is “completely fine.”

Yet beneath the rigid routines and solitary weekends lies a deep, unaddressed loneliness. Over time, she slowly finds her footing. As the author reminds us, “It is never too late, for any of us.” It is a poignant and joyful message.

The Other Bennett Sister

The Other Bennet Sister TV review — a sweet-hearted sideways take on Pride and Prejudice

The Other Bennet Sister offers up the legendary romance of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of a peripheral character. Indeed, it largely dispenses with the events of Austen’s most famous novel by the end of the second episode, when it catapults off into Mary’s new life in London, away from the domineering and casually cruel and narcissistic Mrs Bennet (a very good Ruth Jones). She is frequently nudged in the direction of suitors, through the not-so-subtle machinations of her mother and the more heartfelt guidance of her aunt, Mrs Gardiner (Indira Varma), but, in this very contemporary tale, Mary must discover her true value for herself.

It all works remarkably well. The half-hour episodes are neat and pithy, suggesting a confidence with both sets of source material. It is light and fun, with a lot of heart, basking in the warmth of its own candlelit glow.

I bingewatched this show in a couple of sitting and absolutely loved it!

2026-04-16

“Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot | The New Yorker

Transcript: Critics at Large | The New Yorker - “Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot

This is a wide-ranging podcast covering a lot of pop culture themes around relationships. But some quotes about marriage really stuck with me.

We're gonna be talking about several other texts, and we're gonna be talking in general about modern attitudes towards this very old institution. As we've said, it's kind of at an inflection point right now. Statistically, marriage rates are hovering around an all time low. And at the same time, people are trying to find new approaches to make marriage work. I mean, open marriages, polyamory, all of these things are feeling increasingly mainstream.

And my question for us is, at a time when relationships are more flexible than ever, what do we as a culture want marriage to mean?

Shout out to the long nineteenth century for this idea that marriage is not just a pact between 2 families and mutually advantageous decision made to further the line, but also that people are supposed to find love and romance and sexual fulfillment all wrapped up into this economic bundle with marriage. And as my support, I have on my lap 2 of my favorite friends, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose's wonderful study of 5 Victorian marriages.

The argument that Phyllis Rose is making is that marriage is a political experience, and it's the primary political experience that most people will have. It is about balancing of power. It is, of course, about power between genders, but it's about the the family and the marriage as a body politic in which two people are jockeying and negotiating. And things are frankly set up to not work more than they're set up to work.

I think we have this kind of fantasy idea of marriage as a time where everyone knew their place.The man was the center, and the woman's job was to just help the man fulfill whatever had to be done. And 1 thing that I love about the book Parallel Lives is that it shows us that that was really never satisfying for anyone. And I think that a lot of these ideas that we have now about freedom, personal freedom, sexual freedom, we're trying to reconcile them with marriage. And I think we're in a place where we're trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice, rather than an obvious obligation. That we're doing this because the love is so great, because we can, envision the rest of our lives together, because it's this great mark of affirmation and faith in another person and also in yourself that you're gonna be the kind of person to hold this down.

And so in a way, it's a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to hoping that the fiction becomes true. Phyllis Rose has a great line about reading marriage like you can read a novel. And I think that's true in a lot of these cases too, that life is a kind of fiction writing. Yeah. You are making it up as you go along, and who you are at the start of a marriage is not gonna be who you are at the middle and who you are at the end, and yet that keeps coming like such a rude shock to us. It's such a rude shock Yeah. That we get great literature, movies, TV shows, albums Yeah. From the shock of discovering that the other person is not who you thought they were and that you're not who you thought you were either.

I mean, for me, the great passage, the great moment in Madame Bovary is the opera, where, you know, Emma goes to the opera and she's like reawakened by the opera, sees Leon, the the sort of romantic rival of her husband, is like, you know what? I have to have an affair. You know? That romance is like art in that it has moments of cathartic learning. And if we're supposed to do that at the same time as we're in a contract, that's a lot of weight for any one institution, personal, privately, publicly, aesthetically, to bear.

2026-04-17

Mostpeopleslop

I truly hate mostpeopleslop

In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck...

"The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence."

That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a pile of shit.

Sugarman's advice became the core system prompt for 300,000 tech assholes on Twitter. They've run it through algorithm after algorithm and produced the most soul destroying rhetorical tic of the 2020s. I'm talking about "Mostpeopleslop."

I'll give the format its due: it works // performs. And the reason why is simple. "Most people" is a tribal signal - when you read "most people don't know about this," your brain does a quick calculation: Am I most people? Do I want to be most people? No? Then I better keep reading, so I can be the Holy Exception. But you're not actually learning fucking anything. You're being told you're special for having stopped to read, and the poster is offering you membership in an in-group, and the price of admission is a like, a retweet, any scrap of engagement. It's a scarcity play - people pay more attention to shit that feels exclusive.

"Most people don't know this" is exactly that.

Mostpeopleslop has metastasized because Twitter started rewarding engagement bait at the same time the creator economy started demanding you post all day // every day. If you're a tech influencer in 2026, you probably post 10 to 20 times a day, maybe more - this is what the gurus tell you to do. You need formats you can crank out fast that reliably get impressions, and "most people" threads do exactly that. There's no research required, and no original data - you barely need an opinion. You could generate these in your sleep, and thanks to OpenClaw some of these guys clearly do...

And it trains audiences to value framing over substance - if you read enough "most people" posts, you start evaluating ideas based on how they're packaged rather than whether they're true. A well-formatted "most people" thread with a mediocre idea will outperform a useful post that doesn't use the formula, and so yes the medium becomes the message, but the message is: style points matter more than being right or even being valuable in the first place.

2026-04-18

Is Los Angeles the Status Anxiety Capital of the World?

Is Los Angeles the Status Anxiety Capital of the World?

For some strange reason this reminded me of living in Bengaluru. I guess that's because I haven't lived in LA 🙃 - FOMO and status anxiety is a fact of life wherever you go nowadays 🤷🏽‍♂️.

For your average status-conscious Angeleno, anxiety begins and ends with sleep. Sure, there are Oura rings—sleep trackers hidden in obtrusive pieces of jewelry. But Angelenos will spend hundreds of dollars more on Loftie sound machines, sleep masks from Violet Grey, and magnesium supplements -recommended by their most RFK Jr.–coded friends. Completely sober - 20- and 30-somethings are excusing themselves from dinner at Chateau Marmont at 9 p.m. so they can get to bed early. The status dinner is no longer about what you’re eating, but when. In Los Angeles, it’s perfectly acceptable to eat dinner out of a tin before the sun sets, standing alone in your high-contrast Calacatta kitchen.

The next jolt of panic comes with coffee. It’s wonderful to be greeted by name by one of the high-cheekboned baristas at Maru Coffee, on Hillhurst. But if you are truly somebody in Hollywood, you will be too important to waste 20 minutes driving to a coffee shop—not to mention the time it takes to find parking. Your house will be too high in the hills, and nobody wants to sit in bumper-to-bumper canyon traffic behind a Harvard-Westlake student who’s eating breakfast, texting, and shaving while driving to school. On the rare days you wake up feeling European and think, Let’s go to a coffee shop, you’ll remember that you might run into someone in line who needs something from you—a friend from USC film school who wants notes on their spec, or an ex-girlfriend who’s on her ninth step and is hoping to make amends. It’s much safer to invest thousands of dollars in a Jura coffee maker and source beans from the Gorigesha Forest. If you’re truly somebody, your personal chef will top the coffee with raw milk before your assistant—who was up hours before you—hands it to you as you get into your Escalade mobile office, complete with first-class seats, Wi-Fi, and a 43-inch flat-screen TV.