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2026-05-23
Reading Gap Relationships
Help! My boyfriend doesn’t read
They’ve now been broken up for over a year, and while there were many reasons for the split, April attributes at least some of it to the reading gap. “I remember feeling really lonely at times because I would be excited by something I was reading, and I was just never able to have conversations about it with him,” she recalls.
TIL 👇🏽 women read books and men listen to podcasts (fwiw, I do BOTH, and quite extensively as to - so where does that leave me I wonder 🤷🏽♂️😂!)
Whether it’s through restrictive gender norms or marketing by the book publishing industry, we have, over time, been conditioned to think of reading for pleasure as a feminine hobby. Even when it comes to non-fiction, which men have typically preferred, they’re getting their information elsewhere: men aged between 25 and 34 now make up the largest audience for podcasts. With the reading gap between men and women continuing to widen, it’s not surprising that reading gap couples exist. But how much should these gaps actually matter in dating, and does a literary mismatch really have to be a dealbreaker?
Exercise Addiction
For some exercisers, a healthy habit spins out of control
many such cases
The unhealthy pattern commonly described as exercise addiction (or exercise dependence) can begin unremarkably enough. At first, a person might decide to run just a little more or lift a little heavier. The exercise routine steadies them emotionally. Someone with anxiety, for example, might start adding an extra 20 minutes to their training sessions and feel immediate relief. The routine becomes the anchor that holds the day in place. But over time, the anchor grows heavier. The workouts start to be seen as the only reliable way to manage emotions, stress and frustrations. Tension builds, training provides relief. The routine hardens.
Typically, someone who has developed an exercise addiction plans their life around their workouts. They might wake before dawn to train because the idea of missing a session feels intolerable. Taking a rest day, usually a welcome pause, breeds irritation or guilt. The run or bike ride starts to feel like an obligation that must be met to regain a sense of equilibrium. A major motivation to exercise becomes avoiding withdrawal symptoms – such as irritability, disturbed sleeping patterns, or anxiety – that one experiences without it.
Eventually, compulsive exercise can have adverse effects on a person’s physical, psychological and social wellbeing. The runner who keeps adding ‘just a few more kilometres’ may find himself treating minor injuries and fractures that never quite heal. The teen who doubles up on gym sessions could struggle with persistent fatigue. Other compulsive exercisers might frequently decline social invitations that interfere with their routine, frustrating friends and family. The exercise routine can reshape and shrink the rest of someone’s life.
Letting Friendships Die
This is what I’ve learned. Some friendships should die as we change and grow. I’m not meant to maintain every connection forever, while the guilt of letting relationships fade is often less painful than the slow suffocation of maintaining them. When I stopped propping up every connection, I discovered which ones had actual life – the ones that can handle silence and absence, that don’t require constant performance. Those are the friendships worth having.
Real friendship doesn’t need the artificial respirator of scheduled meetings. It can handle the messiness of people who sometimes don’t text back, or disappear for weeks, or show up unexpectedly on a Wednesday with chai and nowhere particular to be. And it can survive the people we become – because we do become different people, and not every friendship is meant to make that crossing with us.
Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth
This is one of the best overviews of the book that I have ever come across. It was convenient that I was listening to it while going about the house taking care of stuff, because I am not sure if I would have had the patience to read through it.
Having listened to it, I did read through the transcript: Overthink - Closer Look: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth | Transcript Reader
Ellie, today we're going be talking about a text that is really important in philosophy, but also in some ways very unique, and that is Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It is a wonderful text that has been quite influential in a number of fields, including political theory, decolonial philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, you name it, the text has left its mark. And the reason that I say it's also a unique text is because it's a text that was written at the very end of Fanon's life when he was dying from leukemia in the 1960s. And so it is Fanon's final word to the world. And, the text is written both as a work of philosophy, but it also reads very much like a manifesto of sorts, which is why it doesn't really have a lot of references or citations.
And so that makes it somewhat challenging from the standpoint of a scholar.
I think one of the important things to mention about this text is that it was banned in France upon publication. And this is due to one of the things that we're going be talking a lot about today, which is its advocacy of violence. I mean, Fanon thinks that decolonial projects require violence that was obviously very threatening in France at the time.
Yeah. It tells you something about the place that it occupies in the contemporary philosophical landscape, but I also want to say that it was already that influential already 50 years ago back then, because there is in the foreword by Homi Bhabha, a passage where Homi Bhabha talks about just how many revolutionary movements in the 1960s and onward were influenced by this particular text, which has been called the Bible of Decolonization.
But even beyond that, Fanon says, even if we accept the colonizer colonized distinction, at some point we also have to go beyond that because even that is not granular and nuanced enough, especially when you consider that in a colonial setting, you can have a lot of people who are members of the colonized race or nationality, but who are complicit because either they work for the colonial rulers or because they get some kind of economic benefit. So you can be a member of the colonized and still have a vested interest in the maintenance and the perpetuation of the system of colonialism. And similarly, he says, it's in theory possible to find a member of the colonizing group who at some point turns on the colonial regime and becomes an ally to the decolonial cause.
And this is where he takes us from maybe a purely, let's say, destructive interpretation of violence to a more constructive understanding of violence, where violence actually achieves something positive precisely at the moment that it seeks the annihilation of the colonists. And I really love the way Fanon puts this. He says, What violence does for the colonized is it restores them their basic dignity and humanity of which they have been robbed by the colonizing force.
And so with violence, see actually, a restoration or a recreation of the very humanity of the colonized.
Yeah. And I think also what's powerful about these case studies in part is that they show that Fanon is not offering in this text a celebration of violence. I think the fact that he offers a defense and a justification of violence sometimes gets misunderstood as like, oh my God, he loves violence. And no, if anything, I think what these cases really show are the tragedies that violence wreaks on individuals. But as you mentioned, David, those individual tragedies speak to broader social systems.
And so I think his, I read his point about we have to fight violence with violence as somewhat an expression of resignation and compatible with the acknowledgement that violence is a tragedy.
So Fanon describes this post colonization period as requiring the development of a national consciousness because that national consciousness doesn't exist just in virtue of overthrowing the colonial power.
He says at first, it's just a crude empty shell. And 1 of the big obstacles to developing a national consciousness is a tension between the colonized bourgeoisie and the colonized proletariat. He says that the elite and the masses don't really have a lot of practical ties. You know, the elite or the colonized bourgeoisie are accustomed to being a lot closer actually to the colonizers than they are to the other colonized. And so there has to be a long process of development of national consciousness, which then he says leads to a development of social consciousness and education has a really big role there.
And he says, even if you manage to overcome that problem, which is a practical one of creating the infrastructure that is a precondition for a nation state, then you have a second problem, which is that if the nation state that you decide to create really tries to embody this new humanism that is more collective, more socialist, and more communitarian, you have to now face the danger of other already existing nations putting pressure on you not to go down this socialist communist path. And so it's not as if the kind of country that people create is not going to be subjected to new pressures once that country enters into the international sphere, right? Like that's what we know has happened throughout the twentieth century, that whenever any country challenges the hegemony of capitalism, that country is squashed by an alliance of capitalist nation states. And so I say that only to underscore that he is painfully aware of just how difficult the path ahead is and to avoid this impression that violence will bring about a fully formed new nation from one day to the next.
2026-05-22
Darecation
Who wants to relax on holiday?
TIL - Darecation
“A vacation having nothing to do and all day to do it in,” said Robert Orben, an American comedy writer. Summer holidays have long involved reclining on a far-flung beach. But more tourists are forgoing sun loungers in search of adrenalin-packed pursuits, such as canyoning (scrambling down gorges) and abseiling (descending rock faces). “Darecations” are a top tourism trend of 2026, according to Pinterest, a social-media firm. Around 14% of international travellers are keen on such pursuits, suggests the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA), a trade group.
There is “a shift away from fly-and-flop holidays”, notes Lisa Marçais of Airbnb, and towards “immersive and memorable travel experiences”. As the wealthy amass even greater riches, they have more to splurge on tailored trips. Darecationers say they want to get off the beaten track; many see adventure travel as a status symbol.
Where do Men Go From Here
Where Do Men Go from Here? #masculinity
Full Transcript: Critics at Large | The New Yorker - Where Do Men Go from Here? | Transcript Reader
There are many statistics that show that men are falling behind women in grade school, that they enroll in college in lower numbers, that their career prospects are dwindling, that their lifespans are shorter than women's lifespans. And on top of the stats, we're seeing a very distinctive cultural moment that's been going on for a little while, but is really worth highlighting, which is the world of the manosphere. Men who traffic in an aggressive misogyny and the idea that masculinity is directly about suppressing women, subjugating women, and maximizing their own sexual worthiness by all kinds of cosmetic interventions, surgical interventions, hormonal interventions. This has become a huge part of discourse around masculinity, and I would totally argue, probably not alone, a big part of what is going wrong for men right now.
I loved how the podcast breaks down each of the TV shows and how they reflect the culture.
In terms of culture right now, we're seeing a "two roads diverge in a wood" situation. On one hand, there are cultural texts like the new HBO show Half Man, created by Richard Gadd, which really leans into the violent aggression of the alpha male, investigating where that comes from and what its consequences are. On the other hand, we have something like Heated Rivalry, which asks whether men can get back in touch with their softer side—what might be available to them emotionally, whether boys can cry, and so on. That, I think, is what we're dealing with in culture right now.
I'd take it back, honestly, to the feminist movement—we're still in the midst, not even close to the tail end, of the backlash that came out of the women's liberation movement of the seventies. Some men (not all men—this episode should really be called "Not All Men") felt overlooked, oppressed, and disturbed by the recalibration of gender roles, responsibilities, and identities, and out of that grew a men's rights, men's pride agenda. When I think about that, I think about a fictional character from the late nineties: Frank T.J. Mackey from Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 film Magnolia. Mackey is a men's rights advocate who gives seminar performances, rising up before a group of frankly lame dudes and enjoining them, as Nomi said, to "respect the cock."
This is the clip being referred to in the para above 👆🏽
And a reference to Fight Club
I'm thinking about another movie from the same year, in fact: David Fincher's Fight Club, which treats the crisis in masculinity less from the position of being cucked by women and more in the sense of the softness that capitalism has begat. It's made men into softened cucks, and the way to confront that, of course, is by going to the underground fight club, where a fist hits flesh, blood spurts, and the man feels alive again—regaining the powers that the late twentieth century has sucked out of him.
Heated Rivalry
Well, we we've talked about our beloved Heated Rivaly, which also takes place in a highly masculinist world of professional sports. And the sports professional sports sphere in which it takes place allows for a kind of, like, old school closetedness that, creates kind of a plot possibilities and tonal possibilities. And these two characters, Ilya and Shane, should by all rights be expected to be Reuben [reference to Half Men], right, to be these killers who cannot kind of accept any sign of kind of, like, softness or or weakness or anything that diverts from kind of alpha masculinity, hyper straight, and so on. And yet, the show shows them exploring exactly that and shows the joy that they find.
…
…The thesis of Heated Rivalry is that you need to let the sunshine in. The the that you need to expose things. You need to be living in the open. Let the world catch up with you. Take the risk. It's worth it not to feel the degrading shame that comes with living in the shadow in the closet.
and the show Adoloscence
A couple of years ago, we also had Adolescence, also from the UK, about a young man who, under the sign of bullying, commits the heinous crime of killing his female classmate—a little girl. Adolescence isn't the opposite of Half Man, exactly, but by situating the problem among children, it felt like it carried this ray of possibility that things could be otherwise, if only we would all change. I think that was very much the point. Created by Jack Thorne, it's been shown in schools in France, the Netherlands, and the UK as an educational text meant to make the youth aware of toxic masculinity—though I'd be curious how that's actually worked out, because I wouldn't recommend making art in the service of educating anyone, certainly not the youth. I respect the youth too much for that. Adolescence was riveting, and it's also didactic, and the same is true of Half Man. There was a female columnist in England who said she thought Half Man should be shown anywhere men are gathered—strong disagree. What's that going to do? The idea that you'll see the consequences of your actions and feel so horrified you change your ways—I find that such an irritating approach to both men and art. Both deserve better.
The Forsytes
Starting watching this show, and loving it so far.
The Forsytes #tv
2026-05-21
High Agency
Opinion | All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’
A bit late reading this article, but I mostly logged it for its title.
2026-05-19
Before you move to San Francisco, read this.
Before you move to San Francisco, read this.
Tech didn’t always run San Francisco. There’s a reason we call this industry Silicon Valley. For the last fifty years, most of tech existed forty miles south of here, in Mountain View and Palo Alto and Cupertino.
But tech isn’t the only thing here. If you fly in from Twitter, tech is what you see. It has the easiest front door with its conferences, hacker houses, demo days, group chats and dinner parties. But the other scenes are still here. There are still surfers at Ocean Beach, parents in Noe Valley, a gay scene in the Castro. You can find any of them. You just have to look harder.
Most people don’t look that hard. Instead, they dive headfirst into venture-backed tech. They work in startups, socialize with other startup people, and spend most of their time in the same few neighborhoods. There’s nothing wrong with that. SF is one of the only places on earth where you can do this. The unhappiness arrives when people do this and wonder why they haven’t found the community they came here for.
Modern Sleep
Reading this feels a bit wild to me. It's just hard to imagine things were actually this way
Continuous sleep is a modern habit, not an evolutionary constant, which helps explain why many of us still wake at 3am and wonder if something’s wrong. It might help to know that this is a deeply human experience.
For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.
Breaking the night into two parts probably changed how time felt. The quiet interval gave nights a clear middle, which can make long winter evenings feel less continuous and easier to manage.
The midnight interval was not dead time; it was noticed time, which shapes how long nights are experienced. Some people would get up to tend to chores like stirring the fire or checking on animals. Others stayed in bed to pray or contemplate dreams they’d just had. Letters and diaries from pre-industrial times mention people using the quiet hours to read, write or even socialise quietly with family or neighbours. Many couples took advantage of this midnight wakefulness for intimacy.
The disappearance of the second sleep happened over the past two centuries due to profound societal changes. Artificial lighting is one of them. In the 1700s and 1800s, first oil lamps, then gas lighting, and eventually electric light, began turning night into more usable waking time. Instead of going to bed shortly after sunset, people started staying up later into the evening under lamplight.
Biologically, bright light at night also shifted our internal clocks (our circadian rhythm) and made our bodies less inclined to wake after a few hours of sleep. Light timing matters. Ordinary “room” light before bedtime suppresses and delays melatonin, which pushes the onset of sleep later.
The Industrial Revolution transformed not just how people worked but how they slept. Factory schedules encouraged a single block of rest. By the early 20th century, the idea of eight uninterrupted hours had replaced the centuries-old rhythm of two sleeps.
Relationship Wisdom
This is ostensibly an article about dating, but as it often happens it actually is an article about relationships
The hardest thing about dating is learning to see people clearly. It requires you to first see yourself clearly, how your biases and desires color your perspective. It’s easy to become enamored with an aspect of a person and blow it up into a grand idea of who they are. There’s a quote attributed to Marcel Proust that goes, “it is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.”
One of the most misleading ideas in dating is that there exists a “right person” for you. I think you can have many meaningful intimate relationships, and if you’re monogamous, then you are simply selecting one person to build a life with. Some might genuinely believe their partner is “the one,” but you don’t need that kind of conviction in order to feel happy and fulfilled. Dating has no end game. We can’t optimize our choice of a partner.
Unfortunately, social media trains our brains to keep filtering for unrealistic specifications. To feel envied is to feel powerful is Instagram’s implicit motto. By feeding us images of people living their best lives, it creates the illusion that everyone’s relationship is more beautiful, nurturing, exciting, and adventurous than our own. The comparison worms its way into our brains, making us tetchier the next time our partner does something that annoys us.
and also some social media wisdom thrown in
When we curate pictures of our life on Instagram, we’re effectively narrating in the third person. I believe it is possible to share what genuinely excites us without performing for an audience. But it takes intentionality and inner attunement, and love, which is by nature an act of imagination, is particularly susceptible to the trappings of fantasy on our screens.
Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage
Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change
In between laying out her resolutions for a life worth living and contemplating how two souls can interact with one another in friendship and love, she observes that “the true self” is discovered through an interplay between the freedom of choice and the constraints of circumstance. But because circumstances are always changing and choices are dynamic processes rather than static products of the will, the self is a moving target. She writes:
A choice is never made, but constantly in the making; it is repeated every time that I become conscious of it.
With an eye to “the great hatreds of love, the irremediable pride, the passionate ruptures, the mutual tortures” that would bedevil every love if we didn’t counter them with “a lot of tenderness and pity,” she considers the tenderness for change — in oneself and in the other — essential to love yet unaccounted for in the fundamental premise of marriage:
The horror of the definitive choice is that we engage not only the self of today but also that of tomorrow. And this is why marriage is fundamentally immoral. Thus, we must try to determine which one repeats our changing self the most often. One must create a sort of abstract self and say to oneself: this is the state in which I find myself the most often; this is what I want the most often; thus, this is what suits me.
AI as the new avatar of American capitalism
AI as the new avatar of American capitalism
So we have AI looming over our withering creative industries, a generation of young people who are angry and disillusioned by the lack of opportunities, and precarity and anxiety nearly everywhere. In exchange, we get a new batch of tech oligarchs, new shady billion-dollar businesses that employ no one at all and use AI to evade consumer protection laws—that pretty unequivocally leave the world worse off in the wake of the founder’s mad dash to personal enrichment—and new tools for the unscrupulous to accumulate wealth at the expense of those still following the rules, whether in stock trading, prediction markets, or even online poker. That and Claude Code.
That’s why the students are booing, I think.2 They’re experiencing AI in realtime as a forecloser of futures; as the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism, as the prime agent moving a world that’s become a deck stacked against them.
Clippers
The clippening TIL about clippers
Clippers are largely anonymous social media accounts whose sole purpose is to rack up views. The accounts take a piece of long-form content — an hourslong livestream, for example, or a podcast — and pull out the most exciting, controversial, or shocking moments. Sometimes the accounts are dedicated to clipping, but companies will also recruit accounts with existing followers. Clippers can be based anywhere in the world (one tech founder who uses clippers has described some of them as “hungry Slovakian teenagers”) while targeting English-speaking audiences.
After clippers get the source material that a brand wants to promote, they cut it down and blast their version into the open web. Hundreds or even thousands of clipping accounts might be sharing similar videos, all in competition with one another. You have perhaps learned about a TV show moment, a celebrity podcast appearance, or a new band via clippers without even realizing it; it just looks like someone sharing something. Clippers do not need to be affiliated in any real way with the subjects they are clipping, and the clipped content does not need to be creative, transformative, or even interesting. It is the cartilage of the internet, the placeholders for the algorithm to suck in and spit out.
For well over a decade, content creators have worked to reverse engineer “the algorithm.” Deploying clippers allows companies to gamble on content at scale, without paying a network of contractors upfront: Why bet once, when you could bet 50 times? Clipping is nothing new, despite the recent discourse around who uses it and why, and whether paying random accounts to share content promoting something is deceptive or manufacturing fake fandom. The reality is that more and more, the social internet is filled with clips, paid and unpaid, that stand in for the full-length podcast, video, film, album, or piece of writing. As online content increasingly becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version even serve?
Converting tech job ads to plain english
The Pulse: Forward deployed engineering heats up again
too real
Here’s what I reckon some of the terms in Google’s job advert will add up to on the job:
“Founder’s mindset”. No one will provide a spec, and scope creep is your problem to deal with. If your project doesn’t ship, that’s also your problem
“High-agency”. There are no resources besides your own
“White glove”. Do not say “no” to anything the customer suggests, even when they should probably listen to your feedback about whatever it is
“Critical feedback loop transforming real-world field insights into Google Cloud’s future product roadmap”. You will file tickets and a few PMs at Google may read some of them
2026-05-18
Toronto Multicultural Slang
The strange, multicultural slang of Toronto’s teenagers #linguistics
This new dialect emerged from an impoverished cluster of public-housing projects in Toronto—namely Driftwood, Shoreham and Jane & Finch (a district as well as a shopping centre). It is known as Toronto Mans. Differing from Canadian norms through features like TH-stopping (saying “dis” instead of “this”), it is defined by rapid, intense speech, or “squawking” as one speaker puts it. It is, a teenager admits, used by gangs or “wannabe gangsters”.
Much of Toronto Mans is borrowed from the languages of immigrants: from Jamaican patois comes “ah lie” (meaning “right?”) and “two-twos” (“being honest”); from Somali there is “kawal” (to “scam”) and from Arabic “wallahi” (an exclamation, “by Allah”). The roots of others like “crodie” (meaning “brother”) and “gerbert” (meaning “immature”) may well be local.
Slang from Britain also packs the dictionary: “peng” (“beautiful” or “great”), “ends” (the area in which one lives), “oppblock” (an area in which one’s enemies reside), “wasteman” (loser), and “mandem” (a group of men). The “Mans” in “Toronto Mans” is a derivative of “mandem”. “We take a lot of inspiration from London,” says one Driftwood resident. “But we mix it up.”
Either way, Toronto Mans is spreading. TorontoTide, a social-media channel, posts videos of teens speaking the dialect. Filmed in Yorkdale Shopping Centre, a fancy mall, these kids boast the loudest screeches. Their Jane & Finch counterparts say they are exaggerating for clout, and that many of them come from nicer suburbs like Vaughan. “There’s nothing going on in Vaughan,” tuts a Driftwood teen.
In Shoreham not everyone is enamoured. A young dad who speaks in the dialect says he will teach his child “proper English first” so they can succeed at work. Another forbids his daughter from using the lingo: “I don’t want to hear that in my household,” he says. What clearer marker of success than parental censure?
Laptop Free Cafes
Can “laptop-free” coffee shops survive in the digital age? - Coffee Intelligence
Here in Berlin, a LOT of cafes have a weekend laptop-free policy which I thought is a great compromise.
“Our main purpose is to give our customers an outstanding coffee experience,” he says. “The share of travellers who come specifically to us for this is over 50%. We love to offer them a seat to enjoy their coffee.
“At the same time, we can see a desire from those working remotely to do so in a cafe.”
While this dual function may seem complementary, it often creates friction in practice. Coffee shops are designed around turnover – not extended occupancy – and prolonged laptop use can disrupt both revenue and atmosphere.
In some cases, the financial impact is significant.
In response, some coffee shops have introduced restrictions on laptop use, aiming to restore balance between hospitality and productivity by effectively driving laptop users out.
Other approaches across the industry include limiting laptops to specific tables, removing power outlets, or restricting WiFi access altogether.
At The Barn, Ralf says that this has taken a structured approach, aiming to accommodate laptop users while also preserving the ambience of the coffee shop environment.
“We therefore started a café-wide policy of restricting laptop users to 1 hour, or we ban it completely on specific days, for instance during busy weekends,” he explains.
Pea Protein Dumping in US
U.S. company working to thwart pea protein dumping by China Really interesting video I came across randomly. I have no idea how legit it is, or whether it is a whole lot of propaganda.
Some excerpts from transcript summary
The US is the largest global market for pea protein, accounting for about 70% of demand. However, China has been dumping low-quality pea protein, a byproduct of their pea starch production, into the US market at artificially low prices. This has created a glut of cheap product, undermining domestic producers who invest heavily in infrastructure. The Chinese imports are subsidized by their government, enabling them to undercut prices and attempt to gain market control.
The imported Chinese pea protein mainly originates from peas grown in Canada and Russia, with Russia’s share increasing significantly in 2023. Puris emphasizes that producing pea protein domestically supports US farmers and ensures a secure and resilient supply chain. Maintaining domestic processing capability is critical for food security and industry stability.
New York and Affordability
In a City of Big Dreams, Many Young Adults See a Cloudy Future #nyc
NYC is among the top two cities I have lived in ever, so this breaks my heart
It was around No. 87 when Soban Ali started to lose track of all his job applications.
He had moved to New York City, eager to start life away from the Washington area, where he was born and raised. But seven months after arriving, he was laid off from his job at a federal contractor during last fall’s government shutdown. So he started a spreadsheet: “The Great Job Hunt of 2025.”
He applied to roughly 450 openings. He landed upward of 10 interviews. He still doesn’t have a full-time job.
Now, Mr. Ali, 24, feels guilty telling friends he can’t join them for dinner. He wants to start a family one day, but worries. “I can’t even afford myself, so how am I going to afford someone else?” he said. And he laments that he can’t pursue some of the hobbies that have always brought him joy, such as hip-hop dance. Classes are too expensive: about $25.
“It’s this existential depression and existential dread of, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’” said Mr. Ali, who earns $18 an hour working part-time at an after-school program. That’s just $1 more per hour than minimum wage.
He wonders about five years from now: “Am I going to be making a good, livable income? Or am I going to be flipping burgers?”
It’s a rough time to be a young adult. Young college-degree holders face their worst spring in the U.S. job market since the coronavirus pandemic.
And if headwinds are blowing across the United States, they can feel like gale-force squalls in New York, one of the world’s most notoriously expensive cities.
2026-05-17
Tech Minimalism
In what way if any are you a tech minimalist while maintaining your job/love for tech? | Lobsters
Very relatable thread
Curious what others think about this recently popular lifestyle shift. I love my coding, selfhosting, and useful tools but I’ve found myself moving towards “low” tech solutions such as pen and paper or just micro, iPod, a physical calendar versus all these different SaaS and selfhosted services.
2026-05-16
Song of the Samurai
Started watching this show on HBO and it's quite good!
2026-05-15
Brooklyn Coffee Shop and Berlin
bkcoffeeshop - Episode 81: Normal Berliner visits the shop featuring @lau_ramoso)
As a former New Yorker and now Berliner, this episode hit so hard!
Berliner Hello. This place looks nice. Thyme How are you? Are you, like, visiting from somewhere? Berliner I'm actually on vacation from Berlin. Thyme Berlin. Berlin. We love Berlin. I'm about to go on a three week silent techno retreat there. Cale My eight year situationship, Capricorn, lives there. Great. Thyme So what can I get you? Maybe, like, an accidentally vegan unsweetened barley latte? Cale Or we can spit in your mouth or slap you in the face for an extra $30? A lot of Berliners ask for that. Berliner Actually, a plain drip coffee would be good. Thyme Oh, so like a minimalist approach, like a palate cleanser. I get it. Cale You're so lucky you live in Berlin. Who are your fave local artists? I need to know. Berliner Oh, you know, I really have been listening to Sabrina Carpenter lately. Cale The new metal German DJ, the one that spells the name with only fours and fives? Berliner No. It's the one that goes thinking about me every time oh, that's that me espresso. Oh, I mean, that's a really catchy song. Cale Have you heard that song? I don't know that song. Thyme I don't know that song. Berliner No. Oh, I brought my own mug. Thyme I love Berliners. They just get it. Starbucks? Cale Ew. You're carrying that ironically. Right? Berliner No. Yeah. I actually wanted to go to a Starbucks, but could not find one around here, so I came to this place. Thyme This has to be an artistic statement. Cale Incredible job staying in character. Berliner By the way, do you have any recommendations for things to do in the city? It's my first time in New York. Cale Of course. We have Marxist multimedia art installations, poetry nights, and acoustic listening bars. Thyme Oh, and Dry Humor is my favorite non alcoholic bar, Gemini Gemini for vintage. Berliner So far, I'm really excited about exploring Midtown. Yeah. Because I've heard great things about the M and M store in Times Square. Oh, and I cannot wait to do the Friends experience. Yeah. I mean, I know you can tell. I am a Monica. What is the name of that street in Dumbo by the Brooklyn Bridge thing? Yeah? Because I have to get a photograph. Thyme Are you sure you're from Berlin? Berliner Yes. Cale What are your purposes in New York City? Berliner I'm actually here for a b to b marketing conference. I work for a paint company, and we just discovered a new shade of beige. Cale That can't be your job. Berliner Yeah. In fact, the walls in here are actually looking a bit chipped. I can get you a quote. Thyme Are you at least asexual or, like, poly or something? Berliner My husband, Jan, is a consultant at Deloitte. We are high school sweethearts. He is blonde. Cale She has such little edge. She's like an infinity pool. Berliner You know, I really have had enough. You are really projecting your idea of Berlin onto me, and I have to say it's actually very culturally insensitive. You know, most Berliners are just normal Germans working hard, trying to avoid this hipster circus. Cale Projection redacted. I'm so sorry. We just thought statistically you should be cooler than this. Berliner Apology accepted. Okay. Anyway, I have to go to my autoerotic asphyxiation workshop in Ridgewood. I am leading it, so I cannot be late. Thinking about me every time. Oh. Thyme The song again. The grammar. Cale It's so bad.
Raghu Rai has died
Raghu Rai’s whole canvas was India
Check out the article for some of his iconic photos. One of my favorite photographers ever.
India in every aspect was his canvas, but it was the people who enchanted him. Throughout his more than 18 books of photo essays, there was barely a frame that did not show their intensity and energy. He was not an intrusive photographer. Only one camera, usually his faithful Nikon Z8 with a zoom lens, hung round his neck, and he carried no bags. His movements were leisurely. Over the years he had learned patience. Mud-sculptors making goddesses, near-naked wrestlers relaxing under Kolkata’s Howrah bridge, the boy splashing paint and running off laughing, mourning women raising their arms, did not try to pose for him, and he did not want that. Humbly he preferred to merge with his people, a part of the beating whole, seeing them with a pure and unsentimental eye that was led not by his mind, but by his heart.
Only an Indian could do this, someone who understood from the inside his country’s many layers. He could have been a photographer of the world, but when he was invited to join the Magnum agency in 1972—on the recommendation of Henri Cartier-Bresson, no less, who had seen his work at an exhibition in Paris—it took him five years to reply. Meanwhile he went to work for various Delhi-based magazines, especially India Today, where he stayed for a decade, showing India to itself.
To catch that one moment of revelation was already his mission. For photo-shoots of celebrities he insisted on continuing until he found it: until the actress Aparna Sen laid her head on the table in mock frustration, or the actor Satyajit Ray, still smoking his pipe, suddenly twisted round to gainsay him; or until his favourite tabla-player, Zakir Hussain, entered a trance of silence. With the very famous he did the same. He caught tiny Mother Teresa slowly negotiating stairs, her sari filled with light; his friend the Dalai Lama, with an untroubled smile, taking a screwdriver to his TV; Indira Gandhi, in a moment of anxiety, contorting her face with her hands. An evening visit to a friend’s house produced one of his favourite images, achieved only when he turned to look one last time: a view of the whole of Delhi, spread out under a darkening sky, with at its heart a small lit room in which a woman prayed.
2026-05-14
There is nothing more romantic than friendship
Are our friends the real loves of our lives?
For young women who date men – and who are increasingly dissatisfied with the state of heterosexual dating – romantic friendships are setting the standard for what to expect in love. Arasasingham says she and her friends have similar love languages, giving each other more thoughtful gifts than any romantic partner has. “The more I pour into your platonic relationships, the better I feel,” she says. “And the more it raises my standards for romantic relationships because I feel seen so deeply.” Feifei, a 22-year-old writer in Nigeria, says her friendships have consistently shown her what love is supposed to feel like. “There’s no hot and cold, and I don’t have to constantly prove myself worthy of basic affection,” she says. “My friends love me on my bad days, celebrate my wins without making it weird, and tell me hard truths because they actually care.”
It is hard to measure romance, especially when what we are so often sold as romantic is wrapped up in heteronormativity. That is why even speaking about how loving some friendships feel becomes important to expanding our ideas of what is actually romantic. For Basi, it is the depth of intimacy in her friendships, and the constant knowingness that carries through all stages of life, that makes them feel more romantic than her dating life. “At the moment, dating is feeling quite transactional, and we’re all missing the realness, openness and vulnerability of relationships that’s gotten lost along the way,” she says. “If you take away physical intimacy, how much more value is your partner actually adding to your life compared to your friends?”
To compare the romance of platonic love to romantic love would be a disservice to the unparalleled beauty of friendship, but acknowledging that romance can come from a range of places opens up a wealth of possibilities for our romantic lives. “I don't think friendship needs romance’s validation,” says Idowu. “The problem isn’t that friendships aren’t romantic enough; it's that we’ve spent so long treating romantic love as the only love that counts that we’ve underinvested in our friendships and then wondered why we feel lonely.” The remedy, according to Idowu, is simple: start taking your friendships as seriously as your romantic relationships. “I think the most radical thing you can do right now is to be a good friend,” she says.
Olivia Rodrigo's Dress
If you think Olivia Rodrigo looks like a sexy baby, that’s on you
I learned so much just from this one paragraph 😂
The design itself – the babydoll dress – was not even made for children originally. It emerged in the 1940s as a way of conserving fabric during wartime rationing, and was later popularised by the 1956 film Baby Doll. It was later taken up in the 1990s, as a symbol of sarcastic hyper-femininity, by female rock musicians like Courtney Love and Kim Gordon as part of a trend called Kinderwhore. Rodrigo has nodded to the fashion of both eras throughout her career. The outrage, then, says far more about how some people interpret her dress than about her choice to wear it.
Cursive's Comeback
Cursive Club, Where Students Learn With a Flourish
Brought back memories
Years after it was omitted from the Common Core standards, some students are practicing cursive in clubs after school and in libraries. Some states are bringing it back to classrooms.
What is Linen
All About Linen – From Flax to Fabric
Linen is a bast fiber, which means it comes from the inner part of the plant. In linen’s case, that’s the flax plant.
General properties:
- One of the strongest natural textile fibers: Linen is generally stronger and more durable than cotton, making linen fabrics hard-wearing and capable of lasting for decades with proper care
- Eco-friendly life cycle: flax typically requires less water and fewer pesticides than conventional cotton; linen is also recyclable and biodegradable
- Soft hand: linen is often stiff or textured at first, but softens noticeably with wear and washing*
- Structurally sound fiber: Linen garments tend to hold their shape well due to the fiber’s low elasticity
- Launders well and can maintain color effectively when properly dyed and cared for
- Naturally resistant to irritation and often suitable for sensitive skin
- Naturally low-static
- Good moisture absorbency: linen can absorb up to 20% of its weight in moisture before feeling damp**
- Highly breathable and thermoregulating
- Low elasticity, which contributes to both durability and wrinkling
- Time- and labor-intensive extraction process (from plant to usable fiber)
2026-05-12
Flaubert on having kids
The aggravations and the disgrace of existence 🤌🏽
“The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.”
I found this on an insta post of somebody making their way through Madame Bovary and I was immediately struck by this observation.
Career Situationship
Danger Signs That You’re Stuck in a Career Situationship #work
When you’re stuck in a career situationship, you essentially have one foot in and one foot out. You’ll be able to identify pros and cons to your career, but you're not sure which side outweighs the other. If someone asks whether you’re happy with your work, your answer will be different on different days.
But are you really stuck in a career situationship, or are you just having a bad month or two? Here are some red flags that will let you know if it's the real thing:
2026-05-11
Emoji Guide
this is actually a great guide.
I don’t know whether it’s appropriate to use the heart emoji at work. Am I implying that I am in love with the person?
Great question. It depends on whether you are using a reaction emoji (that’s the small one that attaches to a specific message), which is clearly a response to what has just been said. If you send a heart emoji as a reply on its own, you are basically proposing.
I told my boss that I would not be at work one week because I was suffering from amoebic dysentery. I then got a notification that she liked my message. I’ve lost half my body weight and she’s apparently taking pleasure in my misfortune.
If you do a thumbs-up reaction emoji on some platforms, it tells the other person that you “liked“ their message. Your boss should have written back but she was probably acknowledging your message rather than rejoicing in it. Some Gen Zers regard thumbs-up emojis as a bit frosty, by the way. This is why.
…
A few of my colleagues put a palm tree by their names on Slack. I know it means that they care about the climate. I’d like to show my commitment to the planet, too, but cannot find the emoji. Can you help?
Where’s that thinking emoji?
Celebrity Book Clubs
Many celebrities now have book clubs. Most are irritating
Ms Lipa is a British pop star. She is also an increasingly popular literary critic, thanks to her book-club podcast, in which she interviews authors. But Ms Lipa does not have a splinter of ice in her heart. She has something much lovelier. She loves books (“I love books”). She loves storytelling (“I love storytelling”). She loves Helen Garner, an Australian novelist (“I fell in love with you”). She loves Margaret Atwood’s biography (“I loved it. I love it. I love it so much”).
Book clubs are changing. A hobby that was once dull, domestic and faintly frumpy has had a glow-up. Now, anyone who is anyone—and, given the nature of modern celebrity, plenty of people who are almost no one—has a book club, whether podcast, website, YouTube channel or newsletter. Reese Witherspoon, an actor and producer, has a book club. (She is its “book-lover-in-chief”.) Gwyneth Paltrow had a book club as part of her lifestyle brand, Goop. (“Crime and Punishment”, Ms Paltrow declared, is one of her “all-time favourite novels”.) Kaia Gerber, a model, has one with the perplexing aim of “building up our community of rage readers”.
Book clubs, it is true, can be irritating. They are also a little paradoxical. Reading rates are declining rapidly, everywhere. Yet there are podcasts about reading, campaigns about reading and handwringing books about reading. The public seems simultaneously unable to start reading—or to stop banging on about it. Perhaps, instead of listening to people talk about books, you should enjoy books the old-fashioned way. Sit down. Open a book. And silently enjoy it.
AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did
AI Didn't Kill Programming, You Did
Wrong. AI didn't kill programming. You killed programming decades ago by stripping it of all individuality and curiosity to satisfy the whims of giant corporations. You created universities that taught only one language and trained programmers to never think of programming as personal expression. You turned programming into a sterile profession who's only purpose is making other people money. You even went so far as to hunt down and threaten anyone who dared to disagree with you. You threatened their jobs, their reputations, and their mental health over petty bullshit like an underscore in a variable name.
You worked extremely hard to frame programming as only a profession that serves corporations, and made sure anyone who threatened the great corporations was shut down, ridiculed, humiliated, and fired. So everyone fell in line, made only projects for corporations, and talked only about how they could best serve corporations. Even when they tried to fight back against the corporate mindset they came up with a movement that's still about corporate efficiency.
Congratulations bootlickers, you got what you wanted. A boring soulless profession with no originality and a total focus on what corporations want with no regard for individualism and free expression. "Everyone should code exactly the same like good little robots." That's you, bootlicker.
2026-05-05
Europemaxxing
this could have been you europe-maxxing this summer but instead you chose to share a 1bdr with four other dudes in sf to walk around the city with your laptop slightly open so your agents won’t stop running.
this is how i convince myself after moving to Europe.
2026-05-03
Toto's AI Pivot
Shares in Japanese toilet maker Toto soar on AI-related pivot
Unlike AllBirds this one is actually real.
Japanese toilet maker Toto’s shares surged 18 per cent to a five-year high on Friday after unveiling plans to boost production of semiconductor components and posting record annual profits.
Its advanced ceramics business has turned Japan’s largest toilet manufacturer into an AI play and caught the attention of activist investor Palliser Capital.
Despite being better known for its bidet washlets that have defined the Japanese toilet globally, Toto is also the world’s second-largest producer of electrostatic chucks used in the manufacturing of Nand memory chips.
Surging sales of semiconductor components — gaining 34 per cent year on year — have lifted the division to account for more than half of Toto’s operating profit, which jumped 11 per cent to ¥53.8bn in the year to March.
2026-05-02
The Permanent Underclass
Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass
Whether you talk with engineers, venture capitalists, founders or managers, or with doomers, accelerationists, lefties or libertarians, the so-called San Francisco consensus on the impact of A.I. for workers is bleak. Many are convinced that advanced A.I. will soon surpass human capabilities. This would produce tremendous growth and scientific achievement, but it would also displace millions of jobs as fewer humans are needed to make the economy run. The technology will depress economic mobility and exacerbate inequality, while ferrying power and wealth to the A.I. companies and the existing owners of capital.
Some even believe that artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., will create a permanent underclass. In the United States, the term “underclass” gained currency in the 1960s to describe the factory workers left behind by the postwar automation boom. Today, it has become repopularized as a viral term for a theory that posits that people have a limited window of time to build wealth before A.I. and robotics are advanced enough to fully replace human labor. At that point, we will get frozen in our current class positions: The rich will be able to deploy superintelligent machines to do their bidding, and everyone else will be rendered useless and unemployable, left to live off welfare scraps.
Has taste in music been hijacked?
Has taste in music been hijacked?
In March, two of the co-founders of digital marketing agency Chaotic Good sat down for a live podcast recording with the music trade publication Billboard to discuss their company’s strategies for making songs go viral. Their approach, they explained, is designed to manipulate social media algorithms using thousands of fake accounts. They specialise in “trend simulation” — creating hundreds of posts, with tracks by their clients playing in the background, to manufacture the feeling that a song is everywhere.
This is also known as paid-for “user-generated content”, or UGC, and is increasingly common in today’s online media. “We can drive impressions on anything,” one of the co-founders explains in the podcast. “At this point, we know how to go viral.” Chaotic Good also runs what it calls “narrative campaigns”, where it purports to shape public sentiment around an artist by saturating algorithmic feeds and flooding comment sections with positive reactions. An artist playing on Saturday Night Live, for example, might hire the company to ensure that when clips from the performance are shared online, there will be hundreds of positive comments posted by Chaotic Good, perhaps from the large collection of phones in their office.
Match
The Real Truth About Expensive Matcha #matcha #cafe #education
This is a succinct but really good explanation of what makes matcha special among the green tea varieties.
Full transcript below. Other videos from this creator are worth checking out as well (I really loved this one about nail cutters.)
This 1oz tin costs $100 for some weird green dust that your favorite influencer goons to sleep over. But why does a powder made from the exact same plant as your Lipton tea bag cost more than a prime steak dinner? This is episode 8 of Chasing Beauty, and today we're looking at the story behind matcha.
Matcha originates from the Camellia sinensis plant. If you pick the leaves and let them fully oxidize, you get black tea. If you steam them immediately to stop that oxidation, you get green tea. Matcha is actually green tea with a very specific kind of manipulation. It's born in the dark. 20 to 30 days before harvest, farmers cover the tea bushes with black netting or straw, effectively removing 90% of sunlight from the plant. This forces the chemical composition of the plant to shift: higher chlorophyll, brighter color, and a sweeter, more umami profile.
The highest grade of matcha, ceremonial, is typically pulled from the first spring harvest — the cleanest, softest growth of the year. Once picked, the leaves are steamed, air-dried, and then de-veined and de-stemmed. If you've ever wondered why cheap matcha tastes like literal grass and dirt, it's likely because the whole leaf was tossed in. High-grade ceremonial matcha uses only the meat of the leaf, called tencha. It's the culinary equivalent of a filet mignon versus a hot dog.
To get that ultra-fine, silk-like texture, the tencha is ground between two granite stones. This is not a high-speed industrial process. If you go too fast, the friction cooks the matcha and ruins the delicate flavor profile. It takes a traditional stone mill roughly 1 hour to produce just 30g of matcha. This results in a powder so fine it doesn't dissolve in water — it suspends, creating a frothy, creamy beverage that hits your tongue with a wave of umami.
But matcha has another secret: L-theanine. It's packed with this unique amino acid that promotes relaxation without the drowsiness. When paired with matcha's high caffeine content, you don't get the coffee jitters. It's a 4-hour steady burn instead of a 30-minute spike and then a crash 4 hours later.
Next time you see that goon whisking their bright green bowl on your feed, now you know. They're drinking time-honored craftsmanship, 20 days of darkness, and an hour of stone-cold patience. But they honestly probably have no idea. Peace.
Women Drone Pilots in the Ukrainian Army
‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself.’
Hidden in the inner pages of Life and Arts section of this weekend's FT was a long and beautiful story about women drone pilots in the Ukranian army. Its main focus is a woman drone pilot who goes my the codename Multik.
Some weeks later, on a chilly February evening, I met Multik at a chic Lebanese restaurant in Kyiv. Yana Viktorivna Zalevska does not conform to any archetype of a modern soldier. She’s 25, about five-foot-four, lean and strong, with the posture of a trained dancer. Blade-straight dark hair frames her oval face. Her blue-grey eyes stare piercingly from behind prescription lenses in oversized hipster frames. At that first meeting, I noticed a deliberate femininity in how she presented herself. She wore matching pink athleisure wear with clean white sneakers, a nose ring, thick eyeliner, lacquered Kiko Milano lip gloss. Her manicured fingernails were filed to points and painted a deep ruby red. If “Multik” was built for the front line, it seemed Yana was meant to blend into the world behind it.
A few times during our conversation, she noted how odd it had begun to feel for her to be so far from the front, and I sensed her anxiety as she twisted uncomfortably in her seat. The tables around us filled up. To one, where a large family was sitting, a waiter brought out a cake and half of the restaurant began singing “Happy Birthday” to a young woman. Not for the only time, Zalevska excused herself to smoke outside. She confessed she felt like the war had split her personality in two. “There is Multik, who is definitely around more now,” she said, referring to the front-line persona who emerges when she dons her uniform and straps on her metallic-red pilot goggles. “And there is Yana . . . Yana wouldn’t do what Multik does, you know? She wouldn’t . . . No way in hell. But Multik — she loves to punish her enemies.”
To that end, Multik is in the process of forming an all-women FPV drone unit within Ukraine’s 141st Separate Mechanized Brigade. She calls her crew of half a dozen pilots and trainees the Amazon Banshees, after the warrior daughters of Ares, the Greek god of war, and a female spirit in Irish folklore who portends imminent death.
Zalevska’s mind has been tuned by war to function in conditions of survival and extreme stress. “My psyche has been protecting me like this for a long time,” she told me. Over three long interviews with her in Kyiv and closer to the front line, as well as with her parents and several of her sisters-in-arms, I would come to learn that she often speaks about war in this way, as if to keep it contained, away from her civilian life, where she hopes one day to live unburdened by it.
“You could say I am fighting two wars,” she told me. “One against the fucking Russians, and one inside myself.”
The videos are a key propaganda tool, instilling fear and paranoia in the enemy while boosting morale at home. For Kyiv, they also serve a practical purpose. Working towards its strategic goal of killing or catastrophically wounding 50,000 Russians each month, Ukraine’s defence ministry has gamified the war with a macabre point system. For each confirmed kill captured on video, military units earn points that can be exchanged for new equipment through an Amazon-like platform called Brave1 Market. Killing a Russian soldier may be worth 12 points, while wounding one might earn eight. Eliminating a Russian FPV drone pilot is around 25 points.
There is a physical distance between FPV drone pilots and the killing machines they control, but the psychological impact of directing violence on another human being, even one’s enemy, is heavy. And because of their effectiveness, drone pilots themselves are high-value targets, further increasing the stress they are under. “Right now our pilots are really burning out,” Zalevska admitted. She couldn’t estimate how many ask for mental health leave, but some military psychologists and doctors told me there are “dozens” ordered to take leave each month due to burnout, acute stress and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence and the General Staff of the Armed Forces did not respond to my requests for official information and comment. They typically do not disclose information about the number of troops struggling with mental health disorders.
Zalevska’s superior officers have approached her about taking a break in the past, but she pushed back. She wants to see the war out, however long that takes, from the thick of it. She says Multik is still needed as long as the Russians remain hell-bent on destroying her country.
circularity of need
friendship is a series of affordances offered and accepted #relationships
Real closeness requires a circularity of need.
Those of us with a hyper-independent, high-functioning bent often find it hard to want from other people, but are equally happy to give. We work towards a kind of frictionless existence where we give maximum utility to others but need zero maintenance ourselves. We want to be the sun, but the sun is a lonely thing. It sits at the centre of a system, but is not a part of it.
When I refuse to need anything, I’m signalling to friends that there is no shape in my life that they’re required to fill. The circularity of need is the realisation that my messy middle is the gift of agency to a friend. Inviting them in is handing them a tool and saying, “your presence here can change the outcome”. The question of much to ask of them is always a gamble, and one I can’t offer sure-footed advice about. But what I do know is this: To be loved is to be seen, but to be known is to be needed.
Why I Don't Vibe Code
Lots of reasons listed, but I liked this one.
Weirdly, nobody seems more miserable than LLM boosters. I might be more swayed if developers were using their newfound productivity gains to finally live that 4-hour workweek that nerds were pretending to idolize 10 years ago. But perversely, it seems like many in Silicon Valley are outsourcing work to the AI agents and then using their newfound spare time to do even more work. Instead of using their time for relaxation or art or joy, they’re embracing 9-9-6 work schedule and a hyper-quantified workplace that would make even Frederick Taylor blanch in horror. It’s possible that the LLM revolution will finally come for me and my job, but I’d rather not work myself into the grave first.
Hany Farid on the erosion of shared reality
Transcript: The Machinist - Hany Farid on the erosion of shared reality in the age of deepfakes | Transcript Reader
The whole lecture is fascinating, and worth hearing (or reading the transcript of) in full. But this is the bit that struck me especially. It is great to get validation from a researcher/expert on deepfakes on how mainstream news is far from irrelevant.
Audience Member
Yeah. You were talking about social media and being very concerned about anything you see there or digest from there. What about regular media? How accurate is stuff that we're seeing on networks and
Hany Farid
Good. I think that's the right question to ask. So here's what I can tell you. Everybody makes mistakes. Mainstream media makes mistakes.
The New York Times, The Post, everybody makes mistakes. But here's the difference. First of all, they're trying to get it right and you can't say that about Elon Musk and social media. People aren't necessarily trying and there's no consequence for getting it wrong every single day. So I have much, much more confidence in what I read in the large networks than I do what I see on social media because first of all, they have standards, they have ethics, they have consequences.
They have an unbelievably smart people who work incredibly hard every day to bring you reliable information. Do they get it right a 100% of the time? Of course not. Alright. So, what do you do?
You don't just pick one newspaper. You read three of them and you wait. You don't need to get your news in the first 30 seconds of something happening for God's sake. This isn't a race. We're not sprinting.
Take your time. And by the way, you got to read past the first paragraph. This is for the young people in the audience. You know, TikTok is not going to give you news about what's happening in Gaza or in Iran. You got to like you got to dig in.
This is really complicated and it's hard. And you got to reserve judgment. You got to keep your biases aside. But do I think they do better than social media? A 100 times better.
A hundred times better. I would much rather get my information from BBC, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal than anywhere else. I feel like I'm definitely better informed about what is going on in the world.
Food Noise
When did food noise get so loud?
TIL about "food noise". It's kinda fascinating because it seems like a portal to a whole subculture, that I simply cannot relate to. How can people be okay with this?
Kate “absolutely loves” watching food content on social media. “Sometimes I’ll find myself deep in a rabbit hole, watching an influencer eat six vegan pastries in Taiwan or something,” she says. Sometimes, though, that kind of content can trigger intense, incessant cravings. “I’ll realise that all day tomorrow, I’m going to really struggle with wanting something sugary, because I’ll be thinking about the video I watched.” The 32-year-old says that, at times, her relationship to food has been “a very difficult thing” to navigate, adding that she experienced binge eating disorder in her 20s. While she now has “more of a handle” on things, “the deluge of advertising” doesn’t make it easy. “It’s become immeasurably more difficult to resist thinking about food,” she says.
Kate has a point. Today, images of food are everywhere – not only in traditional advertising spaces like billboards and TV, but all over social media too. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube are saturated with pictures and videos of food designed and edited to appear extra indulgent: think Wingstop mukbangs with creators drenching their tenders in ranch, or the endless hype around limited-edition sweet treats (like M&S’s ‘speckled egg cookies’). At the same time, as the cost of living creeps ever higher, many of us are finding it harder to resist small luxuries like Uber Eats deliveries or expensive chocolate, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “lipstick effect”.
At the same time, Brown says, “consumer culture has intensified the constant availability of food. Digital platforms, delivery apps, and targeted promotions mean that food is now accessible and promoted 24 hours a day. The result is an environment where food cues are not only everywhere, but also highly personalised and difficult to opt out of.”
Experts agree that these drugs are far from a silver bullet. According to John Warner, emeritus professor of paediatrics at Imperial College London, using Ozempic to treat food noise is akin to “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted”. It is ultimately a short-term sticking plaster for an issue with much deeper roots; as Higgs says, while Ozempic’s appetite-dulling effects “can be helpful at an individual level, [they do] not change the broader context in which eating takes place.” In Brown’s view, “addressing food noise in a meaningful way requires reconsidering the scale and nature of food marketing, product placement, and digital food environments.”
None of this is to say that all food-related content on social media is an insidious ploy to sell highly processed foods or extreme dietary trends. Many foodie influencers have helped viewers embrace intuitive eating and normalised nourishing yourself across a broad range of food groups (case in point: Maddi Neye-Swift’s popular series “carbs before a night out are a must”, where the creator shares videos of her favourite stomach-lining dinners). But equally, many creators do push distinctly _un_balanced ideas about food. Warner’s suggestion? “Be critical of all you read and hear” online. Which, really, is sound advice for any kind of content — food-related or otherwise.
Friendship and the art of hanging out
I fear I’m doing friendship wrong: why do we lose the art of just hanging out? | Carolin Würfel
There’s a black and white image of the photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller and her friend Tanja Ramm. The two are having breakfast in bed at Miller’s studio in Paris, casually reading newspapers. Their faces are framed by untamed hair and they’re dressed in cotton shirts, with coffee cups in front of them. The image, captured in 1931, is quiet and intimate. They share a blanket, their arms touch. There’s no rush, no urgency. It’s a scene about love but, above all, it’s about friendship.
When was the last time I lay in bed with a friend like that? For most of us, it was probably during school or university, when staying over or crashing at someone’s house was a regular occurrence – sometimes a necessity, but mostly just part of our routines. It kept us close. Staying in a friend’s room or apartment felt like being on an island – safe, cosy and fun. It was about whispering, giggling and sharing secrets. And sometimes it was about nothing at all except being together.
As an adult whose usual habitat is a large European city, when I meet friends now, it starts with a text that goes something like: “Hey, how are you? Would love to see you. Maybe we can grab dinner or drinks?”
Then the struggle begins to find a date. It’s a messy process, especially in Berlin. Days pass. Sometimes, weeks. Finally, if we are lucky, the day arrives and we meet – at a restaurant or a bar, somewhere public, where we’re expected to behave, sit properly and engage in “polite” chat. We update each other on our projects, gossip a little, sigh, complain about circumstances at home or work and then we part ways.
Sometimes, a few hours later, or the next morning, I’ll send or receive a message: “I’d missed you. It was so good to see you. We should do this more often.” An honest message, but an empty one at the same time. Because we won’t do it more often. We’ll continue rushing through our daily lives and responsibilities, fitting each other in where we can.
How close can you really be to someone you only see for a couple of hours every now and then? What can you actually share? In these meetups, we present condensed versions of ourselves. So much of who we really are stays in the dark. We talk. And talking is the only way to feel connected and to bond.
2026-05-01
Maladaptive Frugality
Maladaptive frugality - Herbert Lui
When you default to the lowest cost option without considering the drawbacks, procrastinating or hesitating on spending, or guilt tripping yourself about an essential expense or making a recoverable mistake, you’re engaging in maladaptive frugality.
The most useful thing you can do is be mindful of it and try to draw yourself into the present moment. As Tim Ferriss asks, “What does your last year—not your childhood beliefs—tell you about where you might invest more for a higher quality of life?”
When you make frugality your servant, it can offer you freedom. When you make frugality your master—maladaptive frugality—it traps you and limits your possibilities.
2026-04-30
This Japanese art of breaking from routine
Life is meant to be experienced, not endured.
If everything feels predictable or mechanical, I wake myself up with awe or an element of surprise. I give myself a break from monotony to bring wonder back. And keep life from becoming stagnant.
The Japanese call it datsuzoku.
Datsu means “to escape”, “to flee” and zoku can be translated as “routine” or “convention”. It’s a practice of breaking out of routine, “escaping from the usual” or “stepping outside the ordinary.” Also of freeing yourself from patterns that take away that “alive” feeling of being human.
Datsuzoku is all about surprise.
Freedom from the usual. The kind of break that shocks you into awareness. It’s not just unwinding; it’s reconnecting with a side of life that’s alive, unpredictable. Breaking patterns keeps the mind alert and excited.
Investing
The Robots Make the Predictions - Bloomberg
I wrote last week that, in investing, “There’s no magic, no dark matter, no other source of gains. Everyone’s gains come from (1) economic growth and (2) other people’s losses.” In the aggregate, everyone gets the market return, which comes from allocating capital to economic growth. Some people get more and others get less, but they necessarily cancel each other out. People invest anyway, though, because allocating capital to economic growth is a good long-term proposition.
Prediction markets don’t have that. People put $1 into a prediction market event contract, and at resolution it pays out $1 to the winner. There is no investment in economic growth, no source of long-term returns; everyone’s winnings come from someone else’s losses.
2026-04-29
Post-romanticism
Podcast: 🆕 Never Post! Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man #relationships #dating
Transcript: Never Post - Why No One Wants to Hard Launch Their Man | Transcript Reader
The whole podcast is worth listening to, but this term "post-romanticism" caught my eye. This is probably the first time I am encountering it.
There's a cheery fatalism here. If the marketplace of love offered you a freedom of endless choices, then this new mindset offered freedom from choosing it all. And Carolina explained to me that this ushered in a new kind of dating landscape. Some refer to it as heterofatalism or heteropessimism. But in our conversation, Carolina called it post romanticism.
This post romantic vibe or mood is characterized by sort of a loss of faith in romanticism, of a disbelief in romanticism or at least a performative disbelief in the romantic plot, which is seen not only as a myth, but also as a potentially danger of oppressive one.
Post romanticism trades the emotionally ruinous experience of situationships and ghosting and gaslighting for a completely sanitized view of dating that does not allow for any risk of getting hurt at all. The simplest solution would be to never date men ever. But under post romanticism, you can date. You can have sex. You can have fun if you want to.
But you do so with a kind of intense vigilance that borders on the hypochondriac.
think what is at stake, it's a reversal of the romantic idea of love. Roland Barthes in the Fragments of a Lovers Discourse says that the lover, the 1 who love wants to be loved back so that to become perfect. It is the love I receive that makes me perfect. Whereas in the post romantic discourse, you have to be perfect in order to deserve to be loved. I don't think there is ever a world where you will dine at the table of post romanticism and leave with your belly full. It's a crash diet of avoidance to vulnerability, a commitment to your own misery and the expected misery of others as if it's an intellectual win. But all it really does is make everything so much harder for everyone.
Tech bros and Gutka
The Tech Bros Are All In on Zyn
Everytime I hear Zyn, my mind goes to Gutka.
Gutka is a type of betel quid and chewing tobacco preparation made of crushed areca nut (also called betel nut), tobacco, catechu, paraffin wax, slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and sweet or savory flavourings, in India, Pakistan, other Asian countries, and North America.
The article is kinda wild.
Entrepreneur Garrett Campbell has a 6-mg “cool mint” Zyn tucked under his lip at all times during his mammoth 15-hour workdays, aside from when he is eating.
“I was always very against nicotine,” says the software company founder. The 26-year-old saw his peers using nicotine pouches at college, when they first emerged as a potential productivity-boosting hack, and considered it a “degenerate thing to do.”
But then all of his fellow founders started fueling themselves with nicotine pouches, of which the Philip Morris International–owned Zyn is the market leader. The company distributed 794 million cans in the US in the last financial year, a 37 percent increase over the previous year. Now, Campbell says “every single one” of his friends that runs a company does so with a nicotine pouch in their mouth.
“The brand marketer person [is] doing a hell of a job,” says Campbell, who has slicked-back dark hair and usually wears plain T-shirts in black, white, or gray. He also has ADHD and sold a sales recruitment company last year for a “good chunk of change.”
Nicotine’s core mechanism hasn’t changed in the journey from puff to pouch; the compound still floods the brain with dopamine. Dependence develops quickly, but for some users in the tech sector, the rush of productivity balances out the risk of dependency.
But how “clean” really are the pouches? A gulf is swiftly emerging between nicotine advocates who use the pouches and those who use toothpicks, lozenges, pills, patches, or sprays. Biohacking guru and author Dave Asprey describes nicotine as being close to a perfect psychotropic. “If you're under-aroused, it brings you up; over-aroused, it brings you down,” he says.
…
Nicotine is perhaps the only “biohacking tool” that encounters such strident opposition in other circles. Fellow biohacker Bryan Johnson is against nicotine entirely, and not only due to his claims that the pouches can cause gum recession, oral lesions, and irritation.
2026-04-28
Most People Dont Have a Type
Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’ #dating #relationships
This is not an uncommon trajectory. Many people think that they have a set type, and that all they need for eternal bliss is to find someone who matches it. When people peruse dating profiles, they’re often looking for someone who has specific interests, qualities, or hobbies. But according to a growing body of relationship research, many people end up marrying someone with few of their must-haves and a lot of “haves” they didn’t think they desired. A person might say that they’re looking for a partner who’s funny and conscientious, but then end up in a happy relationship with someone who is neither of those things. “People don’t know what they want,” Samantha Joel, a psychologist at Western University in Ontario who studies relationships, told me, “and people don’t know what they’re going to like until they meet someone.”
That said, shared values do seem to matter to people: A 2020 report found that only 3 percent of American adults were married to someone from the opposite political party, for instance. Eastwick says that this happens because so many people either immediately screen out or simply never interact with a potential date who has opposing values—a hard-core Democrat might live in a neighborhood populated mostly with other Democrats, for example, or swipe left on all Republicans on Tinder. But if two people get together not knowing that they’re political opposites and the relationship takes off for other reasons, they might compartmentalize their differences or move closer to each other’s ideology. (“He’s probably going to become a libertarian,” Eastwick said, referring to the hypothetical Republican.)
The problem is: The way people actually become attracted to each other can be hard to predict, Joel said. Not even scientists who have dedicated their life to studying chemistry can totally pin down its essence. Do you like the guy from Tinder and the joke he cracked about The Big Lebowski just because you were in an unusually good mood on the day you met up with him? If you’d been in a rotten mood, would you have liked him (and his stupid joke) less?
…
All of this might help explain why many people who use dating apps struggle to find a long-term partner. With their emphasis on photos and profiles, Eastwick writes, “apps cater to our ideas about what we like much better than they cater to what we actually like.” Chemistry grows, and love is built on shared experiences and memories, but the apps tend to keep people trapped in small talk. Many users find themselves swiping endlessly without ever meeting up with someone. What’s more, Eastwick told me, apps can encourage people to judge their dates too quickly—and perhaps move on prematurely. “You might have a middling first impression of somebody,” he said, “but then you meet them again, and you end up really liking them.” The apps, however, present so many options that if a date is “anywhere south of great,” people may be inclined to hastily decide “I’m not gonna do the second date.”
2026-04-27
Marriage and Settling
Are on-screen relationships normalising settling? | Dazed
Very similar themes to the New Yorker podcast I logged last week.
What is marriage for? It’s an interesting question in our day and age, when marriage feels less and less necessary. Women are no longer as dependent on men for financial security (although many still are), and there is far less social stigma around having children or living together outside of wedlock. We also know that a significant amount of marriages don't last, with approximately 42 per cent in the UK projected to end in divorce before their 25th year. So why are we still so drawn to the fantasies of this institution?
This is one of the underlying questions of season two of award-winning Netflix drama Beef. Several answers are explored through the series’ three main couples: Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan), Ashley and Austin (Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton), and Chairwoman Park and Dr Kim (Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho). In episode six, Chairwoman Park, bogged down by efforts to cover up her husband’s culpability in a patient’s death, speaks candidly about why she married him: “This is such a headache! The whole reason I remarried was because he was fun. Someone to eat with. To travel with. That’s all.”
People get married for all kinds of reasons: family and societal pressures, visas, economic and financial security, and, of course, love. But one of the most common motivations is the simple fact that people don’t want to be alone. A 2024 survey commissioned by Forbes Advisor, which polled 1,000 divorced Americans, found that companionship was the second most common reason for getting married, with financial security first and love third. On Reddit, marriage forums are full of questions about marriage and loneliness, with one user questioning whether the idea that “you should never marry out of fear of ending up alone” makes any sense. “Isn’t [that] really the only reason to get married?” they ask. “If people seek stability and companionship, they get married.”
In a climactic exchange in the final episode, Chairwoman Park offers a jaundiced view of love under capitalism: “Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They are all the same, another way to serve the self.” Marriage is supposed to save you from loneliness. It is supposed to grant you rights and signal to the world that you are lovable, desirable, chosen.
I don’t want to spoil the ending of Beef – it is messy, complicated, depressing and unsatisfying, in ways both good and bad. But it shows that while marriage is often an attempt to ameliorate the loneliness of being alive, it can sometimes make that loneliness even worse. It is only in allowing ourselves to be seen and known, helped and supported by others in our best and worst moments, that we can, as Lindsay tells Ashley, “finally give our existence some semblance of meaning.” This might also teach us how to genuinely love one another: not by force, or out of desperation, but truly by choice.
Geopolitics and Economy
Came across a couple of podcasts related to this theme.
Fertilizer 101 How the war with Iran and Hormuz crisis is upending fertilizer supply chains. However, beyond just the current news cycle, this episode goes really deep into how the fertilizer supply chain is organized.
Rare Earths and China Traces the history of the discovery of these rare earths and how eventually China came to dominate them.
- Episode: Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China - YouTube
- Transcript: Planet Money - Battlefield rare earths: How the U.S. lost to China | Transcript Reader
2026-04-26
Janteloven
Is the Scandi ethos of Janteloven broken?
I have been hearing this term for a while now, and I started to pay attention to it because I work for a Danish company nowadays.
Janteloven — or Law of Jante — is an informal, often misunderstood, set of rules taken from the satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933) by the Danish-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose. The ten rules, all variations on not acting ostentatiously, were a critique of oppressive rural communities in Norway.
In the years since, Sandemose’s fictional creation has become conflated with broader ideas of Scandinavian equality, a regional brand of solidarity and togetherness recognised around the world. Viewed positively, Janteloven can be linked to Dugnad, the Norwegian tradition of communal volunteer work in parks and schools, while a lack of overt competition lessens loneliness. But it has also been criticised for stifling innovation. And if being transparent in one’s ambitions is frowned upon, one might be tempted into shady territory.
While the article above 👆🏽 doesn't go into what the exact laws are, I found this article which does.
What is Janteloven? The Law of Jante in Scandinavian Society
According to this article:
Janteloven’s social code dictates emphasis on collective accomplishments and well-being, and disdains focus on individual achievements. It is an underlying Scandinavian philosophy principle that applies across Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Understanding Janteloven is paramount to understanding both the history and modern-day cultures of these countries.
The ten rules of Janteloven are:
- Don’t think you are anything special.
- Don’t think you are as good as we are.
- Don’t think you are smarter than we are.
- Don’t think you are better than we are.
- Don’t think you know more than we do.
- Don’t think you are more important than we are.
- Don’t think you are good at anything.
- Don’t laugh at us.
- Don’t think anyone cares about you.
- Don’t think you can teach us anything.
Random (but good) Advice from Ava
some things I've learned about dealing with people - by Ava
Being comfortable in large groups and parties is just a learned skill. For many years, I identified as someone who was very comfortable in one-on-one settings, but unsure of how to socialize in groups. Then I started hosting more parties and events for work and realized I’d mythologized this “comfortable in small groups/comfortable in big groups” thing way too much. It’s literally just a thing you teach yourself how to do. Assume a normal and friendly affect! Talk to people sincerely and unpretentiously! Circulate! If needed, break it down into a set of procedural steps—this is how I enter a conversation with a group of people I don’t know, this is how I leave the conversation when I’m bored.
would love to adopt this 👆🏽
Don’t let not texting someone back for a very long time stop you from doing the above.
Glennon Doyle: “Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”
2026-04-23
Anxiety
The Meaning of Anxiety | A Working Library #books #mentalhealth
Rollo May refutes the assertion that mental health is living without anxiety, proposing instead that anxiety is a necessary condition for creativity, intellect, and freedom. He defines anxiety as the “experience of Being affirming itself against Nonbeing,” as that which propels us to more self-awareness, consciousness, and life. He likewise shows that the refusal to embrace this anxiety, to attend to it and work with it and through it, is an invitation to authoritarianism and fascism. When we lack the skills of being with our anxiety, and feel our only option is to flee, we often flee right into the hands of a strongman who promises security at the cost of liberty. May wrote during the height of fascism in the last century; we read it during the renewal of the same in this one. The lessons hold.
this is such a great quote from the book being talked about
It is to be expected that certain “mechanisms of escape” from the situation of isolation and anxiety should have developed. The mechanism most frequently employed in our culture, [Erich] Fromm believes, is that of automation conformity. An individual “adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him [sic] by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.” This conformity proceeds on the assumption that the “person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more.”
This is the trap anxiety lays for us: in our effort to escape it, we run further into its jaws. But perhaps there are yet alternatives. May connects that impulse to escape with the experience of isolation: can we become less isolated without becoming automatons? Can we find community not in the center, but on the outskirts, among the weirdos and the outsiders, the people who never seem to fit in, who are always playing a different game? There are fewer of them, by definition, but not so few that we cannot find them. We won’t find the comfort of the majority among them, of course—but as we have seen, that comfort is mere illusion—but perhaps we can find the community and camaraderie that is so necessary for our survival, and without giving up our precious selves to get it.
Matt Levine on the SpaceX IPO and the Cursor acquisition
There’s No Time for SpaceX to Buy Cursor - Bloomberg
I havent been setting aside time to read Matt Levine's newsletter often enough. But this one is gold
Part of what you are getting, when you invest in Elon Musk’s Whole Thing, is exposure to his restlessness. SpaceX was a company founded on the principle that it would be cool to shoot rockets into space. Musk still believes that, but in the years since SpaceX’s founding he has added many more visions — brain implants, tunnels, artificial superintelligence, data centers, exposing millions of people to his online comedy stylings and political opinions — to his portfolio. (Also he runs a car company.) SpaceX combines many (not all!) of those visions, but today’s portfolio of SpaceX businesses is to some extent accidental. Today I can describe SpaceX as a “satellite internet, rocket launch, space data center, Mars colonization, frontier AI model and social media company,” but it will be somewhat shocking if I can use the same list in April 2027. In 2027 most of those things will still be on the list, but something else, something that would never have occurred to me, will be occupying much of Musk’s and SpaceX’s time and attention. “Humanity’s survival depends on ______,” Musk will say, about this surprising new thing, “and SpaceX is pivoting all of the computing power in its space data centers to solve it.” Space data centers!
Musk’s restlessness fits right in to a vibes-based, dream-selling IPO: He can show up at the roadshow in June and be like “by this time next year the space data centers will be made out of a previously undiscovered element that we will acquire from aliens,” and investors will be like “oh man is he ever selling the dream.” If you’re investing in Musk you want novelty; if the roadshow was just like “satellite internet is a good steady business” you would be disappointed and would not pay 100 times revenue for the stock.
But the IPO! There’s an IPO! In like two months! It’s bad enough that the SpaceX IPO became Also The xAI And Twitter IPO in February, but making it also the Cursor IPO now is too much. There is no time to acquire Cursor before the IPO.
So it will have to wait. “Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together,” SpaceX’s tweet says. Bloomberg reports:
SpaceX isn’t acquiring Cursor immediately because of the rocket company’s imminent initial public offering, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic information. A major transaction would require SpaceX to update its filings and financial details, potentially delaying the IPO, which is targeting a $2 trillion valuation. The $10 billion is a breakup fee if the deal doesn’t go through, according to people with knowledge of the deal.
I would put it a bit differently: The $10 billion is option premium, giving SpaceX the right, but not the obligation, to acquire Cursor “later this year,” after the IPO stuff has calmed down. Because SpaceX doesn’t own Cursor, or even have a binding agreement to acquire it, the IPO prospectus probably does not have to get into too much detail on Cursor’s business or finances or how they would combine with SpaceX’s.
The SpaceX IPO prospectus will be a historical document, capturing Elon Musk’s Whole Thing at a specific moment in time, but everyone understands that, moments later, things will change. Cursor is part of that “moments later” bucket: Everyone has fair warning that, after the IPO, SpaceX will also be Cursor.
Of course Musk does change his mind a lot. It would be very funny if he sours on Cursor by July and walks away from the deal, and they make $10 billion for three months’ work. I guess that’s another reason not to spend much time on Cursor in the prospectus.
Ibram X Kendi
Ibram X. Kendi’s illiberal views on race are out of favour. Good
Anyone who has regularly talked of “cultural appropriation” or “safe spaces” probably owns a book by Ibram X. Kendi. He became one of the American left’s favourite thinkers on race, having written five number-one bestsellers and won the National Book Award. His best-known title, “How to Be an Antiracist”, claims there is no such thing as “not racist”: at every moment, a person is either being racist (by supporting or failing to challenge policies that sustain racial inequity) or antiracist (when they do the opposite).
This is an insult masquerading as a description, and it is more likely to harden opposition than to change minds. This intolerant streak was visible in earlier work. “The heartbeat of racism is denial,” Mr Kendi wrote. To object to his Manichean view of race relations, then, is to out yourself as a bigot.
That is a telling goal. Mr Kendi is not a serious policy thinker: he is a religious writer for secular lefties. “How to Be an Antiracist” features original sin (racism), public repentance (“the heartbeat of antiracism is confession”) and eternal struggle (“the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing”). This sin must be expiated, not accepted or compromised with. The world is divided into the damned, who disagree with him, and the saved, who accept his proposals in toto.
That suited progressives when they believed Donald Trump was an aberration, and all they had to do to banish Trumpism was cancel bad people and drag politics leftward. But that had a limit, as the election in 2024 showed. Some progressives have come to realise that they have “annoyed the average American into fascism” as Marc Maron, a comedian, sardonically put it. The lukewarm reception for this book is also telling. Google Trends suggests Mr Kendi has attracted less than one-tenth the attention this year as in 2020.x
2026-04-22
Ginsberg and Gen Z
moloch and the machines - by Adam Aleksic
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brainrot, gooning doomscrolling bedrotting,
dissociating themselves through the enshittified ragebait clickbait looking for a dopamine fix,
nonchalant doomers repressing the AI overview of the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who Kalshi and Rainbet and OnlyFans and Doordash sat up vaping in the ambient glow of slot-machine phones drowning in the depths of 4chan contemplating memes…
I’m not going to rewrite any more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl because it’s already perfect. It’s impossible to read the poem without extending it to yourself and your cultural moment. We’ve all been crushed by the oppressive machinations of conformity and consumerism. What can we do but lash out in creative fury, impaling ourselves on the palisades of modernity?
Banoffee Pie
Why we’re all going bananas for banoffee pie
It's been surprisingly hard to find Banoffee pie, since I moved to Berlin. Even in Bengaluru, they were not that easy to find. The one place where I found it a lot was New Delhi.
Banoffee pie has long been a staple of home cooks, bakeries and diners. The version at Bubby’s in New York, for instance, is legendary. But with a return to comfort and familiarity in modern dining, it fits perfectly on upscale restaurant menus too. “It’s playful, nostalgic and a bit messy in the best way,” says Hawksmoor co-founder Huw Gott. “A cheeky dessert you can be sure will sell,” says Booton.
The banoffee pie was invented in 1971 by Ian Dowding, chef at The Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, East Sussex. It was inspired by a San Franciscan recipe known as Blum’s coffee toffee pie but using a soft toffee made from dulce de leche, condensed milk that has been boiled in the can for several hours. “Apple was quite good, mandarin was downright disgusting,” wrote Dowding of his experiments with fruit. “But the day we made it with a layer of banana, I knew I had cracked it.” He finished the pie with coffee-flavoured whipped cream made ’70s-style with instant coffee granules.
As baker Philip Khoury puts it, banoffee pie is a “juvenile pleasure” – he means that approvingly – based on the understanding that banana and caramel just work. But how you choose to make yours depends on your tolerance for sugar. Though whipped cream and fresh bananas are meant to ease the sweetness, Dowding considered his recipe “far too rich”. In his new book Elevate, MasterChef champion Brin Pirathapan proposes an even sweeter banoffee meringue pie made with caramelised bananas and Italian meringue that “is not for the fainthearted”.
2026-04-21
Boredom
Britons are less bored than they used to be. This is bad
Boredom, says Michael Pollan, author of a book on consciousness, is “endangered”. Though precisely quantifying its decline is hard: it is not well measured. More obviously appealing emotions like happiness have international indices. More damaging ones like depression have WHO programmes. But boredom—unloved, uncharismatic—is, says Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida and co-author of the electric-shock paper, “very understudied”.
That is changing. Like other endangered species, boredom is starting to inspire a more appreciative, even elegiac, tone among researchers. “Boredom sucks and we hate it,” says Christopher Mlynski, a researcher at the University of Vienna, but it forces us to find more “challenging things…to do”. The pain is the point. Scrolling on a smartphone, says Professor Westgate, “staves off boredom”—just enough to suppress the entrail-gnawing—but prevents “lasting, meaningful” activity.
2026-04-20
A life that doesn't ask me to explain myself
Be obsessed with your own life
Be obsessed with your own life - by hasif 💌
This isn’t just about choosing to focus on your own happiness or goals in a selfish way. No, being obsessed with your life is a radical act of self-respect and personal ownership. It’s a choice to break free from the constant noise, to turn off the distractions, and to commit to the deep work of understanding and shaping the life that only you can live. It’s about returning home to yourself in a world that’s constantly trying to take you elsewhere.
But what does it mean to be obsessed with your own life? Is it vanity? Is it narcissism? No. It’s the opposite; it’s a recognition that your time, your energy, your thoughts, and your decisions are valuable. It’s a commitment to yourself, to your personal growth, to your values, and to living intentionally, no matter what the world around you says.
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 🙃. I guess 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.
2026-04-17
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.
2026-04-16
“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.
2026-04-15
Shitty Flow and Zombie Flow
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!
2026-04-13
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.
2026-04-12
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.
2026-04-10
Barista Judgemental Glare
Brooklyn Coffee Shop Episode 55: Kumail Nanjiani, Barista Training Expert 🪪☕️ - YouTube
I was at a coffee shop in Berlin today and the barista messed up my order by pouring somebody else's order into my reusable cup and handing it to them. When I pointed it out to the barista, he had this look about him as if it was my fault, which reminded me of this episode of Brooklyn Coffee Shop.
The transcript is reproduced in full below.
Hey guys, it's that time of the year again. I'm here for your hipster barista assessment.
No one says hipster anymore.
You've passed the first test. Nobody says the h word anymore.
I'm sorry. Who are you?
How do you not remember me? I'm Kumail Nanjiani, h word barista expert.
Wow, your aura is like completely different this year. I didn't even recognize you.
Yeah, something seems off. You seem very emotionally regulated.
Oh yeah, I've been on a healing journey. I started therapy.
Therapy? I thought it was a requirement for all Brooklyn baristas to be chaotic and unhinged.
I've been avoiding therapy for years for my craft.
Yeah, that's a big update we're doing to 2026. Now, we want all baristas to go through therapy so that your rudeness comes from a place of creativity rather than trauma. As you know, you need a high score to keep operating a coffee shop in Brooklyn. First, let's see your judgmental glare.
Okay, it's a little dead behind the eyes. I need a bit more boredom, a little more disdain. Like, you looked at me and you already know I'm the problem. More like Mhm. Mhm. Judgmental glare 8 out of 10.
Not. Seriously,we're known in Brooklyn for our judgmental glare.
You were there for a moment.
We have at least 10,000 negative Google reviews about it.
You think 10,000's a lot? All right, let's talk about reading. What are we perusing these days?
Only books on Marxism and existential thought.
Marxism is so played out. It's so old. I mean, look at your mayor. My mom is into Marxism. She's got a little Marx bumper sticker on her Subaru. Now all the cool baristas have circled back around to loving capitalism.
But I spent my entire adult life blaming all my problems on capitalism.
I would shift that blame right over to taxes.
As a fourth generation Gatsby, I can do that.
That's right. Rich is cool again, guys.
All right, let's hear your self-sabotage initiatives to keep customers away.
We've been playing with insults. Usually three to four per customer.
Sometimes we post to our Instagram story that we're suddenly closing and then we stay here just so that we can turn people away.
We never have what people order even though it's on the menu.
Oh god.
When we're in a bad mood, we triple our prices and that is often.
You guys are nailing it right there. All right, let's talk about what are your milk options right now.
Oh, so today we have cacti, water, buffalo, avocado seed, and potato milk.
Trick question. We're all post milk now. You haven't heard of milk fatigue?
The milk is getting fatigued?
We are tired of milk.
No milk made in the house.
How can milk get tired? Milk don't be alive. We're now in our post milk era. I always knew this day would come.
Okay, I have tallied up your scores. You're a B+. Dang it.
I promise next year we'll be even more unapproachable.
Yeah, we'll go to therapy so we can weaponize wellness even more.
B+ is actually the highest score you can get.
I knew it.
We do that just to keep people grounded.
All right, you guys can attend my new workshop. It's called Healing for Baristas. How to calm yourself while flustering others. I will save you two spots