OS 13: esoteric sandwiches, eggs for strength, the best new dark wellness newsletter and more
Plus the world's best soup newsletter
Good morning Irishmen, Friday, post rain: it’s dry as a bone in New York, all the snow is gone from my courtyard, the whippoorwills are breakdance fighting, some snow around still, but it’s grey, the week finishes up with 745 push-ups, we are losing weight on an all-bone soup, Purim came and went and I saw one guy dressed up as Snoopy, the Ides of March are close, and I’m off yogurt—but just for a couple of days. I found a good 95% cotton sweat, tenniz ball juggling every day in the ONLY health aggregation email that surfs between the lines of full health psychosis and being completely normal.
What we’re covering: peptides, CASEIN protein, other (animal) protein, citrus-peel maxxing, patch delivery systems, tendon training, Tai Chi, post-DHT theories of hair growth, post-calories in/out models of fat loss, severe macros mastery, GHk-Cu and Wolverine, Dr. Raymond Peat, sunlight titration, cutting season, demon zero-drop shoes, vibratory therapy (movement), cotton head to toe, cave-person skincare, physical hygiene, strength, curly hair and more. Nobody writes about this. Snake Super Health Open Secrets.
This week: Murakami talks fartlets, the link between nicotine and deep cognitive focus, a novel way to leach MAXIMUM collagen out of bones in soup, a very simple way to ingest less caffeine, the best ESOTERIC sandwich in New York is maybe back for good, the death of the bran muffin (and the rise of demon macro fake desserts), the dull, mathematical-equation approach to beauty (and what it misses about people with 18” necks), how to raise your serum testosterone simply through eggs (read the fine print), Huberman steps in it again, an update on the menstrual cycle workout controversy, a new zero-drop gym sneaker…. from A24? and the most promising dark wellness/beauty newsletter to drop in some time. Open Secretos—
Onto it.
Popular musician Harry Styles interviews popular novelist Haruki Murakami about the latter’s running practice in Runner’s World magazine; the conversation touches on the artistic process*, discipline, and the like. Short piece. Murakami’s writing on running—particularly this piece—is foundational, and to me rises above his fiction. Which isn’t a knock on his fiction, it’s just that good—one of those generational one-off pieces that creates its own subgenre. Kind of like Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (also New Yorker). Tremendous.
I kept thinking of this quote from Atticus Lish: “I want to say to all writers the same thing I say to myself: be happy, may it work out for you, and may you be the happy writer.” one of my favorites.
What happened to the bran muffin? Snake well-wisher/novelist Alexander Chee asks. It’s true. It’s disappeared. It’s gone. Can’t get it anywhere. Victim of macros. The muffin—off the dome, macros profile has to be 15f, 65c, 6p, maybe 9g fiber—was the absolute first casualty of numbers-based, aesthetic eating. Basically a slab of fudge with a little bit of fiber. Not good enough. People get their fiber from other things now—raspberries, avocados, strawberries, ideally, and I suppose lentils, chia seeds, fiber sodas:
They get their sweets more directly. We have to be fair here. This is the silver lining of protein-maxxing. Fake healthy foods built out as desserts are gone. A bran muffin now and then isn’t bad, though. And the inverse: “healthy” foods transmogrified into unsatisfying dessert, feels equally high cost. Whatever. Why complain?
In case you missed last week’s issue
Last week I broke down the Supreme calisthenics collection, the dangers of long-term caloric restriction, protein-maxxing during Lent and a cool very simple posture hack
Speaking of—is beauty math? So says Ruby Justice Thelot over at Ssense. A thorough, fashion-centred critique of looksmaxxing. Helpful to read, overdue, especially… what with Clav having walked the show. I’d argue that beauty sort of is mathematical—eye width, maxilla, all that stuff’s true—but only in the middle, and as a back of the envelope sketch. It gets more fascinating when the numbers break down. You want a Margiela model or a Perry Ellis model? It can’t just all be soap stars. Ultimately the data-based approach to beauty is a ruling class tool that’s maybe 80% efficient. Nothing to worry about. It’s just good enough.
Strange and fascinating story on IG about a Mets prospect ingesting 1,000 raw eggs for a month (30 a day) and raising his serum testosterone from like 300 to 1100 and getting to a 100 mpg fastball. Full story here on MLB.com. Undisprovable, probably. And yet… is this not a more sane and extreme response to looksmaxxing? It sort of shatters gen pop division between hard and soft looksmaxxing—soft being organic, low-danger interventions—since their definition of the latter is beholden to the idea that you have to eat food like a normal person. The premise here, in the intervention, is that enough eggs will push your T through the roof (choline, testosterone), and higher T levels (in men and women) are associated with better protein synthesis. He did this in college. A perfect argument for psychotic analog-maxxing, the only real protocols this newsletter endorses. The long term downside to the guy above’s diet is maybe elevated levels of serum cholesterol down the line. And going bald (raw egg whites are said to bond with biotin and make your hair go away). But is not performance more important than looks? A similar discussion occurred in yesterday’s Snake Super Health looksmaxxing podcast, if you missed it. Listen here.
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A24 is resurrecting the Koyo table tennis shoe, the Sharpman, used in the t.t. scenes in Marty Supreme; info here. Doing it with the company. It’s a nice no-stack simple sole canvas sneaker, in use in Japan for decades for the sport. Scrolling through the Koyo feed there are photos of it in action in the 1960s. This one, featuring Shigeo Itō, is tremendous. How’d he train? Hard to say. But a story here about NPB (Japanese major leagues) baseball players explains their workouts:
Training was hellish rather than rigorous. Everyday, all participants were forced to practice from early morning to evening. Each of the player had different training menu, but some assignments were common: 1,000-times push-up, 1,000-times swings, 1,000-times Fungo, dashing up the slop, etc. During the interview, all participants recalled they had no energy to eat something in the dinning hall and wash their body in the shower room.
No fungos, but probably in that range. Buy here.
Platform News: Friend of the newsletter (and occasional source) Alexis Page has launched her beauty newsletter, Self Involved. Subscribe here. You may/likely know Alexis as “the most important person in beauty you never heard of”—great bio—the behind the scenes makeup (can I say that?) brain at Glossier, Pat McGrath, and scads of other brands on your shelf or in your crosshairs. The amount of intelligence she’s sitting on is unparalleled. Not just makeup (not my beat) but demon health, hair, that stuff. One of the two or three people who stump me on esoteric wellness lore and are real time with items and knowledge, along with my friend Andy. Check it out.
It’s fucking over dude—RFK (Jr.) is coming for Dunkin’ (Donuts).
Nicotine corner: Busy week for this stuff. One, Tucker Carlson’s latest merch drop (yesterday maybe) includes an “I love Nicotine” mug and an “I don’t endorse smoking… that strongly”… not bad. Palantir, the demonic private intel company, and other tech companies (like Hello Patient) are stocking vending machines with nicotine pouches, gums to increase worker productivity. Kind of ties in with the literature, what I mentioned in last week’s newsletter and this line from Edward Luttwak, the strategist (recent interview with him here) from an older interview that the “big jump in intellectual achievement that took place among Europeans, all of whom smoked… The social history of nicotine begins with the sharpening of the brain.”
Maybe? Probably. It makes sense. Since a devil must be driven out by devil, the only way to create long-term focus, fucked through the phone, is through nic. I stopped smoking long ago but still I miss it. The political angle here is that Palantir is an IDF-based company and Luttwak is being interviewed in Tablet. The post-political based argument is that heightened nicotine consumption is actually Mashriqi/Maghrebi behavior.
One of the downsides to nic. patches is that their effectiveness weans off. You focus slightly less as you do them. I do think there’s a way around this. I really like this Lindy approach to titration—slowly working off cigs or nicotine patches, in this case gum—that I ran across… one of these every-few-year genius level n=1 fixies. Anyone can do it. Costs about $3. It’s half clinical brilliance, half occam’s razor Chad galaxy brain. It is a self-double blind, one-person randomized trial. It works best with Nicorette or Lucy. Basically, you
