How the Manosphere Came to Love Zyn
In today’s newsletter, Carrie Battan travels to Sweden to explore how a niche nicotine product went global. And the longtime Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus laments the owner Jeff Bezos’s turn to Donald Trump—and explains why she quit the paper. Plus:
• Is Trump right about Ukraine?
• The Administration’s latest attacks on elections
• Amy Sedaris gets laid off
“If you see another guy popping a Zyn, there’s an almost immediate camaraderie,” a thirty-five-year-old who works in mergers and acquisitions told me.Illustration by Christoph Niemann
Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush
White nicotine pouches were designed to help Swedish women quit cigarettes. They’ve become a staple for American dudes.
In the twenty-tens, it was Juul. The chrome-colored vape, which offered flavors such as mango, cucumber, and crème brûlée, was the “it” nicotine product. Vaping became so popular among American teen-agers that one former F.D.A. official declared it an “epidemic.” By 2020, the agency banned many of Juul’s sweeter varieties, and, ultimately, told the company to stop advertising itself all together.
The youth market doesn’t seem as taken by the latest craze: Zyns, small white pouches that you nestle in your gums and which deliver nicotine to the bloodstream. Instead, Zyns have become ubiquitous within the so-called manosphere—the circle of youngish bros and middle-aged dudes, led by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. “The imprint of a cannister in a pair of khakis is a signature of the finance sector,” Carrie Battan writes in this week’s issue, and, “golf courses have posted signs imploring patrons not to dispose of their pouches in urinals.”
Battan travels to Sweden, the home of Zyn, where a third of the population consumes nicotine. For years, that mostly came in the form of snus—brown pouches of tobacco, popular with men, that had been known to stain users’s teeth. Women, meanwhile, were largely absent from the oral-nicotine market—until scientists there developed white, near-odorless snus, which eventually became Zyn. Battan, a self-proclaimed nicotine addict, speaks to various Swedes who are baffled by Zyn’s cultural associations in America, and tries a few flavors for herself. She doesn’t find it quite as appetizing as the cigarettes, vapes, and gum that she’s fiended for in the past. “I felt that something was missing: I needed my Nicorette,” she writes. “My brain had mistaken my nicotine addiction for an attachment to the vessel that the nicotine came in. I suddenly wished that someone would find a way to deliver nicotine via leafy green vegetables.”
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Photo illustration by Adam Maida; Source photographs from Shutterstock
Why I Left the Washington Post
By Ruth Marcus
Owner Jeff Bezos wants to transform the Opinions section of the paper, where I worked for forty years. After the publisher killed my column disagreeing with that move—it appears here in full—I decided to quit. Read the story »
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P.S. George Clooney will make his Broadway début tonight, in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” based on his film of the same name, about the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s historic conflict with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, in 1954. Twenty years ago, David Denby wrote the story about getting that story straight. 🎭
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