Top all-time · #19712
Maintenance Phase
Personal blog · maintenancephase.comhealthculture
Maintenance Phase is a personal blog at maintenancephase.com about health and culture. Since 2022, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Michael Hobbes' podcast checks health and media claims, such as obesity and screen-time data, against the evidence cited for them. HN readers link it as entertaining and pragmatic.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-01-04
What Hacker News says?
> You cannot be healthy and fat, and we should not pretend otherwise to spare hurt feelings. I think I’d say more that you can’t be morbidly obese and healthy. Fat people can be healthy (just probably less likely to be healthy than someone at a “typical” weight. Too bad this podcast’s website is crap for linking to specific episodes. Check the ep from a few weeks ago: Is Being Fat Bad For You? https://www.maintenanc…
Comment linking /
on “Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64”You may also like YWA alumni Michael Hobbes' Maintenance Phase https://www.maintenancephase.com/ As well as You Are Good, also by Sarah https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good/
Comment linking /
on “A Mormon housewife turned a fake diary into an enormous best-seller”Did they control for anti-fat bias? Unlikely. Especially in the medical system, fat people don't get their body issues taken seriously. The stress of being treated poorly by everyone in your life undoubtedly has a huge impact on your lifespan. Did they control for efforts to change you body? Most fat people are trying to be thinner. Plenty of ways that people are told to change their body involve extreme stress to y…
Comment linking /
on ““Healthy obesity” doesn’t exist. It is unequivocally bad for you”I really enjoyed the "Michael Hobbes Podcast Universe" this year. He's a reporter who is now making entertaining podcasts debunking claims in the media/zeitgeist. I appreciate that he takes a pragmatic approach -- to paraphrase something he said: "There's probably an impact on kids having so much screen time, but this data you're citing doesn't show what you're claiming." If Books Could Kill: https://www.ifbookspod.…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Best Podcasts of 2025?”