Michael Lewis:

Here's a question you probably have never asked yourself:

What, at bottom, is a toilet?

To an ordinary person, it's a device for transferring ordinary human waste from the body to the sewer, as discreetly and sanitarily as possible. But just as all humans are not ordinary, all human waste isn't ordinary, and the waste of Russians is no exception.

From the recent archive:

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Pre-order now!

And also:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."