If it feels like everyone is -maxxing something these days, you might be right. Because we’ve entered the “ballmaxxing” era.

According to Men’s Health, the pursuit of bigger and bigger balls by fluid infusions—and according to scrotal-stretching obsessives, it’s an exhilarating endeavor. On the subreddit r/salineinflation, which has over 8,700 followers, members share photos of exorbitantly enlarged scrotums, taut and near translucent, regaling the prismatic pleasures of the medically risky procedure. There’s no single reason that leads someone to inflate their genitals with fluid (other body parts like breasts and labia can be inflated too), but genital-expansion fanatics describe it with an array of celestial terms: Electrifying. Addictive. Euphoric. Transcendental.

A “guide for beginners” pinned to the top of the r/salineinflation subreddit says it takes upwards of 30 minutes for a bag of sodium chloride to fill the scrotal sac. A liter of saline is said to inflate your scrotal sac for 24 to 42 hours, and the more fluid inserted, the longer the effects will last. Once enlarged, an inflated scrotum feels heavier than usual, intensifying the sensory experience of moving around. The men who’ve done it says their time in the bedroom is improved, too.

Of course, the reasons people get into it vary considerably. Some are drawn to the transgressive novelty of it. Others connect it to more traditional ideas about masculinity, the same logic that drives penis pumps and enhancement surgeries, which have been a documented industry since acrylic penile implants arrived in 1952. By 2024, the global penile implants market was valued at $545.80 million. Testicles, somehow, remained an afterthought until relatively recently.

Predictably, doctors hate this. Dr. Shirin Lakhani, an aesthetic physician, tells Vice that the scrotum contains “delicate structures, including the testes, blood vessels, and nerves, which are not designed to accommodate fluid distension.” The consequences of getting it wrong range from tissue and nerve damage to erectile dysfunction and permanent infertility, with gangrene and embolism representing the worst-case outcomes.

President Trump is meeting with his national security team Monday to discuss the way forward in the Iran war—including possibly resuming military action—after calling the latest Iranian offer to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz “garbage” and declaring that the ceasefire was “on massive life support.” Meanwhile, countries were bracing for prolonged economic woes stemming from high energy prices.

U.S. officials say Trump wants a deal to end the war, but Iran’s rejection of many of his demands and refusal to make meaningful concessions on its nuclear program puts the military option back on the table. Axios points out that Trump publicly threatened several times in recent days to bomb infrastructure in Iran if diplomacy failed.

Iran’s state-owned broadcaster reported on Monday that in its latest counterproposal delivered via Pakistani mediators, Iran had demanded that the United States pay war reparations, recognize Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and end the sanctions placed on the government in Tehran. That’s not going to happen, and Trump is leaving for China tomorrow. Officials said they don’t think Trump would order military action against Iran before he returns on Friday.

We live in a strange time filled with dupes, “fake news” and AI slop. Who’s to say what is real anymore? Case in point: On the same day that White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting suspect Cole Allen plead “not guilty” to all charges, a major survey found that nearly one third of Americans believe that at least one of the three attempts on President Trump’s life over the last two years was staged.

According to the Washington Post, roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to the survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report.

Trump has been the subject of three assassination attempts over the last two years. And perhaps one reason why people think they’re staged is because he rarely (if ever) talks about them. While he’s certainly known to hold a grudge, he told Fox News that he never thinks about those attacks.