It’s easy for announcements to fall into email vortexes. One day, you find yourself missing things that had become part of your weekly routine but can’t quite pinpoint what changed. This has happened to me more times than I’d like to admit. The newsletter landscape is ever-changing and our inboxes are ridiculous AND SO MUCH IS HAPPENING. In other words: I get it. But I also want everyone who wants to be part of the CS community to know where to find it.

So if you’ve been missing Culture Study in your life, there’s so much from the last month for you to discover.

JUST TO START:

• THE CULTURE STUDY ROMANCE BOOK CLUB [two books every six weeks!]

• Ten Detailed Stories of Breast Reduction & Mastectomy

• Thee JULIA WHELAN (!!) on How an Audiobook Gets Made

• How to Find a New Podcast (with specific episode recommendations galore)

• My Very Bad Teeth

• What Makes Heated Rivalry Work?

• A real classic of a WHAT ARE YOU READING

• What Have You Spent Money On That Wasn’t Worth It? (aka De-Influence Me)

• Behold, a Deeply Compelling Science Writing Manifesto!

• What Makes a Book Club Work? (Plus: Really Good Book Club Picks)

• What Have “Self Knowledge” Systems (Enneagram! Tarot! Whatever!) Taught You?

• What Broke Your Shelf?

• Our new subscriber-only chat for The Pitt

• How Did Dating Get This Difficult?

• The Latest in the BIG NO-KIDS ENERGY series: author Maggie Shipstead and Pastor Travis

• We’re also raising money every week and directing it to specific organizations covering rent, meals, and utilities for families targeted by ICE who can no longer leave their homes — many of the posts above have specific links and we’ll continue doing this work so long as ICE keeps terrorizing our neighbors.

For the 80% of you who’ve already moved over to Patreon: think of this email like a lovely little reminder of what might have gotten lost in your inbox. **If you don’t want to receive these emails: here’s how you turn off email notifications.**

*If you’ve been meaning to become a paid subscriber — or a combo tier subscriber — you’ve got the easiest path ever.

*If you’re a comp subscriber and want your comp to transfer over to Patreon: email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail

*If you’re a free subscriber and just want to join as a free subscriber (also awesome): click here and then select ‘Join for Free’

*If ANY of this is confusing, or if you have a different scenario you need help figuring out — just email me (annehelenpetersen @ gmail)

No platform is perfect — including Patreon. But I’m happy to be trying to build a new sustainable home for Culture Study there, and if you haven’t yet made the move, I so hope you’ll join us.

More than 168 recs from small businesses all over — weird, delightful, and truly lovely stuff you won’t find anywhere else. Dozens of class recommendations, gorgeous jewelry, the best birdhouse I’ve ever seen, foodstuffs you actually want to use, all the good cards, the best calendars, THE gift for the forever horse girl, AND A WHOLE OVERFLOWING SECTION just for Canadians. Again, just click here.

For the 80% of you who’ve already moved over to Patreon: think of this email like a lovely little reminder of what might have gotten lost in your inbox. If you don’t want to receive these emails any more: here’s how you turn off email notifications.

If You Still Haven’t Figured Out Your Patreon Subscription, Here’s How You Move Over:

*If you’re a paid annual subscriber, search your email from Friday for “redeem your free month,” then click that link to come over (if you’re a paid subscriber, it will also port over all of your remaining Substack subscription). If you can’t find the link, submit a support request here and they’ll get it sorted within the next day or so (if they don’t, email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail and I’ll escalate)

*If you’ve been meaning to become a paid subscriber — or a combo tier subscriber — you’ve got the easiest path ever.

*If you’re a comp subscriber and want your comp to transfer over to Patreon: email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail

*If you’re a free subscriber and just want to join as a free subscriber without any comp business: click here and then select ‘Join for Free’ (see below)

If you’re having any issues with the process, just email me at annehelenpetersen at gmail dot com and we’ll figure it out!

And again, the people-pleaser in me feels like absolute garbage for asking people to do anything, anything at all, to access my writing and this community. So thank you, thank you, for doing this work along with me. I’ll see you in the comments.

For the 80% of you who’ve already moved over to Patreon: think of this email like a lovely little reminder of what might have gotten lost in your inbox. If you don’t want to receive these emails any more: here’s how you turn off email notifications.

And for the rest of you — this is a soft reminder to come on over.

THE GOOD STUFF ON CULTURE STUDY THIS WEEK:

• A Very Smart Conversation About Fantasy (and Romance) with Leigh Bardugo [!!!!]

• A Fascinating Approach to “Cognitive Household Labor” [WHY ARE ALL THE PARENTING TEXT THREADS WITH MOMS, etc. etc.]

• What Takes Longer Than Most People Think? (I could read these answers all day, so I guess in this this case reading a thread on the internet takes longer than most people think)

• On a recent viral TikTok trend: Would Your Organization Give Someone Baby Formula? (The comments are quite good here)

• What Are You Reading [in November] (Plus My Favorite Book of 2025 Thus Far]

The move has been a real creative catalyst for me — which means we’ve got so much good stuff in the pipeline. Just to start: the next edition of BIG NO KIDS ENERGY featuring an interview with a Culture Study-beloved author, a wild cult story, the enormously popular post-Thanksgiving small business gift guide, talking to Sarah Marshall about satanic panics, and so much more.

Here’s How You Move Over:

*If you’re a paid subscriber, search your email from Friday for “redeem your free month,” then click that link to come over (if you’re a paid subscriber, it will also port over all of your remaining Substack subscription). If you can’t find the link, submit a support request here and they’ll get it sorted within the next day or so (if they don’t, email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail and I’ll escalate)

*If you’ve been meaning to become a paid subscriber — or a combo tier subscriber — you’ve got the easiest path ever.

*If you’re a comp subscriber and want your comp to transfer over to Patreon: email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail

*If you’re a free subscriber and just want to join as a free subscriber without any comp business: click here and then select ‘Join for Free’ (see below)

And again, the people-pleaser in me feels like absolute garbage for asking people to do anything, anything at all, to access my writing and this community. So thank you, thank you, for doing this work along with me. I’ll see you in the comments.

Read below for what you missed this week — 

And for the 70% of you who’ve already moved over to Patreon: THANK YOU. If you don’t want to receive emails like this because you’re already getting all the good stuff in your inbox: here’s how you disable notifications.

For the rest of you — this is a soft reminder to come on over. I’ve written about why I’m making the move here; my friend Lyz has described the feeling as a “controlled burn,” where you momentarily feel like everything’s in flames, and it is!, but then you get to grow on fertile ground.

ALL THE GOOD STUFF ON CULTURE STUDY THIS WEEK:

- The Fifth Annual Culture Study Soup Extravaganza, with a solid 300 new soups to add to your repertoire

- An interview with education historian Jarvis Givans about a very different sort of “American Grammar”

- The podcast episode I’ve been waiting all year to record: thee Audie Cornish on Love is Blind (but you don’t have to watch to love this ep, I promise)

- And then, today, “The Broken Logic of ‘The Best Place to Retire,’” with a particularly excellent Links & Recs, and an opportunity to think about

So if you miss the comments section on one of the good places on the internet, if you want more soup in your life, if you want to hear the easter egg at the end of the Audie Cornish episode, if you want to articulate what you think makes a place a good place to retire, here are the various ways you can come over:

*If you’re a paid subscriber, search your email from Friday for “redeem your free month,” then click that link to come over (if you’re a paid subscriber, it will also port over all of your remaining Substack subscription). If you can’t find the link, submit a support request here and they’ll get it sorted within the next day or so (if they don’t, email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail and I’ll escalate)

*If you’ve been meaning to become a paid subscriber — or a combo tier subscriber — you’ve got the easiest path ever.

*If you’re a comp subscriber and want your comp to transfer over to Patreon: email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail

*If you’re a free subscriber and just want to join as a free subscriber without any comp business: click here and then select ‘Join for Free’ (see below)

And again, the people-pleaser in me feels like absolute garbage for asking people to do anything, anything at all, to access my writing and this community. So thank you, thank you, for doing this work along with me. I’ll see you in the comments.

In other words: come on over!!!

If you haven’t already made the move, please search your email for “Claim your free months” for a link to help you switch over your subscription. Over 62% of you have already moved, and I’m so grateful for you.

I would not do all this work, or ask you to do it alongside with me, if I didn’t think this was the way to make this community sustainable in the long term. So thank you again for trying to keep this one of the good places on the internet.

If you’re having issues with your subscription, submit a support request here. (Patreon actually has support people on staff — this is not a bot — so you will get help ASAP). If you had a comp subscription here — send me an email (annehelenpetersen at gmail) & we can manually set it up again.

**Finally, if you’re a subscriber who’s already made the move and wants to stop getting these emails/notifications on Substack — here’s how to disable them.**

Once you’ve made the move, come enjoy the FIFTH ANNUAL SOUP EXTRAVAGANZA, which will provide you with *ample* recipes to get through the months to come. I made a new keeper this past weekend and can’t wait to tell you about it.

If you haven’t already made the move, please search your email for “Claim your free months” for a link to help you switch over your subscription. Nearly 40% of you have already moved, and I’m so grateful for you.

I would not do all this work, or ask you to do it alongside with me, if I didn’t think this was the way to make this community sustainable in the long term. So thank you again for trying to keep this one of the good places on the internet.

If you’re having issues with your subscription, submit a support request here. (Patreon actually has support people on staff — this is not a bot — so you will get help ASAP). If you had a comp subscription here — send me an email (annehelenpetersen at gmail) & we can manually set it up again.

Finally, if you’re a subscriber who’s already made the move and wants to stop getting these emails/notifications on Substack — here’s how to disable them.

HERE’S A PREVIEW OF THE MASSIVE LINKS & RECS ROUND-UP — GO ACTIVATE YOUR PATREON MEMBERSHIP, THEN CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST….

On Friday, I wrote a little bit about where I live and why I love it — and then an atmospheric river arrived (alongside 40 MPH winds) and turned Halloween into a battle against the elements. But you know what? The kids did not care. They raced around the Trunk or Treat and then came and found the adults in our little island sandwich shop that does a Happy Hour every Friday. And when there’s only a few dozens kids Trick-or-Treating, you can get creative: one couple gave out full sets of markers; another couple gave out mini-LEGO kids (that then kept all the kids busy); I was surprised that all the kids picked the Halloween glasses in my bucket over the abundance of Sour Patch Kids.

As I watched the wind and rain get more intense in the hours leading up to Trick-or-Treating time, I was filled with a sense of dread: everything is gonna be ruined. But I have to remember that it takes a lot to ruin a kid’s joy in wearing the weird outfit of their dreams and acquiring candy. The dread I was feeling was actually just a culmination of the stress of this week — even when you know that you’ve made the right decision (in this case, moving to Patreon), following through on that decision is rarely straightforward. Halloween turned out okay. And so, too, will all of this.

So thank you to every one of you who has put in the time to make this move possible — I’m so glad we’re here, and we’ll continue to figure things out together.

●

And amidst this change, we also raised more than $60,000 for food banks across the country with SNAP benefits still in limbo. It’s a band-aid, but it’s something, and I’m proud of this community for stepping up.

[I’m cashing out on Venmo now — it takes a few days to process — and will post a donation receipt as soon as it happens]

●

If you’d like to access this month’s mega round-up of favorite links & personal recs, including the best soup I’ve made this week (in anticipation of the Fifth Annual Culture Study Soup Extravaganza, which is coming your way THIS TUESDAY), my new second-screen trainwreck, my favorite gothic read, and Charlie’s new favorite body wash.....become a paid subscriber today and get all the good stuff that comes with it…….

ACTIVATE YOUR PATREON MEMBERSHIP [see the top of this post for how to do so]….then

GO GET YOUR LINKS AND RECS OVER AT PATREON

If you haven’t already made the move, please search your email for “Claim your free months” for a link to help you switch over your subscription. Nearly 40% of you have already moved, and I’m so grateful for you.

To be clear: I would not do all this work, or ask you to do it alongside with me, if I didn’t think this was the way to make this community sustainable in the long term. So thank you again for trying to keep this one of the good places on the internet.

If you’re having issues with your subscription, submit a support request here. (Patreon actually has support people on staff — this is not a bot — so you will get help ASAP). If you had a comp subscription here — send me an email (annehelenpetersen at gmail) & we can manually set it up again.

Finally, if you’re a subscriber who’s already made the move and wants to stop getting these emails/notifications on Substack — here’s how to disable them.

NOW LET’S DO THIS FRIDAY THREAD!

People have been asking for a version of this prompt for years. Sometimes, people just want to openly declare their love for the place they’ve come to call home. But other people who’ve asked for this thread are also looking for a place to make their home: for whatever reason, they’re unfixed, and although there’s always a good argument for making where you have to be, for whatever reason, into your home....sometimes we need and want to move.

I mention where I live a lot but forget that I’m not always explicit…..

If you want to read about where I live and why I love it— and read everyone else’s answers — come on over to the Friday Thread on Patreon.

If you haven’t already made the move, please search your email for “Claim your free months” for a link to help you switch over your subscription. Nearly 40% of you have already moved, and I’m so grateful for you.

To be clear: I would not do all this work, or ask you to do it alongside with me, if I didn’t think this was the way to make this community sustainable in the long term. So thank you again for trying to keep this one of the good places on the internet.

If you’re having issues with your subscription, submit a support request here. (Patreon actually has support people on staff — this is not a bot — so you will get help ASAP). If you had a comp subscription here — send me an email (annehelenpetersen at gmail) & we can manually set it up again.

Finally, if you’re a subscriber who’s already made the move and wants to stop getting these emails/notifications on Substack — here’s how to disable them.

Now let’s talk about BIG NO-KIDS ENERGY!

This is the first entry in an ongoing series on the joys of not having kids (while also liking kids just fine). If you have an idea for a future entry, tell us about it in the comments (or send me an email: annehelenpetersen at gmail dot com).

There’s no such thing as a No Kids Lobby. We have no propaganda department. That’s a stark contrast to the Have Kids Do It Now faction, whose power is so tremendous, so omnipresent, that it doesn’t even present as a faction, just a fact.

People assume there’s no need to articulate the joys of the no-kids lifestyle because its benefits are so apparent that it’s silly, or maybe just mean-spirited, to talk about life without dependents. As a result, the existing no-kids literature is quite limited — or inexorably shaped by traditional family formation norms. A fictional character might start out celebrating her life without kids but end up, naturally, experiencing a whole level of untold joy with them.

Because people without kids are meant to feel an acute sense of lack, reveling in that lack comes off as clueless, untoward, or just tacky.

Read on Patreon

….If you’d like to read the rest of this post — come on over to Patreon! Access it for free here.

CULTURE STUDY IS MOVING TO PATREON!

After five years here on Substack, the Culture Study newsletter and podcast are moving to Patreon. You’ve all helped make Culture Study one of the good places on the internet, and I am endlessly grateful for you — and can’t wait to keep building our community over there.

So why is Culture Study moving? Wow do I have reasons! And you can read all about them over on Patreon.

As a thank you for your continued support, everyone is getting comped access to Culture Study on Patreon. Your comp depends on your subscription:

*Newsletter Only Tier*

• Free or Paid Monthly → One free month of the Newsletter Tier on Patreon

• Paid Annual → You’ll get your remaining paid months plus one extra month free (up to 12 months max)

*Podcast Only Tier — Same Structure As Above*

• Free or Paid Monthly → One free month of the Podcast Tier on Patreon

• Paid Annual → You’ll get your remaining paid months plus one extra month free (up to 12 months max)

If You’re Subscribed To Both the Newsletter AND the Podcast In Any Mix (Free or Paid):

• You’ll be invited into the new combined Newsletter & Podcast Tier

• Free or Paid Monthly on either/both = 1 free month

• Paid Annual on one or both = We honor the higher of your remaining months + one extra month (up to 12 months max)

ACCESSING CULTURE STUDY ON PATREON IS EASY — BUT YOU HAVE TO CLICK A LINK IN YOUR EMAIL TO MAKE IT HAPPEN:

• Check your email for details on claiming your access — if you don’t immediately see it, try searching for “Claim Your Free Access”

• ⚠️ To redeem the gift, you’ll need to use the email address associated with your Substack account

• If you have an existing Patreon account that uses a different email address than the one associated with your Substack account, follow these steps to claim your access.

• And if you’re struggling to redeem your free access? → Submit a support request here

• I’ve paused all billing here so you won’t be charged; no need to do anything on your end

This free month offer expires DECEMBER 12— so do it now!

Maybe you’ve been on Patreon for years. Maybe this is your first time there. But here’s what you should know: they’ve built a newsletter client to rival Substack’s, and everything that was free here…will be free there. Paid here…paid there. It’s straightforward — and it’s not with a company that’s doubled down on becoming a social media app that refuses to draw even the faintest line when it comes to hate speech.

And again, for the full story on why we’re making this move…head on over.

If you have any questions, I bet you they’re answered over in the post on Patreon. And if you’ve tried clicking the email link and it’s not working (or you can’t find it) — we’re here to help.

Submit your questions here and someone on the Patreon support team will get back to you ASAP (usually within 24 hours). Or comment below and I’ll do my best to help.

BUT SERIOUSLY, COME OVER TO PATREON AND LET’S REBUILD THIS SHIP TOGETHER!

Food banks around the country are bracing themselves for unprecedented need — and we can help them *right now* to help meet that need. You can donate to your local food bank, of course, or you can donate to FEEDING AMERICA, a broad network of food banks, food pantries, and local meal programs.

I’ll be matching the first $500 in donations. You can either donate directly and forward me your receipt (annehelenpetersen @ gmail)….or you can Venmo me at annehelen or PayPal at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com and I’ll make a big donation at the end of the week (and post all cashout receipts, etc.)

**If you need help finding food — this link will help you find resources near you.**

***If you’re able to dedicate a few hours to volunteering, this link will help you find an organization near you that needs help — local CS meet-up groups, take note!***

One of the recurring themes of this newsletter and is figuring out how to take care of each other in a society that valorizes self-sufficiency above all else. It’s taken so much active unlearning for me to rely more on others — even people I’ve known and loved for decades! — and I know it’s an ongoing project for so many of you, too. How do we stop trying to be perfect parents on our own? How do we stop thinking that any problem we have we can fix by buying shit (for ourselves?)

Sophie Lucido Johnson has been working through these questions too — but through a slightly different lens. First, she’s a talented illustrator, and sometimes these concepts can feel complicated…until you draw them and see just how simple they really are. Her framework of how queerplatonic relationship-building is also tremendously generative — particularly when it comes to communication and care.

If you’re trying to figure out how to find and/or better sustain kin in your life, read on — there’s something here for everyone. (And you’re gonna love these illustrations)

You can find so much more of Sophie’s work here and pre-order Kin here (as a gift to your future self!).

I think we should start with the title of the book and its unifying concept of kin. How do you think of it, and why does it feel appropriate for the sort of bonds & community-making you’re encouraging?

For the purposes of this book, I’ve defined kin as the people in your life to whom you’re deeply bound through all things; and who are essential for your individual and collective survival. I think of it as a word that grounds a relationship that is somewhere in between “friend” and “family” — the type of queerplatonic relationship that is becoming increasingly important as we build chosen family and support structures outside of families of origin.

I think we do need a word for these kinds of relationships, because language helps make things visible; but even without this word, you know the type of relationship I’m talking about. The friend you’d call in the middle of the night if your car broke down and you had no idea where you were. Someone who has seen you be really ugly and mean, and loves you anyway. (Loves you more.) These are precious relationships, and they’re essential building blocks to lasting, resilient community.

Can we share the figures from Chapter 1 of Your Resources / Their Resources / Other People’s Resources? It’s such an effective illustration, and I’d love to have you elaborate more on why New Relationship Energy cannot sustain us.

Absolutely! I’d be honored. People can find all the images here. As for New Relationship Energy….

…it’s that incredible, druggy feeling you get when you start dating someone new, and everything feels so good you can’t believe it’s all happening to you. It’s fun and seductive, and it’s fueled by novelty and uncertainty. It’s chemically supported by dopamine and norepinephrine – which, science alert: our brains can’t sustain longterm. The chemicals naturally even out as we settle into routine and familiarity.

New Relationship Energy is a spark, but it’s not an engine. We’re sustained by tending and returning, building and staying. And, crucially, it’s important for people to get to know the messy, unfun, frayed-edges parts of you, so that you can believe that everything about you is worthy of love. This is the kind of love that we hold on to when crisis inevitably descends — and it will. And we need more than one person to meet all our needs; I think that’s universally true, though it doesn’t have to mean nonmonogamy! We need friends, mentors, companions — people who meet our needs where they are without having to change themselves.

I interviewed several people in polyamorous relationships for my book research and it was really wonderful to veer totally away from what you call the ‘sideshow’ sensationalism and focus on the fact that it’s a lot easier to raise kids with more than two parents. I love how you call out how coverage of your previous book, a memoir about your polyamorous relationship, failed to focus on what really distinguishes poly relationships: it’s not the sex; it’s the communication. What is “lateral communication” and why is it so effective for kin-building?

Thank you so much — and yes, that’s exactly it! The radically honest, open communication is really what has distinguished my poly relationships from earlier monogamous ones.

Lateral — or non-hierarchical — relationships are really important to kin-building. This is about thinking of all of your relationships as existing on an equal level, rather than giving fixed preference or ranking to one relationship over another. Thinking of relationships as lateral allows you to shift your priorities as necessary. Sometimes, you have to prioritize relationships with people at work; other times, your closest friends need to be your priority; still others, it’s important to focus on your family-of-origin. A lateral relationship structure does away with the idea that one person is the most important person in your life. That’s simply not true, anyway! So many of the people in our lives are integral, and they all provide some of what we need.

Communication is about noticing out loud — a practice that is both revealing and vulnerable. This isn’t something that should be reserved just for your significant other; nor is it a truth that everyone in your life has automatically earned. Instead, I’m suggesting you make intentional choices about the people in your life who deserve your truth, and then structure your time to prioritize your friends at the same level as you prioritize romantic partners and blood relatives. This is all very heady-sounding on the page, but I’m basically talking about loving more people in your life by choosing to show them the less-put-together parts of yourself. That builds intimacy, and ultimately, safety.

I really enjoyed the section on how we don’t have adequate vocabulary for the people who matter in our lives. You look to other languages and cultural contexts to offer up some more precise language, and also talk through some of your own very specific relations (and what you’d like to call them). I find that having a name for a bond makes it legible, so I’d love for you to share some of your favorite examples here (this also makes me think this would be a great prompt for a future Culture Study thread).

My favorite is the French sortable: the kind of friend you take to events because they don’t embarrass you. While there aren’t adequate words in English for all the unique roles that our close friends play in our lives, I think it’s still important to recognize what specific people offer. I have a few friends with whom I love to talk about books. I don’t know what I’d do without these people; I think about books nonstop and I feel a deep need to text someone when a novel uses the word “scrum” four separate times. (This is a real example. This really happened.) When I recognized how important that was to me, I sent a voice memo: “Hey! I just realized that you are the person I talk to about books. I am so grateful that you are that for me, and I don’t know what I’d do without you. That’s all! Love you!”

There are also people in my life who’ve taken a vested interest in my daughter and her well-being. That is more meaningful to me than I think they know. She calls them “aunt” and “uncle,” which is a good place to start, but I’ve also sent a card that says, “Thank you for caring for T. I see it and it means a lot to me.” Notice who feeds what in you, and tell them. Maybe language will evolve to acknowledge more roles, too.

The book is filled with advice, examples, and empathetic encouragement on how to start building (and sustaining) kin in your own life. What part of your advice is the hardest to implement in your own life?

I just had strep throat. Three people (three!) I’d describe as kin texted me and asked me if I needed anything. What I needed was for someone to come and hang out with my daughter; she was off-the-wall and I had zero energy. But childcare still feels like a bridge too far to ask for on a whim.

I want to live in a world where I can ask for something and hear the word “no,” and feel emotionally safe in that exchange, but it’s not how I grew up. I grew up to believe that you only ask for help when you really need it, and at that point, it’s not OK for someone to say no. I want to bend this reality; to text my friends, “Can anyone come and take T to the playground for an hour?” and to then trust that any “yes” would be resounding and honest.

But this will take practice. And cruelly, it’s worse when you have strep throat (or anything like it); when you’re not well, it’s hard to act in a balanced, regulated way. So I sucked it up and texted back, “You’re sweet, I’m fine!” when really, I wasn’t.

We went to the same small liberal arts college (which isn’t why we’re doing this interview — anyone who reads Culture Study knows this book is a natural fit for this newsletter). Like a lot of small liberal arts colleges, it’s a petri dish for very, very tight community, and the friendships I built during those four years have structured the trajectory of my adult life. I mean, I live on the same island as someone who lived down the hall from me freshman year! But as close as we were (and are), I’m always struck by a real gap between what we valued then (proximity, casualness, play, community) and the way our institution funneled us into bourgeois career trajectories that actively discouraged all of those things. I also think that feeling has accelerated over the last twenty-five years, as the school has come to understand itself more and more as a launchpad for “excellence.”

We used to say that we worked really hard and played really hard, and then after graduating, we mostly just….worked really hard. (And understood “success” as leaving our friends and seeking out grad programs, internships, and jobs that scattered us across the world; I’m thinking specifically about the push towards Teach for America in the 2000s which I know structured your post-college life).

And from what I know about campus life now, the balance of play and work has really shifted as well. (To be clear, I’m not just talking about “play” as drinking — I’m talking about skipping class to walk to Safeway to pick up the photos you had developed, or filling a kiddie pool on a Tuesday afternoon in front of your dorm instead of studying, or, well, running the Beer Mile, which does involve drinking but mostly involves running naked at midnight). It’s just really hard to build community when you’re professionalizing yourself so damn early (and are so terrified of what happens if you don’t).

I graduated in 2003. You graduated in 2008 — right into the Great Recession. How do you think about how our school prepared us (or failed to prepare us) for kin-building?

Oh my God, no one has said “beer mile” to me in over a decade, and I completely forgot about that. I never did it! But it really did seem fun.

This is a great question. I did go straight from Whitman to Teach for America, and I have barely stopped to process anything about my life since then. I returned to Whitman a few years ago to do a reading from my first book, and it was wild to go back to the manicured lawns and brick buildings and cheese platters and interest houses; I thought, “Wow, you don’t really get the chance to enjoy what a summer camp this is when you’re here, do you?” I spent all four years at Whitman as the editor of the campus newspaper, which at the time was a print weekly with very little faculty advisory. Every Tuesday night was an all-nighter. I remember thinking that was par for the course; actually, I remember thinking that I didn’t work (or play) hard enough.

I got really physically sick living in New Orleans and trying to pull all-nighters while teaching in the Recovery School District. I’m still learning how to rest. It was absolutely not a thing I learned how to do in college. As a college professor now (I teach at The Art Institute of Chicago), I can attest that today’s students are no better equipped for rest; they still stay up all night working and playing. There isn’t enough time for all that we ask young people to do.

Like you, I met some of my closest friends at Whitman, and because the campus was small, our lives were totally enmeshed. My best memories from college are of walking out to the wheat fields to watch the sunrise with friends, or to eat cheese on a blanket or try to fly a kite. But play is not synonymous with rest.

Kin-building is, at its heart, about finding ease and choosing to rest in others. When you have more people in your life, there is less on your individual shoulders to do and achieve. I do wish I had known sooner that it was about people just as much as it was about accomplishments. It’s something we can teach to the young people we meet, through words and actions: life does not have to be as hard as you were taught it has to be. Most of life is not actually an emergency. ●

You can find so much more of Sophie’s work here and pre-order Kin here (as a gift to your future self!). She’ll be doing book events in Chicago and Portland — go see her! And finally, sign up for her newsletter: You Are Doing a Good Enough Job.

And if you value this work, and want to read the comments (and be part of our fun threads from this week, like WHAT DO YOU ACCIDENTALLY KNOW A LOT ABOUT and DEFINITIVE TEXTS OF YOUR MICRO-GENERATION) become a paid subscriber today!

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This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Instapaper is Your Friend)

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What do you accidentally know a lot about? How did you come by your expertise?

I feel like all of my answers are weird because I know a lot about a lot of niche areas because….I was writing a journalistic feature about that thing? That’s how I learned so much about Chip & Joan…

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What’s a Rich Text? Anything you could talk about — and write about — for days. It’s something that might not look like much is going on when viewed from afar, but as you get closer, you realize just how much layered cultural sediment has accumulated around it.

Here at Culture Study, we love a rich text. Ballerina Farm’s FARMER HYDRATE is a rich text. Same with elaborately (parent)-decorated dorm rooms, and Nicole Kidman’s divorce announcement, and Wound Man. (If you had to put a definition next to “Rich Text” in the dictionary, I think Wound Man would be there). I love digging into these texts myself, but I also love interviewing people about the rich texts that have become their obsessions: men’s facial hair in the 19th century, Tate McRae’s new album, the lumberjack, therapy speak, and so many more.

I especially love it when someone convinces me of the richness of a text I would’ve otherwise ignored — which is why I want to hear about all of your rich texts. I’ve done this right around now for the last two years, and as I wrote last year, it’s weirdly cathartic to have the chance to talk at length about something in your world that no one else seems to think there’s something else going on here. I mean, this is the entire thesis of Culture Study: there’s always more to think about when it comes to the cultural objects and phenomena and norms that surround us. (I also think it’s generative to think about what *feels* like a Rich Text right now in concert with our conversation from yesterday, where we reflected on which texts, rich or otherwise, came to define a specific moment for a micro-generation).

Some rich texts I’m currently squinting at:

• Backlash towards millennial hobby energy

• “Watching” podcasts like late-night shows

• Consuming podcasts exclusively via Tiktok/IG clips

• The return of soda

• Peak “Grazing Table”

• The ongoing rise of the complete-package Halloween costume

• Rivian-core (as opposed to Tesla-core)

• The millennial lol

• Luxury Advent Calendars

• A post-Kardashian moment? ????

• How Peloton is hyper-slow-lay-offing its instructors/influencers

• At what age teens are learning to drive (if they’re learning at all)

• Dental Insurance gaslighting

• Sheetpan dinners as the new casserole

• The rise of the take-home loss-leader supermarket roast chicken

• The Vertical Siding /Metal Roof Home Aesthetic

Is there a rich text that’s been quietly terrorizing you / filling your thoughts when you’re driving or riding the bus and trying to organize your life and instead thinking about why all these new fancy protein bars are using the fonts and normie dad names of millennial youth (David, truly wtf)? JUST ME?!? Whatever you’ve been wanting to dig into, I can basically guarantee someone else here would like to as well.

So tell us your text — and what, to your mind, makes it rich. Your theories can be barely formed or a dissertation tucked into a few paragraphs. Whatever it is, we’re here to discuss. Remember our general rules: don’t be butts about other people’s rich texts, and let’s keep this one of the good places on the internet.

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🤢 Second: This week’s episode of the Culture Study Pod is about how male grievance culture breeds climate change denial — it’ll piss you off and stick with you. Also check out Friday’s thread re: What’s Hitting You Where It Hurts — I found a lot of solace there.

👁 Third: By popular demand, we’re gonna do a series of service-y posts about Big Life Stuff — think my colonoscopy post + this fibroids post. The topics: Breast Reduction/Mastectomy (For Any Reason); All Things C-Pap Machine; Pelvic Floor Therapy; Financial Planning For People Without Dependents; Managing the In-Between with Aging Parents (before full-time care but need *some* care).

If you have experience you’d like to share — or questions you’d like answered — click this link to sign up…..and stay tuned for these posts in months to come! And if you want to make sure you’re on the list when those pieces come around….

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Now let’s talk about Ballerina Farm’s new wellness brand. Many of you are familiar with the Ballerina Farm brand from my previous conversation with Meg Conley about its “edentic allure,” which has become one of the most popular posts ever published on Culture Study. But for the uninitiated: Ballerina Farm is a tremendously popular Instagram/social media account documenting the life of Hannah Neeleman, a former ballerina-turned-farm-resident and mother of eight children outside of Park City, Utah.

I started following Neeleman alongside a dozen or so other influencers who fit into the “tradwife-ish” bucket back in 2021 or so, and have been fascinated by the skill with which she pairs the homesteading aesthetic with, well, a lot of money, and beauty, and children. A lot of influencers are doing something like this on Instagram, but no one does it quite as well as Ballerina Farm — as of this writing, the account has 10.4 million Instagram followers.

Other points of note:

• Hannah is married to Daniel Neeleman, one of the heirs to the JetBlue fortune

• She and her family are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka LDS). They are neither super-public nor super private about their faith.

• Her husband’s Instagram is….hogfathering

• In 2024, The Times (UK) profiled Ballerina Farm in a way that painted Neeleman as exhausted and quietly trapped; a slew of Tiktoks followed affirming as much; Hannah then posted a direct rebuttal of the profile. I wrote a bit about reaction here [all of this is semi-important context for the conversation below]

• When her account began to take off, Neeleman started selling her sourdough starter via an online storefront, which has since expanded to include a cornucopia of BF-branded products: “mountain-made meat,” high-protein farm flour, weck jars, raw honey, French sea salt, Pumpkin Protein Powder, and the product that found its way to my inbox earlier this week: Ballerina Farm FARMER HYDRATE. (The Neelemans also recently finalized plans to develop a Ballerina Farm mothership/tourist destination, not unlike Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Magnolia properties (in Waco, Texas) or The Pioneer Woman Mercantile (in Pawhuska, Oklahoma). In other words: Ballerina Farm is no longer an influencer account. It’s a lifestyle and wellness brand.

But before we get to hydrating the way nature intended, I want to introduce you to Sara Petersen, author of Momfluenced (which I interview her about here) and the excellent newsletter In Pursuit of Clean Countertops. In her work, Sara often returns to Ballerina Farm to highlight the politics and ideology that undergird so much of the so-called “mamasphere” (which are often disavowed, by both creators and consumers, because none of this is political; it’s just “living my life!”) Sara’s writing gets into feminine self-effacing fantasy and pristine motherhood and negotiation of whiteness and “choice feminism” and so much more.

So when I opened that FARMER HYDRATE email, I knew I wanted to talk about it — and I knew I wanted to talk about it with Sara. Over the past week, we’ve hung out in a shared Google Doc to work through our reactions, parse the various historical, religious, and political ideas animating the brand, and just generally think big thoughts about fancy water. I hope you’ll enjoy — and join in the discussion below.

AHP: Let’s talk first reactions — what language in this ad sticks out to you?

SP: For me, the language took a backseat to the visuals of their video ad. But unsurprisingly, they’re emphasizing the “naturalness” of the electrolyte powder. It contains “100% real fruit,” “coconut water,” “Irish sea moss,” and “French grey sea salt.” The average health nerd and/or MAHA consumer can feel morally comfortable about consuming this product even though it’s definitively a processed food. Turning strawberries into powder, after all, requires multiple levels of processing!

I did the most cursory googling about the health benefits of French grey sea salt, and it seems that, in terms of health benefits, salt is salt. But doesn’t the idea of salt harvested in the French seaside sound lovely? Doesn’t the verdant softness of Irish sea moss sound romantic? It’s firmly planting an image of untouched nature into your mind. Rather than a sterile factory blasting and pulverizing all of these virginal ingredients into functionally the same electrolyte powder as Liquid IV or whatever.

Even if both the sea salt and the moss (to say nothing of the fruits) are decidedly not local (something many wellness culture devotees claim to prioritize), the storytelling power of the ingredient list distracts you from the fact that you’re spending nearly $40.00 on fruit powder and salt. What do you think of the bizarre syntax of the title itself? Like, why not Farmer Hydration?

AHP: There’s something for someone who studies syntax to unpack here about the direct address here: FARMER, HYDRATE! (As opposed to hydration for farmers, aka, Farmer Hydration — but let’s be real, I bet there’s a copyright claim somewhere in here).

Apart from syntax, here’s what sticks out to me: it’s attempting to connect the (well-marketed) wellness benefits of fancy water to farming, which ostensibly makes sense because this is a brand that’s called BALLERINA FARM.

But….do farmers need fancy water? (Does anyone need fancy water?) No. But also: actual farmers aren’t going to be buying this product, and they’re not the intended audience, either. The intended audience is people who like the idea of farming, and more specifically, the idea of farming as an ur text of American physicality/power.

SP: It’s funny because diet culture/wellness culture products are in many ways antithetical to what farmcore influencers are selling. Like, beef tallow and raw milk would make a lot more sense for the BF brand, but those things are a lot harder to scale/attract a much smaller consumer base. The idealized image of The Farmer as presented by Ballerina Farm (the brand) is someone who’s dipping a copper cup into a mountain stream or a handpump out back.

I don’t mean this literally of course — hello gastrointestinal distress — but in terms of nostalgia and a romanticized notion that everything (including good ol’ fashioned e.coli!!) was better in the Before Times. Leaning into normcore wellness products like protein powder and electrolyte powder is indicative of Ballerina Farm’s larger project of positioning themselves as a nationally recognized multi-category lifestyle brand.

AHP: That’s a great set-up for my next question. I think people who don’t spend a lot of time analyzing the Ballerina Farm brand (and let’s be clear that it is a brand, not a family) might think: this is weird, very off-brand. But the reason I can’t stop thinking about it is because how *on brand* it is, and how it brings corners of the brand that are usually very well cloaked into the foreground. What makes this feel on-Ballerina-Farm-brand to you?

SP: I mean, Ballerina Farm is all about the nuclear family, right? Notice how the whole farming family is included in the powder’s promo video.

Notice how each mini-vignette in the video ad for Farmer Hydrate intersperses a wholesome farm activity with the type of exercise a suburban or urban consumer might engage in. Daniel lifting bags of grain is the same actually as a ripped guy lifting weights in a moodily lit gym. Children running joyfully across fields is the same actually as going for a prosaic adult run. And of course, there’s The Mother (the most important iconographic figure within the nuclear family) as played by Hannah. Beautiful and [femininely!!!] strong. Nothing quite says feminine strength like ballet.

They’re quite literally communicating that drinking this electrolyte powder will imbue you with the magic of Ballerina Farm life. And what comprises the Ballerina Farm lifestyle? Family, physical strength, fresh air, natural beauty, American grit, American freedom, and American individualism. The European salt and moss is really just aesthetic frosting for Ballerina Farm Americana.

AHP: As you and I and our mutual friend Virginia Sole-Smith would agree, running around in circles is exercise and a major failure of exercise culture is trying to limit understandings of “a good workout” to something that occurs in a gym or with a fitness watch. But I am perhaps overly annoyed by the depiction of “what farmers do” — it’s a glossy (and white-washed) interpretation that allows us to continue to fetishize an agrarian lifestyle that is no longer available to the vast majority of farmers.

Farmers use very sophisticated tools so that they don’t break their bodies lifting bags of grain over and over again. They rely on the labor of people who are often in this country without legal status. But that’s not what they want to show. What’s more, a lot of farmers struggle with severe mental health issues in part because their way of life is no longer sustainable, especially under the new regime and its accompanying tariffs (and this is even WITH massive subsidies from the Farm Bill, a government entitlement that Republicans refuse to call an entitlement because it mostly affects their core voters). Which is a very roundabout way of saying that farmers don’t need athletic hydration optimization — unless they’re not actually farmers.

SP: Yes, and Ballerina Farm is not new to wellness culture! And yes, re: Daniel and his artful slinging of grain sacks, it’s like they’re implicitly saying that the best kind of exercise is OBVIOUSLY farmwork, but if you can’t get cut by yanking wooden gates out of dams, I guess you can lift some dumbbells. I also MUST pettily shout out Daniel’s acting chops in the video. The “whew what a heavy bag of grain this is - how very hard I work every day” facial expression is really chef’s kiss.

The packaging of Farmer Hydrate is interesting too. It’s more modern and less kitschy than, for example, the packaging of the Ballerina Farm protein powder (they have a new pumpkin flavor!) It’s equally at home tucked into one’s saddle bag OR in one’s gym bag. This might be a stretch, but the less aggressively cottage-core packaging might be the brand’s way of extending a hand to their urban and suburban fans. I always come back to their altruistic messaging communicated most clearly in the second New York Times profile of Neeleman:

The goal of all this enterprise, Ms. Neeleman said, is not to accumulate more wealth, converts or fame, but to bring her followers the joy she experiences in family farming.

”The community has given us all this,” she said, gesturing to the farm, where a freshly painted barn sported the new Ballerina Farm logo. “Giving back seems like the least we can do.

Ballerina Farm’s marketing of Farmer Hydrate explicitly reaches across the paddock into the average consumer’s grocery cart. You can quench your thirst as well as we quench our thirst. With or without the cowboy chicness of it all.

AHP: While also effacing the business as business, right? She’s using the language of “giving back” like she’s donating to the Boys & Girls Club — not selling wellness products at a significant markup.

SP: I’ll also say that Farmer Hydrate is pretty heavily MAHA coded, even more so than the protein powder. On Tuesday, Hannah posted a TikTok Live with their nutritionist, Tanna Fox, during which Fox explained why the three grams of prebiotic fiber contained in each serving of Farmer Hydrate make this electrolyte powder stand out from that electrolyte powder. She explained that prebiotics feed the “good” bacteria in our guts, and “our gut microbiome is like a second brain . . . [the prebiotic fiber] helps our mind stay happy.”

And wow, if this isn’t a deafening dog whistle for the MAHA mamas! It’s not a very big leap from “food is medicine” to “the conventional medical establishment wants us sick and addicted to sperm-killing SSRIs.”

Tanna Fox also seems to be banging all the usual MAHA drums. She makes alarming, decontextualized, and vague claims about ingredients, and emphasizes that we all have individual power over our own health. She claims that, for example, “our minds control our metabolism,” “freedom requires self-control,” and there’s a lot of focus on health being contingent on living with light. She’s also textbook “here are multiple ways to lose weight (including GLP-1s and six-week coaching sessions) but self-love is the most important thing!!!!”

Here’s how Fox frames her partnership with BF on her website (I recommend reading the entire thing, also worth noting that her brand is ‘Live Right Nutrition’):

Tanna also serves as the Director of Wellness at Ballerina Farms where she loves working with a brand centered on family values & real food, with the highest quality for clean products that fit real lifestyle needs for individuals and families. Ballerina Farms perfect touch of charm and authentic living inspires millions.

Here again, we’ve got a SLEW of MAHA words. The “highest quality” Americans are “clean,” “real,” “charming,” “authentic,” “inspiring,” and devoted to family. What goes unsaid: the contrast to low quality Americans, who eat fake foods and live false lives. Fox’s nutritionist offerings will feel familiar and cozy to any Ballerina Farm shoppers who believe that seed oils and red food dyes are singlehandedly destroying this country.

AHP: All of this makes me think about how MAHA messaging harmonizes with the contemporary discourse around Ballerina Farm. I’m thinking specifically about The Times profile that you and I have both written about, and Hannah’s explicit response to it, and the general idea that people just want to “hate on” BF for living their truth. The theme of triumphing despite persecution seems to run through it all. Can you connect my hazy dots a little more?

SP: All dots connect to choice feminism. And maybe also Manifest Destiny. Women who write critically about cultural texts involving women are “not supporting women’s choices.” To be even more explicit: in this analysis, we are “tearing other women down,” according to the logic that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist. Many trad influencers, for example, proudly flaunt their married, maternal status as proof of their radicalism, their freedom, and their unwillingness to “conform” to hustle culture or whatever.

In this equation, the toxicity and inhumanity of hustle culture is, of course, blamed on progressives and feminists. A queer woman deciding to never have children (for example) does absolutely nothing to threaten the status quo (which is still hetero marriage and kids!), or women’s ability to choose marriage and children, but the “lifestyle under threat” narrative is much more compelling. It’s sexier to buy into a worldview which posits you as a brave truthteller!

There’s something similar happening with MAHA mamas and their protests against vaccines and fluoridated water. Even if there’s ample data to show that these health initiatives are a net positive for public health, a MAHA mama will argue that her “medical freedom” is being encroached on if her kid’s public school has fluoridated water bubblers. In both cases — the water bubbler mom and the tradwife who claims to be marginalized and oppressed by feminists — it’s a matter of prioritizing the individual’s choice over the collective.

The various waves of western feminism have been flawed in many ways, but most folks would agree that some clear net positives have been achieved (despite many of these rights being actively attacked by our current presidential administration). I think most MAHA mamas would balk at the idea of giving up their access to credit cards or their ability to peddle their homeopathic wares on social media, right? And similarly, modern medicine is wildly preferable to biting on a stick after taking a shot of whiskey before someone cuts off your gangrenous leg???!!!

But the MAHA crowd and “choice feminists” (or even anti-feminist, pro-femininity warriors) all claim that the individual’s right to do whatever the fuck she wants should be the highest priority. Even if her access to “freedom to choose” impedes her neighbors’ access to meaningful, safe, economically secure lives. But it’s all mythology. Women (particularly white women) have always made choices that harm others and are counter to their own ability to thrive.

And within the mythology of Manifest Destiny (the belief that white men were chosen by God to “conquer” Indigenous lands), the white guy’s “freedom” to actively destroy ecosystems and food sources in pursuit of his destiny is heralded as “surviving adversity” at the expense of the people actively under threat by colonization. But rugged individualists (particularly white men) have always relied on government aid and community support to survive their violent pursuits of “freedom.“ (Just like most MAHA folks rely on some modicum of modern medicine and most traditional women rely on some form of feminism).

Claiming persecution is also a time-tested (and effective) strategy used by conservatives. I mean, “the nuclear family is under attack,” THEREFORE we must not allow trans girls to play middle school soccer. “Family values are eroding” which is why women are choosing not to have children which is why birth control is BAD and pronatalist medals are GOOD. Feminists have made a generation of women and girls miserable, which is why all women should accept that only a husband and kids will make you truly happy. Public school cafeterias serve frozen waffles which is why we should homeschool and live off the grid.

In all of these cases, conservative policies undergirding capitalism are the real culprits. Instead of supporting policies that would help all families, regardless of what those families look like, the conservative move is to simply double-down on the status quo and make it difficult/impossible for anyone who doesn’t fit that mold to prosper. Are you exhausted? I’m exhausted!

AHP: This is where we arrive at what I see as a really interesting tension in the BF Brand, and something we haven’t talked about: the Neelemans are devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Like many other LDS, their public prominence — even without explicit proselytizing — is still proselytizing: making Mormonism attractive, public, and mainstream. And persecution is very much a part of the LDS understanding of itself (in short: people have long willfully misunderstood and attacked us, our prophets, and our beliefs). But it’s also not very LDS to yell about it.

So you have that persecution understanding sublimated, very effectively, I’d say, into the MAHA Ballerina Farm brand. It doesn’t matter if they’re posting a picture of their eight kids or Farmer Hydrate, both are essentially a screw you to the haters (of Trad Wife-ism, of “healthy living.”)

At the same time: LDS members, particularly mainstream ones (which, I’d argue, would include the Neelemans) are also not anti-vax. They’re not anti-science. They’re not anti-public-school, either, in part because they believe that it’s important to live their message and their beliefs amongst those who are not (yet) LDS. I think that’s important to underline, and has always been a point of tension between evangelical Christians and the LDS. (It’s also worth noting that many evangelical Christians are still very, very resistant to even conceiving of LDS members as Christians. This understanding has shifted a bit since the late ‘90s when I was subject to videos at youth group trying to convince me as such, but it’s still a very strong strain within the evangelical community at large). There’s a shared sense of persecution that undergirds a lot of the messaging, but the source material for that persecution is substantively different.

And obviously we don’t and can’t know what the Neelemans are actually doing in their day-to-day lives, but we do know that they — and whoever is working for them — understand that there is rhetoric that will be very effective on the MAHA universe you describe above: a motley assemblage of people who understand themselves a Christian conservatives, relatively socially liberal crunchy moms, people “just asking questions”.....and LDS members with similar beliefs. So as much as the Farmer Hydrate (and other wellness products) branding annoys me, I also see them as part of a very savvy business strategy that hails a broad and eager consumer base.

Sara: 100%. I mean, who among us hasn’t bought a canister of marine collagen because she wants to believe it will make her thin hair less thin (me, it’s me)!? Wellness is such an economically powerful category because almost everyone wants to be more well. And “well” can mean almost anything. But yes, the soft proselytizing is so much more effective in terms of attracting politically ambivalent consumers. It was years, for example, before I knew Naomi Davis (an OG mom blogger also known as Taza) was LDS, but at that point I had already entirely internalized her joyful narrative of motherhood as something to aspire to.

I know Mormons were certainly persecuted throughout their history, but I am curious about whose lives they themselves have impinged upon in years past, particularly as white settlers in the American west, you know? Last year I interviewed ex-Mormon writer Alyssa Grenfell about some of the violence within the church’s history (Joseph Smith at one point supported blood atonement), and of course, the historical exclusion of various marginalized groups from participating in the religion itself. This is all to say that I find the habit of various conservative groups claiming a victimized status interesting, because either their “victimhood” is taken a bit out of context or almost entirely nonexistent.

AHP: Absolutely yes — the crucial thing about a persecution narrative is that you’re evoking some past persecution (Mormons were indeed persecuted for their beliefs) as justification for your present actions, no matter how much they might currently (or historically) exploit, harm, or jeopardize the safety of others.

Which is how you get people claiming that they were shunned by their neighbors, shamed by traditional medical practitioners, and demeaned by their educators for not vaccinating their children — and using that persecution as evidence of their righteous beliefs. Again, exhausting. I guess the only way for us to end this conversation is by saying that Farmer Hydrate annoys me because all the complex ideological underpinnings exhaust me.

SP: That’s exactly it. It strikes me as uniquely absurd that nostalgic imaging and storytelling evoking American mythology is supposed to make as froth as consumers - TODAY. Or maybe what more accurately frustrates and perplexes me is the fact that this type of lifestyle marketing is still so obviously effective! The jubilant launch of Farmer Hydrate (and the promotion of the Farmer Hydrate lifestyle) feels so entirely out of touch with the urgency and instability of the political moment.

The American brand is NOT coherent in 2025, but the Ballerina Farm brand is contingent on consumers remaining loyal to whatever version of America is still most alive within their imaginations. The BF brand is entirely reliant on people’s ability to maintain a sense of cognitive dissonance between the country we’re actually living in and the country (some) stubbornly want to believe exists. ●

Sara and I started us off, but I’d love to hear more thoughts: What else do you see at work in the Ballerina Farm brand right now? On their Instagram, in the “protein farm flour,” in the ad for Farmer Hydrate? LET’S DO SOME MORE CLOSE READING!

You can subscribe to Sara’s newsletter here:

In Pursuit of Clean Countertops

Calling bullshit on America’s love affair with Perfect Mamas

By Sara Petersen

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You get the weirdly addictive subscriber-only threads, the ability to hang out in the comments, the weekly round-ups of Things I’ve Read and Loved, and all the paywalled essay content. It also shows that you value the work I do here — and make it possible for me to comp subscriptions to people who’ve lost their jobs, are on fixed incomes or disability, or live in countries where the conversion rate makes subscriptions impossible.

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The Culture Study Podcast

A podcast about the culture that surrounds you — with Anne Helen Petersen and a bunch of very smart co-hosts

By Anne Helen Petersen

In response to my piece on how How I Write Culture Study, I asked readers if they’d want to participate in a series where people from various professions talk about their work lives, explaining how they organize their days and weeks, how they protect their time, when and how they do their work and how and when they attend to their inbox, etc. etc.

Our first entries in the series are from a freelance audiobook narrator, a gardening ceramacist, an engineering grad student, a hairstylist, and a collaborative pianist. Today, you’ll hear about what it’s like work as a hosptial librarian.

If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.

Now, let’s hear from Carrie Grinstead about how she deals with AI bot creating trash citations, cleaning up robot work, and how she responds to people who say “but everything’s on the internet.” This one’s so fascinating!

Let’s start with how you described your work to me:

I’m a hospital librarian. I search databases and other sources for information to support nurses, doctors, dietitians, PTs, etc. with any number of tasks -- patient care, research, arguing with insurance companies. These days I also fight with all the AI bots that generate fake citations, spit out inaccurate evidence summaries, and do a terrible job of indexing articles. I work for a large health system and absolutely love my job, but it’s a terrifying time as hospitals lose funding and state-supported conspiracists dress up weird lies as scholarly evidence.

Because people will ask this immediately: how did you get this job?

I had pretty much decided on library school by my senior year of college. I was about to get a degree in history and planned to get an MFA, and I knew I wasn’t resourceful or clever or talented enough to turn either of those things into a job. Then on the eve of library school I had a freaky medical event. I got shunted around to various specialists and had a bunch of tests that I didn’t understand. I remember standing on a dusty sidewalk in New Mexico, crying on the phone to my sister who was studying to be a nurse, asking her what an infarct was.

Anyway that all made me wildly curious about medical information, how it moved and why it was so hard to find when I needed it. I got to library school and learned that medical librarianship was one possible path, and so I focused on that. I took a couple of classes, joined a student branch of a professional organization, and had a few jobs. The best one, which stands as one of the best jobs of my life, was with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. I loved getting questions from doctors and figuring out how to dig through databases for possible answers. When I graduated I really wanted to work somewhere like that and run advanced literature searches for healthcare professionals.

Tell me about how you organize your day — or your week. You can do it like I did (breaking down each day of the week) or you can just do a pretty typical day, whatever makes sense for you.

My day is mostly determined by what’s in my inbox at 8 am. I spend most of my time searching PubMed, and a lot of factors determine what I need to search for first: if it’s for direct patient care, if somebody’s got a meeting, if it’s in response to some larger-scale emergency. Last summer, Hurricane Helene flooded the place that manufactures most of the IV fluids in the country, and there was a frantic need for information about ways to conserve fluid without harming patients.

Most searches take me one to three hours. I first make sure I’m understanding what’s needed: asking clarifying questions, looking up terms. I figure out how to query the database, what words to search for and how to put them together. I review the titles, abstracts, and sometimes the full text of the articles that come up. I try to do some level of appraisal; ultimately, since I’m not a subject expert, I can’t make a final judgment of a study’s quality. But I can recognize some basic methodological flaws, possible shadiness of a publisher or author, etc., and at least flag that for the clinician.

Finally, I curate a list of results and send it in an email. Ideally, the results I’ve found will all be excellent, pertinent studies, and the email won’t say much except to wish the patron a nice day. Most of the time, though, I also have to figure out how to summarize what I did and didn’t find and what decisions I made.

If I can, I like to try to work on all of this in the morning and then, as the caffeine wears off, switch to stuff that requires a bit less brain, such as certain searches that I’m not designing fresh but just re-running to pick up the more recent publications.

I have meetings throughout the month. Pre-COVID, these were in person, but now they’re almost all on Microsoft Teams. I no longer spend much time driving from one hospital to another, or getting lost looking for distant conference rooms, or enjoying surprise snacks. If I were in charge it would be illegal to have meetings on Mondays or Fridays, or before 10 am or after 2 pm. But I’m not, and meetings happen when they happen, and I plan other tasks around them.

I do some teaching, again almost all on Teams and mostly for nurses. This is usually in the form of one-off sessions, orienting a group to library resources or demonstrating a particular task. My goal with these is always to try to provide some clear take-aways, some tools that overloaded people can hopefully use to make their jobs a bit easier.

How do you organize your digital life?

Probably not as thoroughly as I should? But I guess I’ve been plugged into screens log enough to have a decent sense of what makes me feel exhausted and anxious, and my digital organizing principles are based around not letting things build up. I can’t stand having a bunch of open tabs. And, to the extent that I’m able, I try to deal with things as they come in, to delete files and emails, to archive what I need to keep. I have some amount of data management skills, and I use those to make sure that files and folders have meaningful names.

One area that I’ve been meaning for years to try to organize more is my team’s shared OneDrive folder, which has become a bit of a junk drawer. It’s hard to find the bandwidth to do that, especially since it needs to work for a group. I’d love it if we could develop a set of policies around what goes where, what gets saved and for how long, etc. But we’re a pretty small crew and I can’t imagine there will be much capacity for that anytime soon.

When I think about organizing my digital life, my mind goes to the things I do to try to protect and preserve my analog life. I’m as distracted by my phone as the next guy, but I’m not on any socials and don’t plan to be, even though I know there are some robust medical library communities out there.

How do you think about “coworkers?”

Fondly! My team has gotten smaller and smaller since I started my job ten years ago. We had I think fifteen library staff at one point, and now we’re down to eleven. I used to be one of three in my service area, and now I’m alone. We work for a large health system, over fifty hospitals, and we’re dispersed across multiple states. Some of my colleagues, I’ve never met in person, but I do think we all get along quite well and support each other effectively. We’re understaffed compared to comparable health system libraries, but I’ve never felt like I can’t take a vacation or like things will fall apart if, say, covid finally gets me after five years of dodging.

I met one of my best friends in a previous job. We bonded for life over our shared suffering in our toxic workplace. In my job now, I’m not suffering, and maybe that plus the geographic distance is why I haven’t developed such close friendships with current coworkers. To be clear, I like them all very much and am open if they need someone to talk to about anything, work or not-work. I trust them with my stuff and am not opposed to having work relationships grow into something more personal. At the same time, there’s something comforting and stabilizing about having “coworker” and “friend” be two separate categories and two bright spots in my life.

What’s the most challenging part of your work right now?

Right now, with everything burning down, my work is a solace. I care about what I do and feel productive and helpful. So I guess in a way the hardest thing currently is the looming dread that it could be gone. The threats to healthcare, to hospitals in this country, are just unfathomable and overwhelming. And of course bots are actively being developed to do what I do. They do it badly, but I don’t know how much that will matter in the end.

There’s the existential terror of gen AI, and also the constant frustration. One of the first things I learned about in library school was controlled vocabularies. There’s a set of defined words that are used to tag things in a database and make it possible to search for concepts instead of just for terms. When I was starting out as a librarian, there were people at the National Library of Medicine who applied these controlled terms to most of what’s in PubMed. Now that’s all done by algorithms, and the results are pretty terrible. Key concepts are missed, irrelevant tags are applied. Running a literature search is more complicated, takes longer, and in the end I never feel as confident that I’ve found everything I need to.

When I find some particularly egregious indexing, I can write to NLM, and there are still people there who respond, who will clean up the robot’s work if I or another librarian ask them to. But my goodness, it was infinitely better when there was a whole team of highly trained and experienced folks whose job it was to get it right on the front end.

I could go on about this all day, but one other piece that’s important to mention is that it’s so, so much harder now to know what’s real and what isn’t. I spend my entire working life looking at citations of medical literature, but even I can’t tell a fake one without doing some digging.

What’s the thing people misunderstand about how your life and work, well, work?

People don’t know that a hospital librarian is a thing. Which isn’t surprising—it’s a niche thing and it makes sense that you wouldn’t have heard of it, unless you are one or you know one. When I tell someone new that that’s what I do, they think, reasonably, that I work in a library. That my wrist tendinitis must be from lifting big books and not from mousing and typing all day. Or, they think that libraries, especially of this highly specialized sort, are just outdated now. That everything is on the internet, and there’s no role and no need for humans.

One of my colleagues, when she hears the “but everything is on the internet” line, responds that it’s on the internet because she put it there. I didn’t put it there, myself, but I do have some understanding of how it gets there and what it takes to get it back out.

For every “Day in the Life” interview like this we publish on Culture Study, I’m donating $500 to a non-profit organization of the author’s choice. What organization are we supporting with this interview, and why does their work matter to you?

I’d love to support the radio station — The SoCal Sound — that I started listening to when I first moved to California for this job. They’re wonderful company through and beyond the work day, and, like a lot of public media, they are struggling.

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When we taped the baseball culture episode of last week, we tried to answer a question from a listener about why baseball feels like such a dad sport. We came up with a bunch of theories, which you can listen to here, but my theory is that baseball viewing evokes a particular sort of dadness: a sit-in-the-old-recliner-by-yourself-with-the-AM-radio-on Dad, which is to say, a chill Dad, a contemplative Dad, a Dad who’s always trying to get you to sit there with him.

Baseball is not a sport of aggression or frenzy, and neither, at least stereotypically, are its fans. Baseball is also historically accessible: unlike football or basketball, a ticket in the nosebleeds during the regular season costs less than going out for pizza. Baseball is an endurance sport for fans: the season lasts forfuckingever but manages to combine the excitement of spring, the endless nights of summer, and the wistfulness of fall, and invites you to appreciate them all, the way a Dad would tell you to come watch the thunderstorm with him, or take a look at that cool tree looking its leaves, or ask anyone and everyone: can’t you feel Spring in the air?

Baseball Dad is channeling the spirit at the heart of Dad Magazine, which Jaya Saxena and Mattie Lubchansky imagined so vividly for The Toast (RIP, even its archives) more than a decade ago:

See also:

The Baseball Dad, at least how we’re conceiving of him here, is a Good Dad: caring but not controlling, concerned but not terrified. He likes gadgets but isn’t obsessed. He loves a deal. He’s not rich. He’s present. He adores his kids and is kind to his wife or ex-wife or husband (gay dads are often but not always good dads). His masculinity is not rigid, is not anxious, and is not obsessed with self-replication. He is often stubborn but not intractable; Good Dads have been known to change their minds, especially about social issues.

Good Dads get annoyed by things but very rarely furious. They often grew up with some sort of moral code but are no longer staunchly religious. They lack self-consciousness. They’ll do the electric slide for the jumbrotron without even thinking about it. They love a backyard BBQ more than a tailgate, and they like a 4 o’clock beer on a Sunday but never drink to oblivion. They like to tinker more than complete. The Good Dad would pretty much always like to play a game of cards with you, or maybe just go on a drive. That sounds nice.

@raejoanne_My favorite sport is pretending IGAF 😭#sports#sportsmoguls#MLB#yapping#marinersbaseballdetroit

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Good Dads are usually depicted as white and suburban but that’s because a lot of media still insists on representing anyone good as white and suburban. Good dads are of every race, have every accent, and live all over; components of the Good Dadness (the beer in the bottle, just to start) feel specific to the US and Canada, but can readily be interchanged with culturally specific features from other countries. Women and non-binary people can be Good Dads, too, because Dadness is a behavior, not a gender.

The Good Dad is also defined in part by what he is not: The Bad Dad. Here’s where I’m gonna piss some people off and say that the statistical likelihood of a Dad being a Bad Dad goes up when his primary sport is football (or golf) instead of baseball. Not all football fans are Bad Dads, but most Bad Dads are football fans. (For evidence of Good Football Dads, see below).

@richelleholnickSurprising the best dad in the world with @Philadelphia Eagles tickets 💚🦅 #gobirds #eagles #eaglesfans #eaglesfootball

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The Bad Dad is not that guy. The Bad Dad has a temper which he acknowledges and for which he periodically apologizes. But the Bad Dad is resistant to shame. Most dads like the sound of their own voice but Bad Dads like the sound of their voice most when they are lecturing or yelling. Bad Dads are rude to waiters. They think not tipping is a way of encouraging someone to do better. When the Bad Dad gets drunk, he’s angry and spitting. If the Bad Dad doesn’t drink, he lords his sobriety over everyone. The Bad Dad is always right, even and especially when he is very, very wrong.

Unlike the Good Dad, who is represented across all races, the Bad (American) Dad is almost always white, because the primary force animating the Bad Dad is the performance and maintenance of dominance. The Bad Dad’s love is conditional: he loves his wife, but only when she performs and looks a certain way. He loves his children, but only when they behave in accordance with his exacting yet somehow still vague standards of behavior. He loves his friends, but his friends are, conveniently, also Bad Dads.

Bad Dads love gear but only new gear. Bad Dads have very little tolerance for mistakes. They would never be vegetarian. They don’t read fiction, which is admittedly a common Dad Trait, but their nonfiction appetites are limited to military history, the Bible, and self-optimization. The Bad Dad doesn’t just refuse to go to therapy, he doesn’t believe in it, or meds, which are a sign not just of weakness, but failure.

The Bad Dad doesn’t believe in forgiveness, even of himself. He wins arguments by referring to the family home as “my house, the house I paid for, where you’re just a renter.” Bad Dads often had Bad Dads themselves, and suffered mightily under them, but have since beatified them. A Bad Dad would rather throw a child out of their house than change their mind. He treads a very, very fine line between self-pride and self-hatred.

Bad Dads don’t understand irony and find most satire “in poor taste.” Part of the reason they like televised sports and cable news and a certain type of primetime sitcom so much is because most other art asks too much of them. And by “too much” I mean: self-awareness and humility. Bad Dads call most music “that crap.” They refuse to dance, or they only slow dance: once per gathering and with great precision. Bad Dads don’t have rhythm. They make you play volleyball. They belittle a man who lets anyone else touch their grill. They’ll invite you to learn a new game of cards and then they’ll make fun of you when you lose. All dads tell bad jokes. Bad Dads tell mean ones.

Bad Dads come in all classes but reach their full expression in the upper-middle class (see: American Gentry) and the mind-bogglingly rich. Buddy Garrity in Friday Night Lights starts out as a Bad Dad and becomes a Good one (rare); both Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are Hall of Fame Bad Dads. Bad Dads tend towards religious fundamentalism or being loud about their belief in God without anything resembling devotion. Which makes sense: God, at least the God they imagine, is a very Bad Dad.

One Battle After Another is a movie about many things. It’s also a movie about Good and Bad Dads. Sergio aka Sensei (Benicio del Toro) isn’t just a Good Dad, he’s a Best Dad. A Dad for the ages. If you’ve seen the movie, you understand me immediately. If you haven’t, he’s not a “good dad” for his behavior towards his children (although he might also be that, it’s unclear). He’s the Good Dad for his entire community: for his martial arts students, for a group of rag-tag skateboarders, for undocumented immigrants who he helps shelter and protect. (No spoilers ahead, but I do describe some basic plot points of the movie).

We know Sensei is a Good Dad because of his actions (and his tracksuit) but also because of his humor, and the way other people respond to his requests. He is deeply beloved, and that belovedness has been earned.

Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) is in the continual process of wresting Good Dadness from the clutches of Bad Dadness. His background has made him paranoid; his drug use has made him worthless. He is a loose, live wire — but one that vibrates with deep love and respect for his daughter. He is hapless, and he is a fool, but he is a Good Dad.

Neither of these Good Dads have money or societal power. But they are guided by moral compasses directed towards justice. Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote and directed the film, makes the argument for the Good Dadness over and over: in the costuming, of course, but also in the direction of both performances, and the play of lightness and terror that underpin them.

We also know they’re Good Dads because they’re not the movie’s Bad Dads, each of which is played with great, deadpan self-seriousness. For those who haven’t seen the movie, a major plot point hinges on the involvement of “The Christmas Adventurers Club,” a group of men who invites the viewer to imagine what it would be like if everyone in Epstein’s Black Book and the people who’ve spent the most time at Mar-a-Lago formed a secret society rooted in white supremacism and global control. Like a very high-class, Yale-educated Klan, facilitated (but not controlled) by a man named Virgil Throckmorton (played, with delicious irony, by Tony Goldwyn).

The Christmas Adventurers Club has offered potential membership to Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a domineering military commander best known for his “cleansing” work of immigrant populations. Early in the film, Lockjaw has a run-in with the revolutionary group that includes Bob and his girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and sparks (or fans) his fetish for Black, controlling women, which becomes a problem when Lockjaw’s history is combed over for potential Christmas Adventurer membership.

We know that Virgil (Tony Goldwyn) is a dad because he takes a break from his daughter’s wedding to interview a potential member for his white supremacist club. But we don’t know, for certain, if all of these other Christmas Adventurers are dads. We know they have a secret white supremacist bunker lair, which is very Bad Dad, and comb their hair like Bad Dads, and talk about their beliefs without any sense of irony or awareness, which is obviously peak Bad Dad. We know that they drive Bad Dad cars, and wear white shirts under LaCoste polos, the Baddest of Bad Dads.

Also: they are white rich men of a certain age: for them not to be would be a matter of curiosity and censure. Which is why Lockjaw, for all of his “cleansing” work, is suspect: he acts like a Bad Dad and drives the massive jacked-up truck of a Bad Dad, so where’s the wife and child that would make him a Dad? But biological fatherhood is not essential for Dadness, Good or Bad, and there’s a scene involving Lockjaw of such vivid Bad Dadness that I won’t spoil here but will not leave me.

The Bad Dads of One Battle After Another look like respectable, upstanding citizens who pay their taxes, or at least pay someone a lot of money so they pay very little taxes. We understand them immediately: they’re paragons of respectability, leaders in their community, deacons in their churches, and sponsors of Little League teams. They have immaculate dental health. Their lawns are mowed. And they are craven and heartless villains, obsessed with regenerating their own power. They are despicable, and they are ridiculous — and they absolutely live amongst us.

The Good Dads of One Battle After Another, by contrast, look like social problems. When Bob gets arrested while on the run during a protest, he’s carted into the gen pop holding tank, even though he’s wanted by the feds, because he looks like he’s unhoused. But those Good Dads, along with their daughters and friends and fellow travelers, are the beating, beautiful heart of this movie. And they, too, live amongst us.

In her essay collection Thick, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom explains what it means for a person of color to “know our whites”:

“To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness,” she writes. “It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people’s emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.”

Know your whites. Know your dads. ●

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