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.

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.

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.

Unpaid subscribers, subscribe today to join the conversation and get access to everything this newsletter has to offer — including weekly threads like this one, all the paywalled content, and the weekly collection of Things I’ve Read and Loved — all for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month:

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You can donate directly through Venmo (cathshoe) or Pa…

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You can submit your questions using this very quick …

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Just click here; it’ll take 2-3 minutes tops. Thank you so much!

I was reading a post somewhere (forgive me, this is one of the pro…

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• Melody and I recorded a subscriber-only mini-ep of the podcast on “The Showgirl and the Swiftcourse” — if you’re a subscriber to the podcast, you can listen to it here (and if you’re not a subscriber, remember you can get a massive discount because you’re a newsletter subscriber!). The comments are already excellen…

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Last night I went and saw One Battle After Another and I feel like I need to see it three more times and talk about it forever! I’m also reading the best book I’ve read this year and the new Taylor Swift album just came out?!? Plus it’s fall and the light is just so good right now???

I want to talk about everything! Cue: OUR FIRST OPEN CHAOS THREAD SINCE…

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I’ll start with mine.

I wake up to some combination of the sun rising and Bev (my dog) nosing me — usually between 6:30 and 7 am. I reach over, grab my phone, check Instagram and, if I’ve published something, the comments on the post. I very purposefully do not check my email. I get out of bed, let the dogs out to pee, and turn on all the lights in kitchen/living room space where I spend the bulk of my day: five lamps, two lights. I pick up the dog toys that somehow left their crate in the middle of the night. I press the button on the coffee maker (always prepped the night before), feed the dogs, and put on the clothes I’d set out the night before, which are not necessarily the clothes that I’ll wear all day, but are the clothes I wear to walk the dogs.

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When I was in third grade I was obsessed with the New York Mets, in part because my neighbor Kevin told me I should be obsessed with the New York Mets (because he wanted me to trade me all his Mets Baseball Cards for my other good baseball cards). Honestly this was fine by me; I liked having a t…

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Actually good Etsy shops run by real humans doing cool creative stuff

Between 2012 and 2019, I regularly purchased items on Etsy: mugs, vintage earrings, birth…

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What list would you like to see when you’re dead? For me, I’d like to see a list of where everything I lost got lost and where it ended up. I’d also love to see a list of anyone who had a cr…

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First up: The Hounding by Kenobe Purvis, a debut novel about a “season of strangeness” in 1700s Oxfordshire, featuring five orphaned sisters and a bunch of wild shit. I can’t wait.

But what are YOU reading? What’s absorbed you, what did you set aside, what do you want more of (we’re always ready to give recs here). Remember to follow the Culture Study style of ALL CAPS for ALL BOOK TITLES (it makes it easier to scan the comments) and as always, this is a private, subscriber-only space; don’t be butts about what other people are reading and let’s keep this one of the good places on the internet.

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What’s a helpful but little-known fact about where you work/your industry that could be useful for people to know?

(Ex: I work in the library system, and many people don’t know all the odd things you might be able to check out, everything from radon detectors to birdwatching kit…

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B…

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SO TODAY, WE’RE GONNA SOLVE SOME PROBLEMS.

Here’s the exact wording for the prompt from Culture Study reader Shae:

I have "x" thing I have been saving. What should I do with it?

Examples could be journals, pretty boxes, planters, scrap fabric. All the things we save because we want to use them eventually, but don't have ideas for how.

You can take this more in the preservation / archiving direction, as Shae’s prompt suggests, or the repurposing / donation direction (because not knowing what to do with something is often, but certainly not always, why we hang on to it).

And because I already know there’s going to be a lot of suggestions to post things to a Buy Nothing Group or eBay or NextDoor or something similar — try and be as descriptive as you can with how you’d suggest someone list something (or any other tips to make sure it goes somewhere).

As always, this is a private, subscriber-only space; don’t be butts about stuff that people have held on to, for whatever reason, and let’s keep this one of the good places on the internet.

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Back-to-school-pics! Sunset before 8 pm! Costco trying to convince me to buy massive lawn skeletons! Most of my non-dahlia plants looking exhausted! All of Instagram selling me sweaters and so many boots! MUST BE THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST!

Summer is my favorite season and yet like so many of you I revel in the promise of seasonal change: how good it feels, even if just for a few weeks, to choose warmth, instead of desperately trying to escape it. I’m usually out of summer-entertaining-energy by Labor Day, so my activity of choice is to hang out and revel in the perfection (the weather, the sky, the dahlias) in a way that will sustain me through winter.

But I’ve also been reading a lot (and distractedly perusing a few Labor Day Sales) and cooking a LOT of zucchini and have some glorious, end-of-summer recs to sustain you through the long weekend.

As always, these links & recs posts are paywalled so that I can keep the vast majority of Culture Study content outside of the paywall and available to all. If you open this newsletter all the time, if you appreciate this work, if you want to hang out in this Friday’s Thread on What You’ve Learned About Your Body/Bodies in General (That You Wished You’d Learned Much Sooner) …or maybe you just want all the recs in the VERY GOOD BAGS thread? Well, subscribe today:

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No affiliate links here — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not our business model — and I’ve added gift links whenever possible!

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