Culture Study: Essays

BIG NO-KIDS ENERGY

Anne Helen Petersen — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:24:51 GMT

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

Charlie delighting in kids while also having 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.

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Big News: Culture Study is Moving to Patreon!

Anne Helen Petersen — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:13:22 GMT

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.

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Know Your Dads

Anne Helen Petersen — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:25:26 GMT

Some very good subscriber-only content this week: What Are You Cooking/Assembling for Weeknight Dinner and Your First Memory of Beauty.

Also this is your LAST CHANCE to complete the Culture Study survey — if you want more content like this, if there’s something else you want more of, if you have ideas for future threads, tell me about it! Just click here.

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:

This Week’s Things I’ve Read and Loved (Including All the Good Stuff I’ve Read on One Battle After Another):

The Unexpected Melancholy of Nicole Kidman's Divorce

Anne Helen Petersen — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:19:20 GMT

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Urban and Kidman in October 2024 (John Shearer / Getty)

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time standing in line at the checkout of our local Albertson’s grocery store with my mom. Sometimes I’d flit away to go look at the new VHS releases and scare myself by looking at the cover of Friday the 13th, but most of the time I’d stare at check-out magazines: People, of course, but also the pulpy, vibrant spectacle of The Globe, The Star, The Sun, The National Inquirer, and of course Weekly World News, printed using the National Enquirer’s old black & white presses and trying its best to convince me that Elvis was in fact alive.

Back then, People mostly concentrated its attention on celebrities that even tween me knew and understood as stars: Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Michael Jackson. But the tabloids were filled with the drama of celebrities whose source of fame was shadowy or straight up illegible, at least to me: Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins, Richard Burton, Natalie Wood (also back from the dead), Debbie Reynolds…..and Loni Anderson. Always, always Loni Anderson.

Loni Anderson was famous, as far as I could tell, because she had been married to Burt Reynolds, and then she wasn’t married to Burt Reynolds, and they both were very mad about it. What people older than twelve years old knew was that she was on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, and then became very popular, and then thought she should get paid more for being very popular, and then left the show, became even more popular, and eventually married Burt Reynolds (her third husband) in 1988.

They stayed married until 1994, which was around when I started really paying attention to these headlines. I couldn’t understand why she was so important to so many people — she wasn’t even on TV anymore! Burt Reynolds was weird! His sitcom about being an ex-professional football player who comes home to coach a high school football team wasn’t even that funny! (Although I certainly did watch it, like I watched every popular sitcom on primetime in the early ‘90s)

What I didn’t understand then was that the source of Anderson’s stardom had shifted. Before, she was a television actress whose body and demeanor reflected the “bimbo” ideal of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s era. (See also: Suzanne Somers). But over the course of the ‘80s, her on-screen fame was eclipsed by the off-screen melodrama of her personal life. She had become a recurring character in the soap opera of the tabloids: one week, she was the hero; the next, the villain. One week she was a horrible mother; the next week, a saint.

When someone becomes a tabloid star, there’s a sense that their fame has been cheapened in some way — an argument rooted in the notion that “real” art disassociates from the private sphere. But Anderson in her post-divorce era meant just as much, if not far, far more, than at the peak of her time on WKRP. She straddled the line between money-hungry bitch and screwed-over airhead. She refused to cower to her much more famous (and beloved) husband. Her fight for child custody and alimony was either aspirational or an object lesson in how a “bad” woman handles divorce. What people talked about when they talked about Anderson was never Loni, herself, but how you felt about how a woman should behave in and outside of marriage.

And that’s why she stayed in the tabloids: not because her divorce was messy, although it was, and not because she was even that interesting, although her memoir indicates that she was that, too. It’s because a lot of people needed a way to think through what it meant to have a big sloppy divorce in the early ‘90s, because a lot of people — Loni’s age and younger — were going through them too.

That’s one of the foundational truths of celebrity gossip: it’s ostensibly about a star, but it’s always actually about establishing, challenging, and policing norms about what it is to be a person in the world. Talking about Rock Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis was a way of talking about AIDS and homosexuality when most people still didn’t know how to talk about either. Gossiping about Elizabeth Taylor’s weight in the 1980s was just the latest (and most desperate) attempt to police her brazen appetites (for men, for self-determination). And the ongoing drama of Anderson’s tabloid life was a way for women to internalize that asking too much — from a spouse, from your employer, from a divorce settlement — would always make you a villain.

That’s a very long preamble to the breaking news of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s imminent divorce after nineteen years of marriage. Kidman and Urban were the sort of whimsical couple that fans love: two people who find themselves together mostly because they’re famous and were, at some point, in proximity to one another. Some stars (like, say, Matt Damon) like to date non-famous people. Other stars (like, say, Ben Affleck) almost exclusively find themselves with other stars. That was Kidman and Urban: two Australians who would always be recognized when they went out in public. Natural affinity! It didn’t make sense, but it also absolutely did.

Kidman always seemed to be very game supporting her husband’s (very successful) country career: she’d show up to the CMAs and bop her head and somehow never advised Urban to cut his bob. Together, they had two daughters (now teens) and lived seemingly low-key lives in Nashville. For those of us who lived through Kidman’s press tour for Moulin Rouge after enduring a miscarriage and subsequent divorce from Tom Cruise, the marriage felt like a gleeful comeuppance. There was Tom, jumping on Oprah’s couch and getting publicly shit-talked by the head of his studio and grinding with Katie Holmes (ew)…..and here was Nicole, winning an Academy Award and landing a guy who was not a member of a deeply oppressive religious sect. Yes, Cruise had alienated their children from their mother. But who was the real winner here?

Kidman’s marriage to Urban, coupled with the accumulated understanding of her as a real actress, was the happy ending to a sad divorce. Its endurance was a testimony to second loves: getting married to the biggest star in the world won’t bring you happiness, but an Australian country star can! Like Taylor Swift, Nicole Kidman loves to work — but Urban did, too. And because they worked in profoundly different circles, it seemed like their egos didn’t collide. A successful woman in her 50s with a husband who adores her: what a novelty.

In recent years, Kidman had become known for a series of performances as miserable rich white ladies of a certain age grappling with their philandering, inept, and/or violent husbands. Some of the performances were exquisite, but others bordered on camp: there’s a sense, watching her turn in The Perfect Couple, that the only way she knows how to play a woman that resentful of her piece-of-shit husband is as caricature.

Then the news of Kidman and Urban’s pending divorce hit. Allie Jones and Hunter Harris both have good rundowns of how the PR forces are working on this one, but the general gist is that Urban seems to have instigated the separation, “blindsighting” Kidman, and is now…..changing the words in a song he wrote about Kidman to be about his guitarist, Maggie Baugh?? Ew, truly.

One of my friends messaged the group chat on Monday morning after hearing the news: Why am I sad about this? She’s not a huge fan of either. But like me, she was a consumer of celebrity over the last thirty years, acquainted with the peaks and valleys of Kidman’s public life. As it became clear that this wasn’t a “conscious uncoupling”-style divorce, its meaning was enunciated: this is about Nicole Kidman’s divorce, sure, but it’s also about relationships, particularly for motivated, successful, menopausal women. You can do everything right, make so much money, shepherd all your resources to keep yourself looking as young as possible, and your husband will still leave you for his 25-year-old coworker.

To be clear: the relationship is not confirmed. (Baugh reposted the clip of Urban changing the lyrics with the caption: “Did he just say that 👀”). But at this point in the meaning-making process, it doesn’t need to be. Kidman’s PR messaging, paired with Urban’s actions, have made it very easy to understand the story of their divorce in a particular way, and at this point, it’s very difficult to see a way for Urban to substantially shift it. One of these star’s reps clearly understands how to work People Magazine and its gossip watershed. The other does not.

I’m ultimately less interested in who’s the villain in this particular narrative and more invested in how the story underscores so many women’s fears and anger about aging. Put differently, we feel sad about this story because we feel sad about how our society understands, devalues, and invisibilizes women as we age. We feel sad about this story for the same reason we might feel sad about Kidman’s famously immobile forehead, and the forces that would drive one of the most talented actresses of her generation to purposefully break one of her most valuable tools.

You can do so much good, introspective, personal work on valuing yourself, no matter your age or appearance, but you’re still doing that work within a political and cultural reality whose governing logic both explicitly and implicitly devalues women. Not just devalues, but degrades — especially when women fail to conform to societal norms of behavior, which somehow remain: be beautiful, be seen, be silent….then disappear.

I know that’s not Nicole Kidman’s fate. But this part of her story reminds me just how much work she’s had to do, and how much work she’ll continue to do, to make sure it isn’t. Can you imagine how tired she is? If you’re of an age where you read those Loni Anderson headlines in real-time, as I did: of course you can. ●

If you have memories of Loni Anderson in the gossip press — and how your own thinking was shaped on her/her star image — I’d love to hear them. And, of course, all your Nicole thoughts.

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This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (very good this week, just saying):

The Futile Search for the Bullsh*t-Less Job

Anne Helen Petersen — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 11:23:33 GMT

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University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Student Patty Nunn reviews job listings at UCLA, c. 1984 (Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)

Last week, a Substack post by a guy named “Alex” started haunting my feed. His bio: “I collected careers like stamps in my 20s: architecture, music, entrepreneurship—nothing stuck. Turns out I wasn't alone.” The title of the piece: “The Death of the Corporate Job.”

Some illustrative sections:

Walk through the City or Canary Wharf at 8am and you'll see thousands of people who look purposeful. Sharp suits, coffee in hand, calls already starting. The whole thing looks impressively important.
But talk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges. They're in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They're managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They're creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.
A friend at a major bank recently told me about his typical day. He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn't point to a single tangible thing. "I enable decision-making," he said, then caught himself. "Whatever that means."

Also:

The corporate role isn't dying in some dramatic collapse. It's dying like religion died for many people—slowly, through diminishing belief rather than disappearing churches.
The structures remain. The offices still gleam. The meetings still happen. The emails still flow. But the faith that this activity means something, that it's building towards something worthwhile, that it justifies the life hours it consumes—that faith is evaporating.

And finally:

I know developers who do their "official" job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks. Consultants who've automated their actual deliverables and spend most of their time on side projects.
They're not quitting. They're using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn't died; it's become a funding mechanism for actual work.
One person I spoke to called it "corporate entrepreneurship"—not in the LinkedIn way where you're an "intrapreneur" innovating within your company, but in the sense that you're using your corporate presence to subsidise your real work.
This is particularly acute for people in their twenties. We entered the workforce just as the illusion was becoming impossible to maintain. We never had that period where we could believe our corporate roles were meaningful.

It’s all very Fight Club and Office Space meets Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, isn’t it? Maybe a little Graduate, a dash of Say Anything Lloyd Dobbler-ism, and certainly some David Graeber, who first published his essay on “Bullshit Jobs” in 2013 (and who Alex, to his credit, references directly).

I don’t mean to be paternalistic so much as highlight how every generation arrives at a similar point of disillusionment: most jobs involve bullshit. What you do with that information, once gleaned, is usually a pretty good barometer of character. But the realization that the corporate career can feel meaningless — that’s nothing new.

What strikes me is how discordant Alex’s post is from the vast majority of writing I’m seeing on jobs, most of which focuses on the fact that it feels incredibly hard to find one — for people of all ages, but especially Alex’s.

Take this post from Femcel, which also haunted my feed when it was published back in January. The title: WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS:

Don’t tell me to go on LinkedIn, Indeed, or my university’s alumni network. Fuck your “job finding resources” links and master docs. Do not tell me to email a million people for “coffee chats” and “informational interviews” where I make a thinly veiled attempt at letting some Gen X person know that I am totally unemployed via bullshit questions about what they like about their industry, what advice they have for breaking in, what is required to succeed. Do not tell me to put all the key phrases of the job description in some invisible-colored text on my resume so the AI bot reading my resume will boost it to the top of my pile. Do not tell me to reach out to former employers, family friends, blah blah blah.
I have done all of this and more. There is nothing you can tell me that I do not know. I’m 24.
OK maybe some of you laughed at that.
What I mean is — I am young enough to know all the AI and tech tricks, all the websites (yes, I know about ZipRecruiter), the temp agencies, the recruiting agencies, the stuff about reaching out to everyone for a job. I know about all the industries — advertorial, assistant work, sales, yadda yadda yadda.
I am also sick of getting some of the most condescending advice ever:
hAvE yOU tHouGHt oF a jOB iN bUsInESS? WhAT aBouT nOn-ProFit? Or bE An OffICe maNAgER at a LaW fiRM?
WOW! I never thought of that — a job in business or as an office manager? What genius!

I recommend the piece in full for its portrait of a particular sort of exasperation, one that will be familiar for many of us: I did everything “right,” I worked so fucking hard, I did all those fucking internships, I even have a bunch of situational privilege, and now I’m somehow both undertrained and overeducated for everything. She’s not picky; she doesn’t even want a job she’s “passionate about.” She just wants a job.

I felt something similar when I was 24, working a nanny job because it was the only gig that matched my “hard” skillset (aka lots of babysitting and camp counseling). Even in 2005, it was impossible to communicate to a potential employer yes I have no experience, but you should hire me because I’m smart and work my ass off. I’d have killed for an office manager job. A solid 60% (maybe higher, let’s be real) of why I went to grad school was because I couldn’t find an entry point on any other career. (A lot more on all that here)

The first author, Alex, has already had jobs and quit them — and is preaching the gospel of disillusionment. That’s why his writing has the ease and uncanny polish of a self-help book: his career is talking about leaving his career. He chose this route, and wants others to feel better about choosing it, too. Femcel’s disillusionment is borne of desperation — she’s not rejecting careerism; careerism is rejecting her.

●

Fast-forward eight months. It will surprise no one that Femcel is starting a PhD in English this Fall.

Her first newsletter about it: “I am excited for my PhD and you can’t stop me.”

And you know what, she makes some points! To start:

Maybe I don’t have a leg to stand on because I have not started my PhD. But as far as my English PhD goes, I will be: fully funded, in a union which guarantees a salary increase every year for 5 years among other benefits which should be federally legally mandatory without a union but alas, receiving guaranteed subsidized housing, as well as affordable health insurance.

Also:

My first ever job was working the hostess stand at a bougie restaurant in LA with a bunch of aspiring models and actresses, where I was once brutally screamed at by a coked-up chef for not putting a note about a celebrity who had arrived in the right area of the kitchen. I KNOW A TOXIC WORK ENVIRONMENT!
AND TRUST ME, BEING UNDER PRESSURE TO WRITE MY THOUGHTS ON EVE SEDGWICK BY THURSDAY AT 11:59 PM IS A LOT BETTER THAN BEING ON MY FEET FOR NINE HOURS WHILE TRYING TO KEEP MY MANAGER FROM REALIZING THE 6”1 BLONDE NEXT TO ME DID COKE WITH THE LINE COOKS AND THEN A GROUP OF FINANCE BROS WHO GOT A PATIO TABLE FROM HER WITHOUT A RESERVATION, IN JULY!

And finally:

My biggest fear is becoming one of these condescending, belittling, holier-than-thou graduate students who talk about GETTING PAID, HEALTH INSURANCE, AND SUBSIDIZED HOUSING for five years to GO TO CLASS AND DISCUSS AND READ AND WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU REALLY CARE ABOUT as if it is SURVIVING DISPLACEMENT or FIGHTING ON THE FRONTLINES WITHOUT ARMOR.

To be fair, I did not have a union, subsidized housing, five years of guaranteed funding, or a paycheck that covered my bare bones living expenses during my PhD. As far as PhD options go, Femcel has found a good one. I also remember making very similar arguments about the privileges of thinking what I wanted to think about all day, every day, for pay.

What I didn’t understand is that finishing a humanities PhD, both when I did and especially now, requires re-entering the corporate sphere, with even fewer legible qualifications on her resume. It sucks but it’s true, and all of you who have attempted to transition from humanities academia into the non-academic world know it: of course you can find a job. But it’s probably not different from the job you could’ve found at 24, only now you’re over 30 and figuring out how to use LinkedIn is even more humiliating than it was six years ago.

You’re also just as disillusioned about the machinations of corporate America as, say, Alex — it’s just that your corporate experience was the ostensibly un-corporate interworkings of academia. So many of us flee to grad school because the corporate world can’t accommodate us, only to find ourselves immersed in its poorly cloaked tenets (and making far less money). The English PhD might be “safe” for now, but universities are eyeing every program that’s not a profit center, that doesn’t bring in grants, that doesn’t make them competitive for the sort of students who have optimized themselves not to be “the best” or “learn things” but to “get jobs.”

And that’s what makes so many contemporary PhDs miserable: it’s not reading high theory, or slightly insufferable people in class, or writing seminar papers. It’s doing all those things against the backdrop of the contemporary university: the constant threat of program and service reductions, the union fights for cost-of-living increases, the overburdened senior professors, the anxiety-ridden students, the addiction to (and negotiation of) AI, and the looming after.

I don’t regret getting a PhD. But I basically got all the shitty parts of the corporate experience and none of the resume lines. I got yanked around the country chasing jobs but none of the pay bumps. I was expected to attend conferences to keep up with the field but was also expected to take on credit card debt to pay for them. I learned how to teach but, hilariously, only at a level where I would continue to be paid less than a (unionized) kindergarten teacher. I accumulated so much knowledge and so much debt and so little readibly translatable experience.

This makes it sound like I’m arguing for people to take the so-called “email jobs” that both Alex and Femcel rail against. And part of me is like, yes, get an email job and take some grad classes on the side; that’s actually much smarter. Realize that all jobs are sorta bullshit and start cultivating the lush garden of your non-work self.

But also? I believe parts of jobs feel like bullshit. But I think the actual “bullshit jobs” — the ones where you truly do nothing — are vanishingly rare. Most people do work that needs to be done. It’s just that the work itself is structural, invisible, painstaking, or just…collaborative.

For example: a friend of mine works the sort of job that Alex hates. They spend most of the day in Zoom meetings, and then an hour or two doing “their actual work.” One time I was working beside them, eavesdropping on call after call, amazed by how little seemed to get done. I asked: Why can’t you just decide what to do, and then send them an email about it? But that just wasn’t how they did things. They came to consensus, and then delegated tasks, and completed a project, and then started the process all over again. Yes, consensus-building takes a lot more time than direct decision-making; it might even appear, from Alex’s vantage point, to be bullshit. But it might also just be a different — and less authoritarian — way of running a business.

I wouldn’t know that, because I’ve never experienced it. I’ve never experienced anything approximating a stable career environment: I was employed by individual families, then employed by a quasi-corporate entity (various educational institutions), then a VC-funded digital journalism start-up whose corporate culture was “fro-yo machine,” and now I’m a freelance journalist. I have been equal parts rejected, scared off of, and terrified by corporate culture. I convinced myself my only option, the only thing I was fit for, the only thing where I could feel even a modicum of security and be free from others’ bullshit, was to go it alone.

Alex evokes people his age in fancy work outfits figuring out how to create secondary jobs within jobs, pulling a salary while launching their own product on the side, but I think most people — his age and mine — are in a similar place to me. For whatever reason, there’s no place for them in the corporate world: they don’t have the experience or the connections; they’ve been laid off; they’re over-qualified; they’re too old; they’re right at that age where every hiring manager thinks they’re immediately going to have a baby; their bodies can’t handle an in-office 8 to 6; their caregiving schedule demands the sort of flexibility a corporate job in their field cannot provide; their primary skill set is now largely performed by AI; the industry where they worked has been decimated by the current administration; they simply cannot get the key words in their resume to match up with the resume-scraping algorithm, WHATEVER.

The why matters somewhat less than the suffocating feeling: there’s no job for you. So you create one for yourself.

●

I used to think of small business owners as, like, Greg from high school who started a bagel shop. Creating jobs, living out their dreams, calling the shots. But you know who’s a small business owner? Me. Every other freelancer you know. We’re creating jobs, too — we’re just creating them for ourselves. We’re taking the broken vestiges of a career, even if that career was only six months long, and building it into sustainable infrastructure. It’s incredibly empowering — and incredibly precarious.

Health insurance? Your responsibility. Retirement matching? Nope. No vacation time, no sick time, no paid family leave. Sure, you can take it whenever you want — and make no money during that time. And yes, I know people figure out rates that allow them to take time off (Wudan Yan is particularly skilled at this). But the reality is that we have transferred the risk of the job market to the risks of self-employment — and agreed to shoulder the corresponding costs in the name of “control.”

We email all the time, but we email when we want. We can work anywhere, which means we often work everywhere! Sure, we have to be constantly looking for more work, and avoid ever saying no, and serve as a one-person provider of customer service, social media management, content creation, graphic design, billing, and accounting — but we call the shots. All of them, all the time. We don’t need shitty managers; we (shittily) manage ourselves! We don’t need HR, or payroll, or tech support, because that’s us, too! And we’ve convinced ourselves it’s better than the alternative: mouldering away in a bullshit job or constantly searching for the next one.

Alex and Femcel’s posts differ in tone, style, vibe, seemingly everything — save the overwhelming message that the working world is broken. They’ve reacted differently to that brokenness — Alex advises stealing spare hours at your consultancy job to spin up a product launch deck; Femcel applied to grad school — but they’re both so palpably hungry for a different way. Both have or will wind their way to creating their own job, and taking on their own extensive financial risks, simply to arrive at a semblance of life satisfaction and security.

That’s certainly one way for a society to be: thrilled to trade security for control, so thoroughly unacquainted with consistency that you develop an allergy to it, well-armored against demands on your time that you haven’t chosen yourself, ruthless in the pursuit of personal success, because what alternative do you have? There’s no safety net to catch you. It’s the individualistic ethic honed to its most bare and bold self.

You see it most vividly in books, podcasts, and newsletters marketed at entrepreneurs, but I also see it all over LinkedIn, where every non self-employed influencer is so clearly building their social media life raft for the moment when they join our ranks. It’s all over the rhetoric of MLMs and “gig work,” which convince people rejected by the corporate world — usually for very different reasons than Femcel — that there is a way to feel like you have a control, that there is a place for someone like you in the workforce, that moms can make money working from home. And I see it in posts right here on Substack, trying to convince people to subscribe to their newsletter in order to unlock growth hacks that will allow them to make writing their full-time job.

All of it — the people peddling this advice, and the people consuming it, and even the people who scoff at it from their increasingly precarious perch of salaried employment — are operating within the same rapidly degrading system. We trade security for control, which we understand as happiness, and direct our focus inward. But what happens as we age? What happens when, for whatever reason, we can no longer run our business of one?

For a short period of time in the 20th century, we voted and governed in a way that provided firm answers to those questions, particularly if you worked for someone else. When you get old, the company you worked for — along with taxes taken from your paycheck — will care for you. It wasn’t that the companies or even the state was more benevolent; it was that labor was protected, unionized, and strong. They forced that understanding to become reality. But as I’ve written about before, white collar workers rejected unionization: as a whole, they were unwilling to sacrifice the promise of advancement, of individual control, for the protection of the whole.

And so the hard-won protections of the post-war period began to erode. Pensions were replaced by “individual contribution” plans (aka 401ks); at first companies matched their employee’s contributing, then those matches decreased and now, in so many cases, there’s no matching at all — and that’s if a 401k plan is even available. Labor protections have been gradually — and in some cases, thoroughly — eroded. Disability is arduous if not impossible to obtain and arduous if not impossible to live off. Social security will not die, at least not unless our current government pointedly kills it. But what it provides is not enough to age with any semblance of dignity.

Self-employment has remained somewhat steady for the last decade at just over 10% of the working population. There was an uptick after Covid, and current numbers suggest that the demographics with the greatest job loss — see: Black women — are also the demographics with the biggest increases in self-employment. We have woven a rhetoric around the current job market to convince us that the problem isn’t the way we’ve organized the economy, or the ongoing erosion of the safety net, or the erosion of worker’s rights, but the jobs themselves. In that paradigm, the solution isn’t to vote to create a different economy, with different incentives and different allocation of profits, but to create your own job.

It’s rich, I know, that I’m writing all of this from the perch of a seemingly secure freelance job. But it’s also telling that even though this enterprise has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, I worry constantly: about my partner losing his full-time employment and, by extension, our access to good healthcare; about developing brain fog or a disability; about Substack’s viability as a platform; about my relevance as I age; about how much I need to set aside each month to ensure that when I can no longer write the way I do, I will be able to survive.

So here’s my contribution to this genre of job market writing. After years of navigating failing industries and labor exploitation, I finally have total control. I know exactly what I do, and who I do it for, and why I do it. I have almost entirely rid my workday of bullshit. But because nothing about the larger system itself has changed, I can have all that control — a seemingly perfect job! — and operate, every day, in total fear. ●

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This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Gotta say, it’s pretty stacked this week):

A Life With Less Pleasure Reading

Anne Helen Petersen — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:24:30 GMT

If you haven’t checked out this week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast, we got Sam Sanders to come talk about all things Texas Culture. Listen here and remember that all Culture Study newsletter subscribers get a massive discount on their podcast subscription.

These episodes are only as good as the questions you ask — and right now we’re looking for your best for future episodes on mid-life reinvention (hello, the portal!) and an episode with Leigh Bardugo (author of one of my favorite fantasy/dark academia books, Ninth House) about the state of genre, the lines between YA and non-YA, and whatever else you want to ask her about. HERE’S THE VERY QUICK & STRAIGHTFORWARD QUESTION SUBMISSION FORM.

Finally, this week’s threads are exceptional (and very different): Go read Very Good Bags (1000+ comments) and What Are You Struggling With That No One Else Sees?. If you need the space to be vulnerable and hear from others who are doing the same — spanning everything from eldercare to IVF anticipation to layoff grief and late-in-life autism diagnosis — this is the place.

A man reads in the Dead Sea, c. early 20th Century (via Getty)

In the first months of dating my partner, Charlie, he sheepishly told me something that felt, to him, like a dark truth: he wasn’t “well-read,” particularly when it came to the so-called classics. He was embarrassed, he said, because he surmised that I’d read a lot (as evidenced by my bookshelf and my various degrees). Then he told me something I think about a lot: he’d been assigned so many books in his high-pressure, college-prep, very expensive high school. But he was doing so many activities — and had so much homework in his other classes — that he never had time to actually read the books, let alone like reading the books.

It was a stark contrast to my own experience of reading in high school or any other level of school. Like many of you reading this sentence, I was the kid who got in trouble for reading ahead, finishing the book, and then sneaking my own book inside the pages of the book we were supposed to be reading. In eleventh grade, I was astonished when we were assigned the alternating chapters of Grapes of Wrath (just the Joad plot ones, not the descriptive/contextual ones). How could we do that to a book? I read it all and realized the extent of the blasphemy.

In hindsight, I understand that my teacher was trying to get us to experience the Depression-era narrative without having to read the whole-ass 420+ page book. But reading the book, no matter the length, was never my problem.

I’d learned to love reading at a young age through a combination of my parents reading to me, the availability of books (purchased and borrowed through the library), freedom to read widely, an absence of learning disabilities that would make reading difficult, and watching other adults modeling reading for pleasure around me. My dad was never a huge reader, but our walls were lined with my mom’s books, all of which felt like open invitations. My Granddad was a voracious reader. My aunt and uncle were always trying to get me to read what they loved. At Christmas, Santa always got me something I coveted. But my family got me books, which I’d then spend the seemingly endless, cozy days of winter break devouring.

It took me years to realize the myriad ways my family’s class and education factored into that reality. One of my mom’s primary (and often explicit) parenting goals was that my brother and I would love to read. For work, sure, but also for pleasure. She ensured that we always had access to books. But she also ensured, purposefully or not, that there was always time to read them.

I took difficult classes in my public high school, but my homework load was always tenable. I took piano lessons; I volunteered at church; I went to youth group; I spent four to five nights a week cheerleading (or at cheerleading practice). But I was never over-scheduled. I didn’t have a full-time job but as I’ve written about before, I babysat consistently (and also read while babysitting). I spent a lot of time talking on the phone and hanging out with my friends. I wrote letters and notes all the time — or, as I got older, long emails. And I read for pleasure, pretty much every night. Even in college, and later in grad school, I was reading unassigned books.

I first learned to love reading as a child. But I was able to refine and expand that love as a teen and young adult who, unlike Charlie, still had ample time for it.

I was thinking about that distinction this week against the backdrop of new survey analysis detailing significant declines in reading “for pleasure” in the United States. For years, we’ve been told that American reading habits have remained relatively stable. As recently as 2021, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (weighted to reflect the population) found that 75% of adults had read at least one book in the last year. Similar surveys over the last decade found the same.

The primary purpose of these surveys was to parse how people were reading — Pew started doing this when there was a lot of anxiety over whether eBooks would eclipse printed ones. So they didn’t ask people how many books they were reading, just how they were reading that one (or more) book.

You can take a look at some of the crosstabs from the 2021 survey below:

Link; As is often the case with Pew (and most studies), I’m confused about how they decided to account for race (where is Asian?).

None of these findings are that surprising; if they were to administer the same survey today, I’d guess you’d see an uptick in exclusive e-reading, but not much: people are still reading physical books, even if they’re also reading e-books and listening to audiobooks.

I honestly find this type of survey data soothing: look, we’re still reading!! But then I realize that the architects of the study set the bar incredibly low: ONE book! I mean, what happens when you ask people if they’ve read two books? Also, as a good data scientist or poller will point out, our culture understands reading books as a sign of intelligence, curiosity, leisure, class — if someone asks you on the phone if you’ve read a book, there’s a good chance you’re going to say say to yes, even if it’s not true, to paint a more impressive self-image. (The same phenomenon happens when people are asked how often they exercise).

So how do you get a better picture of how much people are reading? You don’t ask them about their reading. You just ask them about what they do on a random day. That’s what the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) does, surveying 10,000 “representative” people from the census data about what they did the day before. The ATUS is imperfect (I still think it measures leisure weirdly) and much like political polling, is overly reliant on people who are willing to pick up the phone (you can read more about its methodology here). But it does offer us a glimpse of how people are reading, again, on a random day.

Researchers at University College London and University of Florida dug into ATUS data from 2003 to 2023 and identified a significant, ongoing decrease in people reading “for pleasure” on a given day: from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.

Source

Note how they label this type of reading in that graph — “reading for personal interest.” They use that phrase interchangeably with “reading for pleasure” or “leisure reading,” which they define as:

…any kind of reading done for enjoyment or purposes other than work or school. It is a multidimensional construct with several components, including behavioral, affective, and cognitive elements, which can be accessed through multimodal forms of reading, from print text to e-books and audiobooks.¹ Reading for pleasure may include reading fiction, non-fiction, magazines, and newspapers, alongside other genres.

A few other tidbits they pull out from the more granular data:

People Who *Do* Read Are Reading More: “Despite the overall decrease [in reading for pleasure], the amount of time spent reading by those who read for pleasure increased slightly from 1 h to 23 min a day in 2003 to 1 h and 37 min in 2023”
Only a Small Percentage of People With Kids Are Reading With Them: “Although reading with children did not change over time, rates of engagement were surprisingly low, with only 2% of participants reading with children on the average day. Overall, 21% of our sample had a child under 9 years (the age by which most can read independently)with them during the diary day. So a large majority of those with young children did not read with them”
People Are Doing More of Their Reading At Home: “A large majority reported reading at home, as opposed to at a library, in the workplace, or other community locations. The proportion who read outside the home decreased over time.”
People Bought More Books During the Pandemic But Did Not Read Them: “We expected to find increases in reading from 2019 to 2021 due to the rise in print book sales during the pandemic.Yet, we did not see an increase in the proportion of participants engaged in reading…Restrictions on movement thus were not accompanied by large increases in reading.”
Reading for Pleasure is Classed and Raced (and more):
“Rates of reading varied across population groups, as those who identified as female, of White race, were older, who had higher education, greater annual family income, lived in metropolitan areas, and did not have a disability were more likely to read in 2023. Disparities between population groups increased during the study period for those of Black race, with lower education levels, less annual income, and living in non-metropolitan areas.”

You can dig deeper into the findings here, but I want to work through a few initial ideas about the overall decline in reading for pleasure —

Theory 1: People Are Reading — It’s Just Not Books

The first thing I thought when I saw this data was that most people I know spend a lot of time reading the internet — but reading the internet is not considered “reading for pleasure,” even under the more expansive definition of reading a newspaper or magazine. Would someone classify reading this newsletter as reading for pleasure? Depends! Is that reading your inbox or is that “reading for pleasure?”

What about our Culture Study threads? Is scrolling internet strangers’ carefully crafted renditions of their relationship to work reading for pleasure? What about reading Reddit? Or the “reading” we do on social media, or skimming the articles you see on the New York Times app, or reading an article that your friend sent to you at 9 pm over text?

I’m thinking about how I would respond to an ask about how much “reading for pleasure” I did yesterday, and while I did spend 30 minutes reading a book before going to bed, I also spent a solid 45 minutes waiting for the ferry reading the captions and Q&As of various dahlia accounts, catching up on newsletters in the Substack app, and reading interviews with someone who was coming on the podcast (but whose general subject area fascinates me). Is that reading? Is that reading for pleasure?

I don’t want to argue over what is and isn’t reading or is or isn’t reading “for pleasure” so much as point out that the lines are incredibly blurred — and I don’t think the American Time Use Survey has figured out how to fully account for that reality. I don’t blame them! This shit is fuzzy! Technologically fuzzy, obviously, but it gets even more muddled given the freelancification of American labor. If I sell dahlia tubers very much on the side, but take pleasure in reading about dahlias, is reading about dahlias “pleasure” reading? Is reading a cookbook, or parsing an extended Reddit thread on a style of knitting, or getting super detailed in Dungeons & Dragons forums reading?

Again, I don’t have answers, but I think it’s worth considering how this sort of slippage is convincing us that people read for pleasure far less than they do.

Theory 2: People Are Learning and “Reading” — It’s Just Through Podcasts

If we consider audiobooks to be books — and listening to audiobooks as a form of “reading for pleasure” — how do we think about podcasts? What do I glean from a celebrity memoir, or an issue of Us Weekly, that I don’t receive from an episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler? What do I learn from an Ezra Klein 1200-word opinion essay that I don’t learn from a 70-minute podcast interview?

We’ve long consumed “news” in a multi-modal way, but the expansion of the podcast universe should also expand our understanding of “reading for pleasure.” What happens to these overall numbers when we ask how much time you spend in the last twenty-four hours “listening” for pleasure?

Theory 3: Adults Work Too Much

Reading takes time — and we don’t have it. We spend so much time working (and reading, online, for work) that when we’re done, reading often doesn’t feel like “leisure.” Hence: TikTok, “reading” Instagram, streaming, gaming. We’ve also convinced ourselves (with good reason) that reading demands a chunk of time (especially if you want to reach the truly pleasurable state of immersion) so we convince ourselves that we don’t have time to get there, so CLEARLY we don’t have time to read (see: me, many weeknights).

Theory 4: Adults Parent Too Much (also: no place to read)

This is a touchy one, I realize, but it’s worth noting what a good parent my mom was and also how much time I watched her reading. Reading “good” books, reading “trash” books, reading magazines, reading the newspaper, reading to me or my brother — she modeled reading constantly, and I never conceived of it as a failure in her parenting.

But we’ve come to conceive of “good parenting” as direct supervision that is energy-intensive and involved. Within that paradigm, reading a book while parenting is “bad” parenting — and more obviously “distracting” than reading your phone, because WHO KNOWS MAYBE YOU’RE TEXTING ABOUT A PLAYDATE, THAT’S GOOD PARENTING! Put differently, a book is an obvious (and mindful) distraction; a phone is an ambivalent one.

We’ve talked about the pitfalls (and difficulties of disinvesting in) intensive parenting so much in this newsletter. I’ll just say that the benefits of kids in your life observing you read a book might outweigh you staring numbly at whatever they’re doing on the playground.

Theory 5: Adults Optimize Too Much

Charlie attended a high school that was attempting to produce graduates who were perfectly optimized for college applications: deliriously well-rounded, high-achieving, and well-resourced. The problem — and this is one that’s becoming increasingly apparent against the backdrop of spiking anxiety and depression rates — is that when you ask a kid to be and do everything, they either develop coping mechanisms (sometimes healthy, often not) or collapse under the pressure. Charlie had to figure out what he just couldn’t do, and then fake his way through the classes that required him to do it. He “read” a lot — but actually read very little, and never for pleasure.

You cannot optimize reading for pleasure — even though I know so many adults who try. They make lists and goals and they pick short books to juice those goals. But when you’re reading because you’ve convinced yourself that reading is a mark of your general achievement as an adult, is it actually for pleasure?

I also think that we’ve convinced ourselves, often within a larger optimization framework (in which our food, sleep, and exercise also all need to be optimized) that when we do read, it needs to be “the best.” The book. We stress over the sunk cost if we choose poorly, or feel apologetic if we get sucked into reading a whole bunch of mysteries or romances or thrillers. This is classed and erudite bullshit, of course, but it’s also a symptom of optimization culture and its corroding effects.

Theory 6: Leisure is Bad

I’ve talked about this before, but in grad school my friends and I had a saying that everything that felt bad (studying all the time) was actually “good,” and everything that felt good (hanging out with friends, hiking, not doing work) was actually bad. This is burnout workism bullshit, and at this point most of us recognize it plainly. But it still laces our vision of our days — especially if you’ve been socialized as a woman. If you have time to spare, you should spend that time cleaning, or parenting, or regimining your body, or freezing future meals, or seriously hobbying (and for many, reading is not considered a hobby — although it absolutely is).

Within this framework, reading might as well be napping. And rest is for lazy assholes. To be clear, I don’t believe this — but sometimes I think putting it in very clear and profane terms helps underline just how pernicious these messages are. Why else are we worried about people (and by people, I mean young women) “overconsuming” books? (If you haven’t heard of this discourse, it’s all over BookTok; see this episode of the Culture Study Pod for in-depth discussion). All of this is just half-baked hustle propaganda directing us to think of our leisure as bad, or at the very least, reserved for specific moments on vacation. ●

Numbers — like what we see in the survey data — can only tell us so much. We’re changing what we read, how we read, and why we read, but the reasons why we don’t read (“for pleasure”) are also changing. The survey analysis gives us the prompt; now we get to work through our answers.

I’ve been working through my own reflections, so now it’s time for your own. How are you reading, and how are you reading for pleasure? If you value the practice, do you feel like you’re modeling it for others (especially kids) in your life? If a life has no space to read for pleasure — whatever that reading looks like — is that life too full?

The comments are a subscriber-only space; that’s part of what makes them one of the good places on the internet. We’ve learned how to talk to each other about stuff that matters, and I know that we’ll have a compelling conversation about ~all of this.~ If you’d like to join the discussion — and get this week’s Things I Read and Loved, including the Just Trust Me — subscribe below.

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This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Gift Links Whenever Possible):

Five Years

Anne Helen Petersen — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 11:21:19 GMT

Five years ago I left my full-time job in journalism to write this newsletter full time. Back in 2023, we did a thread on Pivot Points, and this was one of mine — and a decision that has redefined the work that I do and the way that I do it. Unlike my previous Big Pivot (leaving academia), this decision was not made under duress. Yes, digital journalism was beginning what has proven to be a long, depressing implosion, but back in 2020, there were still jobs, and they were still good jobs.

Still, I had grown weary with the limitations of writing for the big, public internet and the SEO and A/B headline testing that defined it. I was sick of crafting headlines that were small variations of “WHY [INSERT TOPIC] MATTERS.” I wanted to do just slightly less telling and slightly more showing; I wanted to be able to go into detail and follow tangents and not worry about metrics that told me when, exactly, a reader clicked away from the story.

Culture Study offered me that opportunity — and control over my own career destiny, which was something I hadn’t felt, well, ever.

Every year I retell a version of this story on the anniversary of leaving and launching this newsletter. I’m not a big anniversary person, but I am a person who likes to revisit ideas and motivations and arguments. Back then, I was leaving because I was so fatigued by precarity — and wanted to have more freedom when it came to what was “worthy” of a story (and how I could write about it. Now, I realize that shifts in the industry would’ve landed me here no matter what. The difference was leaving on my own terms, and for me, with my career history — that has made all the difference.

But it was only possible because so many of you were willing to figure out what a newsletter community would look like. Things that feel very standard now — the Tuesday and Friday threads, the various concierges, Advice Time, the near-weekly-lengthy-Q&As, the podcast, even the headline formats — either didn’t exist or were only very slowly coming into focus. And even though some features have been refined and routinized, I’m always trying to figure out what sparks the best conversations, what pushes you in ways that feel meaningful, and what makes you want to send a newsletter to your friend and talk about it forever. What Culture Study is, and what Culture Study does.

Take the Q&As. They’re part of a sustainability strategy: they allow me to keep my publishing schedule but not have to write an original essay twice a week, every week. But they also allow me to give the platform over to someone doing intricate, mind-shifting cultural work, and to talk about that work for upwards of 3000 words. There are vanishingly few places on the internet where you do that for a large public audience. And no, they never attract as much readership or subscriptions as an original essay or a carefully paywalled list of recommendations. But they allow us to go deep and wide in our cultural explorations — often in subjects you might not ever otherwise pursue.

And that includes me! When an email shows up in my inbox asking if I’d like to interview the author of a book about medieval drawings of THE WOUND MAN and the way they reflect shifts in the way people thought about themselves and disease and healing and vulnerability, I’m like…..yes, absolutely?? (That one’s coming your way this Wednesday, btw). And I can say yes, with great enthusiasm, because I know that you, as readers, are curious. Like, what a flex that is: to have curious readers! Every week, I get to tell someone not to be afraid to go long or to get nerdy, because “my readers love that.” A writer’s dream.

And then there’s the community. Many of you, like me, learned how to communicate with others in the comments sections of small publications in the early 2010s. And while I hoped for something approximating that, we had all been directly and indirectly warped by years of Twitter, conditioned to understand the primary purpose of online communication as fight club or political purity policing.

We had forgotten, in other words, how to have a good or even an interesting time in the comments. But slowly, and with a lot less surveillance on my part than one might expect, we figured it out. Sometimes, those conversations are about what romance you’re reading — and sometimes they’re about what you’re doing to protect yourself and your community, or what you lie about (just a little). Sometimes they’re ever-expanding little galaxies around individual requests for advice.

People ask me how I managed to “build” a community like this. I wish I had a long list of secrets I could paywall, but mostly I just apply some of the strategies I learned in the classroom: try and get people to talk to each other, instead of to the person in the front of the room. There are various frameworks I’ve used to encourage that sort of discussion — across generations, locations, citizenship, subject areas, class, and precise politics — but the real reason it’s worked is the same reason the Q&As work. As readers, and as commenters, you’re curious. Instead of immediately reacting with disgust to, say, Bama Rush — you’re willing to be curious about your reaction.

If something confuses you, you ask more questions. If you notice some component of a discussion missing, you ask why. Granted, sometimes I cap off a piece with “What’d I miss?” but sometimes you just know a lot about something, or want to know more about something, and realize that the comments are the way to insert that perspective or request into the larger conversation. Your curiosity allows me to write from a place that’s far from the defensive crouch I found myself slowly adopting at the peak of Twitter. My pieces are less declarative and exploratory. I get to say: here’s what I’m thinking. What else should I be thinking about? It’s allowed me to expand the way I think about this work: I’m a writer, but I’m also a facilitator.

Every day, I realize all over again: that is a really, really good job. And every one of you who subscribes, who comments, who shares this work, and who lurks but loves it here — you make it possible.

Depending on when you first subscribed, you might be receiving a notification that your annual subscription is up for renewal. I know there are all sorts of reasons why people who want to be part of this community might no longer be able to pay, and if that’s the case for you, just email me, no explanation necessary, and I’ll extend your subscription. Crucially, if you do have the means to pay, your help makes that scenario possible.

Maybe you’ve been a part of it from day one. Maybe you subscribed just this last week to read about RushTok and MAGA Femininity. However long you’ve been here, what I said on the one-year anniversary holds true: You all help me see the stars as constellations, to continue to seek meaning and narrative amidst that vast, swallowing unknown. I am so grateful to be doing this work with you.

If you haven’t already become a subscriber — maybe today’s the day. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year, and you get all the glorious subscriber threads, the ability to participate in the comments, and full access to the weekly and monthly Things I’ve Read and Loved/Recs/Just Trust Me.

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And just for fun, here are some stats from this past year — the most read post, the most shared, the one that converted the most people (I always find that interesting!), and then a handful of my favorite posts. Please feel free to share your own!

Longest Thread: Culture Study Local Friend Matchmaker, Round One
Tied For Longest Thread: The Smallest Hill You’d Die On
One of My Additional Favorite Threads: What Do You Lie About (Just a Little)
Favorite Practical Thread: How’d You Get Your Job?
One of My Favorite Interviews: A Beautiful Conversation That Will Shift Your Thinking About Parenting
Most Read Essay: Are People Bad At Their Jobs…Or Are The Jobs Just Bad?
Similarly Most Read: This is How We Fall Out of Love With the World
Most Read Interview: American Bulk
Most Listened-To Crossposted Episode of The Culture Study Podcast: Is BookTok Actually About Reading?
Most New Free Subscriptions: Welcome to Bama Confidential
Most New Paid Subscriptions (lol): One Gift Guide to Rule Them All

Additional Stuff I Just Liked/Am Proud Of:

What Bama Rush Means in 2025

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:30:45 GMT

After four years of closely observing Bama Rushtok for a podcast project that got axed, I was ambivalent about covering it again — is there even anything new to say? But then I received at least 100 messages (in my email, over DM, comments on old posts) asking if I’d be recapping again, sending me Toks they thought were interesting, asking if I knew about the drama around Kylan’s little sister….and as anyone who’s stepped into this world knows, once you start looking it’s very difficult to stop.

Also, turns out, there are new things to say — new trends, sure, but also new insights about the way BamaRush is reflecting a particular understanding of ideal American femininity….and how the ever-growing influx of out-of-state PNMS, influenced by TikTok, at once challenge those norms and reify them. In other words, it’s still a very rich ideological text.

If you read my five-part series, Bama Confidential, you’re familiar with the basics: how rush works; how “The Machine” that controls campus politics draws from the Greek system; how the Greek system at Bama remained segregated until 2013; how fraternity hazing endures behind closed doors; and how the system works to consolidate and wield power not just on campus, but across the South and the rest of the country.

If you haven’t, it’s worth trying out — as many, many people have told me, they thought they weren’t interested “in any of this stuff,” but I’ll just say this: disinterest in loci of power has its consequences. If you want to understand what’s happening with the soft and hard politics of Gen-Z in the U.S., you have to understand Bama Rush, full stop.

So start with that piece above — and come to my Instagram Stories, where I’ve been curating Toks and analysis this week. (I’ve been pinning stories as I go, so if you haven’t been following along, start with Day One here). Fair warning that I’m not going to explain terms like OOTD below; go to the initial piece for that!

We’re currently only at the midpoint of Bama Rush, but here are my initial observations — on everything from MAGA Femininity to the Izzy of it All.

(And yes this is paywalled! Pulling all of these Toks together takes hours upon hours of work; I don’t limit access to that commentary, but subscribing here is one way to acknowledge and fund this labor).

The Unexpected Benefits of Starting a Small-Scale Dahlia Operation

Anne Helen Petersen — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 11:41:23 GMT

Turns out people really, really like our latest podcast episode with linguist Nicole Holliday about regional accents — it’s already on track to be one of our most popular. Just trust me, etc. etc. — and listen here.

Planting around 300 of our 1500 tubers & cuttings this May

In the Fall of 2023, I had a rush of creative energy. It’s when I wrote the book proposal that is in the process of becoming my book on friendship (it’s coming, I promise!)….and it’s also when I asked my friend Beth, who I’ve known since the first week of freshman year, if she wanted to go big, like really big, on dahlias. I’ve written about this a bit before, but here’s the basics: we live in one of the best places to grow dahlias in the world. Half of the nation’s most influential dahlia breeders live within an hour’s driving distance. Dahlias love our mild summers. And after my first wildly unsuccessful attempt at growing them, I loved dahlias.

Counter-intuitive, maybe, but part of what makes growing dahlias so gratifying is how cranky they are. (I explain this attraction at length here — along with how people end up getting addicted to them). Yes, they thrive in our mild Western Washington summers — but they are also susceptible to rot in the incessant late spring rain and all manner of bugs in the summer. In most climates, you have to dig them and store them every year. If it gets too hot, they just stop growing. They need staking and constant deadheading and fertilizing and are pretty picky about soil. But I love a challenge — or, more precisely, I love a do-able challenge. So after that first summer of bad big-box-store tubers and battling diseases and cutting frankly pretty ugly flowers, I was driven. I wasn’t just going to grow ten dahlias again. I was going to grow 300.

Well, okay, I was going to grow 300 if my friend Beth would do it with me. And even though she’d never grown a dahlia in her life, she was game. We learned how to divide and store the tubers using those crappy ones from my first summer. We made elaborate Google spreadsheets tracking and color-coding our purchases. We learned how to “wake them up” and take cuttings. We sheet mulched and made new beds out of weird unused corners and read books and watched so many YouTube videos. We were 40-something-year-olds learning something entirely new, and it was exhilarating and overwhelming and awesome.

We ultimately grew somewhere around 350 plants — and definitely lost a solid 75 more (some to tuber rot, some got yanked for dahlia virus, some to slugs). We both had entire sections of plantings that just refused to thrive (we mostly figured it out for this year, but not quite). We had hundreds and hundreds of blooms, the sort of shit you dream about. Mostly, we just filled our tables (and our neighbors’ tables) with bouquets, even as people kept asking when and how we were going to monetize. But the idea had always been to figure out if this venture was even possible — and if we even liked doing it. Then we could think about the future.

One of Beth’s beds after a big rain last year

You might be reading this and muttering must be nice to spend money on something without worrying about getting it back, but let’s be real: that’s what hobbies are! Doing stuff you like just because you like it — and because it activates some pleasurable nerdy part of you that your other work does not. You don’t get into a hobby because it’s a profitable enterprise. In fact, you might get into it because it absolutely is not.

When you buy a book, you’re not thinking about what you’ll get reselling it; when you learn how to make a shift dress, it’s not because it’s cheaper than buying one from Target; when you buy a bunch of Warhammer figurines, they’re not investments. Hobbies bust open our contemporary understanding of how money and time must work. They resist optimization. They’re about losing some amount of money with intention and glory — and refusing to frame it as “losing” at all.

You try dividing that clump

That’s all another way of saying: we made no money during our first year of dahlia farming. In the Fall, we spent hours getting filthy while digging and dividing tubers (every plant makes a clump of anywhere from 3 to 18 tubers, each of which can become its own plant if it makes it through winter storage). Our partners helped out, but most of the labor was just me and Beth, digging in the rain and then listening to podcasts while chiseling away at dahlia clumps, waiting for the tubers to dry so we could write on them, then diligently sorting them in vermiculite-filled shoeboxes so they could hibernate in my crawlspace all winter.

I don’t need much of an excuse to hang out with Beth — we live five minutes away from each other on an island of just under 1000 full-time residents. But we both work demanding jobs and have a lot of other stuff going on in our lives, like parenting two kids (her) and writing a book and this newsletter (me). Growing dahlias has given us so much more loosely structured, casual hang time — while stringing supports, while deadheading, while spraying with stinky fish fertilizer. We talk about dahlias, sure, but we also talk about everything else.

This winter, as Beth and I were deciding how and when we would sell our extra tubers (and how many we wanted to plant…..and how many new varieties we wanted to buy) I wondered aloud if we should ask our friend Britta to join us. I knew Britta had grown a few dahlias the year before — nothing serious. But she was curious, and detail-oriented, and she had the perfect spot for a bunch of dahlia beds. (She also co-owns an excavation company with her husband, so there’s that).

Beth’s response was immediate: Britta’s way too busy, she said. She runs a company, she has three kids, she’s doing so much. There was no way she would be able to run a fledgling dahlia operation with us.

I mean yes, Beth had a point. But I thought about it for a minute, and said: If someone looked at either of our lives from the outside, would they say that either of *us* had the space in our lives to run a dahlia operation?

Of course not! We both radiated busy. But you can be busy with life and work stuff and still yearn for something else — something creative and collaborative, something challenging and in stark contrast to the rhythms of the rest of your day and incessant demands of others. Something that is your own.

So we asked Britta, and Britta obviously said yes. Her access to excavation equipment meant making the space for 600+ dahlias took far, far less time (like at least 100 fewer hours) than it took me. But I’m not bitter! I’m just thrilled that she’s here, schooling me on the difference between U-posts and T-posts, setting up wildlife cameras to see if that is indeed a vole that just decimated one of my most cherished cuttings (update: yes it was a vole, that fucker). When I wrote earlier this year about the most infuriating friendship hack, I said that it was time and patience to let your roots actually grow in a place, and that’s true. That’s how I met Britta in the first place. But packing dozens of boxes of dahlia tubers with her — that solidified the foundation.

Earlier this year, we made the decision to semi-professionalize our operation — mostly because it’s going to make our lives a lot easier. Setting up an S-Corp (and bank account) allows us to write-off expenses, sure, but it also allows us to accept credit card payments via Square. And accepting payments via Square on an actual website that uses Shopify is so much better than trying to keep track of your inventory on a Google Spreadsheet you update manually (while accepting payments via Venmo). (That’s what we did last Spring, and I am never doing that again)

That will make operations easier. But I’m already reaping so many unexpected benefits of doing something like this with other people. This is going to make me sound like a moron who’s never collaborated before, but: I don’t have to be good at everything, or know everything about everything! It’s still frankly mind-boggling!

I’m the cuttings expert, for example, but Beth and Britta are heading up our breeding program. Britta is a bookkeeper and as such our bookkeeper. Beth knows legal stuff and is incorporating us. I’m in charge of the website and social media because that is what I’m good at. Britta knows how to operate a backhoe. Beth is very, very skilled at pounding stakes. I’m practiced at corralling with twine. Britta makes the bouquets that always sell first. Beth is turning an old shed into winter storage using a magic device called a CoolBot. I have an uncanny memory for the names of all of the dahlias.

I’m marveling, clearly, at the very straightforward concept of delegation. You can’t understand what a revelation this is for someone who’s worked in industries where you do so much yourself, and where your survival within that industry is often predicated on your ability to take on more work instead of less. Now, is helping run a dahlia operation on top of writing a full-time newsletter and producing a podcast and writing a book actually more work? Yes, whatever, sure. But I hope you understand what I’m saying here: it feels, in all the ways that matter, like less.

Do I love growing dahlias because it’s not my primary job? If it became my primary job, would I still love it as much as I do? Is the fantasy of being able to do it all the time best held that way — as a fantasy?

Well, real talk: three of us growing 1500 dahlias will still net us about half of a public school teacher's salary, and that’s before costs. It’s nothing close to a full-time prospect. But I do think that keeping it as leisure, the thing I get to do, is what keeps it magical. For the last few weeks, we’ve been selling big, overstuffed bouquets at the Saturday Market. We’ve sold out every week, which is lovely — but we also price our bouquets in a way that’s affordable to islanders, and give free stems to kids, and are funneling 25% of our proceeds to the local school.

It’s not a profit center. It’s a structured way of hanging out with each other — and a scheduled way of interacting with others on the island. An outsized, collaborative hobby, in other words, that’s also an increasingly well-trod path into community.

Britta’s fields earlier this week

A few booths down from us at the market, there’s a woodworker who crafts all manner of clever and kooky creations and donates the proceeds to a different island charity every year. His designs often commemorate a business that doesn’t exist — like ice cream scoops for the “Lummi Island Ice Cream Co.” (We have no Ice Cream Co.) He makes fairy doors and coasters with the faces of all the volunteer firefighters and “stick libraries” for island dogs. He turned an old church piano into a set of beautiful bowls. Everything he makes emanates care, intention, and whimsy. And whenever I look down the row at his booth, Willie’s shooting the shit with someone new.

There’s something to be said for making stuff just for yourself. But there’s also something to be said for making things that allow you to connect with others.

Some people grow dahlias at scale — we’re talking thousands and thousands of plants — and employ dozens of people. That’s not us, just like Willie, who makes the ice cream scoops, is not a full-time carpenter. We’re people with other jobs who like making things. Sometimes the thing is the flower, or the bouquet, or the tuber — and sometimes the thing is the collaboration itself: the extended hang, the revelation of delegation, the thrill of slow, intentional growth.

I really love growing dahlias: the extended, complicated process; the long wait for blooms; the sudden, gleeful abundance. I like how they make me a better noticer: of the way a bloom contrasts against another, of slight differences in leaf and growth patterns, or just how certain varieties unfurl their first blooms on almost the exact same day, year after year.

Growing dahlias challenges me in so many unexpected ways — freaking voles! — but it also calms me. Sometimes, when I’m trying to fall asleep in the middle of the night, I call up a mental image of two of my favorite blooms — Askwith Minnie, hybridized by an octogenarian in the UK, and Salish Twilight Girl, which first bloomed in a hybridizer’s garden just a few hours south on Vashon Island — and am immediately soothed.

I feel a little silly typing that out, but it makes some sort of sense: like the final copy of a book, or even a newsletter like this one, those blooms are the result of so much hard work. But they operate outside the exacting standards of publishing, or online criticism, or even, in that moment, commerce. They’re just something made with friends: something impossibly, undeniably beautiful. ●

Askwith Minnie, in her full glory

If you want to follow along on our dahlia adventures, follow Lummi Island Dahlias here. And if you want to learn a lot more about the fascinating and complicated world of dahlia growing, I went deep here.

I’d also love to hear about your experiences collaborating, collaboratively hobbying, or just making things for others — the joys, the challenges, what you’ve learned and what you love about it. Just remember this is a private, subscriber-only space; don’t be butts about other people figuring out that delegation is a thing and let’s keep it one of the good places on the internet!

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I like to keep essays like this one outside of the paywall so you can share them easily and everyone can read. But I also that the real value of this newsletter is in the community — the expansive comments on essays and interviews, of course, but also the sprawling weekly threads, which manage to delight and move me every week. And this coming Friday, we’ll be doing an advice thread on ALLL THINGS GARDENING.

You can talk about what’s working and what’s not, what you want to desperately want to grow (but need to know where and how to do it), or ask for guidance on what to do with a particular patch of grass or patio. You can ask about houseplants, or growing from seed, or how to divide dahlias. We’ll also have a Substack chat happening simultaneously that will allow you to share photos galore.

But you to participate in that chat and all of the other gloriously diverting comments sections, you have to become a paid subscriber. Here’s how you join us.

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[As always, if you’re unemployed, a contingent worker, on a fixed income, on disability, or living in a place where the conversion rate to USD makes a subscription out of reach, just email me at annehelenpetersen @ gmail dot com, and I’ll comp you, no questions asked.]

The Great Feminist Exhaustion

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 11:36:15 GMT

Do you read this newsletter every week? Do you forward it or text it to your friends?? Do you value the work that goes into it???

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Consider becoming a subscribing member. You get access to the weekly Things I Read and Loved at the end of each Sunday newsletter, the massive link posts, and the knowledge that you’re paying for the things you find valuable.

Last week’s ADVICE TIME thread was incredible, like 2000+ comments incredible. If you want to figure out how to charm the kids on your next friend vacation, make friends as a mom of young kids in a place where the politics are hostile to yours, figure out first steps in investing, or simplifying your life *in actual practice,* this thread has advice for you (and so much more). Also check the first in our series of playlist threads (pump-up songs!!) with work/concentration songs and cry songs to follow.

From a protest after the leaked Dobbs decision (Via Boston Globe/Getty)

Last month I taped an interview with Julie Kohler fdor the new season of White Picket Fence, a podcast that examines the structures and institutions that keep life shitty for so many American women. The interview weaved through so many of the topics I’ve written about here (and discussed in the podcast): trad wives, stay-at-home girlfriends, MLMs, Christian nationalism, Mormon TikTokers, renovation culture, clean culture, calendar culture, intensive parenting, plastic surgery, how little we study the women’s body…..and then we expanded the circles outwards to thin-tok (“eating disorder fight club”), the anti-birth-control movement (both pro-natalist and just women proselytizing the wonders of getting off hormonal birth control), Organization Tok, supplement culture, crunchy MAHA, the wages of postfeminism, and anti-girl-bossing.

The conversation allowed me to connect some ideas that had been bubbling up for the last year or so about this current moment, which I’ve come to understand as a moment of feminist exhaustion — and several branching reactions to that exhaustion.

When I say exhaustion, I mean it in two ways: first, the term feminism has been exhausted of its meaning — and, insofar as it’s deployed in popular culture, its politics. Many people would argue this has been happening for well over a century, but I place the current meaning-exhaustion to the early 2010s, when feminism became a cudgel that journalists used when interviewing female celebrities (“are you a feminist?”) to create a soundbite.

Within this understanding, feminism was a label you claimed, a vague belief system to which you subscribed — usually some version of the time-worn bumpersticker “feminism is the radical idea that women are people.” Within this line of thinking, you didn’t have to act like a feminist to call yourself a feminist; you just had to utter the words, and anything you did became feminist.

Feminism is, as the great theorist bell hooks famously argued, for everyone. But this understanding of feminism wasn’t and isn’t the feminism hooks was describing. It wasn’t intersectional; it wasn’t anti-capitalist; it wasn’t invested in dismantling the status quo. Its apotheosis — the Lean In-style boss bitch — was the opposite of all of those things: fiercely individualist, deeply capitalist, and obsessed with obtaining power and wielding it “like a man,” even if that meant reinscribing the status quo, particularly in regards to racial hierarchies and the performance of “proper” femininity, thinness, monogamy, and motherhood.

Feminism — again, at least in terms of how it was wielded in the public sphere — had effectively become postfeminism. You didn’t need to change the world, you just needed to figure out how to dominate it: how to beat them at their game. But that meant the game itself, and the harsh, exacting rules that guided it, remained the same.

Cue: the second sort of feminist exhaustion, which applies to the generations of women who understand their progressive, aspirationally intersectional, progressive world view as feminist….and find themselves utterly demoralized by a long, damaging fight that now seems to have lost ground.

This is a big umbrella of exhaustion. I’m talking about the ‘80s feminist punks and Gen-X Riot Grrls who tried to figure out an anti-capitalist way forward but every city where they wouldn’t get called names just for walking down the street became wildly unaffordable and they had to get an office job and somehow it’s twenty-five years later and they’re middle management and taking care of teens and aging parents.

I’m talking about Elder Millennials who dared call themselves feminist in some argument with a guy in 2000 and got called a ball-buster for months if not years and internalized the critics of Lilith Fair (both the people calling them a bunch of bra-burning lesbians and the feminists who called the entire festival too corporate and too white)….and were inculcated with purity myth garbage, deeply misogynistic celebrity gossip blogs, rom-com makeover fantasies, cool girl fetishism, and the Spice Girls as girl power. They survived American Pie and whale tails and now they’re being called cringe for having strong feelings about the return of low-rise jeans.

I’m talking about the second-wave feminists who were alive in a time before legalized birth control and abortion, who lived through the porn wars of the ‘80s, who were often the first or one of very few women in various classes and industries and male-dominated spaces, who watched Hillary Clinton and Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky degraded in public forums for very different reasons but with an unified, if unspoken, goal. I’m talking about the women who show up to the rally with the I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M STILL PROTESTING THIS SHIT.

I’m also talking about the women who grew up in high-control religions, understanding feminism as a core evil, who have come to embrace it but still struggle with deeply internalized misogyny. I’m talking about people who always felt like feminist spaces were too white, or too middle-class, or too obsessed with respectability — but got shunned if they voiced as much. I’m talking about everyone who thought that the best way to live their feminist values was to do it all — marriage, kids, career, house — and everyone who thought the best way was to reject doing it all, but are now exhausted by navigating precarity that’s only exacerbated by how much our country privileges partnered home-owners. I’m talking about people who’ve been at the center of this work for decades and people alienated by feminists in the 2014 Jezebel comments. We are exhausted.

And that exhaustion shows. Back in the 2010s, I called the display of that exhaustion a postfeminist dystopia, vividly displayed in texts like Girls, Revenge, and Trainwreck. At that point, I understood these shows as a sort of cautionary tale: behold the miseries of postfeminism! Bad sex, self-loathing, self-destruction, bad jobs, claustrophobic relationships you can’t quit!

I still understand those shows and films in that way. But over the last ten years, dozens of others have joined them: And Just Like That immediately comes to mind, but I’d also add Nightbitch, The Dropout (and all other narrativizations of Elizabeth Holmes), basically every Nicole Kidman vehicle, The White Lotus, Succession, Tar, and that’s just skimming the top of my head.

But here’s the funny thing: because of the slippage in feminism’s meaning, these texts are now understood as a sort of feminist dystopia, particularly when coupled with the non-fictionalized narratives playing out concurrently in the political world. (What is thousands of women bawling in suffragette-white pantsuits after gathering to celebrate Hilary Clinton’s win at an events center with a literal glass ceiling if not a feminist dystopia?) These fictional narratives don’t always explicitly position their protagonists as feminists, but there’s an understanding that this is what it means to try and have it all and do it all: you’re not just miserable; you’re monstrous.

[I want to again acknowledge that I’m purposefully wielding “feminism” in a vapory way — a reflection of how it was metabolized by contemporary popular culture. Bland, imprecise, unchallenging, white.]

So how do we make sense of a feminism that is exhausted? This is where the road begins to fork into the various reactions, factions, and practices that have subconsciously been the obsession of this newsletter for the last five years.

I know I know it’s beautiful, it’s a work of art, credit: ALL ME, BABY

I divide the realm of Exhausted Feminism into four general quadrants, tracking along axes of ongoing investment in the status quo and relative investment in the intersectional feminist project of liberation — not just for women, but for all. These are loose groupings, held together not by identity but by positionality (aka, how they relate and respond to the realities of the world).

I.) FUCK IT, LET’S FIGHT

There are two major sub-groups here: people who’ve always known that they could never blunt their edges sufficiently enough to gain acceptance into the echelons of power and privilege, and people who figured out how to wield that currency, then lost it (or rejected it) and are ready to dismantle the entire apparatus. Home to legitimate radicals, firebrands, activists, and organizers who don’t mind pissing people off (and in fact think it’s part of the point) but also people whose politics might be less far to the left but have no qualms about pissing people off to protect others’ rights.

There’s often friction between these two sub-groups, in part because so many people aren’t given the chance to choose to fight — they have to fight. It’s also one thing to have societal power and then realize that it’s fleeting; it’s quite another to never have access. For some of these people, popular feminism has always been offensive. Plastic surgery has always been ridiculous; same for compulsory heterosexuality and beauty norms and rigid standards of gender performance. Others arrived at that place gradually, often after a trip through the portal or some other clarifying experience that underlined just how much work they put into achieving ideals they could never achieve (and that that was point all along).

I love and honor so many members in this group. Often but not always they are elders with tremendous lived experience and wisdom, and it feels important to spend time in their shadows. They’re not concerned with making men “feel bad” with jokes about misandry. They don’t care much about straight cisgender men’s feelings, period. If they don’t always get someone’s pronouns right they’re really, genuinely trying to (unless they’re TERFS, in which case, they’re misappropriating their years in the feminist fight and mis-identifying the enemy. Also, just to be clear: fuck TERFS).

This quadrant is aspirational in its unruliness but also volatile — and can, at times, gravitate towards policing the purity of others who land here, self-combusting before the real fires can get set. There’s a lot of righteous anger, often masking a well of deep grief for just how difficult the work has been, how long it’s taken, and, right now, the feeling that we’re culturally regressing. As in so many other corners of politics, there’s a warranted tension between the message that attracts those already on your side and those on the fence — a resistance to pandering rhetoric coupled with a desire to get shit done on a systemic level.

I think a lot of people want to be at home here but also feel like this is a home with a lease that’s ending in the very near future. What’s worked in the past, what’s led to progress — it’s just not working anymore.

II.) STATUS QUO BUYER’S REMORSE

So much ideological conflict happening here and I could honestly write about it forever. People in this group understand themselves as feminists, even if they might not have ever been the sort to, like, yell it from the rooftops or fight with their weird Uncle about it. They’re people-pleasers and achievers, successful but never abrasive. They’ve been able to obtain components of the status quo (marriage, parenthood, middle-class or higher income level, home ownership or steady rental) and made it through the first few whirlwind years of parenthood, but are somewhat stymied by how difficult it is to find happiness.

Some part of them knew the status quo could be stultifying, but assured themselves they’d do things differently. They’d work harder at marriage; they’d be amazing at being the fun, feminist mom. But hard work can’t modify a set of constrictive norms whose primary purpose is to make you feel like you’re failing at everything and need to do more (for others).

That’s easy to understand a few decades into the process, but much harder to internalize when you step onto the status quo escalator. Back then, you’re just thinking about success and wedding and cute pregnancy and a home of my own, not Blue Marriage and the Terror of Divorce, calendar culture and intensive parenting exhaustion, or renovation culture and the persistent feeling that your house is the source of all of your problems.

There are mortgages and college funds and 401ks in this quadrant, but there’s also a lot of student loans and “unused” degrees and credit card debt and the feeling that you’re in the “hollow middle class,” as maintaining the status quo has come to mean “maintaining a lot of debt.” That feeling of middle-class precarity (and fear of downward mobility) keeps people in marriages that are profoundly inequitable, in jobs that devalue them, and social scenes that bore them (or would straight up offend their younger selves).

And yet, they endure, because that is what people-pleasing achievers do. A lot of these women have come to low-key hate their husbands, not because they’re horrible or abusive, but because they’ve come to symbolize all they can’t escape. Their marriages are a major puzzle piece in the complicated lives they’ve built around their family unit, a certain amount of income, and a shared property — all of which would be destabilized by a divorce. Unlike trad wives, they have no moral problem with divorce. They are just terrified of trying to navigate life in a society that’s incredibly hostile to single people and anyone who’s been out of the workforce for any amount of time.

When there’s a persistent unequal division of labor in the home, that’s not a feminist marriage. But it is a marriage that allows you to maintain certain norms, which then supersedes the need for either partner to do the deeper work of creating equity. Also: what’s the alternative? GO DATE???? IN THIS ECONOMY??? Unlike Group I, who are exhausted because they’re fighting political structures (and, at times, each other), this group is exhausted because they’re fighting their husbands to please figure out how to RSVP to a birthday party.

This group feasts on divorce literature and books like All Fours (usually with the refrain “maybe just a little too weird for my taste!”). Sometimes they get a divorce and head to fuck it land, but more often, especially if they left the workforce when their kids were young, they direct their resentment into self-improvement: regimenting the body, organizing the home, renovating the bathroom. (I used to think of these activities as basic, but now I understand them as a natural impulse of smart, creative, problem-solving women shut out of their preferred corner of the workforce with time on their hands).

This group is magnetizied to feminist dystopia TV shows not because they think they’re dystopian, but because they feel weirdly relatable. There’s solidarity within this group (complaining about husbands is a team-building activity) but there’s also fierce individualism and a tremendous amount of fear. Their power flows from their investment in the status quo, and they’re (rightfully) terrified of what happens if they can no longer wield that power. See: the concurrent obsession with anti-aging serums and “invisible” procedures and the terror of menopausal weight gain, but also intensive parenting practices intended to sustain the status quo for the next generation.

I want to excavate some generosity for this group, or maybe just acknowledge they’re often acting out of fear, but I’d also argue that the politics and ideological compromises of this quadrant are the most insidious. They’re ostensibly invested in women having more power, but only certain types of women — women who can play by the rules, as they have, but never out-play them. They’re often deeply resistant to criticism and surprisingly easy to radicalize to the right, where you’ll still have to deal with your husband’s bullshit (until he cheats on you right around age 52, because men married to women in this quadrant often internalize the idea that they have a “right” to young women) but no one’s policing your kids’ Halloween costume for being appropriative (the horror, the horror).

If all this sounds bleak, IT IS. But if you’re wondering where so much millennial and Gen-X feminism went, it’s down this very beautifully appointed black hole.

III.) MOM THAT SUCKS / I DON’T WANT YOUR LIFE

Hello Gen-Z and Gen Alpha and welcome to the feminist exhaustion party!

When I was young, watching my mom navigate a deeply destabilizing mid-life divorce, I internalized several lessons: first, I’d never let a man, or a marriage, eclipse by own career trajectory; second, I’d always have my own money and means of survival; third, I’d never be dependent on a man do to stuff, from driving to drilling something into a wall. Some of those lessons have served me extremely well. Others have made me overly wary of dependency — or led me to (very predictable) burnout.

But talking to other women my age, those lessons were not unique. We watched our moms get married very young, have kids very young, and lose sight (or the ability) to pursue other avenues in life that would’ve brought them joy, fulfillment, or security. So as we, their children, grew up, we resolved to do things differently. Some became FUCK IT, LET’S FIGHT radicals, but others have tried to do and be “it all.” And now the next generation has observed the lives of their parents and aunties and elders, ostensibly or explicitly rooted in feminist goals, and have smartly decided: MOM THAT SUCKS.

The perfectionism, the attempt to reconcile the desire for personal success with the safety of the status quo, the self-flagellation, the stagnating and resentment-infused marriage, the obsession with parenting to the point that it replaces personality — they don’t want these lives. Or maybe they just think these lives look pretty miserable. Our politics are either diluted and compromised or brittle and unyielding. They look at us and see a bunch of people disciplined by precarity, cranky about both the past and future, and reproducing the same restrictive norms we once complained about so bitterly.

If feminism is what made us like this, they want to find a different, less harshly extractive way forward. Sometimes, that means embracing a reactionary stance that disavows feminism altogether — which I’ll talk about below — but it also manifests as a rejection of the norms that “good girl” feminists understood as the only way forward. What if we didn’t value career above all else? What if we make heteronormativity weird? What if we don’t just say things like “gender is prison” but act as if it were the case?

Chappell Roan, Doechii, Billie Eilish — all of them feel like avatars of this strain, which is very much in formation and still deeply structured by its relative youth. But it is also such a straightforward — and, to my mind, warranted — reaction to their elders’ exhaustion.

IV.) FUCK FEMINISM AND FUCK YOU TOO

When tradwives first became a cultural fascination, sometime back in 2021, I was repeatedly asked: where is this coming from? Where did these tradwives come from, sure, but also, why are so many people following them?

My answer has always been that these women have always been here — they were just blogging (the 2000s), writing columns in their local newspapers, church circulars, and homemaking magazines (every point in the modern era before that), or showing up in fictional form onscreen (pretty much all the “good” mothers of Classic Hollywood).

Women have also always been interested in tradwives, and the perfect, serene lives they seemed to live, particularly in times when most women feel exhausted by the demands of their everyday lives. I think back on World War II, when millions of women were single-parenting, thrust into new jobs with little training, grappling with the fear that every man they knew between the ages of 20 and 50 was in imminent danger — and then the war ends, and the culture has to figure out a way to make the millions of women who stepped in to do men’s work give up their jobs. The easiest sell: what if you could live a beautiful life at home, with a bunch of new machines and canned goods to assist you? Instead of two jobs (working inside and the home and out) you’d only be doing one! What a deal!

Obviously the “sell” was a lot more complicated — and millions of women who worked outside of the home before the war never stopped working, well, ever. But the housewife became the bourgeois ideal: every woman wanted to be one; every man wanted one to facilitate their lives.

We’re in a similar moment now, with a curious mix of the religious right, TikTok “stay-at-home-girlfriends,” Ballerina Farm, and crunchy vaccine-hesitant canning moms selling women a seemingly simplified (and aesthetically, far more beautiful) alternative to their current lives, and trad husbands hungry for appropriate help-mates. On the surface, the only requirement is “not working outside the home for pay.” But the ideological demands are more exacting: there’s the dependency on male partner, sure, and parenting as the primary source of worth, but there’s also tying one’s self-value to the ability to conform to traditional feminine norms.

The pursuit of “purity” (in body, in cleanliness, in cooking) is closely related: the more attentive you are to eliminating the “toxins” of the outside world, the better mom, partner, and woman you become. (Because the ideal woman is a self-annihilating one). It also offers an opportunity to control an otherwise uncontrollable world: all you have to do is limit your sphere to your own home! The workplace is unpredictable, but the hall closet is imminently organizable!

Many of the most prominent tradwives are devoutly religious, but many women who’ve gravitated towards the tradwife floodplain are just seeking this sort of legible order and control. It’s so, so much easier to understand your husband as “head of the household” and the woman as “in charge of every other damn thing” than try to figure out an equitable distribution of household labor. It’s much easier, particularly in the U.S., to have a parent who “naturally” stays home — in part because our civilization, particularly when it comes to schooling and eldercare, is organized around that reality.

So many of our grandmothers and mothers worked incredibly hard to leave this sort of life behind. They wanted different sorts of marriages, different sets of knowledge, and different places for themselves in the world. They wanted futures of their own making. The fact that so many women are opting to return to this sort of life, or at the very least fetishizing it, underlines just the resilience of the patriarchal status quo. And feminism, at least in its current exhausted form, has been out-matched by the slow-focus bucolic visions of the right, with their promises of simplicity and domestic joy.

At least that’s how it’s manifesting for women in their late 20s and 30s. For younger women, the rejection of feminist politics is showing up in the re-embrace of all the shit millennials and Gen-X have disavowed from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s. Tanning, starving yourself, low-rise jeans, thongs, vague or explicit cool girl raunch — with the very of-the-moment additions of “preventative maintenance” plastic surgery, Thin-Tok, and “everything showers.” In short, the redirection of the majority of one’s energy into radical discipline of the body.

If the TradWife elides the work of ideal femininity — Ballerina Farm just wakes up and looks like that! — the Gen-Z Postfeminist broadcasts and monetizes it. They think any attempt to point out how poorly that route turned out for older feminists is not just cringe, but contradictory. Isn’t the point of feminism not to dog on other women??? Isn’t it MY BODY, MY CHOICE??? Didn’t you say we shouldn’t TALK ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE’S SIZE or PERSONAL CHOICES??? I’ve seen Tradwives pull similar rhetorical moves, wielding feminism’s hollowed-out core, and the idea that anything can be feminist (and above reproach) if a woman does it, like a lance.

I’ve always been taught that the history of feminism is a history of continually battling the forces of regression: for every two steps forward, you create a backlash that pushes you at least one step back. But I think that metaphor only works when feminism, itself, is a robust battering ram — and when we believe that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice. But right now, feminism feels too exhausted to push forward: it’s too politically weakened, too vulnerable to others’ manipulation, and ill-equipped to confront a moral arc that is not bending towards justice. And while I know that those invested in the continued dominance of white patriarchy are the number one problem, I also feel like feminism, at least in its current state, is inadvertently helping the cause.

Maybe the women who eventually coalesced under the banner of third wave feminism in the ‘90s felt this way back then: that unless they refined feminism’s aims and got explicit and exacting about how white bourgeois women are getting in the way, then feminism was no longer a useful tool in the ongoing fight for liberation. Maybe some of you who were part of those conversations can remind us. What I do know is that women’s rights — including and especially marginalized women’s rights — are eroding at an alarmingly rapid rate, and our exhausted feminism has been unable to protect any of us.

So what would a movement look like that’s rooted in economic equality, but also cognizant and actively combatting all the ways socialist movements have failed to address patriarchal norms operating within? That is truly gender-inclusive but not invested in “not-all-men” coddling? That isn’t invested in purity policing but doesn’t hedge when it comes to its values, and that honors those who’ve fought the fight but celebrates new ways of fighting it?

Fuck if I know! I barely mustered enough might to write this essay. We’re all doing too much. We’re watching too much, angry at too much, reading too much, exercising too much, working too much, parenting too much — which leaves us with so little time to strategize, organize, or even just imagine a different way forward.

When a person is this exhausted, we tell them to rest. When a piece of land is this depleted, we let the land lie fallow. When a perennial begins to wither at the end of the season, we cut it back and let it hibernate for the winter. We place faith in its eventual restoration, because that is how the world works: you work, you rest, you regroup, you refocus, and you work again, because the work is never done.

The same is true for political movements. They can be reborn, refocused, and redirected, but only with rest and reconsideration. And until we can make space for that sort of political imagination, we’ll be locked here, flailing, with increasingly debilitating exhaustion, against a tide working so methodically to return us to the past. ●

One of the great things about writing a newsletter is I can put ideas out here and ask for your elaboration and extension of them. So let’s elaborate and extend. What else is debilitating the feminist project? Or, more hopefully, where do you see the future of the movement coming to life? If you’re a policing asshole in the comments, you’re doing exactly what I describe above as making this work difficult. Let’s work VERY HARD to keep this a good space on the internet, even as we work very hard to discuss the future of feminist politics.

Very Pertinent Reading:

Also make sure and check out this ep of the Culture Study podcast on what it actually takes for a tradewife to leave — and this episode on how the pop culture of the ‘90s and early 2000s messed up millennial women.

And if you enjoyed that, if it made you think, if you *value* this work, or maybe if you just want all the weird threads content — consider subscribing:

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An Obituary for Reading the Internet

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 11:12:19 GMT

This week’s episode of is all about men’s fashion trends — like why everything is earth-toned and why so many moms still buy underwear and socks for their adult sons. Listen here — and remember that all paid Culture Study newsletter subscribers get 35% off their podcast subscription, so if you want to skip the ads and always get access to the Ask Anne Anything segment, just click here to get the discount.

Back in the early 2010s, I had a friend who used to spend the first hour or so of every work day poking around the internet. He didn’t read on his phone, and he wasn’t on social media, so his online reading happened almost exclusively in those hours. He’d navigate to a handful of websites he liked, and blogs he read, and then he’d go to Digg, which would show him a homepage of curated articles of various lengths, spanning various disciplines and formats. He was a scientist, but one of the most widely read people I knew, at least when it came to the sort of things you’d find on the internet: think pieces, reported pieces, esoteric but compelling blog posts, interviews, curiosities, news items, new movie trailers, you name it.

‘Welp, I read the internet,’ he’d sometimes tell me around 10 am. “Got anything else for me?”

I always did, because I also read the internet in that way. I used a combination of Google Reader, favorite websites I’d refresh multiple times daily (The Hairpin, The Toast, Grantland, Jezebel, Go Fug Yourself), and followed links from those sites to other stuff the editors thought worth my time. Early Twitter and early 2010s Facebook weren’t yet link suppositories; you spent most of your time actually posting observational shit instead of retweeting. So you found your reading (relatively) on your own.

I’ve come to think of these years as the halcyon days of the post-recession internet, a sort of second golden digital age. It was before so many publications’ fate became inextricable from social media, so even though everyone over at Gawker Media was still being badgered by the traffic leaderboard in their offices, the idea of the homepage still held power. People navigated to your site because they liked your site and knew they found good stuff on your site; then they read stuff there. Not just scrolled, but read.

In hindsight, this period probably reached its apex at some point in 2014 to 2015, when people were arguing over whether there was too much longform journalism on the internet (the actual subject of at least two longform interviews). There were entire sites — two of them! — dedicated to curating the best longform on the internet. And people read these long-ass pieces! And not just me, a person who also wrote these long-ass pieces! Indeed, many of you originally found me by reading one of those pieces.

At some point, I began to realize that there were too many good long pieces for me to read each one, or to keep an open browser window forever. Plus, like a lot of us, I was increasingly using my phone to navigate and read the internet — a significant shift that coincided with my move to New York and the beginning of a 45-minute commute. I didn’t have internet access for most of that time, but I could read things that I’d saved to my phone. And I could do that because of Pocket.

I’d started using Pocket at some point in the late 2000s and have been a power user ever since. It was launched in 2007 as “Read It Later,” with a simple premise: you install the extension on your browser, then press the little icon (eventually, a “Pocket”) anytime you come across something you want saved. It saves that article or website to your account, and when you open up Pocket (in your browser, or, later, as an app on your phone) all of your Pocketed reads will be there.

Over the years I’ve used Pocket for research, to read on the subway, to find that investigative piece I read about olive oil back in the mid-2010s, and, with the newsletter, to put together the weekly list of things I read and loved. Now that we largely access the internet vis-à-vis social sites, I used Pocket to save links to interesting pieces that fly through my various feeds. It was a way of making pieces sticky, of adhering them to me (and, eventually, through this newsletter, to you). Over the last four years, I’ve felt like so many of the places where I used to find “the good stuff” have died unceremonious deaths. Indeed, my Pocket history is a wasteland of broken links and once-cherished websites URLs now addled with bots. But Pocket allowed you to keep reading the internet even when so many other forces were conspiring against it.

And now Pocket is dead. Or, rather, in the next two weeks, it will be. In 2015, Firefox began integrating the Pocket extension into every users toolbar — but Pocket itself remained independent. Two years later, Mozilla (Firefox’s parent company) officially acquired Pocket, and they hired a team to combine the functionality of the app with the curation qualities of sites like Digg (RIP). During these years, getting featured on Pocket could drive hundreds of views. But Pocket also resurfaced older gems, put together collections, and just generally served as a repository of stuff people wanted to save on the internet. Being there felt like slowing down internet time.

I periodically beat myself up about how bad I’ve become at reading the internet — how fragmented my attention has become, how easily I skim and scroll, how much more interested I am at looking at all of the things, even if that’s just the titles of posts in my newsletter feed, than instead of reading them.

I think back on the stuff I used to read in the 2010s and how I couldn’t get enough of it. But it was gloriously finite. The Hairpin stopped publishing at 5 pm Eastern. It went dark on the weekends. The New Yorker only published so many features a week. Whatever site or blog you loved almost certainly operated similarly. It was never an all-you-can-eat-buffet that left you nauseous; it was an excellent, satisfying meal. The architects of this current iteration of the internet identified our hunger, understood they could teach us to consume more. Instead of reading the internet, we see it — but understand what we see less fully.

I’m sure there are many reasons Mozilla chose to kill Pocket. But it’s hard not to see it as one of the last remnants of a different understanding of what the internet is primarily for. When I miss the internet of the 2010s, it’s not just because I miss an internet less magnetized by Trump, although I certainly do miss that. I miss the internet that wanted to be read, not scrolled, and created tools accordingly. ●

I’ve love to hear your thoughts on how your own experience of reading on the internet has changed over the last fifteen years — and what tools (and mediums) facilitated a different sort of relationship to reading. Yes, we should talk about Google Reader — but other stuff, too!

And I also want to know your solutions on how to save stuff for later; if I have to use browser bookmarks I begrudgingly will but that won’t work for, say, saving something I see on Instagram, or a newsletter I read in the Substack App. And finally: I think the Substack App *wants* us to read the internet, but doesn’t quite reach its goals. What’s *not* working, and how could it change?

And if you also like reading the internet and you want to be part of the vibrant comments section on each and every post — consider subscribing:

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Becoming a paid subscriber gives you access to the weekly discussion threads, which are so weirdly addictive, moving, and soothing. It’s also how you’ll get the Weekly Subscriber-Only Things I’ve Read and Loved Round-Up, including the Just Trust Me. Plus it’s a very simple way to show that you see the work that goes into creating this newsletter every week. If you’re already a paid subscriber: thank you so much for making this work sustainable.

How the NFL Sells Flag Football to Bougie Parents

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:14:52 GMT

The summer edition of the Culture Study Cookbook Club is here!! We’re cooking from Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish and it’s going to be SO GOOD. If you want to sign up to cook a recipe, I’ve put together a Google Spreadsheet here — just put some version of your name in there to claim it. On July 20th, we’ll come together and talk about what we cooked, how it went, and vote on our Fall cookbook pick. [Indian-ish is widely available (try your local library!) but if you don’t have access, email me and we’ll figure something out.]

DID YOU READ FRIDAY’S THEAD ON HOW TO GET INTO SOMETHING WITH A HIGH BARRIER TO ENTRY? I am continually amazed by this community’s wisdom, expansive experiences, and advice. Come learn how to get better at crosswords, how to start making your own clothes, how to start lifting heavy weights, and how to start reacquainting yourself with your sense of style.

It’s a total coincidence that this week’s episode of the pairs quite well with today’s piece — it’s all about unpacking current intensive parenting trends (in a way that doesn’t try to make parents feel shitty). The co-host is the great Melinda Moyer, and we talk about how “gentle parenting” has diluted and infused so much of parenting culture, how to handle generational parenting divides, and so much more. Click this magic link to listen wherever you get your podcasts — or go listen over at the show page.

The U18 Girls Flag Football Championships in Canton, Ohio in 2024 (Getty)

Last month I was in Seattle for a weekend visit, staying with some college friends who have a third grader and a kindergartner. After our usual Sunday morning routine of some film in the larger Hotel Transylvania universe, we set off to a morning of flag football.

I love these kids and love hanging out with their parents on the sidelines, but I don’t generally love watching kids’ sports. Soccer is just a boring blob and somehow it’s always raining. Baseball is an endless stream of bad pitches. But I was pleasantly surprised by just how fun it was to watch these shorties play football. The kindergartners didn’t really have plays, but they understood the concept (which, if you think about it, is kinda just complicated tag?) and at this point in the season, were getting pretty good at handing off the ball and dodging defense.

But the third graders!! They had plays — lots of them. Fakes. Lots of passing and beautiful catches. Half the team plays offense for the first half and the other half plays defense, then they switch. The game moves quickly and there’s a lot of scoring but because you can’t “run it back” (aka, intercept the ball and then run to score) it’s hard to drive up the score in a way that feels crappy. The sun was out, the kids were drinking Capri Suns, and there wasn’t an angry sideline dad in sight.

And then, of course, I started asking questions. How do they get away with using the NFL team names and logos on the jerseys? Why is this so well organized? The parking lot was overflowing with Rivians, Audis, and apologetic Teslas. How did these parents — who’d likely never consider letting their kid play tackle football — get here?

Luckily my best friend is also a person who likes to ask questions and sideline analyze cultural phenomena so she broke it down for me between plays:

There are many different leagues across the US, but this particular league is officially called NFL FLAG, and the Washington teams are specifically affiliated with the Seahawks. (Philadelphia teams are affiliated with the Eagles, New York teams are affiliated with the Giants, etc. etc.) But only the league champions get to wear the jersey of their ‘home’ NFL team; all the other teams are other teams in the league (my friends’ kids both played on the Chiefs, for example).

There are currently 2000+ leagues across the United States, and they just launched a rapidly expanding program in Canada (with a goal of 250 leagues in the next three years). Participation in kids sports has been falling across the board for the last decade — but flag football is exploding. Since 2015, the number of 6 to 12 year-olds playing has grown by 38%. There are lots of non-NFL leagues, but the NFL one is the biggest (and is generally very well organized).
The leagues are co-ed or, in a few cases, girls-only. You can play from age 4 to 17.

The NFL doesn’t really care if you play in its flag league — they just want you to play in a league (if you search for leagues using its local league finder, it pulls up all sorts of YMCA and Boys & Girls Club options). They’re also lobbying heavily for wide scale adoption of girls’ flag football in high schools across the United States (right now, it’s sanctioned in 15 states and being piloted in an additional 18). They just really want kids to play football.
In Seattle, the league is explicitly positioned as a low-buy-in sport: you show up for two hours on Saturday or Sunday, and that’s the extent of the commitment for the week. The team practices for around 45 minutes before the game, and then the game itself lasts less than an hour.

When I was at the game, I ran into another one of my college classmates, there to watch his son. After I posted a pic of the game on Instagram, another friend told me she’d been across the field complex, watching her twin girls, who are avid players. And as I tried to back my car out of the packed parking area without dinging the pristine $70,000 SUV next to me, I thought: huh, the NFL is really pulling something off here.

We have to backtrack a bit to make sense of it. In 2015, the NFL reached its all-time peak broadcast audience numbers, reaching an average of 18.1 million viewers per week. But then those numbers began to decline: in 2017, average weekly ratings were down to 14.9 million viewers, and hung out in the 14-15 million range through 2020.

At that point, the effects of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), an increasingly diagnosed brain degeneration in players who’d received repeated concussions, had been public for years. I don’t think you can attribute the decline in viewership to Aaron Hernandez’s 2017 autopsy results (which revealed signs of CTE in the brain) or the release of Will Smith’s (pretty melodramatic) movie Concussion, based on Dr. Bennet Omalu’s attempt to identify CTE and convince the NFL what was happening to its players.

I don’t think people necessarily stopped watching football because of CTE. I just think their relationship to football got more complicated. During this same period, high school football participation continued what was by then a decade-long decline. If, knowing what you know, you wouldn’t let your own kid play football — what does it feel like to watch other people’s kids play football? Is the natural evolution of the sport just a scenario where poor kids agree to risk brain degeneration in order to lift their family out of poverty? That’s some Gladiator shit.

We know now that tackle football participation numbers have dropped in every state save Alabama and Mississippi. We also know that high schoolers in states that voted for Trump in 2020 are 1.5 times more likely to play football (not surprising, for several reasons) — and, according to recent Washington Post polling, liberal voters are more likely to discourage their kids from playing football, whereas the conservatives’ thinking on the subject has not changed since 2012.

As Andrew M. Lindner, a sociologist who studies football participation, put it to the Post, “There seems to be a very disturbing possibility that who your dad voted for [in the presidential election] could influence your risk for very serious [football-related] ailment or injury.”

The NFL recognized that it had a massive problem. Yes, they were dealing with thousands of its former athletes experiencing significant and often profoundly dangerous brain degeneration. But they were also at risk of breaking their fan pipeline, which took football-playing kids and gradually transformed them into football-obsessed NFL fans who spanned the political spectrum. Liberal, bougie parents might not make up the majority of their audience, or even a third. But disinvestment in the sport, even just gradually, would have ramifications that would be impossible to reverse.

Or rather: impossible to reverse unless they stopped tackling. Which is not going to happen — at least not until we get rid of the electoral college and the filibuster and recede from our current state of extreme ideological polarization, wherein banning even extremely dangerous types of tackles is understood as infringing on others’ freedom (to watch other people tackle).

People with this sort of ideological positioning put banning tackle in the same bucket as allowing books about trans people in schools, gun registration laws, DEI initiatives, vaccine mandates, environmental regulations, and restrictions against four-wheelers in wilderness areas. No one should have the right to regulate someone else’s kids, the thinking goes, or your way of having fun. To mess with football is to mess with both — and a crucial component of the American masculine ideal.

Obviously there are all manner of contradictions inherent to this line of thinking (I should have the freedom to go to a concert and not be scared of getting shot, just to start) but it helps illuminate why any attempt to regulate football, whether on the part of the league or the part of the state, is understood as a form of moral injury. In these circles, it wouldn’t be received as “protecting kids” or “saving lives” — it would be the libs saying that I guess it’s illegal now for men to be men (etc. etc. etc.)

So banning tackle is off the table. How, then, does the NFL get people to stop thinking about its effects? The short-term play: distraction. I don’t think Taylor Swift was a plant, but I do think the league appreciated her presence tremendously. The long-term play: get people who’d internalized the CTE dangers invested in football without tackling, while also promoting the idea of the NFL as beneficent and forward-thinking (instead of terrified of its reactionary base).

Enter: a sprawling, well-organized, well-publicized, inclusive flag football apparatus that integrates a form of football into millions of family’s lives. (The NFL first started investing in flag back in the early 2000s, but has ramped up those efforts considerably over the last ten years). Of course, many of these flag football-playing families were already watching the NFL, and likely would have even without their kid getting into flag. But flag makes the NFL look like it’s really working on the problem. Like it cares about kids, and gender-inclusion, and believes that “the future of football is female.”

If an organization that was not the NFL was doing this work, my reaction would be: this rules. And I want to be very clear about this: flag football does rule. When I talked to Frankie de la Cretaz, co-author of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League, earlier this week, they emphasized that these co-ed leagues are particularly awesome for non-binary and trans kids who don’t have to negotiate other people’s hang-ups about who should play. Plus, a sport that hasn’t (yet) been super professionalized that kids don’t have to start playing at age five if they want to keep playing: amazing. More fun, lower-commitment sports for all!

But you cannot separate the NFL’s flag boosterism from the rest of its politics. The league has made numerous efforts to reduce the amount of concussions in games (changing kickoff rules, testing and requiring better helmets, and changing rules about helmet to helmet tackles and how teams enact concussion protocols with players who have taken hard hits). But the sport is still in an untenable position: the reforms necessary to make the sport truly safe from traumatic head injury (banning or drastically changing tackling) would result in a game that is not, strictly speaking, football.

That doesn’t mean they couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. Kids who want to make it to the NFL start taking hits as tweens. That, too, should be seen as untenable. Right now, the NFL is building a gorgeous new pipeline to its stadium seats — while also keeping a different, collapsing pipeline open, luring kids there with the promise of millions of dollars on the other side, and assurances that they take player safety very seriously.

Just look at the FAQ section of the NFL Flag website, under the question “Is football safe to play?”:

Football, as we know it, is changing. The way the game used to be taught and played is different from what’s happening today. Player protection and injury prevention are front and center, causing a major culture shift within the sport. Leagues across all levels are adopting new technology, regimes and regulations in an effort to reduce the risk of injury, as researchers continue to focus on the impact of sustained contact in youth sports.

The phrase “culture shift” is doing so much work here. Football is changing! This is not the bad headlines, wife-abusing, double-homicide football! In other words, don’t look here —

@nflvinnie This might be it for Tua… praying for him and his family || #fyp #nfl #dolphins #tua #concussion #miamidolphins

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@becauseofmarketing_NFL’s “Flag 50” marks their second Super Bowl commercial. The two minute film puts the spotlight on girls flag football, as part of the NFL’s effort to grow the sport around the world 🏈 #superbowl2025 #superbowllix #superbowl59 #becauseofmarketing #flag50 #nflsuperbowl

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The photo-op visits from NFL players, the Future of Football is Female kiosks at football stadiums, the promotion of college-level flag scholarships for women — all of it works to smooth the ick factor. It persistently and persuasively invites bougie parents to understand “football culture” as something that includes families with politics and beliefs and zip codes like theirs.

There’s a term for using sports to soften a cultural perception of something in need of an image overhaul: sportswashing. In recent years, Russia and a number of the Gulf states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia have invested in popular sports teams, leagues, and championships to take some of the focus away from their human rights abuses, unabashed corruption or regressive policies toward women and minority ethnic groups.

Most recently, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars building LIV Golf, a mostly-sham organization that has nevertheless recruited popular golfers with tantalizing contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Each year, the golfers play a tournament in Saudi Arabia — and while they’re not full on propagandists for the state, the investment and participation from popular athletes is meant to make the country look more modern, friendly, and paper over atrocities like, say, the killing of the Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi.

What the NFL is doing with flag football is obviously not the same. But it’s not wildly different either. In a weird way, the NFL is sportswashing itself with a different sport in order to make the original sport appear a little less regressive.

And when you’re convinced of the NFL’s good intentions, it’s much easier to let your own slip around — particularly when your kid is having fun. I talked to one dad in Central Washington who was adamant he’d never let his son play tackle. But his son fell in love with flag, and excelled at it immediately. Because of where they live, many of his peers will be moving on to tackle. This dad felt his hard line slipping: what if he just plays offense? But the only way to protect your kid from the dangers of tackle football is to not let them play tackle football.

Of course, you could read all of this differently: the flag league is the NFL’s attempt to very gradually groom its audience into getting on board with the eventual shift, several decades in the future, to a flag league. But no one really thinks that’s going to happen. Instead, flag will continue to grow in popularity: it’s officially now part of the 2020 Summer Olympics, and the NFL has cleared its players to participate. The NFL isn’t trying to replace the tackle league. They’re trying to create a second income stream while bolstering the first.

I don’t think kids should stop playing flag — and I certainly won’t stop watching my friends’ kids play it. But I also hope we can see the NFL’s facilitation for what it is: sportswashing its own sport.

You can love flag football and still find the NFL fundamentally despicable. You can pinpoint its joys, and why it feels safe for your kids, and continue to ask questions about why we allow any kids to play a profoundly more dangerous iteration. I hope you’ll join me. ●

If you liked that, if it made you think, if you open these emails all the time and forward them to people — or if you just want to support this work….I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. You get the weirdly addictive weekly threads (How To Start Doing Something (With a High Barrier to Entry), all the personal essays behind the paywall, and the big weekly links + recs. If you want that sweet sweet Full Culture Study experience, and access to all the exquisite knowledge and wisdom this community has to offer, come join us:

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For more thinking on the paternalistic way the NFL is treating women’s football, see Frankie de la Cretaz’s piece on gender equality in football — and subscribe to their newsletter for ongoing smart commentary on queer sports and pop culture. I also recommend the six-part Washington Post series on “the divided states of football” and Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva’s The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game,

Just a Little Midweek Love Letter

Anne Helen Petersen — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 13:51:46 GMT

First Off: You voted and Priya Krishna’s INDIAN-ISH is our summer pick for the Culture Study Cookbook Club — I’ll post a link to specific recipe sign-ups in the next week, but for now, this is your sign to buy, borrow, or reserve a copy from your local library. And if you want to see how this worked last time around, here’s the post on the easy connection of a cookbook club and here’s what it looked like when hundreds of people cooked from Tenderheart.

Now, let’s talk about the thing I can’t shut up about: my new favorite podcast and why it works. And yes I’m paywalling this shit because I love to paywall the slightly trifling stuff that people can’t resist while keeping the trenchant stuff (and interviews with smart people) outside the paywall and available to all. Subscribe now and get it all!

The World Has Always Been On Fire

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 28 May 2025 11:51:26 GMT

This is the sort of piece I’d never be able to publish at a mainstream outlet — not because of its subject matter, but because it meanders from question to question without an unequivocal argument or a stern recommendation. It’s not an op-ed; it’s an invitation. What would it look like to hang out more in this curious, questioning space?

So if you want to think more about the culture that surrounds you — and join our ongoing, deeply generative discussion threads, like yesterday’s on What Are You Working On? — become a paid subscriber today.

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Last month, publicity for the poet and author Ocean Vuong’s new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, began saturating my media diet. I read Vuong’s first book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, over the course of a hot, stormy August afternoon back in 2019. It was luxurious, stunning writing and very deliberately loose on plot. I don’t remember reading On Earth so much as experiencing it.

Not a lot of poets do big press tours, but these past few weeks, Vuong’s been everywhere: on Oprah, on the other side of *the* New York Times Magazine interview with David Marchese, on PBS NewsHour, plus countless events where he’s been asked big questions in front of big, hungry audiences. Last week, Vuong was at Politics & Prose in Washington D.C., and someone asked what he tells us students — he’s a professor of creative writing at New York University — about how to write in this moment.

Here’s how he responded:

I know it’s hard. The world is on fire. Metaphorically, and figuratively. However, it has always been on fire. There has never been a single author that had the immense luxury of writing at a time of absolute peace.

And so, choosing this work, you are entering a lineage of despair. And it’s up to you to turn the sentence into a medium from which we can understand each other and make something new out of this.

That answer has been ricocheting around my head for the last few days, like a pinball that keeps hitting bumpers long past all expectations. Our history is a history of terror, unrest, and flight. If you were ignorant of it — or could forge a space where you could maintain ignorance — that didn’t mean the fires weren’t burning. The smoke is our air. As one teacher put it in the comments of the Instagram post above, “oftentimes I say to my students, ‘nothing has actually changed other than your awareness.’”

It’s a crucial corrective to the notion that creating art in dark times is somehow inappropriate — or evidence of a lack of commitment to justice. If no one wrote about romance or frivolity or joy or fantasy because times were too dark then we have nothing but despairing, didactic dramas. Making sense of the world takes so many forms! Some of them just engage the lineage of despair more explicitly than others.

When Vuong evokes the power of the sentence, he’s talking about writing — but you could expand his understanding to so many other forms of art, including the unheralded art of living our everyday lives, and the creation and maintenance of connection. What does it look like to cherish other people? To cultivate our empathy for one another, even when our own experiences are so disparate? If a burning world is our lived reality, how do we continue to steer ourselves towards the sort of compassion that might create a different one?

It’s not by policing each other, or parsing others' good faith posts for ill-intent. It’s also not by telling people to stop caring about what they care about. I’m not saying make friends with fascists, because that is always the bad faith interpretation of this argument: you want me to cozy up to people who hate me, who want me dead. Never, not at all.

But we do have to figure out how to create narratives — amongst people who hold very similar beliefs, but also with those who do not — that have a stronger gravity than fascism, or Steven Miller-style white supremacy, or JD Vance/trad-wife pronatalism, or so many other noxious ways of orienting oneself to the world. All of those ideologies are, at heart, antidotes to the deep sadness at the heart of everyday life. We need better ones.

But wow is there a marketing problem. It’s so much easier to market rage than care. Gentleness and openness are so squishy and squirmy! It reminds me of the cloying Pass It On ad campaign, whose aim is to “promote good values.” This sort of shit makes me want to punch “good values” in the face, and with good reason. Everyone knows these ads are vacuous, ineffective shit. They only endure because billionaires have wild ideas about absolution.

By contrast, you can tap into someone’s insecurities with astonishing ease. You don’t have to actually shame them so much as present the possibility: come with us, buy this product, espouse this theory, otherwise humiliation is imminent. Economically, sexually, situationally. If you haven’t been cucked already, you will be soon.

MAGA, with the fantasy of the American strong man at its center, has offered an alternative. As Max Read astutely pointed out, cuckoldry “structure[d] the first Trump administration’s understanding of politics and focus[ed] its obsessions: the idea of a black or brown stranger entering one’s home in order to replace and emasculate its owners is almost too on-the-nose as a parable about the Trumpist understanding of immigration.” Now, the Trump administration’s fixation has moved from cuckoldry to pronatalism — a sort of “public-policy breeding fetish,” as Max puts it. “The concern here is less “strangers fucking your wife” and more “strangers fucking their own wives while you and your wife don’t fuck at all.”

When I read something like that — or the similarly persuasive argument that the DOGE ethos is, ultimately, all about sad men being mad that women have what they perceive to be bullshit email jobs — my first reaction is: I have no interest in creating something that will speak to anyone who has been swayed by that logic. It’s so fucking dumb. I feel debased just considering it.

Here’s where I think we take the proposition of connection — of generating alternatives — too literally. And by we, I mean everyone who sees the MAGA/DOGE viewpoint as a problem, but especially the Democratic party, desperate to reverse engineer a blockbuster political message that will magically erase years of residue about how the world should work and who we should blame for it not working that way. Going on the stump with Liz Cheney is not the solution! Neither is every college-educated liberal buying a copy of Hillbilly Elegy or pontificating about deaths of despair.

It’s like expecting all those READ posters from the ‘90s with Mister T or Nicolas Cage to somehow convince someone who’s been told for years that reading is a waste of time that reading is, in fact, very cool. The propaganda is too obvious! It just makes people think you think they’re dumb enough to fall for it! Insulting all around! And yes: propaganda is a reality of political life. An additional reality is that it will never work if it isn’t created by people who are living the same sort of life, with the same sort of fears, as the people you want to reach. (See: Gramsci’s understanding of the organic intellectual).

Of course, the propaganda coming from the right is also ham-fisted, transparent, and bad. But bear with me here: you see that clearly because it’s not touching any of your shame or fear points. That doesn’t mean you’re smarter; it means your fears are different. Or, more precisely, your reaction to those fears are different. When faced with change, do you try to preserve the way things are (or the way you imagine they used to be) or do you try and grapple with the realities of the future? Do you understand norms as fixed or always shifting? Do you think difference should be assimilated or celebrated? How open are you to changing your mind?

If you think of yourself on the left of the political spectrum, it’s easy to graft your politics onto those dichotomies and come out feeling great: I welcome change; I don’t fetishize the past; I celebrate difference; I’m open and affirming and ready to change my mind. And yes, at least when it comes to identity politics, those descriptions are (pretty) true of most people on the left. But that openness has its limits. A very incomplete list of things that trouble it: anything that threatens bourgeois class status, when your public school is “bad,” unions in actual practice not just in theory, polyamory, the Land Back movement, prison abolition, reconsidering the value of higher education, the primacy of home ownership, fat liberation, trans people who don’t aspire to homonormativity, and unhoused people.

I’ve seen all of those things activate fear centers in people who consider themselves liberal, causing them to act and speak and cling to solutions that aim to conserve their personal and financial status quo. I point this out not to shame, or to absolve, but to invite us to consider a common tenderness —and shared susceptibility to janky, ill-begotten salves. Maybe the first step to actually understanding each other is to stop fancying our own politics as somehow pristine, without contradiction, and above reproach.

The dynamics of polarization — in which we are “right” in part because we are not “them” — goad us into thinking that way. And once we agree the other side of the political spectrum is an abomination, and yet somehow out of our control or censor, we turn our opprobrium where it actually does work: on those in our ideological vicinity.

And that eats movements from within. The more we try to parse others’ impurities, the more we lose the plot. Do we want less suffering? Less fear, more compassion? Less corruption and more stability? Great. That’s the point. Now let’s get out of our own fucking way. Sometimes that’s how I try and explain the reality of solidarity: not missing the fucking point.

In his interview with the New York Times Magazine, Vuong points to the American obsession with dynamic stories of change, of heroes and anti-heroes, of happy endings and character evolution. But “American life is often very static,” he says. “You drive the same car, people live in the same apartment, but it doesn’t mean their lives are worthless.”

Most of our lives are that way, too. Apart from a few seismic events, we live our lives and live our lives and live our lives and keep living them, usually without the promise of glory or recognition. “I’ve been interested in this idea of kindness without hope,” Vuong continues. “What I saw working in fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people are kind even when they know it won’t matter. Where does that come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no payoff?”

Like so many other writers, these past years have been filled with moments where writing — writing anything, publishing anything — has felt self-deluded and futile. But we have to use the mediums available to us, whatever they are, to speak — but also to listen. To write — but also to read. To extend care‚ and be cared for in return. To change someone else’s mind and allow your mind to be changed. To practice kindness, even and especially without hope.

And then, maybe — and I hesitate to even write it, lest it sound too much like hope — forking subtly from our lineage of despair, there’s the whisper of the idea Vuong leaves at the end of his advice to his students. Something new.

●

For today’s discussion: there are admittedly a lot of ideas swirling around here, so please treat this piece in the spirit in which I wrote it: as exploratory, entreating, and curious.

Along those lines: What makes communicating while the world is burning so difficult in this moment? And what does kindness without hope look like to you?

What Was The Summer Vacation?

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 21 May 2025 12:42:24 GMT

This week’s Culture Study Podcast is about EVERYTHING WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT PERIOD PAIN — death cramps, final boss periods, fibroids, butt pains, PTSD, let’s go!! Listen here.

Subscribers have asked for a friend-matching thread, and we’re gonna make it happen — it might be kinda awkward, but it might also lead to some really great connections for people invested in actually making connections with other people of all ages. If you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, do it now and you’ll get that thread in your inbox this Friday.

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“We had a 15-passenger van that my dad modified by removing two bench seats and putting a mattress on the floor. Since he had to work, my mom and her best friends would take 8 kids under the age of 10, and we'd drive from Bakersfield, CA to places like the Grand Canyon and Arches National Park. We drove with a huge cooler full of sandwiches (next to me on the van floor, where I lay and read my book as my mom did 60mph), and everyone had to use the bathroom at every rest stop. Looking back, I realize my mom was a superhero.” - Kathleen

“I grew up with a single low-income hippie mom in Canada. Vacations were visiting friends and family — usually via epic road trips in our broken down car. I have really good memories of these trips: listening to CBC and singing, and stopping for popsicles. And never quite sure where we were going or who we would see.” - Alix

“We never flew. We never rented a house; I have vivid memories of a Best Western near Intercourse, PA, with a swing set and a pool out front. The five of us shared one hotel room (two queen beds and a cot) and a single bathroom. Activities were usually a mix of historical/educational sites, shopping for the adults, and 1 (one) day at an amusement park to exhaust us kids.” - Amanda

My brother, just absolutely thrilled to be hiking on family vacation

I was talking with friends about their summer plans the other day — the difficulty in scheduling camps, figuring out when to go where and for how long, how to manage official time off work and concert plans. I started thinking of what’s really stuck with me from my own summer vacations, growing up solidly middle class in a small town in North Idaho. We’d go camping. We’d go hiking. A few times we went and stayed at a friend’s old family cabin. One time, in Central Washington, we got rained on so aggressively, with so little hope for respite, that my parents sprung for a room at the old school resort on the lake, and we started going there for a week every summer. The highlight was a big ice machine and a hot tub.

Last week, I asked Culture Study subscribers to describe their summer family vacations: where they went, of course, but also how they understood the purpose and meaning of their family’s choices. What did they remember? How has that memory shifted with time? Who did the labor? How did it feel? What mattered — and what didn’t?

A few themes emerged — ones that are worth turning over as we approach this summer and the perceived demand for highly orchestrated family leisure. What follows is my attempt at loosely organizing them, with the hope, as always, that we’ll collectively elaborate even further in the comments.

1.) The Family Summer Vacation Was Not Fancy

I cannot emphasize this one enough: the trips people remember, the ones they cherish, were not fancy. They cost money, but they were not the sort of thing you put on your credit card and paid off for the rest of the year. Vanishingly few of them involved airfare of any kind.

Almost always, they involved driving places — and driving many, many hours to get there. Depending on when you grew up, those drives may or may not have involved seat belts. On road trips, many people camped, or slept in an old airstream, or stayed with friends and family members along the way. If hotels were involved, they were Best Western-style — beloved for their novelty, not for their elegance.

You rarely ate out — even if you were on the road. You ate sandwiches made at rest stops, drank pops from the cooler. Or: you went out for very special treats, like a slurpee from 7-11, a dip cone from Dairy Queen, a popsicle from a gas station. Meals were places where money could be saved, not spent.

Sometimes vacation was just going to a relative’s and reveling in the newness of place, the different breakfast cereals in the cabinet, a toy you’d only seen on commercials. Some people from middle-class families went to family lake cabins purchased generations ago when middle-class earners could afford things like lake cabins. Usually these spots were lovingly maintained by no-frills; people slept on floors and couches and smashed in bunk rooms with no insulation. Others went for a week to the beach (particularly if you were from the East) where you rented a rickety place by the week smashed next to hundreds of other rickety places. Where you stayed mattered far less than the fact that you were there, and there was not home.

I’m making this sound gauzy and nostalgic, the way we often do when describing the simplicity of our youth. But that simplicity matters; it’s what allows the other memories to come to the fore.

2.) The Family Vacation Was Not Structured

The closest thing to a structure was a road-trip that involved specific destinations: national parks, battlefields, historical monuments. Most of the time, there was a destination, and a general idea of things you could do at that destination (ride in circles on your bike, play cards with your grandpa, go to the beach) but few requirements to be at a certain place at a certain time doing a certain thing.

Vacation meant hanging out with adults who weren’t working and open, in a way they seldom were, to leisure: card games that endured, afternoon hammock reading that stretched for hours, swimming and swimming and swimming some more. It also meant hanging out with other kids (who may or may not have been related to you) with little to not direct supervision. Adults were around, in other words, but cared far less about controlling exactly what you did.

Friendships and alliances and informal hierarchies are manufactured and destroyed quickly; I vividly remember one lake weekend, staying at our neighbor’s grandparents’ cabin, when the kid next door started calling me “Burnt Toast” (I didn’t have a sunburn; this made no sense) and it was all I could think about the whole week and clearly all I remember of that weekend now (scratch that, I also remember watching a VHS tape of Napoleon and Josephine, a mini-series starring Jacqueline Bisset released in 1987).

If you were vacationing with your siblings, it was a period of intense negotiation: you had to figure out how to be even closer to one another than you were on a daily basis for long periods of time, but you were also reliant on each other for entertainment, since your parents’ primary objective with the trip was not engaging you. If you were with other kids, it was a period of accelerated social development, especially since the other kids usually spanned a pretty wide age group. What was cool, what was weird, what was baby stuff — all those ideas were negotiated with alarming speed.

I always remember feeling very alive during these vacations — like my skin was feeling everything, like everything tasted better and stronger, like I was tired but so excited to wake up and do nothing and everything. You’re constrained by location and opportunity but also empowered to write the story of your own day, even if that story was just walking down to the creek by yourself with a sandwich and then catching some grasshoppers and walking back to a cold generic pop waiting for you in the fridge. The best summer vacations are like that: somehow so limited and yet so expansive.

3.) The Family Vacation Was Not Novel

The most memorable family vacations involve tradition in some capacity. That tradition might be a road trip (with different destinations) or a fixed destination or going down the shore for one precious week in mid-July or your fish camp up north or a very specific campsite with the good creek at Dworshak Reservoir.

The repetition was part of what made it meaningful — the knowledge of where you’d go, what you’d see, what you had to look forward to or dread. The smell of an overheated transmission is just as much a part of these memories as learning a new card game. My mom had a grocery list for camping that included the same shishkabob marinade every weekend and that consistency was as much a part of the joy as spending hours poking the fire.

Of course, there are small variations to the familiar: a different national park, book-on-tape, car fiasco, or hot teen boy at the beach shack next door. But those things felt manageable and survivable and even pleasurable within the familiar, consistent vacation architecture. The vacation becomes a palimpsest of every vacation that came before, stories and memories peeking through of that one summer when the bugs were so bad, or your uncle taught you to waterski, or the raccoons got into the trash. The verses of each summer change slightly but only in a way that makes the chorus all the more meaningful.

4.) The Family Vacation Was (Largely) Screenless

Sometimes there were family movie nights where everyone would watch a movie together, but the recurring media of summer vacation are books, games, and music. Music on the speaker, on the radio, in the background, like a soundtrack; books in the backseat of the car, books in a sleeping bag, books in a hammock, books at the beach. Puzzles and cards and Trivial Pursuit that pisses you off because all the questions are for all the old people. Someone in your family would have a point-and-shoot with a new roll of film — but only 24 available attempts to capture the week, and that was that.

Some of this screenlessness encourages spending time with other people. But some of it grants you the freedom to dive deep into a book that you might avoid if there was a television (or phone) to absorb you. It makes space for your mind to both focus and roam. It’s another form of constriction that, in practice, generates a tremendous amount of freedom.

5.) The Family Vacation Wasn’t Always Fun

Maybe your parents kinda hated each other and vacation brought it out most vividly. Maybe your mom resented her mother-in-law’s hovering surveillance and you always knew something was weird when everyone was together but couldn’t quite understand it until you were old. Maybe you hated hiking — I certainly did — and pouted through every Petersen Death March until you were in high school.

I feel ambivalent about forced togetherness, but I also think that most adults, several decades removed from the experience, understand that part of being a kid is figuring out how to eek fun out of the options adults make available to you as to how you’ll spend your days. What small delights blot out the long expanses of tedium? How do you learn to be interested in your own weird mind? How do you not just tolerate but have fun with the most annoying person in the world, better known as your sibling? Vacation isn’t de facto fun. It’s a space to figure out all the different shapes fun can take.

To state the obvious: how your family defines hard work, leisure, and rest when you’re a child shapes your own relationship to all three as an adult. Who makes “casual” vacations feel that way? Do you pay others for the labor that makes dinner appear, or do family members (almost always women) do it in the background? Who “deserves” rest on a vacation, and who drives the car? If you only have two weeks off a year, how do you allocate that time? Whose interests and understanding of fun do you fulfill?

I’m still thinking through all these questions, but the one thing that rings out from the hundreds of answers in last week’s thread is that a good vacation is not optimized. It is not over-planned or scheduled. It does not demand too much from any one person, or privilege one person’s leisure over all others’. And it is not centered on what children want. All worthy considerations as we look to the seemingly endless sprawl of summer weeks ahead. Personally, I want to wake up the same way I did every random summer morning, feeling so alive to the season, thrilled for a day of another day of everything and nothing, all at once. ●

I also remember a highlight of our summer being sent to my aunt's in a small city about an hour and a half away to stay with our cousins for a few days. We slept in and watched soap operas and walked to the convenience store to get Slurpees. It was the best! We were entirely satisfied with that vacation. We looked forward to it every year. Did I want to go to Disneyland? Of course! Was I jealous of those that did get to go? Yes! But I still had a lot of fun wherever we were. - Erin

As a child, almost every single family vacation was to visit extended family. The message imparted was a duty to visit family (and be in either emotional or actual service to them while on that trip). Now, as an adult, I am working to amend the deep-seeded feeling that wanting to go somewhere purely relaxing or rejuvenating with my nuclear family is an urge to be resisted. This is big work. - Millie

My family of seven spent all our summer vacations in Bobcaygeon, Ontario. We went every year as soon as school was out. We always stayed at the same fishing camp. We had a small cabin with a wood burning stove and no running water and of course, no bathroom. There was a bath house at the camp that we shared with all the others who had come up for the week. Even though we kids were responsible for hauling wood for the stove and water to drink and do dishes, we loved it. It was two weeks that we spent almost totally free. There were no schedules. No Lessons. Really no chores, since hauling wood and water were novel for us. We swam and fished and played tag and cards. It was ideal for us kids.

This year will be by 70th year going back up to Bobcaygeon for my summer vacation. The old camp is gone and we have found another place to stay. My children and grandchildren join us, and this is still the one place I feel totally free. I can't imagine going anywhere else. - Lee ●

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Friday Thread: Analyzing Your (Childhood) Family Vacation

Anne Helen Petersen — Fri, 16 May 2025 16:19:41 GMT

I’m working on a larger piece about the concept of the family “summer vacation” and how it’s shifted over time — and as I sort through some ideas, I’d love your anecdata on what a “summer vacation” looked like for your family — if you had one at all.

In my family, summer vacation was camping. On the cheap. That was in the 1980s and ‘90s in Idaho, and we…

What Do We Do With All This Consumer Rage?

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 14 May 2025 11:35:22 GMT

This week’s episode of is one that we could only pull off with the help of a very smart weirdo (I mean that with utmost affection) like Tove Danovich — we connect alllllll the dots between the backyard chicken glamour campaign, MAHA, regulation resistance, and more. It’s a wild and satisfying ride; come join us.

And Paid Subscribers: yesterday’s What I’m Reading Thread is *kicking* (plus I recommend my most recent favorite read). Go overload your TBR list!

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You get access to the full Culture Study experience, which includes the weirdly addictive weekly threads, all the personal essays I paywall, the monthly mega-links & recs posts, and access to the general wisdom of this community. Join us today for less than the cost of most single-serve beverages.

It’s dahlia planting season right now in the Northern Hemisphere, which means the online dahlia groups, a real mix of hobby growers and small farm growers and everything in between, are overflowing with people posting pictures of their orders. Sometimes, it’s to praise a seller: look how beautiful these tubers are. Mostly, it’s to ask if they’re right to be upset about the size or state of the tuber.

Earlier this week, someone who was thinking about selling some tubers posted that all the comments in the group had made her incredibly wary: no matter what sort of service you provide, you’d piss off somebody. And they’d post about it. And things would devolve from there.

She’s not wrong: in the last few months, I’ve seen dozens of posts about too much packaging, not enough packaging, the type of packaging, arriving too early, arriving too late, sprouts being too big on tubers, tubers not already with longer sprouts, not enough instructions, tubers that were too large (and should’ve been trimmed to be smaller), tubers that were trimmed to be smaller, tubers that are too small (even though the variety only grows small tubers) — you get the picture. A lot of it comes from a place of general ignorance: they’re new to growing. But some of it is just a high level of sensitivity when it comes to “getting your money’s worth.”

In her post, the would-be seller noted that she’d recently seen someone complaining about tubers that arrived in individual bags labeled with the variety name, but didn’t have the name printed on the tuber itself. I admit: this kinda annoys me too! But I mutter briefly to myself, appreciate the quality of the tubers, and then write the name on the tuber.

Because I have bought a lot of dahlias (and sold a few) I also understand why some sellers skip this step: if you have a whole box of a variety, you feel less of a need to label each tuber. Or you might be running a one-person operation, and the only way you can actually get the tubers out the door is by saving time on things like marking each tuber. Regardless: it’s a perfect example of what the would-be seller dubbed “a complaint that’s not really a complaint.”

It’s an annoyance. Something you text to a friend, if it even rises to that level — or that you recognize as a personal preference, one that you can act on the following year, when you purchase from someone who does mark every tuber.

I’ll tell you what it isn’t: an abject failure on the part of the seller. But in groups like this one, personal preferences are often mistaken for strict industry standards. I see small-time hobby sellers of living, unpredictable, organic matter treated like corporations selling paper cups on Amazon. I see frustration with infrastructure (like, say, the postal system) channeled onto individuals with little to no control over it. And I see a profound absence of grace of any kind.

Most smaller sellers are a part of big, global Facebook groups — for dahlias, but also for other hobbies — out of necessity. They’re sources of knowledge and connection, but also a means of linking to your farm when someone asks “who’s selling this variety.” It’s the digital version of putting your sign on the highway coming into town. The reach of these groups has also encouraged people in super-rural areas and oversaturated ones to get into selling. Before, your market was limited to whoever came to the farmer’s market, the craft fair, or the antique reseller; now, that market has expanded well beyond state lines.

But the promotional potential of these online spaces also means exposing yourself to relentless and only moderately censored critique. You could opt out, and some successful growers have, or you could watch seller after seller get questioned for their practices. (Dahlia wonks, I’m not talking about KA drama here, just want to make that clear — that’s a whole different post).

You could call this “accountability” — and many people writing these posts think it that way. But I think it speaks to a larger flattening of the marketplace, facilitated by globalization and the simultaneous erasure of distance (between seller and consumer) and expansion of it (you know who you’re buying from, but you don’t know them). It’s a perfect recipe for ever-accelerating alienation — and its byproducts, rage and resentment.

As consumers, the globalized marketplace (with a noted assist from venture capital) has taught us to expect and demand levels of seamless service at low prices. But the companies that provide seamless service at low prices often provide lower-quality products and service. Or, now that VC-backed enterprises like Uber and DoorDash have ceased to subsidize the on-demand lifestyle, they provide lower quality products or experiences at higher prices.

Fuck that, we say — fuck Amazon, fuck Uber, fuck Target, fuck Temu, fuck every company that promised to send me a really cool looking pair of earrings for $17 and then they turned my ears green!!! We’re gonna seek out smaller businesses with less exploitative labor practices promising more personal experiences!!! But then: we’re upset when the speed and price are not the same as when a company is operating at (massive and frequently exploitative) scale.

Predictably, customers of these small businesses start complaining about their experiences with the same fervor as they’d complain about a bad experience at Chipotle. Their only outlet: public forums, and often in the form of preferences voiced as complaints (or, as I like to think of it, people who are mad that an orange isn’t an apple). You can see how a lot of small business owners become resistant or hostile towards online customer feedback: what, exactly, do you want from me?

Everyone’s angry and no one’s listening, and it’s only going to get worse.

To elaborate, I’ll use an example from our island. We have one restaurant and it is a very good one. (Not this one, which very famously shuttered several years ago). At our restaurant, a serving of fish and chips is $21. You could get fish & chips at the place at the ferry terminal in town for $5 less, but it wouldn’t be made with Lummi Island Wild Salmon (supporting a local island business) and it wouldn’t be on, well, an island — where you’re paying for the goods to get here (which involves additional ferry charges) and the higher wages necessary to convince people to work the dinner shift five nights a week.

There’s a premium to pay, and I’m happy to pay it. I know the people running the restaurant. I know their musical tastes. I see them hauling food over in giant coolers. They know our dogs and our orders and they are just wonderful people doing a sick job of running a restaurant on a tiny island. Because I also ride the ferry, I know what they’re charged every time they drive on. I also understand that if things are running slow, it’s because they’re slammed during tourist season. Or that if they change something on the menu, it’s not because they wanted to personally offend me.

I know all of this because anyone who’s remotely interested in knowing it, knows it. Other people know it because at some point in their lives they worked at the restaurant, or their family ran it, or their brother worked there.

You don’t have to live on an island to feel this way about an establishment, whether it’s a coffee shop or a bowling alley or a dry cleaner. You just need to understand the means of production as something that humans do — not robots, but humans with lives and needs! — and the process itself as a sort of small miracle, always on the edge of falling apart entirely.

The more you understand how something works, how a pizza comes to be, the less alienated you are from the product — and the more empathy you have for the people making the pizza. That’s Marxism, of course, but it’s also just a way of understanding that unfettered capitalism makes it a lot easier for people to scream at strangers.

●

Earlier this year, the writer P.E. Moskowitz made the case for quitting DoorDash and other delivery services as a means of forcing yourself outside your on-demand bubble. It’s good for your mental stability, but it’s also a straightforward way to become more intimate with (some) of the means of production.

When you order a bagel dropped off at your door, you never have to know who’s making the bagel, or watch them as they juggle toasting it and following your precise smear instructions with six other orders. You don’t recognize the same guy working the cash register, or how he always has the Mets game on. You don’t exchange light pleasantries or tell each other to have a nice day. You lose the humanity of the exchange, which makes it so much easier to get furious, furious, when something about the bagel is off.

When I talked to Derek Thompson earlier this year for my forthcoming community book, he told me that on nights when his wife was working and he was in charge of the baby, he’d often go to a local taco place to hang out, have a beer, and sit at the counter. The place had been built to house a ton of people, but was very rarely full. Not because it wasn’t popular — it was! But the people who used to come in had been replaced by DoorDash orders waiting on the bar.

It’s just so much easier to order in — at least that’s what we tell ourselves. You don’t have to worry about getting a table, or getting the check, or figuring out what your kids will do. But even though we’ve done our best to eradicate it whenever possible, patience and tedium is part of being human and becoming an adult. And while (most) kids watch their parents practice patience and understanding with them, as children — how often do they get to watch the adults in their lives practice the same with other adults? Where and how is that modeled outside the home, particularly to people who are providing, them, or their family, with services?

Community decay is at the heart of so much of the bubbling anger on the edge of so many consumer interactions. Yes, we’re mad and frustrated about everything else — and a frustrating or disappointing consumer experience opens up a vent from which that rage explodes. But it’s much, much harder to direct that rage to someone you know, even in passing. Someone you’ll see again, someone who knows your kids or your friends, someone amongst the sea of someones who collectively hold you accountable to be a decent human in the world.

The inverse applies, too: when you know your customers, you’re more accountable to them. But massive global conglomerates have no reason to be accountable to anyone but their shareholders. Amazon is only nominally invested in kicking crap sellers off its platform. Target doesn’t care if you stopped shopping there. West Elm can and will ignore your complaints about their poorly made couches.

Be as angry as you want; your rage bounces off their profit-imperatives…..and lands on poorly-paid, often subcontracted customer service agents, return-desk employees, and the person just trying to make sure you don’t shoplift in the self-checkout. It also gets absorbed by those small businesses you otherwise ostensibly value. It’s like ordering a Domino’s Pizza, but then the Domino’s app is glitching so your order gets canceled. You have to call the local wood-fired pizza place down the street, but it’s already 7 pm on a Saturday and they’re slammed, so then it takes 90 minutes for your pizza to be ready and they don’t deliver and your kids won’t eat it because it’s “weird pizza” and it cost double, so you’re ripshit angry — at the place that made you the pizza, not at the cheap place that’s outsourced the taking of deliveries to an app.

It’s a bizarre, contradictory place to be. We’re addicted to cheap stuff and infuriated by the systems that produce it but resistant to reform. We’re hungry for local alternatives but disappointed that they are, well, what they are: not cheap, and not always quick, and not always precisely what we wanted. Like so many other good things, they’re unoptimizable and deeply human — which means they require the sort of flexibility and patience we have become unaccustomed to offering.

●

When the would-be dahlia tuber seller posted to Facebook, the main theme of the responses was that a handful of people would always be mad, or unsatisfied, or angry in some way. You just have to figure out how to provide good quality at fair prices and enough people will come back year after year. That’s what it’s historically meant to run a good business, and so long as you’re operating at a small scale, it’s what it means to run one today, too.

The difference, of course, is that singular, loud, irrational, or just angry dissenting voices can do so much more reputational damage online than, like, that one lady who didn’t like the ice cream she got at your store one time in 1990. There are ways of countering these reviews (Airbnb owners responding with specifics of how an issue was handled; customers flooding a Yelp page with glowing testimonials), but my approach to the problem is to rely less on the online review, just generally. The people who leave them are almost always people who want to be mad, and will find something to be mad about, particularly when they can do it in a forum where they remain anonymous but their words live forever.

Instead, I’ve become increasingly reliant on human recommendations and in-person experiences. Where should I go? What should I try? If I hear about a new restaurant in my town, maybe I should just go there, and see if *I* like it, instead of reading Cranky Bill’s five paragraphs on Google Reviews, which, why am I reading Google Reviews??

I want to forge my own opinions while also disabusing myself of the notion that everything should be cheap, and special, and perfect. I want to reacquaint myself with what it’s like to be a human who sometimes needs or wants to buy things, instead of a consumer, convinced, as we’ve been told again and again, of our spectacular and hideous righteousness. I want to extend grace, and be extended it in return. ●

For today’s discussion, I’d love to hear about how you’re grappling with flattened norms — or cultivating your tolerance for less than immaculate experiences. How are you extending grace? How have you, as an owner of your own small business, received it — or what do you wish more people would understand?

The Most Infuriating Friendship Hack

Anne Helen Petersen — Thu, 08 May 2025 18:45:43 GMT

I felt like writing today, which is why you’re getting a little piece in your inbox mid-day on a Thursday! If you have some extra time in your day, consider returning to the Culture Study Job Fair from Tuesday — there are hundreds of later-to-the-game posts, questions, and job opportunities.

And also make sure you check out this week’s Culture Study pod on Tate McRae — it’s one of my favs of the year.

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This is a post about patience — particularly when it comes to making friends. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot these past few months as we inch towards our fifth year of living on this little island of right around 900 people.

The Pitt is a Show About

Anne Helen Petersen — Thu, 01 May 2025 11:53:20 GMT

I don’t usually focus a piece on a single piece of media, but The Pitt has affected me in unanticipated ways — ways that make me want to talk about the entire show with anyone else who’s watched it and cajole others into watching it as well.

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THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT AN EMERGENCY ROOM

In the city of Pittsburgh, sometime around the present. It was created by R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells (who were also responsible for ER, arguably the most important and successful drama of the ‘90s and the anchor of NBC’s Thursday Night “Must See TV,” and Noah Wyle, the actor who stayed with ER the longest (from its launch, in 1994, through its eleventh season, in 2005). Wyle has starred in various other series and films, but nothing that comes close to compromising the vague feeling that John Carter (his character in ER) has simply aged a few decades, moved a few hundred miles east, and become Dr. Michael Robinavitch aka Dr. Robby on The Pitt.

Unlike ER, which often focused on a single shift but also guided us through weeks and months in the lives of a Chicago emergency room, The Pitt takes place in “real-time” — there are fifteen episodes for fifteen hours on a single Monday in what we’re to understand as an under-resourced and over-burdened hospital in urban Pittsburgh.

The Pitt is also, somewhat surprisingly, on Max: surprising because it’s in many ways a classic network show, albeit with more leeway (it’s far more graphic than ER ever could be) and, I’d argue, more verve; it’s shot in a seamless but effective style (but the aesthetic never feels cheap the way Netflix genre series often do).

The Pitt has also been widely heralded as a return to what makes television good: tightly plotted, non-flashy, wonderfully but not overly acted, a show that is about stuff but also, plainly, about an emergency room. It’s spectacularly good television, and like many of you, I tore through it. And apart from its narrative brilliance, I also think it’s doing some pretty deft ideological work — using very micro examples to create the space and empathy necessary to understand various macro issues and the difficulties in confronting and resolving them.

So here’s a semi-formed thoughts, with the hopes we can arrive at more together. (Mild spoilers ahead in terms of a major-but- strongly -telegraphed plot point; nothing that will ruin watching or finishing the show)

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT SYSTEMS

These systems are the show’s canister — and a big part of what makes it so narratively pleasurable. First, there are the legible (but always gently interrogated) hierarchies of the personnel. Doctors are different from nurses, but doctors couldn’t do shit without nurses. Then there are residents, attendings, people who come downstairs from upstairs and people who only stay downstairs, you can ask questions but you also have to take orders.

The dynamics of a teaching hospital make the systems especially visible: a patient comes in, and the senior doctor asks the junior to articulate exactly what’s happening and what could happen. Then there are protocols to follow: if A, then B, if B, then C. Sometimes the protocols get scrambled, but the deviations don’t ultimately undercut the protocols. Instead, they reinforce them: you do this, and if this doesn’t work, then you get creative. If you’re in trouble, you call for someone who’s your senior, and they’ll arrive and help, unannoyed, because that’s just what you do.

If you come into the hospital in an ambulance, you go straight to the back. That’s just what you do. If you come in on your own, you sit in the waiting room for hours upon hours. That’s also just what you do. If a probation ankle bracelet thinks you’ve left your approved workplace, but you definitely have not, it still blares. If you sign an involuntary commitment order and change your mind, it cannot be rescinded. If you sign a DNR but you give your children power of attorney, it can be ignored. If you doubt your son is declared brain dead and you don’t believe it, two tests can be performed to definitively prove otherwise; if you decide to follow his declaration to donate his organs, there is an ornate choreography that follows.

Some of these systems work as intended and others do not. Exploring their effectiveness is the pulse (sorry) of the series: why have these systems in place, if they’re so tattered as to become meaningless? Is their depiction here meant to change our thinking on their effectiveness? What does the existence of a mass casualty protocol tell us about the society we’ve created?

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT TRIAGE

There are multiple moments in the final episodes of Season One — when the emergency room is in the throes of responding to the mass shooting — where the cameras leave the fluorescent lights of the emergency room to follow the doctors stationed outside the hospital in charge of triage.

When a vehicle pulls up, the physicians have ten seconds to assess the severity of their wounds and slap a bracelet on them that corresponds to how they’ll be treated — from stabilized to dead to on arrival. During the peak of the three episode stretch of mass shooting pandemonium, the cameras linger on the triage doctors as a fresh batch of critical patients arrive, replacing the set they’ve just sent inside to trauma units. “Is this ever going to end?” one doctor asks. Another responds: “the only way out is through.”

Whether you binge the show now or watched it in episode clusters as it was released, you can’t escape the message that these healthcare professionals are, for the most part, just trying to help people — and keep getting punched in the face as they try to do so, literally and metaphorically. The show is fucking ceaseless (there is at least one explicit mention of the myth of Sisyphus).

And how do you deal with ceaselessness? Triage. Technically, triage is a medical sorting procedure, but it is also a mechanism for responding to trauma. It is about adapting to a system under strain and doing one’s best when the circumstances are shitty. Sound familiar?

If The Pitt is a show about systems — some sturdy; most broken — it is also about resiliency and what it takes to adapt to that brokenness. The hospital is resource-strapped; its administrators are focused on bottom lines at the expense of the physicians who keep things running. Life savers are under-appreciated, overworked, and physically abused. The line of ambulances never ends, nor does the parade of weary patients in the waiting rooms. The Pitt takes great pains to show the brokenness of the system, but it also refuses to offer neat solutions or glorify resilience. Triage is not about mending a broken system. It is about surviving it.

At the end of the mass casualty event, Dr. Robby gives a short speech to his beleaguered day-shift team. He lists off the people that came through the emergency room in the last four hours — more than 120 — noting that only six died. It’s a victory speech of sorts, but the show doesn’t revel in those stats. We don’t know, will never know, what happens to the survivors: do they survive another day? What is their road to recovery? What trauma will they endure?

This is the tacit lesson of the show: you can exercise control for a brief, horrible moment in time and do your very best. But you still have to decide how you will confront or ignore what happens next.

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT AMERICA

This isn’t subtle! The creators and writers have infused the show with topical storylines — fentanyl overdoses; sex trafficking; self-harm; vaccine hesitancy; troubled and potentially violent young men; concerns about the unhoused, abortion; mass shootings. The specter and unprocessed trauma of the pandemic hangs over the entire show. Just listing that out makes the show sound heavy-handed but, save for a few brief moments, it isn’t.

I attribute most of that success to The Pitt’s (almost) real-time episode structure. Episodes don’t end neatly as much as they run out, which has the effect of doling out chaos like a continuous IV drip (again, sorry). Some episodes end on cliffhangers or with a gentle resolution, but the major themes of the show and the ceaseless feeling of the crisis bleed through episodic cuts. Nothing ends; we just got older, more weary, and with more understanding of how all of these systems do and do not work.

If I had to dial up a piece of entertainment to give a time traveler a notion of what it means to live in America in 2025, I don’t know that I could do much better than The Pitt. The safety nets that should protect people from concrete harms like child sexual abuse, gun violence, or trafficking are almost non-existent or held together by duct tape. Often the doctors, bound by the rules, must hold their tongues while patients make the wrong choices. One person, even one hospital, can only do so much.

It goes unspoken, but the sickest patient in the show seems to be the country itself. The show knows that just because the main characters who populate the emergency room are mostly brilliant, selfless, type-A adrenaline junkies with stethoscopes solves nothing. Their tireless efforts are band-aids on gaping gunshot wounds. The Pitt rightly demonstrates there is dignity and honor in applying this kind of first-aid. But it is not enough.

Near the end of the show, Dana, the head nurse of the day shift, tells Dr. Robby she’s thinking of calling it quits. If the emergency room is a solar system, Dana is the sun, projecting an unflappability and moral decency in the face of every single setback. When she’s assaulted by an angry patient in the beginning of the season’s third act, she signals that perhaps she’s had enough. It’s unclear if Dana, a fan favorite, will be back for the show’s second season, but her seeming resignation (in the final episode, she takes down the family pictures at her workstation before going home), is part of what makes The Pitt so raw and honest. It is an admission: there are no guardian angels, just people pushing the boulder up the hill. Eventually, everyone reaches their breaking point.

The Pitt gathers all this bleakness and still somehow leaves viewers feeling something akin to hope — a real testament to the final product. But it’s also why the show feels so quintessentially American. For fifteen episodes, we are confronted with the worst of humanity and infuriated by the constraints of overlapping systems of oppression, greed, and inadequacy.

I’ll be real: there are moments when the show feels less like an entertaining respite and more like the feeling of scrolling a social media timeline. The narrative works as a microscope, asking us to examine all that’s wrong with the world and all the ways the helpers are continuously stymied.

But The Pitt refuses to give up. In the end, it asks of us to experience this broken world with the stubbornness bordering on naivete that its protagonists possess. It asks us to keep coming back, knowing full well the trauma in store. And what’s more infuriatingly American than that? ●

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What Are We Actually Talking About When We Talk About Intensive Parenting?

Anne Helen Petersen — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:05:21 GMT

First: This week’s episode of is so FUN. The topic (fan fiction) is fun, the co-hosts (longtime fanfic readers and writers and hosts of the podcast Mind the Tags) are hilarious, and we managed to talk extensively about taste hierarchies AND a Hermione/Draco Malfoy fanfic. We worked hard to make this one accessible to newbies *and* compelling to longtime practitioners/readers, so click the magic link to listen wherever you get your podcasts….or you can find it here.

Second: Rachel Khong’s Real Americans has been a mainstay of our Culture Study ‘What Are You Reading’ Threads since it came out last year — and to celebrate its paperback launch, Rachel (a Culture Study reader, can you believe it, I’m so thrilled) emailed to see if we’d like to do a giveaway. If you’d like a copy, email me at annehelenpetersen at gmail with REAL AMERICANS in the subject line before this Friday, and I’ll use a randomizer to pick three readers to receive a copy. (And if you want to subscribe to Rachel’s free monthly newsletter about short stories, here you go)

Third: If you signed up to cook a recipe from ’s Tenderheart for our inaugural CULTURE STUDY COOKBOOK CLUB — we’re gonna do our big discussion thread a week from today, so get cooking! I made the first of my recipes and I’m making the alluring BROCCOLI FOREST LOAF later this week and I can’t wait to talk to 800+ of you about all the cool vegetable dishes we’ve made.

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Last week, when I was outlining the tenets of millennial hobby energy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that so many of its impulses — to optimize, to aestheticize, to buy a bunch of stuff to feel like you’re doing it right, the performance of the hobby on social media, the tendency to make your hobby your entire personality, to equate “doing it on hard mode” as doing it right — also describe the set of bourgeois parenting practices identified as “intensive parenting.”

I dropped that observation very casually in the piece, wondering if/whether readers would take it anywhere. The first comment to engage with that idea went in that direction surprised me:

I would like to unpack the idea of intensive parenting as a hobby and as a concept. I feel like it's often used with negative connotations, i.e. for parents who are just hovering and constantly engaged and thinking about their kids and have no other interests etc. I recognize this might apply with older kids. But I can't see how parenting very young kids is anything but intensive! They need constant supervision so they don't destroy themselves or the stuff around them, or both.
I can do the supervision myself or I can ask someone else to do it, so maybe the idea is that I'm not willing to ask someone else to do it, but asking someone else to do it costs money or social capital. (And honestly the amount of time you usually get in exchange for what feels like a lot of money or social capital is so meager.) I guess I just feel like intensive parenting is often positioned as a choice, but it doesn't feel like one with kids under 4-ish (increase that age by whatever for kids who are neurodiverse or have other special/medical needs). So hobby feels like not the right thing...

You can read the conversation that followed here, but it made me think there’s more thinking to do here when it comes to what “intensive parenting” actually describes, and how we wield the term in conversation and in pieces like this one. As other commenters pointed out, you can understand that it’s grounded in sociology — and also understand the ways in which it’s now wielded to disparage a set of parenting practices that can feel difficult if not impossible to disengage, depending on your race/class/education/location.

I’ll start with some basics of how I understand it — and will be very curious to hear yours.

I was not trained as a sociologist, so I didn’t come across the term “intensive parenting” until I started really digging into the literature about parenting practices from the period when millennials were growing up. I was lucky to have a bunch of sociologists directing me towards various texts on Old Twitter (RIP), including Sharon Hays’ The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (hall of fame ‘90s cover, see below) and Annette Laureu’s Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life.

Hays observed the norms of college-educated, upwardly mobile middle-class professionals that were calcifying in the ‘90s and grouped them together under the umbrella term “intensive parenting.” Her definition is, quite frankly, a banger: intensive parenting is “child-centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive.” Just spot fucking on.

The only thing I’d update, if there was possibly room in such an already packed and otherwise perfect list, is that intensive parenting is also performance-oriented, unequally distributed [in heterosexual partnerships], and anxiety-producing.

Worrying about preschool placement is intensive parenting. Endlessly researching johnny jump-ups — or any number of other implements that aren’t necessary but feel necessary — also intensive parenting. Reading Emily Oster is meant to make you feel like less of an intensive parent but data-based childrearing practices has a real Intensive Parenting vibe. Those apps that tell you exactly how much your kid ate at preschool snack, re-orienting your life around a kid’s travel sports schedule, exclusively buying wooden toys — all components of intensive parenting.

But asking what your kid wants to watch on TV and then watching it with them and having a conversation afterwards — that’s also intensive parenting. So is asking their input on big family decisions, planning and executing ongoing conversations about gender identity and fluidity, and giving kids a lot of space for grief. Intensive parenting isn’t harsh, or regimented, or (explicitly) obsessed with outcomes. Gentle parenting is intensive parenting, for example. But intensive parenting also has implicit expectations about where all this parenting will lead: better outcomes.

I realize that you can make a case for the benefit of each of these shifts, even the creepy surveillance cameras that make your kid in their crib look like they’re on a gas station closed-circuit feed. I’m not here to argue about any of that (truly, you have the rest of the internet to stoke those arguments). I’m just underlining the shift: this style of parenting focuses on the child’s needs above the parent’s, is obsessed with “expertise” (data-based or vibes-based), dominates the parent’s mental and physical space, and requires tremendous capital to execute.

There are similarities between intensive parenting and a hobby — only it’s a hobby you don’t get to choose, other than deciding to become a parent, because depending on where you live, there is an understanding that failing to follow the spoken and unspoken norms of intensive parenting are tantamount to neglect. In some locales, not supervising your kids at all times isn’t just “bad parenting,” it’s illegal — and all the more dangerous if you’re a parent whose race or immigration status makes them far more likely to be targeted by child services.

Intensive parenting, in other words, has been not just normalized, but naturalized: the (best) way to raise a kid, regardless of whether or not its norms are attainable for you.

Some people argue that intensive parenting should be the norm: if you have the time and resources available to intensively parent your kids, then why not do it? Why not give and get your kids “the best”? Why not maximize how many non-work hours you can spend enriching their lives? You had the kid — shouldn’t it be normal to orient your life around their needs?

And this is where the thinking begins to splinter:

If only people with abundant resources (time, money, mobility, social capital) can intensive parent the “right” way, then other parents without those resources are understood as “worse” parents
“Doing everything right” parenting-wise leaves little room to think about less tangible components of parenting, just generally, like how to be incredibly present, exploring failure and its rewards, etc.
Part of children’s developmental process relies on figuring out limits, social hierarchies, and safety outside of direct supervision — so how do you foster independence, curiosity, adventure, bravery, confidence, etc., when less supervision = bad parenting?
Because parents are exhausted from the norms of constant supervision, they rely on screens to give them a break — but screentime becomes pathologized (another way to be a bad parent) while also not exactly providing the same developmental experiences as being “un” supervised
And are you even intensive parenting correctly if others don’t observe and acknowledge your parenting? Performing parenthood becomes yet another form of labor on top of the parenting itself.
Because intensive parenting is so emotionally absorbing and time consuming, its discussion — how you’re doing it, how you should be doing it — becomes the center of your relationship with your co-parent and your other parent friends (I know this seems utterly natural, but it wasn’t always)
If a kid is high-needs, however you want to understand that adjective — do you even have an option not to intensive parent?
The denigration of intensive parenting leads to the fetishization of free-range and/or “1950s style” parenting (or before; see: “when I was a kid, I came home to an empty house five days a week and ended up fine”) which sucked in its own ways (and often involved parentification of older siblings)
Because of the, well, intense demands of intensive parenting, it also creates a tremendous amount of anxiety amongst those equipped to pursue it, because there’s always a sense that you’re not doing it intensively enough (or, depending on your perspective, that you’re doing it too intensely)
Intensive parenting is highly individualistic — it’s all about “what’s best for our kid,” not “what’s best for all the kids,” an ideological position that contributes to the gutting of public services in favor of private, expensive, and highly controllable options (schools, after-school programs, camps, summer care)
But what if “what’s best for all kids” is truly shit for your kid?
If you’re striving for “the best,” that means that some people will always be excluded from the services that facilitate it — which often transforms parenting into a competitive, antagonistic process, instead of a collaborative, community-based one
“Ideal” intensive parenting requires men to parent significantly more than previous generations, but because intensive parenting is so time and labor intensive, the majority of that labor still falls on women (see especially: mental load/planning components which are central to intensive parenting, like summer camp registrations)
Intensive parenting norms implicitly position children as a product that can be successfully optimized — you don’t have to say that aloud for the kid to start to understand as much (best evidence: millennials who were intensively parented!)
But again: what’s the alternative?

Going through these arguments, I find myself returning to the title of Hays’ book: intensive norms transform parenting into a practice constantly at odds with itself. It is a cultural contradiction. It makes pretty much everyone feel like shit — not just because it makes parenting hard, but because it makes it more difficult to access (or normalize accessing) the resources that would make it easier. It also doesn’t make kids happier, even if evidence does show it makes them “more successful” and wealthier, which are often equated with “happier.”

I’ve tried to peel back the layers of intensive parenting to consider what parenting is even for: we want kids who grow up feeling cared for, safe in the spaces they call home, and free to be who they are. I think most parents would also agree that they want their kids to be kind, empathetic, and curious. How do we cultivate those norms? You can’t optimize a kid’s kindness. You can’t buy into a zipcode that makes your kid curious. In fact, trying to do either will often make them the opposite.

Instead, we group all of those basic desired outcomes into a bucket called “grow up to be happy” — and then interpret “happiness” as “reproducing or surpassing class status.” Which is so very American: when your class status is always in question, when you’re terrified of losing your family’s position or your children falling backwards, you grasp at anything — including and especially parenting norms — that promise security.

To me, the best of intensive parenting is the recognition that kids are humans deserving of care and consideration, not accessories or laborers or afterthoughts. The worst of it is an acute symptom of income inequality that also works to widen the chasm that causes it. Put differently: we intensive parent because being poor in this country is terrifying, but intensive parenting practices also ossify the system in which it is all the more terrifying to be poor.

So now I want to hear from you: what are you talking about when you talk about intensive parenting?

How do you personally understand intensive parenting, outside of Hays’ definition of “child-centered, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive” ?
What does intensive parenting look like, right now, in the spaces you occupy?
How has it changed over the last twenty years — or even the last two?
If you’re parenting a kid with high needs — what do most conversations (including this one) about intensive parenting leave out? What do you wish they’d consider?
If you’ve worked to reject some components of intensive parenting — what privileges allowed you to do it without fear of being labeled a “bad” parent?
If your parents are immigrants, how did their parenting practices deviate from or resemble American intensive parenting practices?
If you’re parenting somewhere where intensive parenting is not the norm — what’s your perspective on how it’s been normalized in places like the U.S.?
If you’re not a parent but are a part of other parents’ lives (aka, all of us)— what’s hard about all of this to understand, and what would you like to understand better?

Or take this an entirely different direction — just know that I wouldn’t pose these questions if I didn’t have abundant evidence that the Culture Study commenting community knows how to handle tough, sensitive shit like parenting norms without this turning into every other discussion of parenting on the internet (aka, a hellscape).

In other words, I’ll be monitoring comments closely. So spend time before commenting, be generous in the grace you extend towards other commenters, and as always: don’t be butts and let’s try really hard to keep this one of the good places on the internet.

And if you want to join this conversation — and all the other ones we have here at Culture Study, where the comments always number in the hundreds if not the thousands, become a paid subscriber today. You can get all manner of advice, suggestions for quick work lunches that require no effort, directions to the best corners of Reddit, a wedding planning concierge, and coming next week: a collection of companies that have provided *exemplary* service, local and national and global.

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Finally, some additional reading, if you want to dig in a little more before diving into the comments:

And two hugely influential pieces for me:

Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid” (and a good follow-up: “The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time”)
Kim Brooks, “The Day I Left My Son in the Car”

Culture Study: Essays

BIG NO-KIDS ENERGY

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

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Big News: Culture Study is Moving to Patreon!

CULTURE STUDY IS MOVING TO 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*

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Know Your Dads

This Week’s Things I’ve Read and Loved (Including All the Good Stuff I’ve Read on One Battle After Another):

The Unexpected Melancholy of Nicole Kidman's Divorce

This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (very good this week, just saying):

The Futile Search for the Bullsh*t-Less Job

This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Gotta say, it’s pretty stacked this week):

A Life With Less Pleasure Reading

Theory 1: People *Are* Reading — It’s Just Not Books

Theory 2: People Are Learning and “Reading” — It’s Just Through Podcasts

Theory 3: Adults Work Too Much

Theory 4: Adults Parent Too Much (also: no place to read)

Theory 5: Adults Optimize Too Much

Theory 6: Leisure is Bad

This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Gift Links Whenever Possible):

Five Years

And just for fun, here are some stats from this past year — the most read post, the most shared, the one that converted the most people (I always find that interesting!), and then a handful of my *favorite* posts. Please feel free to share your own!

Additional Stuff I Just Liked/Am Proud Of:

What Bama Rush Means in 2025

We’re currently only at the midpoint of Bama Rush, but here are my initial observations — on everything from MAGA Femininity to the Izzy of it All.

The Unexpected Benefits of Starting a Small-Scale Dahlia Operation

The Great Feminist Exhaustion

I.) FUCK IT, LET’S FIGHT

II.) STATUS QUO BUYER’S REMORSE

III.) MOM THAT SUCKS / I DON’T WANT YOUR LIFE

IV.) FUCK FEMINISM AND FUCK YOU TOO

An Obituary for Reading the Internet

How the NFL Sells Flag Football to Bougie Parents

Just a Little Midweek Love Letter

The World Has Always Been On Fire

What Was The Summer Vacation?

1.) The Family Summer Vacation Was Not Fancy

2.) The Family Vacation Was Not Structured

3.) The Family Vacation Was Not Novel

4.) The Family Vacation Was (Largely) Screenless

5.) The Family Vacation Wasn’t Always Fun

Friday Thread: Analyzing Your (Childhood) Family Vacation

What Do We Do With All This Consumer Rage?

The Most Infuriating Friendship Hack

The Pitt is a Show About

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT AN EMERGENCY ROOM

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT SYSTEMS

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT TRIAGE

THE PITT IS A SHOW ABOUT AMERICA

What Are We Actually Talking About When We Talk About Intensive Parenting?

I’ll start with some basics of how I understand it — and will be very curious to hear yours.

And this is where the thinking begins to splinter:

So now I want to hear from you: what are you talking about when you talk about intensive parenting?

Newsletter Only Tier

Podcast Only Tier — Same Structure As Above

Theory 1: People Are Reading — It’s Just Not Books

And just for fun, here are some stats from this past year — the most read post, the most shared, the one that converted the most people (I always find that interesting!), and then a handful of my favorite posts. Please feel free to share your own!