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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other points of note:

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

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

• Her husband’s Instagram is….hogfathering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Pursuit of Clean Countertops

Calling bullshit on America’s love affair with Perfect Mamas

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By Anne Helen Petersen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you organize your digital life?

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

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

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

How do you think about “coworkers?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Subscribers: If you liked that and want access to all the other good stuff (the sprawling surprising comments sections, the weekly threads, the summer book recs!) and the knowledge that you’re helping fund the stuff that makes your life more interesting — consider funneling less than the cost of a cup of coffee into a subscription:

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And if you have questions for Carrie about her work, schedule, training….she’ll be watching the comments and attempt to answer what she can! And you can find more about her and work here.

Second: LET’S GO MARINERS! Let’s go PLAYOFF BASEBALL! And let’s go listen to this wonderful podcast conversation featuring me [MARINERS FAN], Melody [ROYALS FAN] and the hilarious *and* brilliant Ali Liebegott [METS FAN]. Dad Culture! Pitch clocks! How Queer is Baseball? MR. MET!?!? LET’S GO!!! [Let’s especially go if you want to hear me, a casual fan, explain the Homer Hanky to these newbs….or, I guess, allow them to explain the Ghost Runner to *me.*] We have opinions and we have analysis and we have a lot of laughs. Click here to listen. (And if you missed the podcast subscriber-only episode on The Showgirl and the Swiftcourse, go listen to that, too)

If you watched any of Rushtok, you’ve seen them: lavishly decorated dorm rooms that look nothing like the spaces we occupied in our late teens. The beds are almost always “vaulted” to make space for storage underneath; the walls are often painted or covered in stick-on wallpaper. Other existing furniture (desks, dressers, wardrobes) are either covered with matching wallpaper/fabric or replaced with “better” items (where does the furniture go? Usually into a storage unit, paid for by the student’s parents). There are THROW PILLOWS and MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF RUGS and BED SKIRTS. It’s just a lot — and it’s also very, very easy to scoff at the entire thing.

And because this is Culture Study, I wanted to do more than just say it’s the latest sign of the consumerist intensive parenting apocalypse. So when Meagan Francis wrote for The Atlantic about her own experiences in the Facebook groups that often serve as the guiding inspiration for many of these transformations, I knew she needed to come explain the larger dynamics at play in the newsletter.

I’ll just say that yes, obviously, this is about intensive parenting (and turning the consumerist impulse on a new space) but there’s more going on here, too — and I particularly love how this Q&A ends. Stick with us and let’s keep talking in the comments (I’m hoping someone was as cool as I was and had Starry Night and Nighthawks as their own form of elaborate dorm decoration).

And be sure to read Meagan’s piece in The Atlantic — here’s a gift link!

I’ve become very familiar with the expensive dorm room makeover during my many hours on Rushtok, but for readers who haven’t been a part of this world, can you paint a picture for us of these transformations and how aspirational norms are changing when it comes to dorm room decoration (and, more specifically, parents’ participation in it). (We can link a few Toks here if we’d like!)

I had no idea how pervasive this trend had become until last summer, shortly before I dropped my youngest son off at his freshman year of college. Suddenly all kinds of dorm decor groups with names like “Dorm Room Mamas” started popping up as a “you might like” in my Facebook feed. [AHP Note: if you want to get a sense for one of these groups, I’d recommend this one]. I clicked through out of curiosity and fell down a (overwhelmingly homogeneously decorated) rabbit hole.

The groups had their share of practical questions like which hardware to bring on move-in day to assemble beds, but what really caught my eye were the room reveals and inspo posts. The first one I saw featured two matching beds with layers of designer bedding and monogrammed signs hanging above them displaying each student’s name, flanking a white sofa with a fluffy rug and glass-topped coffee table displaying linen-bound coffee table books about Chanel and Louis Vuitton. I was like, “Wait, is this for real?”

@bre.morrisBAMA FRESHMAN DORM !!! 💖💖 #dormtour #dormroom #bamarush #bamarushtok #dorm #movein #dormmakeover #colorful #dormtransformation

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I guess it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that “normal” parents — rather than just stylists at product companies and lifestyle sites — might be aspiring to these kinds of rooms. It’s not that I’d never seen fancy dorm makeovers pop up on my feeds before, but in my mind I’d just dismissed them as over-the-top aspirational influencer content. But when I saw so many room reveal posts in one place, with so many parents commenting on them and then asking questions to try to emulate that look in their own child’s room, I realized that there were large numbers of parents who were actively involving (and investing) themselves in the dorm-decor process.

I thought back to my own dorm room in 1995. My roommate and I had a blast putting it together with odds and ends we’d thrifted, foraged from our family basements, and made ourselves. We’d taped posters and printouts to our cinder-block walls. Our dorm room was our first grown-up, semi-independent space and we truly made it our own, in all its mismatched, low-budget glory.

As I looked at picture after picture of these students in their homogeneously ‘aesthetic’ rooms without a trace of actual personality and no evidence of that scrappy, “I’m figuring out who I am as I go” sensibility I remembered from my college dorm, I just felt sad for them. And the idea for the piece was born.

I know this is difficult to parse, but how much of this phenomenon seems driven by parents — and how much by the teens themselves?

As you say, it’s difficult to parse. Some of the comments in response to my Atlantic piece claimed that it’s the teens who are driving this whole trend. But then again, it was the parents, not the teenagers, sharing mood boards and decor links in the “dorm room mom” groups I saw! Of course, I don’t know what conversations were happening inside homes and I have no doubt that teenagers are just as prone to social media pressure as their parents. In the end, I guess it’s probably mostly marketers driving this phenomenon, and parents and teens alike are caught up in it, just for different reasons.

And of course, this pressure usually doesn’t manifest itself in the over-the-top, wealth-flaunting rooms you’re going to see in those stories about 10K rooms styled by professional decorators, like the Rushtok rooms. But there’s still a high level of expected parental involvement in the whole process I hadn’t critically considered until I saw it play out in these dorm mom groups.

Just from being a mom of multiple young adults who came of age in an intensive parenting environment, I have to believe a lot of the involvement is parent-driven even if the actual room decor is directed by the students. None of us want to believe we’re the helicopter parents, but we’ve been so entrenched in an intensive parenting culture, we don’t even recognize that we’re doing it at times. And there’s a huge spectrum, too: is making sure our kids have a roll of paper towels and a trash can to toss them in helicopter parenting? No? Well, what about if we add in a cozy throw blanket - those rooms do get cold, after all - and a new set of towels? It’s a slippery slope to monogrammed wall hangings and dust ruffles.

You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about parenting teen kids (and older) — and also spent a lot of time in various Facebook groups for college applications and dorm decorations. They’re all manifestations of different sorts of intensive parenting, a concept that we’ve talked about a lot here on Culture Study — a posture towards parenting built for our particular anxieties, economic and otherwise.

I know this is a huge question, but what fears, anxieties, and tensions do you see popping up in the conversations about dorm room prep — explicit and implicit? Because it’s about the dorm room, but it’s not really about the dorm room.

I think what struck me is how invested and concerned today’s parents are not just about their kids’ safety — as my parents also would have been! — but also their material comfort, to which I think my parents devoted almost zero brain cells.

There seems to be a lot of anxiety over questions like: will my child know how to organize their stuff? Will they wake up for class on time? Will their friends want to spend time with them in their room? Will they be able to eat when they want to? Will they be comfortable? Questions that, of course, there are no shortage of products that purport to solve. So the decor itself - the matching comforters and monogrammed wall signs and coffee tables - is a part of the trend, but it’s not the whole story.

And, by the way, I’m not exempting myself from this! So far, I’ve only sent boys off to college, and they were stereotypically disinterested in their rooms’ aesthetics. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t concern myself with their comfort - I definitely did, and I’m certain to a degree my parents wouldn’t even have dreamed of.

I think, too, that there’s something here about the way families use space today that plays in. I have moved two of my sons into public state universities, and another into a community college with live-in facilities. In all three cases their residence halls were nicer than any place I lived before the age of thirty, and it was obvious the institutions had poured a lot of money into creating welcoming, functional community spaces: movie rooms, study rooms, game rooms, beautiful shiny kitchens…if any of my college kids have needed a midnight snack or a place to hang with their friends, trust me, they’ve got options.

But our kids grew up in a culture where it’s not enough to have nice shared spaces to use and enjoy; we’ve also helped them feel entitled to a lot of personal comfort in their own, private spaces. So maybe they don’t want to go use the TV in the rec room, they want to lie in a perfectly comfortable dorm room and scroll TikTok on their own device while looking around their own, personal, well-appointed spaces. I’m curious what readers think about that theory!

I think there’s a tendency — and I’m guilty of this — to look at these TikToks, or eavesdrop in these Facebook groups, and think: I showed up to college with an extra-long twin sheet from Wal-Mart and bought a copy of Starry Night from the poster sale in the quad and I was fine. And I was fine!

But I also think I had a very different relationship with my parents at that point: there was no way I’d let my mom help me decorate my room. In your piece, you point to the fact that this generation of parents is much more involved with their children’s lives not just as they head to college, but the years afterwards.

Again, my tendency is to judge that involvement, but that’s because, like a lot of people my age, there were negative connotations to being overly connected to your parents (or parents being connected in that way to their children). I think I harbor pretty entrenched ideas about independence, and could have benefited from slightly more dependence in my life.

How are you thinking through these ideas, both as a parent and someone deep in parenting discourse?

If you read the social media comments on my article you’ll see those entrenched ideas about independence reflected over and over: so many people shared stories about being dropped off at their dorms with a bed in a bag and not much else and making their way inside alone while their parents practically peel out of the lot. Or some people semi-bragging about having no parental presence at all, not even a visit or phone call their whole first year. It’s all very “I walked two miles to school, uphill both ways, through knee-deep snow”

I definitely harbor my own somewhat prideful defensiveness about the way I was raised and it’s colored so many of the realizations I’ve had to face as a mom of young adults, many of which I wrote about in my book. Like, oh, maybe it’s not such a bad thing for our young adult children to depend on us a bit, and maybe it wouldn’t have been so terrible for me to depend on mine a little more?

Ultimately, I don’t think there is a single thing wrong with caring about how our kids experience their first home away from their childhood home. Of course we care, and that’s a good thing! But we are also the parents - the adults - in this scenario. It’s up to us to restrain ourselves for everyone’s good, because as pediatrician Ken Ginsburg pointed out in my story, “Who doesn’t want free, nice stuff?”

Our kids probably aren’t going to decline our help or involvement at this point when we’ve been training them for eighteen years that we’re in control, we’re in charge, we know best. We need to lead the way on creating a new path, a new set of expectations.

Writing this story inspired me to dig up photos of my own circa-1995 dorm, and I asked friends on Facebook to share theirs, too. They were, to a one, delightful. Mismatched, patched-together, tacky, and anything but social-media-ready, but they were ours. I want that feeling of freedom and expression so much for today’s kids! And I want it for us parents, too, as we are learning how to step back into our lives, and decorate — figuratively, literally, or both — our own blank walls back at home. ●

You can find more of Meagan Francis’s work here and subscribe to her newsletter here. Her most recent book is The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Need: How We Let Our Kids Go and Embrace What’s Next.

And if you open this newsletter all the time, if you forward to your friends and co-workers, if it challenges you to think in new and different ways, if you want to hang out in the comments and see this week’s 400+ comment thread on WEEKDAY DINNERS, consider subscribing:

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For Subscribers: I’d love to hear what this interview sparked for you in terms of your own college dorm memories — and your thoughts about fetishizing independence, intensive parenting into the college years, and more. Just remember that this can easily turn shame-y if we’re not careful — so think about tone before you comment, take others’ comments in good faith, and let’s try to keep this one of the good places on the internet.

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This week’s thread on “Your Morning Routine” is so unexpectedly addictive, soothing, and thought-provoking — go read about my blanket skirt, precise alarm-setting behavior, and how ADHD and morning routines collide here.

I think I’ve changed the headline on this post at least forty times. I’m just desperate to convey how good this interview is — and how paradigm-shifting it is when it comes to the way we think about contemporary women’s happiness (and partnership, and leisure, and careerism, and family planning, the list goes on). I first heard about Corinne Low’s work after reading a similarly eye-catching headline from The Cut: “This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men.” The article is, indeed, about how being married to a man turned out to be an objectively bad deal for Low — but it’s also about her deeply persuasive argument about the root causes of so many unequal partnerships.

Low’s new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours isn’t a soulless manual on how to optimize your life. It’s not about treating potential partners as breeding stock. It’s about understanding how contemporary partnership structures work economically, digging deep on what makes you happy, and looking at our choices (past, present, future) within that paradigm. I found the book, and Low’s answers to my questions below, to be deeply compelling — particularly her explanations of “the squeeze” (which so many women experience in their 30s and 40s) and how “the bottom fell out” of the marriage economy. I cannot wait to discuss this one with all of you — I’ll see you in what I already know is going to be a ridiculously good comment section!

You can find more about Corinne’s work here and buy Having It All here.

I have read so much on unequal partnerships, published so much on it, done so many interviews about the mental load….and I’ve never deeply engaged with this idea within a strictly economic paradigm, and I have to say, the framework feels revelatory, particularly when I pair it with all of the other thinking I’ve encountered on how we’re socialized into roles, value, etc.

You call your approach “a radical framework for understanding the lives of women, and improving yours if you happen to be one.” What does it mean to look at our lives and choices through the lens of Economics (with a purposeful capital-E)….and what makes it radical?

I have this broader sense that women at some point lose sight of ourselves as the protagonists of our own lives. I always reference this Onion headline: “Mom Hasn’t Ordered Favorite Pizza Topping in Over a Decade.”

Because it struck me as so, so true as I thought about twisting myself into knots trying to cook for everyone’s different dietary preferences and likes and dislikes. And our own needs are often nowhere in that equation. How often do dads go without their preferred pizza topping?

So to me, the very idea of saying that our own preferences and desires should be our north star in decision making is radical. And it’s also radical vis a vis the conventional wisdom about what women should be doing, which is that we’re supposed to use our lives as battering rams against the structural forces holding us back, and climb the corporate ladder (these books always imagine only one kind of life experience — the author’s) by any means necessary. The ironic thing about my economist lens is that by really looking at what drives value in your life, it makes it imperative to consider things besides our career as part of our integrated purpose in life.

And finally, I think women’s decisions have a lot more complexity because we never have the freedom to optimize just one dimension. I talk about the constraint of reproductive capital: a term I coined for the value of fertility and the fact that it depreciates over time, meaning we have to balance our reproductive time horizon with that of our careers. But even without children, our lives are so deeply enmeshed in others and in the caring for others that those needs are always part of our equation.

More table setting: can you explain how “the bottom fell out” of the marriage economy? (I’ve never seen this progression explained so cogently. I underlined this sentence three times: “The problem with marriage today is that it has retained the same social role, while having a completely different contracting structure and a totally different value proposition to women.”)

If you look at the 1950s, our picture of marriage is that one person is employed in the market, and one person is doing what economists call home production — the kids, the meals, the laundry, and everything else. And at this time, it’s a lot, because we don’t yet have microwaves or even dryers. (Big aside: it’s actually a unique period of time because women’s labor force participation was at an all time low — when the American economy was more rural, of course women were working on farms, and poor women, immigrant women, and Black women were always working —and even in that period, there’s really high employment of domestic workers, which are, you guessed it, women working. So I think we have a pretty narrow picture of “the past”—but nonetheless!)

So at that moment in time, what we see in a lot of marriages is what economists call specialization: him focusing on the market domain and her on the home domain. And specialization continues to exist without it being so extreme — it’s a couple who are both lawyers deciding it’s better for one person to work 80 hours a week and make partner while the other takes leave, goes part-time, downshifts, etc.

But the thing about specialization is that it’s risky. Investments in children and the household are a public good within marriage: it benefits both people. But investments in a career are also a private good — you can take it with you if you leave the marriage. And, starting in the late ‘60s and ‘70s when divorce became a lot easier and more socially acceptable in America, that’s what a lot of men did. The classic trope is him marrying his secretary, right? And back in the 1950s if he wanted to do that, he had to write his wife a check. Literally. Because both people had to agree to a divorce. You had to buy your partner out of a marriage the way you buy a partner out of a business.

Marriage was supposed to be a joint venture — a commitment that allows you to make investments together. But with unilateral divorce, he could just leave. And child support and alimony didn’t make up for the equal sharing of income from his job. And what this does is totally upend the commitment possible in marriage, and therefore the ability to take a risk, like specialization. Now, of course there’s positive things about this for women, and a lot of people saw it as a victory, because women can now leave abusive or untenable marriages. But also, a lot of women were left very, very poor.

So then younger women get the message that they need to be able to support themselves — they witness their moms and aunts getting left trying to get a minimum wage job or start over at 40 — and they think: how do I make sure that doesn’t happen to me? (AHP note: This is definitely what happened to me). So we see this flood of women getting college degrees and entering the labor market (an economist friend has a great paper called “Degrees Are Forever”.) This is part of my grand theory of how things ended up so messed up with gender roles converging in the workforce but not at home: part of the source of the workplace gender revolution wasn’t feminism or female empowerment, it was necessity. It was survival. And so it was a very partial revolution that left a lot of pieces of the puzzle still unsolved.

The graphs in this book….let me just say, I’ve never seen such persuasive graphs!!! Economics!!! Looking at the data and creating these graphs led you to the concept of ‘The Squeeze’ — what is it, and what does it do?

I remember being in this period of life when I had my son in 2017 and was tenure track at Wharton and just feeling like life was impossible. And I was like—is this it? Is it always going to be this hard? Is the fun part of my life over? So when I started studying women’s time use, I wanted to look at time use over the lifecycle and especially during this period.

And what I found was what I was experiencing — this mountain of childcare and household time on average in our 30s, whenever you have young kids, which also tends to be when you’re still making career investments, so your time is crucially important at work, too, but those investments haven’t paid off yet, so money of

en feels tight at the same time. And looking at the data, I just felt so seen. I was like—oh, it wasn’t just me. That period of life sucks. So I called it “The Squeeze.” Because it’s time and money pressure pushing down at the same time. And then, I call what comes after it “the ironic relief,” because income is higher at the same time as these time pressures abate, and we’re thinking, gosh, could have used this a few years ago!

My hope in highlighting this period is to empower women to do whatever they need to do to get through it, and I try to offer some strategies for that. But first you need to understand — this is temporary, and it’s really freaking hard, and it’s not just me. Would love to hear readers’ stories of The Squeeze!

I think there’s a temptation to look at an economist looking at how women can make their life better and presume that you’re just trying to encourage women to optimize their lives for more earnings, or more *everything.* I think your explanation of figuring out your “utility function” counters that presumption quite effectively — please tell me about ‘the jollies.’

YES! This book is not about hacking your life to be more productive, or how to make a million dollars, or land the corner office. It’s not about the one weird trick that now I’m selling you a super special limited space summit on. This book is about figuring out what makes you enjoy your life, the things you value the most, and then strategies for getting more of those things.

Which brings me to utility functions. I think we’re constantly inundated with messages about what we’re supposed to want and what a good life looks like, and so in order to figure out what the heck we should be doing, we have to really intentionally get in touch with what we want. Economics has a really useful concept for that—firms are maximizing profit, and individuals are maximizing utility. We teach it in every econ 101 class, because it’s part of understanding consumer behavior, and a dear colleague / friend, trying to explain what utility was, would call it jollies.

The thing about where you get your jollies is that it’s unique to you. So I was noticing the way careerism and the desire to maximize income at all costs was making people unhappy, I started teaching my class the idea of actually figuring out your own utility function. And once I did, I said the phrase “don’t compare yourself to someone who doesn’t have the same utility function as you do.” It’s one of those things my students tell me they remember and think about years later.

And once you understand utility (jollies for short, the sum total of your joy, meaning, contentment, and fulfillment over a lifetime for long) then it puts your career into perspective. Because your career is a means for maximizing utility; it’s not an end in itself. And I think that concept in and of itself is so freeing to women, because we’ve been given this message that we need to lean in and maximize our careers, not just for ourselves, but for the culture, for feminism. And I am sorry, but if that is at the cost of my happiness then that vision is not feminist! (I also try to widen the lens to consider how absurd this idea of work as empowerment is when you take a perspective that includes other socioeconomic statuses, times in history, and countries.)

The book is not just observational — it’s deeply pragmatic. It offers readers suggestions about how to examine (and change) their own lives. The only section where I was like ‘I don’t think this works’ is the career one, where you (not incorrectly!) suggest that people think about career paths in context with their utility function, but also look closely at where people similar to you are in their careers at age 40, 50, 60. When I decided to pursue a PhD in 2005, I looked at that trajectory and saw exactly what I wanted — and then the bottom dropped out of the academic market (again, and again, and again). Even the tenure bargain that you take (significant investment for significant payoff) is eroding in so many institutions, and as the job market contracts further, people will be unable to decline jobs where tenure is not secure.

And that’s just academia! I’m also thinking about how AI is changing (and poised to further change) so many (theoretically secure) career paths — from the law and database management to coding and PR. And then there’s the elimination of so many “good jobs,” jobs with stability and lots of room for personal utility, in the wake of DOGE cuts. How are you thinking about that advice now?

I really appreciate the pushback here, because you’re 100% right, the same caution I give for relationships applies to our careers: we can’t predict the future, and we have to be prepared for these changes and shifts external to us that push us wildly off the path we thought we were on.

When I was writing the advice to think about your lifecycle, I was thinking about the women who were pursuing career paths where they know that the more senior women at that firm or in that field are not happy, or had to make enormous sacrifices, or, just do not share values and, yes, a utility function with them. And so I wanted to give kind-of a wakeup call to look down the road you’re on—and if it’s lined with spikes and hot coals—consider an alternate path? Because I felt like career advice so rarely encourages us to think about whether a job works for us, rather than whether we’re working for the job—we’re good at it and able to get promoted.

But you’re right that the path ahead can look like flowers and sunshine, and then, um, a tree can fall across it? (I’m really straining this analogy.) I think women need to make plans that include factors beyond their control, and think about transferable skills and human capital if there is a disruption to the field they’re in. And, that’s not dissimilar to my advice to think about what life looks like in case your marriage doesn’t work out even if you’re deeply, deeply in love.

We just don’t know how things are going to change in the future, and there are real “shocks,” which is the economics word for disruptions — it’s a “technology shock” when an industry is bowled over by changes in how things are produced, a trade shock when it’s about where things are produced, and amusingly, a “love shock” when your feelings toward your partner change. Investments in your career should try to be as insulated from these shocks as possible. How are you diversifying your assets in your own human capital portfolio to prepare for those unpredictable possibilities?

Longtime readers will know that I think of Elizabeth Taylor as someone who just had a bunch of serial relationships, not unlike most people I know in their 20s — the difference was that morality dictated she had to marry everyone she wanted to (semi-publically) sleep with.

I always feel timeline blessed that I wasn’t forced to marry any of my long-term boyfriends from my 20s, and had time to get to know myself and my priorities *really well* before finding my partner (at age 33). In your chapter on choosing a partner, you write about the importance of knowing what you want — and then having serious conversations with any potential partner (at an appropriate time!) about those goals. Apart from just, well, getting older…how can people cultivate that skill of self-knowledge….and can you also talk about why asking someone to envision the home you’d share in 15 years is such a useful exercise in determining red flags?

I mean, take this all with a giant grain of salt, because I did marry the boyfriend from my 20s, and then my needs and wants radically changed as I became a grown-up and a parent, and so then, spoiler alert, I got divorced and became a lesbian. So this is very “hindsight is 20/20.” I think part of the mistake I made was ironically because I was so career-focused, I never really thought about what I wanted a partnership or my family life to look like.

So when I met someone with whom I got along really well, I kinda stumbled into that extremely serious relationship without doing that reflection first. So, I think just understanding how big of a role our partner choice plays in our personal and professional well-being over our lifetimes is a start — it says that this is a decision we can’t make based on attraction alone. I call it “interviewing for the wrong position” because we interview for the position of boyfriend when we really need a co-CEO. What I hope is that by offering people really tactical “interview questions” for their relationships, they can almost practice self-discovery through those conversations with their partner. As you talk about these things, you’re actually getting a clearer picture of your own vision, which sometimes is only brought into relief when we see things that don’t align with it.

And that’s where the red flags come in. Because there might be these unspoken assumptions where one person has always pictured just trying to maximize their own career, and never thought of the interdependence in a relationship and a household — that’s “what happens if we both have a meeting, and one of our kids is sick?” Or it might be that someone has a wildly different view of how much it’s appropriate to rely on outside support: one of my friend’s biggest fights with her spouse isn’t that he thinks she should do all the domestic work, it’s that he just thinks they should hire someone for everything, and she’s like, well, I think parents should actually see their children.

To me, the biggest red flag — and it’s one I absolutely ignored — is the reality of what’s happening right now. If he’s not doing the dishes, or cooking, or self-actualizing, or whatever it is that worries you now, he’s not going to start later, when the squeeze hits and life gets harder. So I’d rather young women have more of these fights now, to see if things can change now, rather than once they’re more entangled or have spent years together (which are more costly to women, because of reproductive capital).

Can we talk about leisure? I think a lot of people will relate to the idea of putting on your clothes to go on a run, or setting out all of their quilting materials, and then seeing a pile of laundry on the floor and thinking: ‘I should do that instead.’ Can you talk a bit about reframing leisure through an economic investment perspective?

Again, this is where I think it’s radical to say: you’re supposed to enjoy your life! In economic terms, if you take an hour and do something you love that enhances your wellbeing, that’s just as productive as if you spent an hour earning money so you could then buy something that brought you the same jollies. Isn’t that amazing?? You were actually productive just by doing something that you like! So it isn’t taking away from anything, it isn’t interfering with anything; in fact, it is the purpose of your life.

And of course we also need to do the laundry, and we need to work so that we can eat, which also brings us pretty important jollies. But I think the utility we get directly from spending our time on things we like gets completely overlooked as equally valuable, equally productive. So the next time you set out to do something that you love, maybe that can be your mantra—I’m going to be so productive right now! I’m going to make so much utility out of my time!

This book is propulsive. It’s so readable, it’s so smart — but it’s also deeply empathetic. It’s not trying to convince everyone to make your decisions, but to make decisions that align with what feels foundationally right to them — and to avoid status quo bias. You’ve also willing to make the personal public, both in the book itself and its promotion, in a way I find compelling. How did writing for a much larger public serve your personal utility function?

Oh man, I am still in the thick of this because it is such a big change for someone who’s been an academic writing research papers for journals with, like, 100 readers on average until now. And this week I taped a TV segment where the host was like so you’re a lesbian now, tell us more. But I think part of why I wanted to share my personal story is that it’s so easy for books like this to seem trite and even gaslight-y: like, it’s so simple, and I’ve got it all figured out. But I very much didn’t. And there’s really no way to separate the research that I did from my personal life, because I did it in part to understand my life—to make sense of what was happening to me, and to my friends, and to so many other women.

I also don’t want to give the impression that now I have it all figured out. I was out of the squeeze, and then decided to reboot it by having a baby and a book-baby at the same time, and yesterday breastmilk leaked in my backpack on my laptop and now I’m typing this with one side of my screen blacked out. So, I guess I really just wanted to tell women that we are in this together, that it’s not easy, and to give us permission to navigate these realities however works for us. And that is going to be messy and imperfect and occasionally disastrous, but I also hope that it can joyful, meaningful, and loving — that we can all get our jollies. ●

You can find more about Corinne’s work here and buy Having It All here.

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I was named for my grandma (Ann) but the spelling was for another Anne: Anne of Green Gables. When I was of age, my mom read me the first book — and we watched the (now iconic) mini-series. Readers, I hated it. I should absolutely revisit it (the books and the series!) but I also understand that my reaction was a form of identity building: I hated that the most prominent Anne (of Green Gables) and Annie (of the musical) were red-headed spunky unruly girls, not because I had anything against redheads, but because I was obsessed, at that point in my life, with fitting in.

That obsession stemmed from other parts of my personality that flagged me as weird (my bookishness, my lack of sports skill, my short hair) and shadowed me for years. So I understand why I rejected these texts, but am also jealous of people who flocked to them (and, once there, found so much joy and solace). So when Ragon & Kelly commented on my post about starting a small dahlia farm with my friends, outlining their “niche Anne of Green Gables podcast,” and how it’s served their friendship….I knew I wanted to interview them before I even finished reading their comment.

As you would expect from a couple of Anne friends, they submitted their whipsmart answers ahead of time. Of course. I can’t wait to hear about your own relationship to Anne (and/or stuff you do with friends that makes your friendships expand and shine).

I think a lot of people who read this newsletter know what it’s like to love a text so much that all you want to do is talk about it with other people who get it. How did Anne of Green Gables become that text for both of you?

Ragon: Like many people of our generation – I’m at the tail end of Gen X, Kelly is an Elder Millennial – we were both first infatuated with the 1985 miniseries that played frequently on PBS and the Disney Channel. That’s the one with Megan Follows as Anne Shirley and Colleen Dewhurst as Marilla Cuthbert and that beautiful score and all those incredible shots of idyllic Prince Edward Island.

Kelly: And of course we had the same first crush in Jonathan Crombie’s portrayal of Gilbert Blythe from the miniseries. That miniseries captured the imagination of pretty much every bookish kid who liked an old-fashioned setting. Another thing we’ve noticed is that the miniseries very much aligned with a lot of the visual aesthetics of the 1980s, from the bouffant hairstyles and puffed sleeves to the country kitchens. I think a lot of us aspired to live in that version of Avonlea.

Ragon: Enjoying the show quickly led to reading the book and finding a kindred spirit in Anne, even more in print than she was on TV. Because I was a kid who loved nothing more than an endless series to read back to back and who can’t get enough of a favorite character, I was delighted to find out that there were seven more Anne books and many more books by L.M. Montgomery to fill my shelves. I’ve always been an avid rereader–I love revisiting my favorite characters and worlds, especially when life feels hard and the Anne books were some of my frequent rereads. And I think what’s special about these books is the way they reward rereading–every time I go back to them I find something new, I appreciate something different, I identify with different stages of Anne’s life, I discover some new depth. Many people are aware of Anne of Green Gables, from the first book or the miniseries, but if you love the entire series? I know we are kindred spirits!

Kelly: Reading Anne of Green Gables was a really profound experience for me in childhood. To very quickly fill your readers in on the plot of the book, Anne Shirley is eleven years old and an orphan when she is adopted by a middle aged sister and brother, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. They live and work on a farm on Prince Edward Island in the early twentieth century, and are hoping to adopt a boy to help around the farm. Due to a communication mix-up, the orphanage sends a girl instead. This girl is the talkative, impulsive, imaginative Anne. The book is about Anne’s tumultuous journey to finding family and home with the Cuthberts at Green Gables.

Like a lot of kids, I felt lonely and misunderstood, and so I identified strongly with Anne as a main character. Using imagination to cope was already very familiar to me, and the book was all about a young girl who did the exact same thing. Anne loved to read, hated her name, was competitive at school, and fell a little bit in love with trees and ponds and her closest friends – it was like seeing a version of myself on the page. Eighty years after L. M. Montgomery brought Anne to life, I felt like she was written just for me. Turns out a lot of other people feel the exact same way, and I’ve been so delighted to find them.

How did you go from “we are two people who really love these books” to “where are two people who are doing a podcast about these books?” Be detailed, you know we love process around here!!

Ragon: Kelly and I had been friends for at least 12-13 years at this point, so the foundation of friendship was strong. We attended each other’s weddings, played endless Dungeons and Dragons campaigns together with our husbands, started a little book club with a third friend and podded during Covid lockdown together. Books had always been a huge cornerstone in our friendship. We could talk about the books we were reading for hours and we both absolutely love a deep dive: like give us the lore, the fandom, the nerdy t-shirts, the fan art for all our favorite books.

We were just at the point in our friendship where we both had a little more time in our lives — both our careers were solid and while they kept us busy, they weren’t as draining as in early career life. My daughter was starting fifth grade and didn’t need as much intensive parenting so I felt like I had free time in the evening again. Covid lockdown was over which meant our social worlds and obligations were expanding again. Which was great, but we also wanted to do something fun for just us together. Much like doing a book club ensured that we made time to meet up once a month or so, we thought if we did a bigger project together, we would definitely continue to make our friendship a priority.

A podcast seemed like something we could do together that didn’t require us to be in the same space. We live in the same city, but by Los Angeles standards we don’t live that close to each other. So we batted around ideas, first in a joking way and then in a more serious way.

Kelly: It’s worth noting that these conversations took place over a period of months — we didn’t say “let’s do a podcast” one day and the next day bought microphones. It was very much a “wouldn’t it be fun if we . . .” type conversation for the better part of a year. But the more we talked about it, the more we felt like “well, yeah, that actually would be really fun.”

Ragon: Exactly — basically any time we had a really long or profound conversation we said “we should do a podcast!” but it took awhile before we realized it was an idea we were both thinking about more and more seriously. We thought about an advice podcast since we both have careers that lend themselves to giving good advice — I’m a therapist, Kelly’s a lawyer — but there are a lot of those out there, and a lot of them are really good.

We weren’t sure we’d be bringing anything new to the table. Then we thought about a more general book club podcast but there are also a lot of great book podcasts out there. But then the idea of doing a deep dive on Anne of Green Gables came up — we both loved those books and had already spent way too much time enthusing about it together. I think I got out the words “Kel, do you want to do a podcast about Anne of…” before she had already said yes and we were off.

We went out of town one weekend for what we call a “girls reading weekend” to our favorite mountain town. Usually, that involves us bringing stacks of books and reading and eating snacks and talking all weekend. This time, we decided to sit down and see if we could come up with enough ideas to make a podcast. And I think within a few hours, we had planned out the bulk of our entire first season — 18 episodes!

Kelly: We both knew we had something in that initial planning session. We were overflowing with ideas — we couldn’t take notes fast enough. It felt like the podcast already existed and we were just discovering it.

Ragon: The ideas just flowed and we bounced off of and built on each other’s ideas so naturally. Even the name of the podcast seemed obvious! We didn’t even entertain any other title because that just seemed exactly right.

We wanted to do character studies for all the characters in Anne and mapped out themes for each character we wanted to explore. We discussed parenting and motherhood through Marilla Cuthbert, the middle-aged woman who adopts young Anne Shirley under unpredictable circumstances. We discussed friendship through Diana Barry, Anne’s first friend in Avonlea.

We also thought about what type of podcasts inspired us and discussed why we thought certain elements worked or didn’t work to figure out how we wanted to structure our episodes. We liked pods where we wanted to hang out with the hosts — where it seemed like the hosts were good friends who were including us in their conversations. We liked deep nerdy dives into a particular subject area. And we loved recommendations and wanted an excuse to do that on our pod too!

It turns out that starting a podcast is not a very expensive investment. We needed microphones and a podcast hosting platform, and we chose the free level at Podbean to start (a free audio editing software). Then we use Audacity, and a shared Google doc. We record over Zoom so we don’t have to battle LA traffic to record, which would honestly be a real hurdle to recording regularly otherwise!

We script our pods fairly heavily. Our fourth episode was going to be the first of our character study episodes, after doing an intro and a couple of recap episodes of the book. We went in with only an outline figuring “Oh, we know the subject and we love to talk and it seems easy when other hosts do it, it’ll be great!” And it was awful. We talked over each other, started sentences that never got finished, went on tangents and never got back on topic, and left out chunks of content we had intended to cover. So awful we binned it and decided to script the episode instead.

Kelly: Episode Four was a real turning point for us. The recording was awful, but it wasn't unpublishably awful. We could have released it and kept going in that vein, and perhaps we would have eventually found our stride. But we both had this moment where we realized that if we were going to put this much time and effort and energy into this project, we wanted it to be good. We realized that we cared enough about the podcast to do it right, and that it was going to be worth the extra work of researching and scripting the episodes in advance, rather than flying by the seat of our pants while recording.

That was also an interesting moment because we discovered a new layer of our relationship with each other. We weren’t just close friends with a hobby, we were collaborators. And collaborators hold each other accountable and say things like “This isn’t very good, and I know we can do better.”

Ragon: So now we are a lot more intentional. We outline the whole season well in advance, and we script individual episodes. Our first couple of episodes were about 10-12 pages and now we regularly write 20 page episodes.

Kelly: There’s probably a book in there somewhere, at this point.

Ragon: We still go off topic and we try not to read word for word. We leave time for spontaneous chitchat at the top of the episode, but the script means that we cover everything we want to cover and if we get off topic, we know where to pick up the conversation. It’s also easier to edit the show in a way that flows naturally.

We release episodes every other week but at the beginning of the season we often try to write and record several episodes well in advance in case life gets busy. That way we always have a few in the can ready to release.

Kelly: We can take off time for holidays and school breaks while still staying on a regular release schedule. Earlier this year we were able to pause for a couple months following the fires in LA. I lost my home in the fires and Ragon was leading the front lines of support for me and many others in our community, so it was nice to be able to pause the podcast in that moment where we needed space to be human beings and deal with this great big awful thing.

Ragon: Building in time for breaks is also important because we both work full time and the podcast is not monetized in any way. And the truth is it’s a lot of work. It doesn’t always feel like work the same way our jobs feel like work, because the podcast is about our friendship and this shared passion, but also, it is a lot of work! It’s time-intensive, even outside of our recording sessions. When we are in the middle of a season, at any one time we are writing and researching one episode, recording another episode, editing still another episode, and listening to a finished episode for mistakes. This is really a project of friendship and enthusiasm that’s taken on a life of its own.

I first heard about Kindred Spirits when you commented on my post about the unexpected benefits of starting a small dahlia farm with your friends. Tell us about the unexpected benefits of doing this pod.

Kelly: We are both Culture Students and avid readers of your newsletter and we love getting lost in your comments section. That particular post about planting dahlias at first for fun and then forming a small dahlia farm with your friends and neighbors hit home for us, because of course that was exactly what had happened with Kindred Spirits Book Club. What started as a friendship hobby evolved into something more expansive than either of us could have predicted.

Ragon: At this point we are about to start our fifth season and our fourth year of the podcast! We have 74 episodes out there and we are on the last of the Anne books. And this ride has been WILD! We truly thought that only our close friends and our mothers might listen — and maybe a few devoted Anne fans might find us along the way.

Kelly: We always hoped the podcast would find a listenership, but we were fine knowing that Kindred Spirits Book Club would be niche. Our goal was never to quit our jobs and become podcasters. We did not have a solid promotional plan in place. We talked it up among our friends, families, neighbors and colleagues; we mentioned the podcast in the comments sections of online communities we are part of, including Culture Study; and we used social media to promote (and by that I mean we started an Instagram account, posted a few times a week, and followed every other Anne fan we could find). Mostly, though, we talked about it. It seemed like every time we met another woman our age, we found out she also nurtured a crush on Gilbert Blythe from the 1985 miniseries.

The podcast started growing by inches. A small publisher of classic books for middle grade readers called Owl’s Nest Publishing asked us to read their annotated version Anne of Green Gables. We loved it and invited them on the podcast, and all of a sudden we were a podcast that had guests?!?

Ragon: A turning point was connecting with the scholarly community who study and teach L.M. Montgomery’s work. A friend in academia told us that the L.M. Montgomery Institute was a uniquely welcoming academic space, so we decided to go to the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s biennial conference in June 2024 on Prince Edward Island, in Canada. At that point, we were finishing our third season of Kindred Spirits Book Club.

Kelly: We had good material and were proud of our show, but we were also acutely aware that the hobbyist-level work we were doing was very different from the career-level work the presenters were doing. We decided to go with open minds, to listen and learn, and to share a few postcards promoting the podcast.

Ragon: PEI is the home of Anne of Green Gables and a major center for L.M. Montgomery tourism, so in addition to the conference, it was a literary pilgrimage. The whole trip was incredible, but the conference expanded our world: we got to connect with and learn from so many scholars with so much knowledge. Our brains exploded with learning: we’d get back to our AirBnb every night and just have to braindump everything we learned. We had been a little nervous about sharing about our pod with the people we met — I mean, these were the most knowledgeable L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables scholars out there and we are a fan podcast. We still thought of Kindred Spirits Book Club as something that was mostly for the two of us and we were surprised every time we found out someone unrelated to us listened to the pod!

Kelly: The community of academics welcomed us warmly and arranged for some really unique experiences for us, including recording an episode of the podcast in L.M. Montgomery’s church. As we began to plan our fourth season, we realized we knew real experts who would guest on our show, answer our emails, provide advice and inspiration, and who loved to talk about Anne and L.M. Montgomery as much as we did.

Ragon: Not only have we had the opportunity to have some of those scholars on the pod, but we’ve gotten feedback that we are really doing something valuable! That feels a little unreal still.

Kelly: And we are learning to hold our own in deeper conversations with people who are approaching these books at a higher level, which has been a wonderful creative and intellectual challenge for us. After the conference, we started to think more critically about growth, whether and how we wanted to grow as a podcast. We met with a couple professional podcast producers, including Jessica Alpert, who we met in the Culture Study classifieds, who gave us advice about how to find more listeners. We decided our goal was to make sure that if someone was looking for a podcast about Anne of Green Gables, they could find us.

And that seems to be working. One person who was recently looking for a podcast about Anne of Green Gables was Kat Sandler, a playwright, director, and producer who had just been commissioned to create a new theatrical version of Anne of Green Gables for the Stratford Theater Festival in Ontario, Canada. While Kat was writing the play, part of her research and immersion in the material was listening to our podcast. Once the show was in rehearsals, she reached out to us. We had her on Kindred Spirits Book Club as our guest, and then she invited us to attend the opening night of Anne of Green Gables as her guests. We were honored to have been even a small part of her creative process. The show is absolutely phenomenal and still playing through November 16, if anyone in the Toronto or Great Lakes region gets a chance to see it.

Ragon: Meeting so many people who want to talk about Anne of Green Gables with us has been such a special, life-affirming and connecting benefit of starting this pod. We recently did a substack live with another Culture Student, Lisa Sibbett of The Auntie Bulletin. Continuing to engage with so many people not just as fans of Anne but as a touchpoint to talk about so many of the themes and issues that continue to resonate for our contemporary circumstances — found family, building community, how to hold high ideals but also live in the real world — we love being a part of these conversations.

We were both so touched when our little podcast community really stepped up to help replace the library of L.M.Montgomery books that Kelly lost in the fires. It was a small, bright kindness during a terrible time that was a little tangible proof of how connection can grow through the airwaves and the internet.

I think another unintended benefit has also been the chance to keep stretching our intellectual brains. Of course both of our jobs require thought and expertise, but you can kind of get into the groove of your career and forget about learning things outside of that realm. I haven’t done literature deep dives since college and I love getting to flex that muscle and remember that I like creative writing and close reading. And learning new skills! I took on the task of learning how to edit the pod; that’s a whole new skill in an area of tech that’s not usually in my wheelhouse and I’m really proud of slowly building that skill.

Kelly: Somehow along the way, we went from two friends geeking out about a beloved book from our childhoods to mini celebrities in a very niche field. Now we are working on our conference presentation for next year and plotting our fifth season. It doesn't even feel real. For us, having this shared passion, this shared goal of creating something we enjoyed and were proud of, and a really solid foundation of respect and care for each other was what allowed this little hobby podcast to grow the way it has. That and time: lots of it; making time and putting in effort have given the podcast the room it needed to grow.

Ragon: I think neither of us could have predicted that we would get this far or that the pod would grow the way that it has but it’s so exciting to think about how we will continue to grow in the future. This has been the best journey to go on and Kelly is the only person with whom I could imagine doing this kind of project. The intentionality, focus and time we’ve brought to the podcast also means we’ve brought intentionality, focus and time to our friendship.

Postscript from Kelly and Ragon:

We are so excited to launch into our Fifth Season, which features an in-depth the last book in the Anne series: Rilla of Ingleside. For those who aren’t familiar with the book, it’s through the eyes of Anne’s youngest daughter and her experience of World War I on the Canadian homefront. It’s also one of the only books about the experience of Canadian women and girls on the homefront during this period — written by someone who experienced it herself. The new season launches October 3rd!

Follow Kindred Spirts on your podcast player of choice here — and follow Kindred Spirts on Instagram here. (And find out a lot more on the pod’s website!)

Free Subscribers: If you liked that and want access to all the other good stuff (the sprawling & surprising comments sections, the weekly threads, the book recs!) and the knowledge that you’re helping fund the stuff that makes your life more interesting — consider subscribing:

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And if you have questions for Kelly and Ragon about their work, their process, or Anne….they’ll be here in the comments and eager to answer!

Additional Reading:

Also, this Sunday we’re doing the fall edition of friend-maybe-even-romantic matchmaking — if you want to find Culture Study readers in your area, find or start an online book group, or write a very Culture Study personal ad….become a paid subscriber today to get immediate access to Sunday’s thread.

Everyone’s lives have been touched, in some way, by addiction — and over the last ten years, more and more people’s lives have intersected with the rehab industrial complex. For some people, rehab has really worked — while others, and their loved ones, have struggled to figure out why it doesn’t. The answer is complex, because addiction is complex, but one of the reasons rehab doesn’t work for so many is actually quite simple: it’s run as a profit center.

Shoshana Walter is a powerhouse investigative journalist — and she’s written a real stomach punch of an investigative book. She follows the stories of four different people who traveled through the rehab system, illuminating the various ways the system has expanded to exploit the vulnerable. This is really eye-opening shit; read on to understand the extent of the scandal.

You can buy Rehab: An American Scandal here — and read more about Shoshana’s work here.

Last month, I published an interview with Melody Glenn about her book, which interweaves the story of Dr. Marie Nyswander, who fought to mainstream methadone maintenance treatment, and Glenn’s own path as a burnt-out emergency physician whose mind was gradually changed about the medical establishment’s understanding and treatment of addiction. It’s a really excellent companion to your book, but it got me thinking about timing.

There was a wave of books (and journalism) grappling with the reality of the opioid epidemic, and now it feels like there is a wave of journalism grappling with our pretty abject failure to confront it. So before we get into the meat of your reporting, I want to hear more about how you’re thinking of this moment in the larger timeline of opioid addiction and treatment.

Over the past 25+ years of the opioid epidemic, our country has undergone something of a transformation in regards to addiction. During the crack cocaine epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s, addiction was almost universally viewed as a moral failing, deserving of punishment and incarceration — especially of Black and Brown drug users.

And then the opioid epidemic came around. It started as a pain pill epidemic, mainly impacting White communities. And the approach to addiction became something completely different. Suddenly, lawmakers — including notably tough-on-crime Dems such as then-Senator Joe Biden — were referring to addiction as a disease deserving of compassion. And the solution to this drug crisis was not prison, but addiction treatment. Biden in particular really championed this effort to find and launch a pharmaceutical “cure” for addiction. And lawmakers undertook this enormous expansion of our treatment system. We entered into partnership with a for-profit pharmaceutical company to launch the gold standard treatment med Suboxone, and the Affordable Care Act expanded treatment access to millions of Americans.

Then we saw this huge demand for accountability, and Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were cast as the villains of this story. There were waves of books and television shows about the company’s malfeasance and profiteering and corruption. The company declared bankruptcy, and waves of lawsuits forced drug manufacturers and distributors to pay up.

So where are we now?

More than one million people have died since the start of the epidemic. Today, about 80,000 Americans die of overdoses every year. We’ve seen some decline in overdose deaths, but we’re still near pre-pandemic levels. And that doesn’t account for the people whose overdoses were thankfully reversed, or the millions of people in this country who continue to struggle with substance use or addiction, or who have family members or friends who do. The expansion of our treatment system did not solve this problem, nor did the punishment of Purdue Pharma. These hard-won and well-intended efforts served as compelling narratives, but ultimately fell short.

I think — I hope — the country may be at a place where we can all acknowledge that this isn’t working, and try to figure out something that does.

With that established: how does “rehab” live in the popular imagination — and how does that image contrast with the reality of the system, which, as you argue, is ruled by profit and punishment? (Secondary question, of course, is how that first image is put in place to distract us from the profit-minded, punishment-rooted reality)

We’re all familiar with rehab (or think we’re familiar with rehab) because we’ve all seen those books and movies and stories about out-of-control celebs who check themselves into rehab, especially the fancy ones in Malibu, stay for a month, and then leave with a new lease on life.

These programs are typically insurance or private-pay-funded. They often rely on a curriculum that has been developed around Alcoholics Anonymous or the 12 steps. And they often last a maximum of one or two months. The reality of these 30-day programs — even the ones with the best of intentions — is that they often fuel relapse. People leave without the support system from which they benefited within rehab, they return to regular life, and they relapse.

In fact, someone who completes a 30-day treatment program is much more likely to overdose and die in the year following treatment than someone who failed to complete the program altogether. That’s because these programs often require prolonged abstinence from a person’s drug of choice, leading to reduced tolerance for that drug. So when someone leaves rehab and relapses — taking the same amount as before — it is now suddenly too much, and it leads to overdose. In the age of fentanyl, that can be detrimental or even deadly.

And this is the system that exists for people with some semblance of means. For those without, there are longer-term programs (typically not insurance-funded) that are often faith-based, unlicensed by any regulatory authority, bar evidence-based medications, and often require uncompensated work. These programs often employ behavior modification techniques that are very punishment-driven and aim to push patients to rock-bottom in order to build them back up.

With very little oversight, these kinds of programs can very easily go off the rails. I found programs all over the country that effectively utilized their patients as a temp labor force. One program I wrote about in the book sent patients to work at Exxon and Shell oil refineries, working up to 80 hours per week. Their only pay: a single pack of cigarettes per week. Residents rarely received counseling or adequate medical care. And this was a program that was licensed. Many regulators and judges that were sending people to this program were not only aware of these practices — they endorsed them. Even with the the cultural shift around addiction, there is still this enduring belief that addicted people deserve and need punishment in order to change.

There are some institutions in American society that, when run well, absolutely resist profit optimization. Daycares are one of them. Treatment centers, to my mind, is another. But one of the throughlines of the book is that once these centers came to be understood, by capital interests, as potential profit centers, they also became increasingly unsafe for many of the people who needed them most.

There are so many places in the book where staff break their own protocols (or legal guidelines) in order to save money, or keep someone in their treatment (instead of transferring them to a place where they could get the care that matched their needs). Can you talk about a few of the most egregious ways rehab centers have standardized the prioritization of profit over care?

Addiction treatment used to be this niche territory, occupied by palatial retreats solely for the wealthy, or rag-tag government-funded nonprofits. Then the Affordable Care Act expanded insurance coverage of addiction treatment to millions of Americans and completely transformed the treatment landscape. Suddenly, treatment became a viable business, and insurance-funded programs proliferated, offering care designed to maximize profits through billable services. These programs are limited by what insurance companies are willing to cover.

Even high-quality treatment programs are frustrated by those limitations: I spoke with many treatment company owners who were frustrated by the 30-day maximum often imposed by insurance companies. One owner referred to this as a “cycler.” Rehab patients come in, they leave, and then they relapse and come back — often starting with detox, a more expensive (and profitable) level of care.

In fact, many treatment facilities have now made these high relapse rates a part of their business model. That same facility employed staff who would call former patients to find out if they had relapsed, and if they had (especially if they had high-paying insurance), they would re-enroll them. This was the rehab’s “after-care” service. Instead of providing ongoing support after rehab, the program would simply bring them back in for another round.

And when it comes to for-profit treatment, what I’m describing is just the least of it. Finding a quality treatment program in the United States is treacherous. Many programs utilize marketing companies who use online ads and 1-800 numbers to recruit patients with the best insurance policies to specific programs. Some utilize “body brokers” who get paid thousands of dollars per patient, sometimes even passing on that payment to the patients themselves. There are recovery influencers, such as Michael Lohan (the father of actress Lindsay Lohan), who have easily found steady streams of patients to place in exchange for kickbacks. Some patients actually sustain their drug habits by selling themselves into rehab. I got great insight into all this from a former marketing company owner who made millions doing this work but felt immense guilt and abandoned the industry after seeing dozens of his brokered patients overdose and die.

Rehabs are able to afford the cost of brokers and marketing companies by overbilling insurance companies for unnecessary services, such as urine tests, which are so lucrative they have become known in the industry as “liquid gold.” I reviewed financial records from one mom whose son died of an overdose immediately upon returning home from 88 days in rehab. Soon thereafter, she received a bill for $202,860 for 42 urine tests (that’s more than $4,800 per test). There is no evidence that such frequent drug testing is necessary for someone in treatment.

And then there is the lack of regulation and oversight. In California, which is one of two main hubs for treatment in the United States, outpatient programs are not required to be licensed. Nor are sober living homes. Patients can file complaints about any rehab program, but regulators do not investigate facilities that don’t require licensure, and the investigations they do pursue are often cursory and glacial. There are currently about 2,000 licensed facilities in all of California, mostly concentrated in Southern California. Yet there are only five investigators located in that region of the state.

One of the people I follow in the book is a grandmother from Los Angeles named Wendy McEntyre. Wendy decided to make it her mission to root out corruption in the for-profit treatment industry after her own son died in a sober living home. Her methods are often extreme: while I was reporting her story, Wendy was arrested for felony kidnapping after she helped a teenager escape an abusive facility. Several programs had filed restraining orders and libel lawsuits against her. She operates a 24-hour hotline that feeds directly to her cell phone, so that anyone can reach her at any time of day or night to report an abusive facility.

Wendy investigated a treatment program in the San Bernardino mountains that had a pattern of overmedicating patients to the point of impairment. One such patient, 21-year-old Donavan Doyle, fled and disappeared into the snow and fog. His remains were found months later, a mile down the side of the mountain. At least two other patients died after receiving powerful cocktails of medications that records showed were not actually prescribed to them.

Wendy investigated the hell out of this facility. She sent hundreds of emails and filed dozens of complaints with regulators and law enforcement. And yet neither the state nor law enforcement ever shut the place down. The owner closed the facility himself after going into debt following a series of wrongful death lawsuits.

When I spoke with the owner of this facility, he told me that he had good intentions — and that how he operated his program is industry standard. Sadly, I do think there’s some truth in that. So many of these programs are detrimental for patients, yet no one is doing an adequate job of looking out for them.

So many pieces of the various narratives in the book gesture to a need to understand rehab not as a place you go, or even a meeting you attend, but a whole web of interlocking services and safety nets. The more access you have to that web — psychological care, reliable transportation, family with means — the more effective treatment becomes.

Can you talk about how that reality played out in the lives of the people whose lives you catalog in the book, and how we see it playing out in the larger statistics, particularly as pertains to race and location, when it comes to relapse, incarceration, and overdoses?

Yes, and I should preface this by acknowledging that treatment can be life-changing for many people. Most people go to treatment three or four times before entering long-term recovery. There’s a substantial portion of people who go six or more times. That speaks to the problems in our treatment system, but also the difficulty of recovering from addiction. And multiple bouts of treatment can be beneficial.

But I found in my reporting that it’s often what happens after treatment that is just as important — maybe even more important — than the treatment itself. Research emphasizes the importance of “recovery capital,” the mixture of internal and external resources that people draw from in order to enter and sustain recovery. This can include community and social supports, but also financial stability, a job, housing, food, transportation, healthcare. The more recovery capital a person accrues, the greater their chance of success.

The longer someone remains in their addiction in the United States, the harder it is to retain or grow recovery capital. Because of our country’s drug policies, addiction has all sorts of collateral consequences. It can trigger additional physical and mental health problems, lead to incarceration, and the loss of civil rights and government benefits. It can make it impossible for someone to find housing, a job, or obtain loans. If addiction came without consequences, some people would never find the motivation to recover. But at some point, the consequences of addiction become as much of a barrier to recovery as the addiction itself. Those obstacles become impossible to overcome, keeping many people in the cycle of addiction, without the resources and ability to climb out.

And access to recovery capital is unequal. The same structural barriers that create inequality along race and gender lines also impact someone’s chances of recovering from their addiction. In addition, there’s massive racial disparities in who has access to treatment, especially addiction treatment medications like buprenorphine, which can reduce overdose deaths by more than 50 percent. Studies have found that Black patients are the least likely to enter addiction treatment and least likely to finish it, in large part due to the socioeconomic stressors they face in the outside world. These patients also face disproportionate risk of arrest and incarceration for drug offenses, and someone who is recently released after a period of incarceration is at exponentially higher risk for overdose death. In fact, even as we’re seeing overdose deaths ticking down nationwide, we are seeing rates rise in Black and Indigenous communities.

As always, mothers experience the worst of this. We’ve known for decades that treatment programs that allow mothers to remain with their children have the best outcomes for families. About 70 percent of women struggling with addiction have children. It’s one of the top reasons women cite for not entering treatment. And yet, since the start of the epidemic, the number of facilities catering to mothers have drastically declined. Today, less than five percent of all programs nationwide provide child care for patients, and fewer than three percent allow patients to bring their children with them. Pregnant women are routinely turned away from treatment programs, while others come up against months-long wait lists. Meanwhile, the overdose death rate among mothers has been skyrocketing. Mothers are literally dying — or being forcibly separated from their children — because they can’t find treatment.

You can see these different trajectories play out in the lives of two people in my book: April Lee and Chris Koon. Chris is a middle class White guy from Louisiana, who was court-ordered into a program that required him to work up to 80 hours per week without pay. After getting injured on the job and failing to complete the program, he returned home and assumed he would be sentenced to prison. Instead, the judge gave him probation, and Chris moved in with his dad, who helped support him as he got on his feet. His parents helped Chris pay for Suboxone, and Chris finished a welding program, got a job, married a girl and moved on with his life. It was still very difficult for him, he faced obstacles, but recovery capital made it much easier.

April, on the other hand, was a Black single mom of three living in poverty when she was sexually assaulted and addiction took over her life. As the sole caregiver and breadwinner, April did not feel she had the capacity to take time away from her kids to get better. Eventually, her kids were removed by child welfare authorities, and April went off the deep end. She became homeless, sustained herself through sex work, and then desperate to stop the cycle of addiction, she got herself arrested. Even though she was incredibly motivated, it took April a lot longer than Chris to get on her feet, and even longer to reunite with her kids because she did not have the same amount of recovery capital.

You see celebrities with all the privileges in the world entering rehab and coming out. Many of them relapse. They still don’t lose it all. If recovery is this difficult for them, imagine how difficult it is for people who don’t have anything to lose.

The full title of the book is Rehab: An American Scandal. Sometimes, when we spend so much time with a subject, we’re no longer scandalized by the realities: we understand them, we despise them, but they’re….just how it is, and how it feels like it will continue to be. What scandalized you first about this larger American story — and what scandalizes you most today?

I was shocked to learn that someone who completes a 30-day program is at higher risk of overdose death than someone who didn’t complete that program. Or that someone who is recently released after a period of incarceration is 40 times more likely than the general population to overdose and die. These are two of our country’s main responses to addiction: an insurance-funded, short-term residential stint, or incarceration. And yet these methods increase the risk of death.

Then you have lawmakers and judges endorsing rehab programs that work people to the point of injury or death. And moms dying or being separated from their children because they can’t access treatment. I mean, I still can’t believe it. This is the gist of my book and I am honestly still scandalized by it.

Time and again, lawmakers in our country have gone through periods of supporting treatment as a “cure” for addiction, and when those efforts ultimately fail to live up to their promise, there’s a swing in the other direction, toward more punitive policies. I think we’re seeing that now, with the federal government declaring a war on fentanyl, with states cracking down on homelessness and passing mandatory minimum sentences for fentanyl-related offenses. These policies are likely to further marginalize addicted people, and make it that much harder for many of them to escape addiction.

Studies show that longer-term treatment, often within someone’s own community, works better for most people. What works is ongoing support, especially with peer specialists or community groups, and with treatment medications such as buprenorphine and methadone. And most essential of all, what works is recovery capital. There are good programs across the country doing this work. It is not impossible. And I believe this with my whole heart: we can do better. ●

You can buy Rehab: An American Scandal here — and read more about Shoshana’s work here.

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. 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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Further Reading/Listening:

The Culture Study Podcast

How Private Equity Destroys the Companies You Depend On

Chances are high that you’ve heard about the way that “private equity” has acquired, hollowed out, and bankrupted some service, product, or company you depend on. For years, I understood the work of private equity only in the vaguest terms — that it was bad, and that it f*cked stuff up. I had to learn a lot more when I was writing…

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10 months ago · 31 likes · 19 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

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And make sure and check out this week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast, which is all about how internet speech develops, spreads, and expands into our offline conversations (if you want to understand the Skibidi Rizz of it all, or if you’re just weirded about by brands using phrases like YAS QUEEN….this is the ep for you).

The Culture Study Podcast

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

By Anne Helen Petersen

Want to know about the particular pressures of writing an online recipe? Or how bubble tea seemingly came out of nowhere (and whether it’s going to disappear, like so many other seemingly faddish desserts?) Have you noticed how seemingly no one threw dinner parties for decades….and now they are? Or wondered how race and trad wife aspirational lifestyle content intersect? Maybe you just want to revel in smart writing (in short essay form, which I know so many of you love) about all corners of why we eat (and fetishize food) the way we eat (and fetishize food) now.

All Consuming is the book for you, written by the great Ruby Tandoh, who, in addition to being the runner-up on The Great British Bake Off, has also been through it when it comes to the food-writing/recipe-development/food celebrity industrial complex. As you’ll see below, her writing manages to be cutting, jaunty, and wry — just exquisite. You’re going to love this interview, and then you’re going to love All Consuming.

You can read more of Ruby Tandoh’s work here and buy All Consuming here.

A good way to introduce readers to the pulse of the book would be to talk a bit about Christopher Driver’s book The British At Table, 1940-1980, which examines the rise of totally unforeseeable trends in British cooking and eating over the course of just forty years. In the intro to All Consuming, you use this framework to think about what people in the 1980s would’ve found difficult to imagine about the way we cook and eat today. Tell us more!

That’s right. So Christopher Driver, who was a British food writer, wrote that book in the early eighties at the time that the word ‘foodie’ was worming its way into the discourse. Actually, maybe it’s better to say that it was the time that the discourse itself was invented — this constant chatter about food, the fixation on food-based cultural clout. Driver wanted to figure out how all of this happened, and why, and — crucially — why now. The way Driver saw it, there were a few things that would’ve been unimaginable just forty years before, including diet gurus, mainstream vegetarianism, and the foodies.

There’s something really fruitful about this hypothetical positioning, imagining how the culture might look from some other vantage point. There are so many things that we’re so immersed in that they feel obvious to us: cheeseburgers, restaurant critics, even something as simple as the need for an attractive photo alongside a recipe. But if you travel back a couple of generations, all of it would have seemed niche, even absurd. For me, this minor perspectival shift is what brings everything into relief. It lets you see what’s interesting and new, and creates space to sift through the reasons why it’s come about. It also throws up beautiful threads of continuity – things that feel so zeitgeisty, like TikTok influencers, but have wonderful historical parallels. The average American consumer in the 1940s might well have understood [Instagram Food Critic] Keith Lee better than we know.

We do a periodic thread of “what are you cooking” here on Culture Study, and I’m always interested to see how certain recipes and sites circulate, become popular, become mainstays, and recede. Readers here are going to love your chapter on recipe generation, so I’d love to give them a taste (sorry): what makes a recipe “sell”?

So full disclosure, I used to write recipes. I had a baking column in a newspaper, and then I wrote cookbooks, so I spent the first few years of my writing career trying to anticipate what people might want to cook and how to help with that. And then a point came where I couldn’t face it any more: in a world of seemingly infinite recipes, most of which you can access at a click, what more could I possibly contribute? Don’t we have enough of this stuff already?

That ambivalence sparked the very first chapter of All Consuming. I researched the changing shape and tone of cookbooks, then the migration of the recipe avant-garde into food magazines like Gourmet, then the movement of recipes onto the internet and then social media. I noticed certain overtures above and beyond the micro-fluctuations like the chopped salad trend. They were structural changes in the way that recipes work, and it called to mind [media theorist] Marshall McLuhan — every time the medium for recipe sharing changes, so do the recipes themselves.

A recipe in a cookbook is sold on the authority of its author, and on the vision of the book as a whole, but once a recipe breaks free onto the internet, it suddenly has to sell itself. It does this through the photos or the videos, the choice deployment of certain keywords in the name (“cheesy”, “crunchy”, “crispy”, “creamy”), the twist towards superlatives like “the BEST EVER brownies” and just general SEO and algorithm-gamification. Recipes have had to evolve to stand out in an increasingly crowded ecosystem. It has yielded extraordinary new permutations, and also some horrors.

Maybe the most interesting shift in all this is the role of the recipe writer themselves. The job of the recipe writer used to be to record and convey knowledge, maybe at most to have a theory of how cookery should be. Now, a recipe writer must also be a recipe developer, creating a new twist, working on a sciencey improvement to the basic chemistry of a cookie, engineering something that feels fresh. And crucially, they must also be a recipe marketer — a recipe is good not just if it’s good, but if it sells.

“There is no practical reason to drink bubble tea,” you write, “no culture to which it is truly traditional.” Can you trace the path of bubble tea across the globe — and break down your argument about why you think it’s become so popular? (I’m also curious if you think it’ll have staying power given the fate of so many other faddish desserts/drinks!)

It’s really hard to think of another food – except for perhaps the cheeseburger – that has achieved anything like the lightspeed and global reach of bubble tea. Fifty years ago, it wasn’t A Thing, even in Taiwan. But then someone had the bright idea of putting tapioca pearls (popular in many East and South East Asian desserts) into strong milky tea (made with British-style strong Indian tea, and mixed with American-influenced creamer) and shaking the tea up (a method a Taiwanese bartender had learned in Japan a couple of decades before).

Already, you can see how many post-colonial threads are getting tangled here. Within a couple of decades, the drink was huge in Taiwan, then it spread through nearby parts of Asia, then to diaspora communities worldwide. Where All Consuming picks up is in the UK in the early 2010s, when the first British bubble tea chain opens. Our conversion was even quicker: within fifteen years, we’ve gone from having almost no bubble tea to it being everywhere. How did this even happen? I wanted to really dig into the reasons, to pick through how and why a food takes off. And it turns out that it comes down to the timely intersection of a bunch of things, from the changing nature of food media, to the shift of emphasis from food manufacture to marketing, and the hedonic pathways opened up by the internet.

To understand how bubble tea became the international hype food that it is, you have to look not just at a physical terroir, but how all these forces came together at a critical moment in time. In 2012, which is around the time this all kicked off, the UK got Instagram — a bubble tea hall of mirrors for a time. We also started to accept many more students from mainland China, as the university funding system was overhauled. Migration laws have, simultaneously, made it harder for working class migrants — including cooks — to come here, and rents have increased, and chains have proliferated. And in comes bubble tea, a drink spread not by migrant workers but by migrant consumers, sold in inexpensive tiny shops and often made without any particular expertise. I think that’s why it’s stuck around so much more insistently than the average trend: it’s not just a reflection of changing aesthetics, but a fundamental shift in how food systems work. Like the burger, it’s the symptom of a new cultural mode.

I appreciated the chapter on tradwife (and tradwife adjacent) domestic influencers, in part because you situate these accounts within a much larger understanding of teaching women how to “do the work” — for their own homes, but also for others, and how magazines like Ebony, aimed at the growing Black middle class, made doing this work *for your own home* aspirational, in part by featuring Black stars like Dorothy Dandridge in the same sort of domestic idylls as their white Hollywood contemporaries.

For the white Hollywood stars, these photoshoots and accompanying articles worked to neutralize their self-evident power (they were working women) and their potential for scandal (mothers, not vixens). You argue that for Dandridge and other Black stars, these features did something slightly different: they suggested that Black women, too, deserved a beautiful life.

You talk about this a briefly in the book, but I’d love to hear more about your relationship to the beautiful lives of influencers like Nara Smith — as you write, “there’s no accounting for why I’m so interested in these women, I tell myself, but then I know that’s not true.”

You’re right about that subtextual difference between how these features worked in white women’s magazines versus in the Black press. In magazines like Ebony, which got its start almost immediately after the Second World War and in a moment of relative prosperity, so much of the content comes back to the question of ownership. Literal ownership — of houses, cars, barbecues, with the advertising to match — but also a more holistic feeling of ownership among readers over their fate, career paths and domestic lives, all the way down to something as small as how to cook a chicken. Bearing in mind the fact that a great many Black women were still employed in white households at the time, this desire to reclaim the Black home — even to make it a sanctuary — had particular resonance.

So for me, when I started seeing Nara Smith on my Instagram For You page, and then got caught up in the many opinion pieces and discourse squalls in her wake, I was fascinated. Women, and especially Black women, have been wrangling with these questions for so long, and you can’t understand Nara Smith solely from the perspective of an extremely Online person in 2025. But there was also a more personal side to my curiosity. Even when I was young, I was obsessed with other people’s home lives. I watched shows about parenting, about big Mormon families, about foster kids, about well-deserved home makeovers, about hoarders — anything that addressed, obliquely or head on, the emotional mechanics of the home.

But when I got into food, I noticed that cooking talk hardly ever incorporated kids or families or even glancing mention of the home. It was like keeping a home or raising a family was one thing, and cooking was something entirely unrelated: an expression of pure culture, a craft, a hobby, a discussion point. Food media dealt with eating, but never with feeding. So to see Nara Smith, I was hooked. She had this weird performance art thing going on, yes, but she was going down these hyper-nerdy food rabbit holes while placing these experiments in a context of cooking for a family. She’s a fascinating bridge between those worlds.

I didn’t realize it until you said it, but people really don’t throw dinner parties anymore — at least not the way they used to. How did the dinner party become cringe, and how has your own thinking on making dinner for other people in a party-like-scenario changed with time? And if people feel intimidated by the over-determined prospect of “entertaining,” but also feel more ambitious than just throwing a potluck, but also don’t want to just make everything from Alison Roman’s Nothing Fancy, where do you recommend starting?

So dinner parties took over from cocktail parties in the ‘60s and ‘70s. (Until then, hors d’oeuvres really were the height of sophistication. Even James Beard wrote a book on the topic.) I think the initial impetus was reactionary: in a highly processed post-war American food landscape, the marker of class was to cook using “real” ingredients and “authentic” recipes and with an eye turned towards France. So you get the rise of Gourmet, with its beautiful and ornately out-of-touch dinner party menus. You get people talking earnestly about recipes for terrine. And by the eighties, the dinner party apex, you have Martha Stewart’s debut Entertaining, which took the entire sensibility to new extremes. And then you know how the cringe cycle goes: it starts with sincerity (the post-war gourmands, inspired by Julia Child), then reaches saturation (Martha Stewart), then becomes cringe.

We’ve been living through the cringe part of the cycle since the nineties, when dinner parties became passé, even indicative of some moral rot. So people started using euphemisms. Instead of dinner parties, you invite people over for dinner. You entertain. (But not too much.) You throw something together. You partake of a kind of culinary sprezzatura, in the Alison Roman vein – the “Oh? This old thing? I just threw it together!” And the focus became not how complex the creations were (so croquembouche was very much out) but how honest the food was, how truthful to its origins.

There was still a huge amount of effort involved, but it had migrated from the cooking itself to the procurement of perfect ingredients. But the cringe cycle must continue. After cringe, it returns through a kind of ironic reclamation, before once more becoming sincere. We’re seeing the tongue-in-cheek dinner party revival already in motion. Look on Instagram, and you might notice silver platters beginning to appear with alarming regularity. A vol-au-vent. A princesstorte. A croquembouche.

For anyone who wants to avoid all of this posturing and just cook from the heart, you don’t need my advice to do that. But if you want to entertain without ruining your day, and to please your guests, believe it or not Martha Stewart may offer some guidance. She got us into this mess, but she can also get us out. Instead of a dinner party, she suggests, why not throw a dessert buffet? An omelette party? A soirée dansante? All deranged, all delightful. ●

You can read more of Ruby Tandoh’s work here and buy All Consuming here.

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Further Reading/Listening:

The Culture Study Podcast

How a Cookbook Gets Made

This is such a delight of an episode! We’ve been wanting to do a big cookbook conversation since the start of the podcast, and when America’s Test Kitchen emailed to see if we’d be interested in talking to Sarah Ahn about Umma— the cookbook she put together with her mom (!!!) documenting the Korean recipes that have defined her past and present life— we…

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a year ago · 34 likes · Anne Helen Petersen

The Culture Study Podcast

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

By Anne Helen Petersen

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

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

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

Now, let’s hear from Leslie about how she organizes all the puzzle pieces of rehearsals and concerts and more rehearsals — and why people think she charges too much for her work (and what they’re actually paying for).

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

I’m a pianist and accompanist; I play for multiple schools and community choirs, as well as a church and for various theater groups. I also have a part time job doing finance/accounting for a (different) church. I also teach piano lessons for a few students.

For people who aren’t familiar, can you describe what an accompanist does?

An accompanist is someone who plays the piano (usually piano; there are organists who are accompanists as well) for an ensemble or soloist who is performing on an instrument or as a singer. In recent years, the more used term is Collaborative Pianist.

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

Each day for me is different, so I’ll give a weekly overview of what I have that is consistent from week to week and generally stays the same (at least during the school year).

Sunday: Church in the morning until around 11:00, teaching lessons in the afternoon, community choir rehearsal in the evening from 6:00-8:30

Monday: School choir rehearsal (School A) in the morning and afternoon from about 9:30-3:00; orchestra rehearsal (this is a non-paying gig; I play in a community orchestra) in the evening from 7:00-9:00

Tuesday: School choir rehearsal (School A) from 9:30-12:30, school choir rehearsal (School B) from 12:30-4:00

Wednesday: Work at my non-music job** until around 1:30 (my hours are flexible but I usually try to be in my office by 9:00); School A rehearsal 2:00-3:00; church (worship service and rehearsal) from 6:30-8:30

Thursday: Mornings I am usually at my non-music job; School B rehearsal from 12:30-3:00

Friday: School A rehearsal from 9:30-12:30; afternoons alternate between school B from 12:30-4:00 and school A from 2:00-3:00

**My non-music job involves working at a church and handling financials. This is a part-time job that is usually 10-12 hours a week. Because it is geographically fairly close to both schools I play for during the school day, I will often fit in a couple hours here and there throughout the week either before or in between my other rehearsals. I also spend time on this job at home in the evenings and on Saturdays depending on the week.

These are the basics of my schedule. What isn’t included here are the things I do that are shorter term or sporadic.

In addition to the two schools above (A and B), I regularly play for three to five other schools in the area. For these schools, I usually have to schedule four to six rehearsals for each concert, and then figure out how to wedge those into my existing schedule. I may tell school B that I’m not available on a specific Tuesday afternoon so that I can go to school C instead on that afternoon. I may tell school A that I have to leave at 11:00 instead of 12:30 on one Friday so I can fit in a rehearsal at school C in between the morning and afternoon rehearsals at school A.

School choir concerts are almost always on a weekday evening, so whenever I have a concert, that will be added to the calendar on an evening. Often they are on Tuesdays or Thursdays, but if they are scheduled on a Monday I will miss my own orchestra rehearsal and if they are scheduled on a Wednesday I will find a substitute to play for me at my church.

I also play for a semi-professional choir that performs three or four concerts a year. For this choir, we will schedule rehearsals three to four rehearsals in the weeks before the concert, usually on Sunday afternoons. Concerts with this ensemble take up a Friday evening for dress rehearsal, a Saturday afternoon/evening for a concert, and then a Sunday afternoon for an additional concert.

And then there are musical theater productions. When I’m hired as a musician only, the time commitment is generally about a week of nightly rehearsals before the show opens, and then three or four shows per weekend for the run of the show. (If I am playing for a high school show there is usually just one weekend of performances, if it is a community theater production there are usually at least two weekends, sometimes three.)

If I’m hired as the music director for a show, the time commitment is much greater, requiring multiple nights of rehearsals over the course of ~six weeks. With community productions, rehearsals usually run Sunday-Thursday evenings in the later evening. I have one school that I regularly music direct for in the spring, but those rehearsals are earlier in the evenings. There’s a longer time commitment (we start rehearsals towards the end of February and start performances the first week of May). When I’m involved in these productions I can generally keep all of my evening commitments that are already in place since rehearsals are generally from around 3:00-5:30.

Lastly, I also accompany individuals for recitals or solo contests, usually facilitated through one of the schools. Sometimes the school will arrange an event; sometimes there is a state-wide contest day in which any school can participate. For these rehearsals, I schedule blocks of time where I can be available (usually before or after school) to rehearse with these students in between all of my other scheduled rehearsals.

How do you organize your future? (Planning for future work, planning for time off, etc.)

I usually have a general idea of the overall shape of my year, which is mostly dictated by the school calendar. I ask for concert dates from the schools I play for as early as possible to navigate any potential conflicts. I also try to plan for any musicals I know I will be involved in by adding rehearsal start dates and show dates to my calendar right away, even knowing that I won’t be needed for every single one.

I love to travel; it’s one of the things I try to do every year as much as possible. It’s the only ‘time-off’ I take. Generally I will try to plan ahead and schedule a trip right after I know I have a concert or show. Because I set the specifics of my schedule, I’ll often travel during the week.

Every once in a while I will try to plan for a day that I can have completely “off.” I might pick a Monday after finishing a show, or a Friday after a concert. I usually only do this during a time when I’ve had a few weeks without any days off; where I’ve had Saturday commitments as well as my usual Sunday-Monday work. I will let my schools know I’m not available (if it’s after a concert I will often not be required for rehearsal anyway) and try to refrain from scheduling appointments. I like to use those days to sleep in, read a book, and do laundry….mostly I just want to stay home and enjoy my space!

How do you manage your income streams? Software, specific accountant needs, you can take this in whatever direction you need. Does accompanist work feel stable?

I probably don’t keep as close an eye on this as I should. My income fluctuate quite a bit month to month. The only thing that stays consistent are my two church jobs. These two (one music, one not) pay me enough to almost completely cover my mortgage and my ‘usual’ bills like utilities, cell, internet, etc. Everything else (groceries, food, gas, savings, plus anything ‘non-essential’) is covered by all the other work I do. I generally try to keep to a certain expense budget per month, since I know that my income will always vary. I am also very careful about setting aside any ‘extra’ money each month to save for the things that invariably go wrong when you’re a home and/or car owner, as well as a small amount each month that I specifically put towards future travel.

One thing that I haven’t done yet is hire an accountant. I probably should? I’ve been doing my own taxes for years now, and it’s very likely I am missing some deductions and other things that I should be taking advantage of.

My work feels very stable in the sense that there will always be some kind of work that I can find. I do think that there’s a certain amount of security in having a skill that can be used in many ways. I worry if I have to turn something down due to scheduling conflicts that it could affect my chances working with that person or organization in the future. I also struggle with the sense that I should always be doing more and filling my time more, even when I know logically that there are only so many hours in the day, and it’s important to have time for not working.

How do you think about “coworkers?”

I definitely think much more in terms of “colleagues” rather than “coworkers.” It’s kind of a pedantic difference, but I very rarely, if ever, work with people doing the same thing as I am as a collaborative pianist. I very often work with the same people more than once, especially the directors at the schools I play for, but the relationship feels different to me from past jobs I’ve had in retail or offices. I am often coming in and out of the spaces; I am collaborating with people, but I’m not usually a part of the fabric of the day-to-day in the same way you are with someone at the desk or register next to you.

I have many, many colleagues because I work with so many different people and groups of people. Music is a very time and place specific thing; when you perform you are creating something at a certain time with a certain group of people and that specific performance won’t ever be re-created. Even if you are on Broadway performing the same show ten times a week, each performance will be a slightly different experience. So while I work with schools and directors year after year, the students are different each year.

This is a very niche field, and it has very niche struggles and joys. I would like to help create a better community for connection between those of us who do this work and are passionate about it.

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

Honestly money/compensation is probably the biggest thing… I think that if you are not involved in the music world it would be very difficult to understand what I do and how I’m able to make a living with it. Even if you have been involved in choir or musical theater as a student or adult, it can be difficult to understand if you have never been the person playing the piano.

I often have people not in the music industry imply (or outright say) that I charge too much for my time. At the same time, people in the music industry tell me I don’t value my time highly enough. People often don’t understand how many years I have spent building my skills and my musicality. When I am hired for a job, I am being hired not for the hours I might spend on that specific job, but for the 30+ years I have spent learning my instrument and developing my musical skill and ear, the 15+ years I have spent being an accompanist, and the two years I have now spent as a full-time collaborative pianist.

I also think the specific things that make a good collaborative pianist are very opaque to people who are not musicians (and sometimes also to musicians!). I spend a lot of time really thinking about what I do and why; every choice that I make and note that I play is felt deeply and comes from a place where experience and love of music meet.

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

I would like to support the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund. I live in Iowa, I am queer, and I have trans people in my life that I love. Iowa is the first state in the country to roll back civil rights protections and it is infuriating to me every day. This organization is relatively new (founded in 2021) and is able to provide micro-grants to Iowans who apply for help with gender-affirming care.

You can join Culture Study in donating to Iowa Trans Mutual Aid fund here.

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And if you have questions for Leslie about her work, schedule, training….she’ll be watching the comments and attempt to answer what she can!

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Now, as for this week’s interview. I’ve been talking about Wound Man all week, and this interview does not disappoint: you might not think you’re interested in medieval medical drawings, but give this interview a few minutes of your time and I promise you will be (or at least know a lot more about them that you can then drop in casual conversation).

Jack Hartnell is particularly skilled at articulating what makes these artifacts not just interesting but illuminating. (You might have heard of his previous book, Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages, which invited readers to think differently about the “backward” practices, particularly around the body and its treatment, that typify the popular understanding of that era). Wound Man is a brilliantly researched, engagingly written, and beautifully illustrated book, and as I wrote this Sunday, the fact that I can run something like this in Culture Study (and know that you, as readers, will approach it with curiosity instead of disdain) is one of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter.

So let’s get curious and nerdy — and learn a bit more about the Marvel Universe of Medieval European Science.

You can find out more about Jack Hartnell’s work here and buy Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image here.

When I first read about your book, the title struck me as the sort of lightly macabre character one of the kids in my life might conjure: a man composed entirely of wounds. Which he is! But he is also, as you point out in the beginning of your book, quite stoic about it — which is foundational to your argument that the Wound Man is “an imaginative and arresting reminder of the powerful knowledge that could be channeled and dispensed through the practice of premodern medicine.”

To get us started, can you elaborate on that idea — and what, ultimately, is so illuminating about the proliferation of Wound Men [a phrase you don’t use but strikes me as quite funny] across the globe over a three-hundred year timespan in the Middle Ages?

The phrase “Wound Man” definitely sounds like a superhero, I agree! He’s actually turned up in this guise across a variety of more modern plays, albums, poems — a real inspiration for many creative thinkers over the years, including none other than the author Ian Fleming, who wanted to call the sixth book in his James Bond series of spy thrillers “The Wound Man”, but was instead forced by his publisher to go with “Dr No”!

The term is in fact a translation of the German word ‘Wundenmann’, which was first used to describe the medieval medical figure back in the 1910s by a historian named Karl Sudhoff. Sudhoff was working right at the beginning of the twentieth century and was one of the first people to write in a sustained way about all sorts of really interesting medieval images from the perspective of medical and scientific history. His term actually puts the Wound Man into dialogue with several other of these figures: Zodiac Man, Planetary Man, Bloodletting Man, and so on — so plenty of other medical diagrams that we could use fill out the full Marvel Universe of medieval European science.

The long history of this term, however, conceals the fact that although the Wound Man has been known to this particular niche of medical historical scholarship for more than a century, at least by name, it has taken until now for someone to actually sit down and write at length about this image’s remarkable history. I found it so strange when I first started conceiving of this book that the figure had generated so little sustained scholarly curiosity.

I think this maybe has something to do with your second point: the relationship between the Wound Man’s strikingly macabre surface and its really complex original purpose, a background which is actually quite stoic, calm, and technical. Anyone who has mentioned the Wound Man to date has tended to focus on its former aspect, speaking about him as an exclusively sensational and grotesque image. But the more I looked into the figure and its long history, the more I discovered that there were many, many different uses to which this image was in fact being put, many reasons for different kinds of people in the past — surgeons and physicians but also scribes, artists, students, religious communities — to want to present him on the page in their endeavours.

Moreover, it was very quickly apparent that this image was of interest to people for many, many centuries: the earliest example that I found comes from the late 1300s and it remained an extremely popular image (in part because of this variety of users) way through into the 1800s and beyond. So, in short, this book is really an attempt to gather together some of these different “lives” that the Wound Man inhabited and understand them better. When we do, all sorts of interesting through-lines seem to emerge, most of all the idea that something which on the surface seems to be extremely graphic and unpleasant might in fact be informative, empathetic, creative, even artistic.

As a follow-up question that I’m hoping will ground us a bit more in your research process: please get very detailed about how you tracked down 93 Wound Men, many of which were not held in collections (we are process and archive nerds, have no fear). Is it weird to ask you to pick a favorite rendering (and explain why)?

You’re right, this was probably one of the most intensive aspects of researching the book, although this is a project that I’ve been thinking about for some time, almost a decade on and off, and so there has been plenty of time for fortuitous discoveries to pop up along the way. I also think that undertaking a long research project like this is a little bit like when you first hear a new term or new word or a person’s unusual surname in conversation and then you notice it cropping up all over the place. Your brain gets almost subconsciously attuned to the kinds of spaces this image is likely to appear, and so you’re on the lookout without really realising.

That doesn’t mean you just sit back and things come to you, though - there is a lot of legwork involved! In this project, I’ve been hugely helped by the incredible work of librarians, archivists, and digital humanitarians of many different types all around the world who have led the charge in shepherding enormous waves of cultural heritage objects (in my case manuscripts and printed books) online into complex databases and digital libraries.

I’m an art historian by training, so I really firmly believe that direct encounters with works of art are incredibly important to understanding all sorts of aspects of their facture, their impact, their effect on the viewer, and so on. But being able to browse through literally thousands of books online for this project, and to do so at real speed, has been invaluable and means I was able to cover in a few years probably more materials than someone like Karl Sudhoff, working in the early twentieth century, could cover in a lifetime.

A lot of this work is pretty instinctive. The digitised collections I work from are extremely varied, ranging from tiny gatherings of manuscripts in surviving medieval religious institutions through to enormous collections of printed books held by national repositories. It takes a while to become familiarised with a particular institution’s form of cataloguing, the structure of the metadata that they provide about their objects, and so on. But slowly, after spending a fair bit of time with each particular collection, you begin to get your eye in and understand which items are likely to reward close and careful looking and which could maybe be quickly skimmed.

The result of these large scale digital trawls essentially means that I can then draw up a significant long-list of items which, at least to judge from their digital counterparts, require me to delve much more deeply into them with an in-person visit. That’s when a second round of discoveries tended to take place, really getting into the detail of reading these manuscripts first-hand, discovering a name here, a place there, a fact or a detail that I could follow up on using more traditional historical methods.

A caveat to this approach: for all that the digital world provides an amazing capacity for overview and for understanding materials at a distance, we have to always remember that it’s hugely imbalanced in terms of coverage, something that follows from huge imbalances in opportunity and national infrastructure. The Wound Man began its life in medieval Germany and Bohemia, which was extremely fortunate for me because German libraries and archives have led the way and set the standard in excellent (in some case almost exhaustive) digitisation.

But just over the border in Italy, different funding priorities and the complexities of working with much less federalised networks for cultural heritage mean the digital coverage is comparatively poor, in some cases non-existent. So it’s really beholden on me as a scholar wanting to do justice to the full breadth of my materials to understand this landscape and act accordingly to balance what is available online.

A handful of Wound Men in the book were also not my own finds: because this project became such a long-term undertaking, stretching over many years, I was able to build up some really rich networks of scholars interested in similar ideas to my own and who were often generous enough to point me in the direction of their own discoveries, and they are cited in the book as such. Just before the book was about to go to press, for instance, a friend told me that they had seen an image of the Wound Man in a manuscript that was actually up for sale on display in a commercial bookseller’s shop. I was then able to communicate with the dealer and visit the manuscript myself, and we ended up having an interesting conversation about the book’s unusual provenance. I think sometimes scholars of historic artefacts shy away from ‘The Market’ as somehow grubby and un-objective, but the people who operate in this world really have seen it all and have themselves often accrued exceptional knowledge-banks of materials through practical experience, all of which can be invaluable for someone on the more academic side of things.

As for a favourite Wound Man: there are so many very beautiful images to choose from, but perhaps because of this fact my current favourite surely has to be one from a manuscript now in the Zentralbibliothek in Solothurn, Switzerland, which has to be one of the very worst images I have ever seen in my life. It really looks like a child produced it. But, perversely, as a result this is an image which tells us so much: that the Wound Man wasn’t just about fancy pictures and high-end artisans - rather, it was also a working image, something that a practicing medic could jot down in their own notebook for reference in learning more about their craft!

I was enthralled by the section of the book on “wound laws” — and just the general way that physical and emotional harm was conceived and communicated (and compensated for). Can you outline how they (and wergelt, aka “man-money”) worked, and how they drew from the wound man imagery that was in circulation at the time?

Wound laws are extremely interesting, and in discussing them in the book I’m drawing on a fair bit of scholarship undertaken by some great legal historians, especially those working in northern European contexts where such laws are probably best preserved. Essentially it’s the biblical notion of “an eye for an eye” translated in more fiduciary terms: “an eye for a dollar”, or what contemporary writers called wergelt, as you say, literally “man-money”.

This cost was to take into account both the specifics of the damage done and, more complicatedly, the original capacities and merits of the victim before injury. The result was most often a series of published tariffs that acknowledged that different parts of the body required compensation at different levels. For instance, tariffs from Old Frisia (now the northern Netherlands and northwestern Germany) individuate over 150 bodily locations for injury, taking in everything along the way from eyelid and moustache to uterus and kneecap. The specific execution of the injury and its relation to the victim’s prior standards of living were also considered important, something that towards the end of the Middle Ages was evaluated by official wound assessors, mostly surgeons, dispatched by local authorities and charged with taking context into account to help determine final compensation. They considered, among other things, whether the injury was committed in the victim’s home, how easy an injury would be to conceal from others, whether a professional would be required to cure the wound, and the degree to which the wound would have lasting effect on the function of the victim’s senses, a crucial marker for the potential standards of future living.

The level of detail found in these laws is striking, suggesting the sheer array of injuries that medieval authorities were familiar with litigating against — and many marry closely with those depicted on the Wound Man’s ghastly form. Given how widespread this culture of bodily compensation was in German-speaking lands, we can imagine viewers coming across the figure in a manuscript with a sense of legal fright, both for the significant financial compensation he represented and the potential bill of bodily retribution due to whomever had enacted his multiple injuries.

I also loved the section of the book where you use the spread of Wound Man as a case study for the way the printing press was actually functioning (where, how, and why) in the 15th century. (As opposed to: the printing press was invented, then it sprouted up like mushrooms all over civilization, then the world changed, the end).

I’d love to hear you riff a little on how the Gregoris Brothers’ printings of Wound Man show us the instability of printing technique at the time and the way printers like them were innovating to exploit the “middle market” for medical images/pamphlets/prints.

This part of the book came about first and foremost because of a frustration at how the current history of medicine and of art described the first printed medical images to be found in Europe in the late 1400s. The Wound Man itself was first printed in Venice in 1491, part of a medical compendium called the Fasciculus medicinae or ‘the little bundle of medicine’ printed by a pair of brothers working in the city, Giovanni and Gregorio de Gregori. This text is often described, unthinkingly, as the ‘first printed medical book’ — but all it takes is a cursory look at texts being printed in Venice, indeed all over Europe from the 1450s onwards, to see that medical images appear all over the place. So I dedicated a chapter in a book to tracking the origins of these works down in a more comprehensive way, including examining the very first pharmacological books on medical botany, and all sorts of other texts depicting bloodletting or anatomical dissection in action.

The Gregori brothers seem to have decided upon printing the Facisculus in part to appeal to the nearby medical communities at work at the University of Padua, a real centre for the study of medicine in the period. Their book is basically a medieval medical compendium of the kind we find quite commonly in manuscript form, reproduced using the cutting-edge new technologies of moveable type and woodblock images. In fact, in the case of the Wound Man small pieces of moveable type have actually been inserted into the woodblock image to allow the figure’s curving lines and textual labels to sit comfortably together. This 1491 edition, printed on unusually large-format paper, would have surely appealed to the highfaluting university scholars, packed full of Latin medical texts as well as images like the Wound Man.

But if we follow the publishing history of this text, the story isn’t quite that simple… Only a few years later, in 1494, the Gregori brothers themselves published another version of the book printed this time not in Latin but in Italian, suggesting that there was a growing market among non-Latin speaking audiences, presumably from an up-and-coming middle class of merchants or bibliophiles (i.e. not trained medics) for a short text on medical matters.

In the same year, a Catalan version of the text was printed in Spain, followed soon after by versions in German, English, Dutch, and many more Italian versions, all produced in emerging print centres across the continent. So something that seems to have started out as quite a specialist book was very quickly adapted amid this moment of speedy technical evolution for a mainstream audience. This is what I mean by a “middle market”: people interested in a book whose practical medicine was theoretically sound, good enough for university doctors, and yet which still foregrounded a suite of popular, vibrant images as a way of organising and advertising its abbreviated medical contents using the very latest reproductive technologies.

I’m hoping we can situate your work more broadly within art history — some people reading this newsletter might still think that “art history” remains generally limited to, I dunno, a survey of Modernist Painting taught in Mona Lisa Smile. But the field is so much more expansive, weird, and global, and you make such a convincing case for the Wound Man, however “sandwiched between disciplines,” as a piece of illustration (and media!) that tells us so much about the people who consumed, referenced, and reproduced it. This is a reach, but what are artifacts “between disciplines” from today’s world that might fit a similar role? What might they tell scholars of the future?

I said earlier that the Wound Man’s history has been overlooked: that scholars have known about it for more than a decade, but it’s taken until 2025 for someone to actually write a book about this figure’s long history. And I really do think this is largely down to the ‘in-between-ness’ you draw our attention to here. Diagrams, of which you could say the Wound Man is an interesting example, have a simplistic aesthetic which often sees them deemed too insubstantial for ‘serious’ study by art historians, who generally prefer to spend time with much more ‘beautiful’ stuff.

Meanwhile, the words and labels which accompany such diagrams never quite seem sizeable enough to reach the independent status of a ‘text’, the bar often necessary for literary scholars to sit up and take notice, preferring instead to spend time with more substantial sonnets and novels. This is a bit of a caricature of both sides of the word-image divide, but I think it still pertains to some practitioners and definitely to public opinion of art and of science, where the appreciation of images, objects, and ideas which fall between two different areas of understanding can often be quickly labelled as too complex, too obscure, even plain weird.

Today, the overarching discipline of the medical humanities tries to keep up a parity between two of these conceptual extremes, between the methods of history and the materials of health. Yet as with many aspects of the historical field, the rich medical humanities of modernity and the present day are all too often allowed to overpower the important contributions of medical visual culture from a more distant era: explorations of the x-ray, robotics, genomics, artificial intelligence, and so on often trump a dusty old manuscript.

My goal in writing this book was to make sure that premodern voices are kept loud and strong in these discussions, and that material which falls in between periods as well as in between disciplines is raised up by this conceptual overlap rather than become sidelined. In this sense I feel like the Wound Man reveals a really interesting process of medico-artistic entanglement, one which can transport the reader as an intricate and unique site of contact between often opposing things: sickness and cure, beauty and ugliness, painting and print, suffering and sanctity, art and science.

As for future historians and things today that sit between disciplines: I think we’re way too close to our own moment to tell! Breaking ideas down into disciplines is surely too hard when we’re up close to all the overlaps - we’re living in the middle of the Venn diagram, and it’s only when our world is so fragmentary and distant that it requires whole disciplines to re-piece it that I think these areas of elision between fields can probably take place.

In terms of the Wound Man, when scholars speak of historical objects as activating debate, inculcating power, or voyaging the oceans, or whatever else historians of the moment are interested in, their minds are far more likely to jump to the ricocheting histories of painting and sculpture, of diplomatic gifts, even of bulk goods than they are to medical diagrams. Yet the Wound Man’s history makes clear that healing images from before the modern era undertook all of these roles and more. ●

You can read detailed analysis of several images of Wound Man (including two of those pictured above) in this short piece by Jack Hartnell for The Public Domain Review.

You can find out more about Jack Hartnell’s work here and buy Wound Man: The Many Lives of a Surgical Image here.

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Dr. Melody Glenn was never really taught how to deal with addiction. Like so many clinicians, it just wasn’t really part of the curriculum. She had the same posture towards people with addiction that most people in America do: it was someone else’s problem. Glenn’s new book, Mother of Methadone, tells the largely forgotten story of the woman who popularized the use of methadone to treat opioid addiction, but it is also the story of our individual and societal struggle to think differently about addiction.

It’s sometimes hard to articulate the overarching goal of this newsletter other than: I hope it gives you the chance to think about something you might not otherwise think about today, and to think about that thing in more depth, and with more curiosity, than you have before. Sometimes that thing is facial hair, and sometimes it’s how a hairdresser organizes her life — and today, it’s addiction treatment. I can’t promise you’ll leave this interview feeling more hopeful. But I do know you won’t regret the time you spent with these ideas.

You can buy Mother of Methadone here — and find out more about Melody’s work here.

I’m going to start with the broadest of questions in order to situate our readers in your work: what about the current understanding of methadone made it feel like you needed to write a whole book about it? Writing a book is REALLY HARD, especially when you have a day job — but sometimes a book presents itself and must be written. That’s the story I want to hear.

Because overdose doesn’t have to be fatal, every death from an overdose feels like an injustice. Parents, children, friends, and coworkers would still be alive today if only they had access to treatment and harm reduction. But they don’t.

Methadone and its sister medication, buprenorphine (collectively referred to as MOUD) are probably the most effective treatments we have for any chronic disease, doubling someone's likelihood of staying in addiction treatment and halving the risk of a fatal overdose. And if someone does overdose, naloxone, an opioid-antagonist, can completely revive someone if given in time.

But in America, these treatments are wildly underutilized: less than 2% of physicians prescribe MOUD, less than 10% of the people who need MOUD get it, half of the country doesn’t even have a methadone clinic, and a recent executive order just further hamstringed harm reduction.

Partially, this is because most clinicians don’t know anything about addiction or its treatment. When I was in medical school and residency, the only thing I remember learning about addiction was a one-hour lecture from Dr. Drew Pinksy (remember Loveline?). The only mention of opioid use disorder in my hefty emergency medicine textbook was a paltry two pages about how to reverse an acute overdose with naloxone. There was no mention of harm reduction or treatment with MOUD. And my education was not unique.

Although substance use/overdose is one of the greatest causes of death in our country, most medical schools don’t teach anything about it. According to a 2018 New York Times article by investigative journalist Jan Hoffman, only 15 of 180 medical schools taught addiction medicine — and it might just be a one-hour lecture. I graduated from medical school and residency thinking that addiction was a helpless condition — that there was nothing I could do.

But a few years later, a colleague suggested that I give buprenorphine to one of my patients in the emergency department who was in the throes of withdrawal: vomiting, moaning, and writhing in pain. Within minutes, he was transformed into a perfect gentleman, thanking us and asking to go home. Even in the ER, rarely have I seen any treatment offer such a rapid and profound transformation.

Once I realized MOUD’s potential, I couldn’t unsee it. Almost every shift, I found patients with untreated opioid use disorder and offered them MOUD. I still remember how one woman hugged me with gratitude: finally, someone was seeing her humanity and providing real help instead of just scolding her. The bar was low — people who use drugs face a lot of stigma, even (or especially in?) healthcare. Buprenorphine helped her feel normal again — a feeling she had been chasing for years.

I soon started teaching other clinicians about MOUD because, like me, they hadn’t learned anything about it. Yet, no matter how much data or scientific papers I cited, I couldn’t convince the skeptics. Stigma was not something rational, but something lodged deep within their hearts. I hoped that a story might invoke the empathy actually needed to change their practice.

I also had my own questions: where did these biases against addiction and its treatment come from? How could I make a difference without falling into the savior trope so common in physician narratives? Where could I find a female mentor in medicine to guide me?

I found the answers through writing, and at some point, the book started to write itself, waking me up at three in the morning with ideas. And once I learned more about Dr. Marie Nyswander, I was even more motivated to finish. Her story was so inspiring and relevant to the present moment, yet hardly anyone knew about her. Mother of Methadone was the book I wanted to read but didn’t (yet) exist.

(And practically speaking, it was my MFA program that provided the structure and accountability I needed to create this book. After finishing my medical training, I enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing that culminated in a thesis project!)

There’s a remark early in the book that stuck with me: “what else is residency but an indoctrination into the hidden curriculum of medicine?” What was the hidden curriculum of medicine that you internalized when it came to addiction?

The complete absence of education around opioid use disorder spoke the loudest, sending the message that addiction did not fall under medicine’s purview. Addiction was someone else’s problem, something better managed at a detox, therapist’s office, or maybe even a jail.

Even worse, the hidden curriculum taught that people with chaotic drug use were to be despised, either because they were making poor choices and thus deserved to get sick, or because they were trying to take advantage of us – lying about their pain in order to get IV narcotics. But so much of what we treat in the emergency department is the result of what could be labeled as poor choices: trying to climb up on the roof at 80 years of age, driving a motorcycle, taking your kid to a trampoline park, or working at a desk (they say that sitting is the new smoking…). Yet, we don’t stigmatize those choices in the same way.

But healthcare workers’ distrust of people who use opioids runs deep. In 1914, the Harrison Act essentially prohibited doctors from giving opioids to people with addiction. In response, hospitals often refused to treat patients who used drugs because they were so afraid they would “trick” healthcare workers into administering opioids (and thus breaking the law).

Similarly, during my residency, we were taught to avoid giving opioids to people who use drugs (PWUD) at all costs. At that time, there was a lot of messaging that doctors were to blame for the opioid epidemic. By giving out oxycodone like candy (see: Sackler Family, see: Purdue Pharma, see: Pain is the fifth vital sign), we had flooded America’s opioid supply and thus caused an epidemic. The solution? Stop prescribing them. And although there is a component of truth to that, the pendulum swung too far: lots of people with pain were unable to get the treatment they needed, and many switched to heroin.

But I didn’t know that historical context during my residency. All I knew was that people I looked up to — attending physicians, senior residents, and experienced nurses — rolled their eyes when talking about “the pain seeker” in room 12, boasted about getting security to kick them out of the ER, or refused to give them the opioids they needed to stave off withdrawal. And this cruelty was completely normalized.

It wasn’t until I arrived at my fellowship in San Francisco that I realized things could be different. A young man about my age checked into the ER with an abscess from injecting heroin. After I told him that I planned to anesthetize the skin with lidocaine and drain it, he asked for IV pain medication. I said no, that wasn’t something we did for other patients, and I wasn’t going to do it for him. I didn’t want to “give in” to his “demands.” Despite the fact that I, too, had used a lot of drugs in my life and had several friends/family members with addiction, I still didn’t see this man’s humanity – the hidden curriculum was that powerful. It’s amazing how much power an invisible narrative can hold over us.

The second I used a scalpel to pierce into his abscess, he shouted and jerked his arm away, blood spraying everywhere. He jumped off the stretcher, cussed at me, grabbed his jacket, and left the ER, his wound incompletely treated. When I complained to my attending about this patient, she turned the blame on me. Why had I refused to treat him adequately? In withdrawal, his pain would feel ten times worse than somebody else’s. What did I think my puritanism was going to accomplish? Did I think I would get him to quit using heroin? Of course not. In fact, he was probably on his way to use right now, his abscess left to fester and worsen. Although I am deeply ashamed of my actions, I hope that taking accountability and sharing my story can help others on a similar journey.

Okay tell us about Dr. Marie Nyswander — what was popularly known about her (and initially attracted you to her story), but also what you sought to understand about her research….and *also* her experience battling the double stigma of (1) being a woman in medicine in the mid-20th century and (2) treating addiction?

I know there’s the paragraph pitch about who she was (the mother of methadone!) but what do you always wish people really understood about her, that doesn’t show up in Wikipedia summaries or the two (!) New Yorker profiles or even her biography?

I don’t think anything was popularly known about her — yet another glaring omission! I first heard about her when I began my deep dive into the origins of methadone’s stigma, coming across a short article in JAMA commemorating methadone’s 40^th anniversary.

The article described her as a charismatic, iconoclastic, progressive physician at a time when there were few women in the field, moving addiction medicine forward time and time again. I hoped that she could become the female mentor in medicine I had been searching for.

In addition to developing methadone maintenance as a treatment for opioid addiction — a discovery that some say is as monumental as the development of antibiotics — she also challenged a lot of medicine’s dogma. So much of what is currently seen as standard of care today – like offering outpatient addiction treatment instead of mandatory institutionalization-- originated from Nyswander’s innovations. So, why hasn't she been held up as an icon along the likes of Dr. Paul Farmer, someone that so many idealistic medical students aspire to become? Her only book-length biography was from 1968, her legacy largely forgotten.

After becoming Sarah Lawrence College’s first premedical student in the 1930’s, Nyswander planned on becoming an orthopedic surgeon – a field that still today has the lowest percentage of women of any medical specialty. Just like me, she hadn’t learned anything about addiction medicine during medical school, so she never considered it as a career. It’s amazing how little has changed in the decades spanning our lives. In 1941, she tried to join the Navy and serve at a field hospital in China, but because they “didn’t have a uniform for women,” she was sent to work at the U.S. Narcotic Farm, a federal prison/locked drug treatment facility in Kentucky emblematic of our country’s indecision around addiction as a crime vs. medical condition.

When Nyswander was a teenager, she got involved with politics after sneaking out and finding a ride to one of LA’s clandestine, communist bookstores. It wasn’t long before she was using her mom’s “capitalist car” to assist with farm worker strikes and sending arms to loyalist Spain. At age 16, she got married for the first time, although it didn’t last long. Her first mention in the NYT was during college, highlighting that even before she was somebody, she had that special something that captured people’s attention. Even while working at Narco, she couldn’t contain her rebellious streak: at Christmas, she was caught giving out morphine shots to patients to cheer them up.

After her year of service at Narco, she began a residency in psychiatry — a field more accepting to women — and tried to leave addiction medicine behind. But because she had more addiction experience than any of her coworkers, she found herself frequently intervening to help patients whose care would have otherwise been mismanaged (like a woman who developed seizures when withdrawing from barbiturates). As she explained, “you simply can’t abandon someone when there’s nobody to give you a glass of water.” She then wrote an academic paper for the New England Journal of Medicine about withdrawal management, hoping that nobody would need to call her for advice again. But as she told an interviewer, “Of course what that did was set me up as an authority and so, far from being rid of the problem, more calls.”

Eventually, she gave in, opening an addiction medicine clinic for jazz musicians (at that time, ~40% used heroin) and joining a practice with another forward-thinking female physician in Harlem. Yet, despite her dedication and novel methods, her patients continued to die. Even the most robust, abstinence-based therapy wasn’t enough. By the late 1950s, she was coming to believe that opioid maintenance was the only way forward. The problem: it was illegal. She decided to try it anyway — and it worked. Still, methadone was never given a real chance to be successful, and now we are in the midst of the biggest opioid epidemic our country has ever seen.

Mainly, I just wish people knew about Dr. Marie Nyswander at all. She had a powerful vision for how methadone can actually upend our country’s fatal overdose epidemic – we just need to let it! But also, she was complex, and her life had many contradictions that I’ll never be able to explain, like the bizarre, anti-feminist book she wrote (The Power of Sexual Surrender). And I think that is important to see, too. Nobody is a god.

Can you talk a little about what happened with your hospital CEO and the reticence to publicize very real (and potentially life-saving) improvements to addiction services? It felt like such an illustration of, well, all the contradictions around addiction services, treatment, and public attitudes towards both.

In 2021, my department developed a press release about all the services our hospital now offered for addiction. I hoped this would both help patients navigate the confusing treatment landscape and pressure my colleagues to do the right thing, as back then, few Tucson emergency departments or hospitals gave out naloxone or started MOUD. I once heard of a patient who checked out of the hospital “against medical advice” as soon as she delivered her baby in order to go to the methadone clinic (because the hospital wouldn’t give it to her), and then immediately checked back in to continue her postpartum care and be with her baby. That shouldn’t happen, and I hoped some publicity would make it harder for doctors and hospitals to refuse to offer basic addiction care.

But then the hospital CEOs refused to let us publish the release. As the public relation officer emailed me, “They are concerned that if we announce this publicly, that we will become the city’s primary resource for substance abuse.”

Would they ever try to obfuscate the specialized treatments we offer for people needing stroke care, transplant surgery, pediatrics, or oncology? Of course not. So why would they do that for addiction medicine? Because they don’t think addiction is a medical problem? Because they are ashamed of people who use drugs, or because treating addiction doesn’t generate a lot of revenue for the hospital? Because they don’t want the “good” patients to be scared away by “addicts,” even though people with addiction are already in our hospital? As none of this was said out loud, I can only speculate.

This incident highlights what people with addiction face when trying to access care: thinly concealed stigma embedded in every single layer of the system. Not just in my hospital, but in healthcare organizations all across the country. And nobody knows, because it’s all shrouded in neat excuses and platitudes. That’s why I think there is so much power in saying the unsaid, on making the invisible visible, whether it's the hidden curriculum or stigma. Only then can we make meaningful change.

I think most people would agree that we’ve culturally shifted from a paradigm in which addiction is conceived *wholly* as a moral failing…..and more to an understanding where addiction is a disease (but also probably sorta kinda a moral failing). From the time you’ve spent working with people who’ve struggled with addiction and the time you’ve spent as a researcher, deep in so much discourse *around* addiction — why is the moral component so hard to shake? What do you still struggle with, and what do you do you see other medical professionals and family members and people battling their own addiction struggling with?

There are many ways that this sort of morality shows up. I have patients who want to get off MOUD as soon as possible (i.e., before they’re ready) because they have been told by their church, family, or peers in recovery that “a drug is a drug,” even though we would never say that about the medications people take for diabetes or high blood pressure. People want to fight addiction “on their own” in a way that they don’t with other medical conditions. It's not like MOUD replaces someone’s need to do the deep inner work — it just makes it a little more possible. It’s hard to recover if you’re dead.

There is also this idea that substance use and recovery exist on a linear spectrum, with people progressing neatly from chaotic use (dirty, or bad) to abstinence (clean, or good). I have met many doctors and nurses that only offer empathy to people who are interested in total abstinence, otherwise, they withhold care. But drug use is more like a wavy line or a circle, and not everyone is interested in total sobriety. Maybe they never will be! Often, people are using drugs for a reason: to stay up all night so nobody assaults them when living outside, to numb the pain of very real trauma, or to gain a little bit of energy when their severe congestive heart failure makes them feel tired all the time. It’s a very calculated, risk-benefit decision, even if it's not the decision that their doctor would have made. So, what about those people? How can we support them and their choices in this present moment?

This moral component is so hard to shake because of deep-seated, and often unconscious, stories that we have internalized. They have incredible influence over us, perhaps precisely because we don’t even know they exist. When I was a resident surrounded by people who disdained patients with addiction, I thought that was normal. It’s only until you see something different that you realize that another path is possible. Or, as Nyswander put it, “You began to get experience when other people more courageous than yourself, and more intelligent, showed you that there were other ways.”

Over the last ten years, I have seen a lot of positive change in the medical community. More medical schools talk about treatment, residencies are required to dedicate hours of curricula to addiction, and professional medical societies are publishing white papers and hosting national presentations about substance use. Here in Arizona, the Department of Health Services has spearheaded a robust naloxone distribution program across the state. All of that is wonderful. But despite healthcare’s increasing adoption and integration of addiction medicine, I think two critical components are still often left out: the voices of people who use drugs and harm reduction. And until that changes, I don’t think the moral component will ever truly go away.

Harm reduction is both a practice and a philosophy. As a practice, it can include wearing a seatbelt, putting on sunblock, using a condom, or carrying naloxone – all things to reduce our risk of harm. As a philosophy, it means that we meet people where they are and see individuals as the experts of their own lives. This is somewhat contradictory to the traditional, hierarchical world of medicine that posits doctors as the experts. Although there is a lot more education around methadone and buprenorphine, many curricula are still missing harm reduction — and it shows. Harm reduction needs to be the foundation upon which everything else rests. ●

You can buy Mother of Methadone here — and find out more about Melody’s work here.

Subscribing also gives you access to the Weekly Subscriber-Only Links Round-Up, including the Just Trust Me (see below!). Plus it’s a very simple way to show that you value the work that goes into creating this newsletter every week.

This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Gift Links Whenever Possible; Remember Instapaper is Your Friend):

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And if you haven’t yet checked out this week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast, it’s all about nerdy book and publishing trends; I learned so much. (Also: the bonus segment is all about how to make your book club sustainable and how to pick books that are, in Melody’s words, all bangers). Listen here and remember that all Culture Study newsletter subscribers get a massive discount on their podcast subscription.

Finally, I’ve pinned a thread of ways to donate to organizations that are managing to get aid through the Israeli government blockade to starvig Gazans — you can find it here.

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

Our first entries in the series are from a freelance audiobook narrator, a gardening ceramacist, and an engineering grad student. Today, you’ll hear about what it’s like to run your own hair salon. If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.

Now, let’s hear from Heather Haavisto about the work of running your own hair salon, the breakdown of how different stylists make money, why the business models are in flux, what cutting hair does to the body, social media ambivalence, strong feelings about scheduling, AND SO MUCH MORE. This interview is so addictive.

How long have you been cutting hair, and how did you get started?

When you’re in hair school, at hair events (educational classes, shows, retreats), interviews for jobs, and probably various times throughout your employment at salons, you’ll get asked this question, and I used to be embarrassed by my hair origin story. It never came off as creative or “born with shears or color brush in hand” enough, and I really wanted to be seen as a Fellow Artist with Innate Talent. I used to even embellish the story, because having a fairly simplistic answer felt almost sacrilegious in an industry that pushes the narrative that we’re all here for the passion of the craft. It feels like that’s what everyone else outside the industry wants to hear, too.

Having now been doing hair for 20 years (and getting paid to do it for most of that time), I’m not embarrassed anymore! I think the story has a little bit of cold reality in it that people find off-putting when discussing creative jobs (and we don’t have that same response toward other jobs).

I was a kid who loved English and reading and writing. I had creative pursuits at home (my mom was a big crafter and I participated in some of her hobbies like knitting and cross stitch, I got super into makeup as a scene kid teen), but I never really connected that to “what should I get paid to do someday.”

I also couldn’t entirely connect the more traditional school subjects I enjoyed to a career either, and my parents were straightforward about what they could help pay for education-wise and that we didn’t have “take your time and figure it out” money. I always think it’s interesting that my sister and I, children of government workers with college degrees, both went directly out of high school into trade schools. I’m sure that bluntness from my parents contributed.

I had high school friends who graduated early and moved to San Francisco to go to hair school, and after casually mentioning that once, my boyfriend at the time responded, “Well, have you ever considered that? You really like makeup and stuff…” (big teen response). It was probably the first major revelation of my life, like, oh…I could just…not go to traditional college. (I love being a student, so this was not as easy of a decision as I’m making it sound!)

We booked a tour of that same San Francisco school my friends went to in late winter of the year I was due to graduate high school, and I was quickly enrolled to start the eleven month cosmetology program that August. That was 2005!

Now, tell me about how you organize your day — or your week.

This is going to be different for many hair stylists, depending on the set-up of your salon and payment structure, which I’ll talk about in the next segment. For the last five years, I’ve owned my own solo business and rented studio space in a building that has nothing to do with my industry. My neighbors design kitschy gifts, screenprint, and are a videographer/photographer. I would say I’m definitely in the minority with this setup, and it means I have to do a little more work on the business side of things, as well as physical maintenance of the space.

Fortunately, once you set up the business stuff initially, organizing days becomes more of a “plug and go” type of situation. When I opened I made sure I had a solid, concise and aesthetically pleasing website (they say people don’t care about those anymore, but I get a lot of compliments, even from Zoomers, and yes I made it myself!), my Google listing and social media accounts I wanted to (begrudgingly) be on sorted, licensing (both business with the city and cosmetology owner/operator with the state) paperwork filed and walk-throughs booked (that can go slowly because these smaller state agencies aren’t typically efficient), QuickBooks set up and, really key to everything for me, all of my clients imported into my Square account.

There are a lot of options for appointment software, many specific to my industry, but at my prior salon I helped set up Square Appointments so I was already familiar, and then it’s integrated with the Square payment platform we’re all familiar with. It’s very customizable as far as how I want to label services, items (if you’re selling product in-salon), and it gives you a lot of data and trends. You can even set it to pull from every single sale a certain percentage into a savings account, which I do for taxes. I also like that clients are familiar with it because it became so ubiquitous in coffee shops.

This sounds simplistic, but now that I have most of the important things set to “auto-renew” if you will (I update the website if I need to, I glance at my Google listing if someone leaves a review, I know when I have to do the annual licensing stuff, the quarterly taxes), the majority of “organizing” my day is more like all day mini-maintenance and comes down to answering texts from clients and opening that Square Appointments app and booking them! “Plug and go,” if you will.

It’s a divisive topic, but I don’t do online booking. I have a form clients can fill out to contact me on my website (usually used by new clients), a few of them email me which is fine, and the majority of booking I do via text. Once I’ve seen someone once, if they don’t want to rebook in person, and want to come again, I actively encourage them to save my number and text.

My reasoning for this is that while I do cut and color nearly exclusively (styling on occasion but not updos), the appointment times vary a lot. I have 15 minute appointments (bang trims), to hour long haircuts, to three hour long blonding services. It makes my life very difficult if a client, say, opens an online booking platform and plops down a 45 minute service at 2:00 on an empty day. That can really alter what fits before it, after it, and if a client logs on and doesn’t see available options anytime in the near future (when I might be able to make the Tetris work better vs. the computer), it may frustrate or deter them.

Clients can also have unrealistic ideas of what service they think they should get, or how long it should take, no matter how clearly you describe it on the booking site. Thinking your multi-hour balayage transformation should only take the time of a partial highlight can result in a lot of disappointment day-of in the chair when I have to reschedule you because we don’t have enough time. I can usually avoid this sort of thing if we can have a brief back-and-forth over text where I gather enough information to book the right amount of time, and can explain why.

Online booking software will give you the option to approve every appointment before it’s finalized, but if I’m often having to go back and communicate with the client to make the whole day fit together and most efficiently, I’m not really saving that much time.

I have really high standards for myself to answer people as soon as possible. Coming from someone who switched to a four-day work week after a six week “lockdown” in 2020 and never looked back, I know this sounds inconsistent as far as work/life balance is concerned. But I see it as a concession I need to make if I’m not offering the convenience of online booking. And feedback I’ve gotten from clients about stylists they’ve left over the years (or tattoo artists! Or estheticians! Or lash techs!) is that consistency and reliability is really important, and I mean, as a client myself, I feel that way too.

This means I have answered people while waiting for a band to go on at Red Rocks. I have answered people while in a time zone 17 hours ahead (and tried and occasionally failed to not mess up the appointment time back home) while on a two-week trip. I’ve answered while sick. I’ve answered while flying home for a medical emergency for very unwell parents halfway across the country.

Most of my clients are aware of this, so they’re respectful of timing often, and they’re also aware of why I don’t do online booking. When I explain it to them they’re like, “Ohhh, yeah. That sucks. I wouldn’t want a huge gap in my day where I don’t get paid, I see how this helps prevent that.”

I try extremely hard to resist the urge of the dopamine release I’d get from clearing a notification, and don’t open any text I’m not ready to answer that moment. However, I do fuck up! Sometimes one slips through and I don’t respond for a week, or they have to poke me again. But because we’re all aware of how and why I’m doing it this way (and they can relate to forgetting to answer a text despite their best efforts), there is very little friction around this. I really can’t imagine doing it any other way.

Outside of texting and booking, a typical day for me is waking up, checking my books to see if I have any new clients that day and if so, sending them a set of instructions on how to enter the building, parking map, door code, etc. I am in a 140 year old, formerly-industrial building in a very old part of Kansas City. This means it isn’t a typical entry procedure and I need to be very detailed about how to enter, for timing’s sake and also ease of experience; a 140 year old building is charming and cool until you get lost going the wrong way on the indoor loading dock. If you can’t tell by my language, there was a fair amount of trial and error here! I have all the scripts as well as a parking map I doctored in Photoshop in my Notes app, so morning of I can just fire them off to the new client via text.

I try not to ever leave a mess behind for myself, but I do often throw in a load of laundry before leaving the night before. One single hair stylist uses so many towels. The laundry is never ceasing. I try to get there a minimum of 15 minutes before my first client, earlier if I think I need to fold some capes, refill the beverage fridge, water a plant or eight, or complete any minor day to day maintenance chore. Unfortunately sometimes you show up and the whole beverage cart is a mess because a biblical storm caused the super old roof to leak on it, or some such thing that isn’t life or death but is annoying and messy. My wifi was out all day today and it doesn’t stop me doing my job, it just means I can’t provide you with beautiful Dinner Music playlists to create ambiance. Nothing is an emergency unless we’re out of power or water; otherwise, I can do my job still. There’s some sort of beauty in that, I think!

As I said before, I chose to go to a four day work week five years ago now. The traditional salon weekend is Sunday/Monday, and for me there’s now a Tuesday. It sounds luxurious, and often is. But plenty of time on Tuesdays I do “admin” type stuff like going back through my uncategorized transactions on Quickbooks, placing a color order, placing a styling product order. Sometimes I do book people on a Tuesday if I’m going on a trip, or if I had to reschedule people for illness, or even occasionally if I can see a day people aren’t booking further ahead, so I take that day off and offer a Tuesday instead if people have shown interest in it (even though I regularly am reminding them that I don’t generally work Tuesdays). But I try to be pretty strict with myself about not breaching those boundaries too often.

How do you organize your future? (Planning for future work, planning for time off, etc.)

I think because my work is so day to day and week to week, the number one job I have, doing hair, is not something I really think of as “planning” future work, but every time I book an appointment for someone I guess I technically am. I have a few people who rebook on the spot for 12+ weeks out, but they’re rare. Covid really changed how my clients, at least, organize their hair appointments. I have way fewer rebookings in person and more people opt to “just text later.” I’m not in a place where I can stop working Saturdays, but they fill slower than they used to, and while evenings used to be highly sought after and booked far out, that’s calmed some and people fill in the many hours of the day in a more balanced way (I do not hate this).

If I were earlier in my career, these changes would freak me out (and I have moments where they do) because I was trained in a very rigid system of thought around booking, as in, “X% of people need to be rebooking in person, you need to be rebooked X amount of weeks out, etc.” But at the end of the day, if I’m bringing in the money I’ve decided I’m comfortable with, I’m okay (sometimes this is like a mantra I need to repeat to myself a few times). Covid exposed the office job crowd (much of my clientele) to the idea that more flexibility could exist in their work/lives and they are bringing that to how they schedule. Why get your hair done on the weekend or after work if you can Zoom while your color processes at noon on a Thursday?

Things can change within a few days or even hours, and do, all the time. I often say that the somewhat volatile nature of this job does not go well with the structure that I naturally crave as a person, but 20 years in, I guess I’m managing okay! There’s no doubt that I’ve gained skills to soften my natural rigidity from having to learn to pivot and manage expectations of a work day or week or even month, and am much better for it.

As far as time off is concerned, I try very hard to block my books off as far in advance as possible. I am pretty strict about putting an actual detailed block (“Denver Trip”) on my Appointments app, which feels silly at times, because no one can see it but me. I really like to have travel blocked at least 12 weeks in advance, since most aren’t booking that far out anyway, but sometimes I have it blocked off even further than that. Folks who have been with me longer will actually ask upon leaving (if they don’t want to rebook at that time), “Are you going anywhere the next month or two?” to gauge when they need to rebook.

If I am going to be out for an extended period of time (two weeks or more) or a time of year that is often very busy is approaching, I’ll send out an email via Square so people know it may be more of a squeeze to get in if they don’t get ahead of it. It’s hard to hold people’s attention these days, and I want to resist text marketing as long as I can, so as to not be more annoying digital trash in your face, so I’ve stopped caring about the email open rate. I can only do so much to get you to notice communications from me, we’re all adults responsible for our time, godspeed (I say with love).

Most years my partner and I do travel quite a bit. This is something my clients know (and enjoy? Maybe?) about me, and again, transparency is key to them understanding if something does come up and I need to reschedule. I like to try to get on top of that as soon as I know, even if their appointment is eight weeks away but now I know I’m going to be gone then, and give plenty of alternate options (Tuesdays can be useful here). They move appointments around with me all the time (within reason, and before the cancelation window which is penalized at 12-24 hours) so they understand I’m a human being with a life, too.

As far as studio “work” is concerned, as in work on the physical space, I also sometimes use Tuesdays for medium-term maintenance like a deeper cleaning tasks or reorganizing, or longer-term projects, as mentioned. But honestly? Sometimes I do any or all of this shit on a Sunday or Monday, or a slow work day, because…I can :)

I do keep a few lists of tasks I consider annual (do a big inventory count of color), quarterly (like the deep cleaning) and then a bigger project list that will probably always be growing (one day I will learn to patch drywall, or finally paint the part of the wall we lazily didn’t because we didn’t close the freight elevator door when we painted). Do I complete these exactly when I aspire to? Generally, no! And honestly that’s partially because I need help from my partner or friends sometimes and they don’t work on my schedule…the studio would not exist without the help of MANY people learning in real time how to paint something weird or construct a curtain rod out of metal pipes 12’ up near the ceiling, or the only real contractor of the group helping with something more serious like plumbing.

What’s the thing people misunderstand about how your life and work, well, work? (Would love love LOVE to hear more about the different set-ups, renting a chair vs. owning your own salon, all that stuff here — as you told me, this is the thing most people don’t understand, but you can expand that in whatever direction you’d like).

I think there are two things I want to discuss here, the first being the multiple payment structures that exist, and second, the somewhat sudden narrative shift I’m not only hearing from some clients but also more broadly about how entering into trades is the way to fix the college debt issue in this country.

There is a lot of variability state to state as far as what the most common payment structures are, which are certainly influenced by the many, many different laws governing this industry from state to state, so just keep that in mind. I’ve only got experience with California, Washington and Missouri.

A commission salon is one that takes a percentage of the service dollars you bring in, and you get the remainder (pre-tax) and are a W-2 employee. Industry standard seems to be around 48% (for the stylist), though I myself have made as high as 52% and as low as 36% (the latter seen as heinous by most and justified by the establishment by having a full benefits package and higher serviced prices for new stylists than most at the time, as well as a huge marketing presence). Some salons opt to do a “sliding scale” based on the amount of service dollars you bring in each period they designate (it’s usually done by week). I’d also like to note that unless you’re charging quite a bit (unlikely as a new stylist) it’s damn near impossible to hit the high end of the commission scale unless you’re double booking.

These are usually bigger salons, and are often able to offer some benefits (this varies widely), marketing, product, color, continuing education, often they have a receptionist who books all your appointments…all the stuff you’re responsible for if you’re on your own. Also often (not always), if you’re a new graduate from cosmetology school looking to do an apprenticeship, you will usually find them at a commission salon, with the idea that once you “graduate” apprenticeship, you will have a spot as a stylist in that salon, and all the built-in infrastructure, clientele, and stability that comes with it (this is what I did). Some apprenticeships pay minimum wage for the time you’re there cleaning, washing hair, assisting senior stylists, and then you take classes and do models to continue learning on off days. Some don’t pay at all, or they pay you minimum wage to be present in the salon assisting stylists and cleaning, but you don’t do models or take classes, just learn from those around you.

(Note on my wording there of “senior” stylist: I mean established and busy. A salon can use any kind of terminology to describe its stylists, so you will see all sorts of titles out there. Someone is a junior, or a senior, or a master stylist because the salon says so, just like I’m the czar of the Taco Bell by my house because I’ve deemed it so. This is not the same as how the “traditional” trades categorize themselves i.e. master plumber, apprentice painter, etc. The titles at salons are used to justify different pricing for different stylists, and while this is fine, I’ve found it has led to confusion for clients in the past because they think there’s a standard system. There is not. Many stylists at a salon I worked at got bumped to the next tier because they sold a ton of product and had a high rebooking percentage, but were super green experience-wise. Clients do not enjoy hearing that, but it isn’t uncommon).

When you’re an employee of a commission salon, they can dictate a lot of how your work life goes: your schedule and the time you have to be in the salon, regardless of whether or not you’re doing hair and getting paid (most of us have sat for three hours in the middle of the day after a last minute cancellation not being paid and not being allowed to leave!), how your appointments get booked, what your services cost, what chores you’re expected to contribute to if you have down time.

As a result, many stylists reach a point in their career where they feel comfortable with their amount of clientele, but would like more freedom and flexibility in their lives, and decide they can go it on their own and do “booth rental.” (There is a small movement gaining steam that makes a commission salon actually appealing to stylists that changes a lot of what have been considered required elements of them and gives stylists a lot more freedom while still being employees, and I endorse this new version and hope it becomes the standard; at this point, though, it’s uncommon).

Something clients hate to hear: a lot of commission salons consider the client their property and will not let the stylist leave nicely or take your information with them. If you’ve ever called your salon up and learned your stylist was no longer there, but, “no, unfortunately we can’t tell you where they went, we’re sorry,” this is why. Non-competes are common across many industries, and I think they’re becoming less common and less enforceable in this one, but this behavior by commission salon owners leaves an understandably sour taste in stylists’ mouths about working in them again in the future. And most clients are appalled by it. (Social media has made stylists much more accessible to clients, and that’s somewhat solved this problem, but it still sometimes results in legal action).

Booth rental can exist in a multitude of flavors, but generally you are renting a chair in a salon and pay rent to the salon owner. These salons can be as big as twenty chairs or as small as two. (Some people are even experimenting with micro salons with just one chair and someone rents it from you on your off days, to fully maximize your space).

You are mostly your own boss now! You make your own schedule, book your own appointments (rare instances exist of receptionists in these salons), buy your own color, and do your own marketing. Some of these salons offer “back bar” usage, i.e. you get to use the shampoo/conditioner and styling products the salon provides, and even get commission off of products you sell if they stock them. Sometimes they’re very bare bones, and you have to provide everything yourself and just pay rent. These stylists typically file taxes as a 1099 or contractor/sole proprietor. (Please no one yell at me about LLCs vs. S-Corp, etc. I’m not an accountant and I’m not gonna endorse the best way to play the horrible US tax system!) That’s one downside: you now have to remember to set aside tax money to pay quarterly. At least in Missouri, the state considers you your own salon, and you have to get a separate license for your “booth” as well as your operator license. You should also go ahead and get some business insurance, because you’re responsible for most of what goes on in that chair now.

A kind of sister of booth rental is the studio rental situation, which I think is still considered booth rental in the eyes of most cosmetology boards and the tax system. A building with multiple small studios built out, sometimes of all hair people but often of many different types of beauty service providers in one building (I call them “beauty malls” sometimes, not meant derogatorily!) Most of what I explained about booth rental applies, except now they’ve walled off your chair/space and given you a door for a little privacy. Sometimes they’re super small and you share a big shampoo room with others and again, “back bar products” are included in the rent you pay. Sometimes they’re a little bigger and you get a shampoo bowl in your room, and have to supply all your own product. You get to dress it up as you want within reason usually, which I think is a nice little bonus. Usually you get the benefit of a shared backroom with other tenants, which is great, because while I love all you clients, talking all day and then having you watch me eat a salad with foils in your hair is just too much for me.

Then we have situations like mine, which, again, are pretty uncommon, frankly because rent is really high, especially in cities, and it’s hard to find space small enough that can also be plumbed properly. I’m really no different than a photographer renting a studio or a standalone tattoo artist or therapist except that the state considers me a true salon, so I need a different license (and a business license with the city).

Here’s what I’ll say from my own experience: a lot of how the industry has been structured for decades is no longer working. Salons close regularly; people are physically and emotionally burnt out and frankly not making enough money. It’s really hard to keep the lights on in a lot of salons because they’re paying a receptionist when many clients don’t really care to call anymore, or they’ve got $10,000 worth of product sitting on the shelves they need to keep replenishing, when so much of that is purchased online now.

If the owner is also a stylist, they work a LOT to try to keep it going, and stylists are still unhappy because they think their time and work is being exploited and they don’t even get benefits. This happens in both commission and booth rental. I’m not a business coach, but these are the sorts of changes I alluded to a couple paragraphs back that may see the industry adjust (I hope) so that it feels more achievable and sustainable to be a salon owner and not have everyone splintered off into their own studios.

As far as, “children entering the trades will save us!” is concerned: I do want to remind people that trade schools cost money, too. (Last I heard my school was $26k for 11 months, but that was several years ago). Unfortunately, cosmetology has a really high dropout rate because people are not adequately prepared for the slog of the first few years. I actually worked 6-7 days a week for several years when I moved here, between being a barista and building my clientele, and even once I thought I was secure, I was scared to let the barista job go!

If you push through that, you also get smacked with the hard reality of providing your own healthcare, short term disability (you probably need it, if you so much as sprain your pinky you can’t make money and you aren’t bringing any in), no sick or vacation pay, and no retirement or 401k matching. Pregnancy/having a family/caretaking can knock your annual income significantly for years as you inevitably lose clientele during extended time away. This job can also be hellish on your body (see next section) and because most of us are going without all of those benefits for a long time as we start our careers, preventive care is not happening. Taking all of that into account, and then learning that the average annual salary for hair stylists according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics was still $34k in 2024 — it’s pretty sobering.

I know that it sounds like a fun gig (and it is! I do enjoy my job) but there’s a lot more to it than “playing with hair and yapping all day,” and much to consider when encouraging kids to enter the industry because TikTok makes it seem super lucrative. I don’t want to discourage people. But I do want them to be as informed as possible about the difficulties that come with the job.

One small and gentle final thing I will say that I think people don’t understand: we absorb a LOT of information from our clients day in day out, much of it emotional, and doing hair is an intimate experience! I think many of us would love to see the, “my hair stylist is my therapist!” thing die out. I have stronger boundaries than many (and it is our job to cultivate them and set them), but we aren’t trained therapists at the end of the day. Please share your lives with us, the good and the bad, but there are limits to what we can absorb healthily, and there are professionals much better suited to it.

Can you talk about body care as a hairstylist? As in: preventing repetitive use injuries, protecting the back from standing all day, how blowdrying fucks with your wrists, etc. etc. How do you protect against overuse and injury?

I do kind of want to laugh at this one because honestly, it’s HARD. I was trained in my apprenticeship program to stand in certain ways, move the client in certain ways, position my wrists like so. But you fall into patterns or, embarrassingly for me, don’t want to tell someone to move their head for the 50th time and just give up.

There are some tools that I use that for me, put less strain on certain areas like my wrists. (My blowdryer isn’t very back heavy, for instance). Mats under the chair and at the shampoo bowl are a non-negotiable. I widen my stance instead of bending at the waist (at least while cutting and coloring), I try to really pay attention to not locking out my knees because that’s one of my worst habits, I try not to bend my wrist when round brushing. I also should stretch more, especially before work, but a recent bout of health stuff unrelated to hair has had me struggling there.

Everyone’s body is different, and I can recall many coworkers through the years who have had to drastically change certain ways they do hair to make the job tolerable, some of them surprisingly early on in their careers (to me, when I was early on in my career). Many of them hid it by finding alternative styling methods, or foisting a blowdry onto an assistant when the dryer got too heavy or their carpal tunnel too inflamed. At some point in the last few years I decided I would just be open about the things I can no longer do without feeling it into the evening/the next day and the very real possibility that those things could take time off my career.

There are two important movement types that used to be very regular parts of my workday and I’ve now almost entirely eliminated, and they both have to do with my hands:

• The first, and less common for me, is any long, intense flat ironing. The clamping motion really puts a lot of stress on my hands, especially my dominant (and obviously, most important) one. It sucks to say that if you prefer your hair blown out and straightened, I am no longer the stylist for you, but I must say it.

• The second, and more controversial one, is I no longer massage clients during a shampoo. Que horror! I know. I don’t love that similar to the “hair stylists are therapists” rhetoric, we have also been traditionally expected to provide this relaxation moment that takes a chunk of time out of the service, when we have professionals out there dedicated to doing this as their whole job. Bluntly, my number one job is to provide clients with an excellent hair service, and massage is not part of that, in my opinion. So I have switched to using a silicone scrubby brush that pairs well with the cleansing product I use, and it has helped so much (and it still feels nice). My clients (when it rarely comes up) understand, especially when I show them my double-jointed thumbs that have never handled massage well! I listened to an interview with a braider a couple years ago, and she said that her hands are the most important thing to her job, and she doesn’t even open jars anymore. That really stuck with me. I semi-jokingly bring that energy to scrubbing a pot my partner (who does the cooking) maybe got a little aggressive with, but it is true: if my hands are in too much pain due to repetitive tasks or strain, my career doing hair won’t be long for this world.

A major industry improvement vs. when I started I’d say is we’ve all accepted, for the most part, much more casual workwear. The salon I apprenticed in had an all-black dress code and there was almost an encouragement to wear heels (on cement). These days I damn near have a uniform of loose fitting pants, sneakers with inserts, and a boxy tee or lightweight longsleeve I can push up to my elbows in winter. (I’m maybe looking into orthotic inserts for work coming up soon; sexy!) It gets slightly fancier sometimes but I work with a lot of chemicals and have ruined so many shirts/jeans over the years, even if I’m a borderline expert at stain removal now. I keep joking to my clients I’m gonna start wearing scrubs, because I’m jealous of all the medspa estheticians pivoting to that. I truly don’t think they’d mind, but it’s hard to break away from the old mindset.

As I already said, part of why I went to a four day work week was overuse, and it took lockdown to realize it. So some prevention for me is just literally trying to work less, no matter how loud the internal American Protestant screams. The other thing I refused to do ever again after I left the last commission salon I worked at is double book (while one client’s color processes you start another, or do a haircut during that time). It’s nearly impossible to do without an assistant, and even with an assistant you’re cramming food in your face at a horrible pace when you can (or not at all), not drinking enough liquid because there’s no time to pee, and hardly ever getting to sit down. It’s also mentally taxing, and clients understandably don’t love it. If you are a stylist still double booking and reading this: raise your prices and stop harming yourself.

I also get massages monthly and try to look at that as maintenance instead of bougie luxury. My massage therapist wants me to see a PT because something in my lower back/hip on one side is causing the rest of the system to overcompensate (and has been going on a long time if we’re honest), so that’s on the to-do list.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on social media and brand management when it comes to hairstylists — what have you experimented with posting, and does it feel worth your time?

I want to start by saying that purely based on luck and timing, I began doing hair in a window of time that meant that social media was just ramping up (I mean, MySpace was the platform du jour when I was in school!), but I still was taught a lot more traditional techniques of building a clientele, and got to utilize the size and scope of an existing salon to build. That is nearly impossible if you are coming into the industry now, especially if you’re young; most of your peers expect a strong social presence.

It’s not that I’m not online or a luddite; I may be, as they say, “too online” still. But what I learned very quickly once “hair Instagram” started taking off around 2014-15 was that I really resented having an entire other job added onto an already difficult job. I got away with not participating in this for a long time until I moved to booth rental. That salon was smaller, and we didn’t have the presence of a larger, more established one, so I kind of had to start participating. I mostly just created a hair account and took pictures of my work. I decided to frame it to myself as an “online portfolio” because trying to keep up with what Instagram wanted of you changed all the time, and required time spent on the app I just didn’t appreciate. “Make sure to like lots of posts, make sure to comment a lot, make sure to hashtag properly, make sure to not hashtag too much, share others’ content to your stories…” Yuck. I’m not a social media manager, I can’t pay one, and this isn’t what I went to hair school for.

I also found that I was severely critical of any photo of work I took, and it required a lot of investment in equipment to get right without over-editing color services (most of what I’d post) in a way that could feel dishonest. Lighting has just been weird in the past few buildings I’ve worked in, and fighting it was an endless struggle in limited space without making half the studio into strategically placed lighting umbrellas. I’ve been told by people younger than me to chill out on being so critical of the photography and just post, because potential clients aren’t looking at it the same. I had to just laugh and say…no. This isn’t really possible for me, sorry!

Also, in a very Millennial way, I cannot cultivate a front-facing camera, video-making social media personality or presence. This is not discomfort I’m going to push through. And while I CAN make a reel, and have, I simply don’t want to spend my life doing that. None of this is paid work! You have to take extra time out of the day to shoot content of your clients, it adds stress to the timing and flow of the day for me, and I probably just didn’t put in enough time to see fruits of that labor (is what some coach would tell me).

And what’s funny anyway is…I still have new clients coming in, plenty of them young. Sometimes people find my Instagram and love what they see even if I haven’t updated much the last couple years (I actually don’t think I’ve taken a hair picture in two)! Sometimes they see my website and Instagram and Google reviews combined and decide they like the vibe. I have gotten an influx of people from ONE Reddit comment someone left on r/kansascity recommending me. They’ve been awesome clients! And not to sound too old, but…some of the best clients are still usually word of mouth from my already established clients. Sorry!

It was also very important to me to hire a friend to make a little logo and be aesthetically consistent across my website and social media, on Google and in my Square communications with my clients. It feels professional to me in a way I like when I see it in other businesses. (Because some days I’m like I cannot fucking believe I’ve been doing this on my own for five years, and I need to manufacture that professional feeling for myself)! That’s why I named the studio as opposed to using my own name, as well. I also hired another friend to take professional photos of my studio because I love his work, but I also wanted the website and Google listing to look as nice as possible, and my shots weren’t going to cut it.

I know a lot of people in my industry reading this will not like my “low social media usage” answer. I also know that I’ve heard a LOT of us complain about how they feel chained to it, don’t want to be on their phones using screens as much as it requires them to, and it wears on them mentally because it’s hard to shake the likes = worth bug, or the comparison bug. Someday deciding not to be silly on TikTok may come to bite me, but it doesn’t really seem to be a problem for my business at this time, and I’m happier for it. No client has ever sat down and lamented my lack of reels; if anything, they’re understanding about why I don’t want to do even more labor.

There’s a small bit here to discuss about product sales, and how a social media presence can really help bolster those. That is true — if you already have a strong following. I’m sorry to say that I hate sales, though I love to recommend products I love to my clients if they’re in the market for something, or if I think they’re in need of upgrading to something that will help with an issue they’re having. The truth is, people are going to Sephora or a big box store a lot of the time (and ordering online), and I don’t really want to fight them on that, it’s tiring. It’s so expensive to carry product in-salon these days, which is why many have pivoted to the affiliate link type model. But if you want to do a “support small business” thing, buy from your stylist’s affiliate links or online storefronts if they have them. It’s a nice thing to do and we do get commission.

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

I know that interviewees often choose a non-profit that is adjacent to or relates to their industry, but I’m choosing AIRR KC (airrkc.org), Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation in Kansas and Missouri. They are doing incredibly important work: real time ICE alerts, education, and activism on behalf of immigrants in my area. I think the moment demands it. ●

And here’s my donation receipt to AIRR KC:

Heather Haavisto owns Suki Hair Studio. You can visit sukihairstudio.com for more info or go to @sukihairstudio on Instagram. She’s located in the West Bottoms neighborhood of Kansas City, MO.

You can ask Heather questions in the comments below — and paid subscribers, you can keep reading for This Week’s Things I Read and Loved. Unpaid subscribers, if you want access to all the other good stuff (the sprawling surprising comments sections, the weekly threads, the summer book recs!) and the knowledge that you’re helping fund the stuff that makes your life more interesting — consider funneling less than the cost of a cup of coffee into a subscription:

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And if you haven’t listened to this week’s episode of The Culture Study Pod, it’s all about Why Montana Is So Obsessed With Itself. If you’re from the West, in love with the West, or hang around with someone who’s in either one of those buckets, you’re gonna appreciate this one.

What You Might Have Missed in the Culture Study Universe This Week:

• The first in our playlist crowdsourcing series: PUMP UP SONGS (I put together the Top 100 in a pretty ridiculous playlist at the end of this piece)

• The Great Feminist Exhaustion (come for the comments section)

• What Were Your Parents Right About? (Surprisingly hilarious and moving!!!)

I won’t be annoying and put this in giant font but I will put it in caps lock: THIS INTERVIEW IS SO FUN. I knew, the second Sarah Gold McBride talked about in a Culture Study comments section many months ago, that it would be interesting, but I had no idea how fun it would be. So many smart, dedicated people can and have written good books, but it’s a special bonus skill to make those books not just fun, but addictive — even thrilling. That’s how I felt reading Whiskerology, which details the “culture of hair” in the 20th century, and how I know you’ll feel reading this interview. It just explains so much! Hair is so weird, and so culturally freighted! It’s bonkers!!!

If you’ve ever wondered why men (of all races!) in the 18th century wore weird white wigs in hair styles like George Washington’s: she’s got you. If you’ve been annoying by someone born before 1950 talking about facial hair like it’s a sign of moral failure: she’s got you there, too. We cover bearded ladies, disguise wigs, cross-dressing, all manner of racialized hair discourses — just believe me when I say it’s a romp, and you’re gonna leave this feeling like you understand something about the world in a way you didn’t before. And isn’t that the best?

It’s a cheat to use the first question to ask about something that shows up on the very first page of the book, but my rationale is sound: if you chose it to open the book, it’s something that’s not only weird and compelling, but also speaks to the themes of the book as a whole. And so: let’s talk about this weird passage from an obscure French book of “beauty secrets” that was reprinted dozens of times in publications across the U.S.

Coarse black hair and dark skin signify great power of character, with a tendency to sensuality. Fine hair and dark skin indicates strength of character, along with purity and goodness. Stiff, straight black hair and beard indicate a coarse, strong, rigid, straightforward character. Fine dark brown hair signifies the combination of exquisite sensibilities, with great strength of character. Flat, clinging, straight hair a melancholy but extremely constant character. Harsh, upright hair is the sign of a reticent and sour spirit; a stubborn and harsh character.

Coarse red hair and whiskers indicate powerful animal passions, together with a corresponding strength of character. Auburn hair, with florid countenance, denotes the highest capacity for enjoyment or suffering. Straight, even smooth and glossy hair denotes strength, harmony and evenness of character, hearty affections, a clear head anD superior talents. Fine, silky, supple hair is the mark of a delicate and sensitive temperament, and speaks in favor of the mind and character of the owner. Crisp, curly hair indicates a hasty, somewhat impetuous and rash character. White hair denotes a lymphatic and indolent constitution; and we may add that besides all these qualities there are chemical properties residing in the coloring matter of the hair-tube which undoubtedly have some effect upon the disposition.

Thus red-haired people are notoriously passionate. Now red hair is proved by analysis to contain a large amount of sulphur, whilst very black is colored with almost pure carbon. The presence of these matters in the blood points to peculiarities of temperament and feeling which are almost universally associated with them. The very way in which the hair flows is strongly indicative of the ruling passions and inclinations, and perhaps a clever person could give a shrewd guess at the manner of a man or woman's disposition by only seeing the backs of their heads.

I found the text in full by googling the first sentence of the passage — and the first result was from the New Jersey Herald, which put it online as a “from the archives” post (originally printed on February 27, 1868).

Can you introduce us to this idea that our hair communicated something essential about our inner selves — and why it became so prevalent in the 19th century? (I basically found every single part of this intro enthralling but please mention the cult of sincerity, I’m obsessed)

I’m so glad you pulled out this passage because I completely agree: it is just so weird! If this list of correspondences between hair and personality had appeared just once in a random newspaper, that would be one thing, but I saw it over and over again! In total, I found this passage in over 50 newspapers and magazines—and that only accounts for publications that have been digitized! (The list of titles is delightfully wacky, too: from local papers like the New Jersey Herald or the Daily Alta California, to high-brow magazines like Harper’s Weekly, to specialized trade publications like The Monthly Journal of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.)

I became kind of obsessed with tracking down this passage as many times as I could because I loved how, both in its content and its broad circulation, it perfectly captured the core idea of this book: that all different kinds of people living in the United States during the nineteenth century believed that hair had the power to reveal the truth about the person from whose body it grew. Hair was broadly understood to be capable of quickly and reliably conveying important information about a stranger’s core identity—especially their gender or their race—as well as their personality: whether they were courageous, ambitious, sketchy, or likely to commit a crime, for example. One of the most exciting and surprising findings of my research was that, in some contexts, hair was actually thought to be more more reliable than other body parts that we more often think of as relevant to the way Americans have tried to read identity from the body, like the shape of the skull or even the color of the skin.

That’s the other big claim I’m making in this book—that from a nineteenth-century perspective, hair truly was a part of the body. So much of its significance to nineteenth-century understandings of identity has been overlooked by scholars, I think, simply because we don’t share that same conception of hair today. Hair still matters, absolutely, but hair isn’t really thought of as part of the body anymore; hair grows from the body but isn’t really of it. But in the nineteenth century, my research shows, it really was as essential to the body as any of its flesh-and-bone parts.

So, why did hair become so important—and so freighted with significance—in the nineteenth century? It’s really rooted in the broader economic, political, and social changes that rocked the U.S. between roughly 1800 and 1900. I teach my students about this almost every semester because I think it’s hard to wrap our heads around just how profoundly virtually every single facet of the country changed over that one hundred year period. It’s like the greatest hits of structural change: abolition, capitalism, urbanization, immigration (and immigration restriction), colonization (and, by the end of the century, imperialism), national transportation and communication networks, mass media, mass voting rights for white men, white supremacist violence against Black and Indigenous people, new understandings of science and medicine—it’s dizzying even to list them all out!

What all of these changes shared in common is that they not only scrambled the kinds of institutions that had long provided ways of understanding differences between human cultures and bodies; on an even more everyday level, they just forced people to deal with strangers in a way Americans had never had to do before! This is so normalized for us today, but imagine what it would be like for a group of people to spend generations mostly just seeing, talking to, and doing business with people they knew, and then, within about two generations, there are just strangers everywhere you look: strangers sitting next to you in a theater or at the circus, strangers buying goods from your shop, strangers trying to sell you some kind of “cure-all” remedy, strangers asking if they could borrow your watch (the classic confidence man’s trick!), strangers coming through your town on the train, strangers who did not look the same or work the same way or speak the same language. For many Americans, that’s what daily life in the nineteenth century felt like: like living in a world of strangers.

In some ways, being in a big crowd of strangers can be thrilling—even liberating! But lots of people were totally freaked out by these changes, too: how could you know who to trust when you hardly knew anyone around you, and everyone around you could be lying to you or trying to scam you? This was especially true for upper- and middle-class white men and women, particularly in the North—and this makes sense because they were also the people most likely to live in cities, work and consume through the market economy, and attend large cultural and commercial events, and thus have significant social and financial stakes in being deceived.

This is why many nineteenth-century Americans—especially those well-to-do white people—tried to come up with new ways to evaluate unfamiliar people quickly and reliably. One of the books that really helped this click for me is a classic of nineteenth-century U.S. cultural history: Confidence Men and Painted Women by Karen Halttunen (1986), which explores what Halttunen calls the “cult of sincerity.” Essentially, in the 1830s—when both life among strangers and the very idea of the middle-class were both new—middle-class people created all of these advice guidebooks and conduct manuals that taught their peers how to convey themselves as sincere. Being sincere, they thought, would help them thread the needle between achieving social and business success with people they did not know while also not stooping to manipulation the way a confidence man would. To convey oneself as sincere became fundamental to identifying oneself as part of the middle class—until, in the 1850s, the performance of sincerity became, itself, insincere. The snake ate its own tail!

The cult of sincerity is not just a wild story of middle-class class anxiety (though it absolutely is that too)—it also shows us just how much mid-century Americans were thinking about truth and deception. The norms of sincerity that they developed in response are one example of a whole raft of efforts to create an easily-understood method for evaluating who was telling the truth and who was faking it.

And yet, importantly, no methodology or type of evidence was more compelling to nineteenth-century Americans than the human body itself. In all different kinds of publications—from advice guidebooks to medical journal articles to popular newspapers—nineteenth-century scientific and cultural authorities attempted to identify, measure, and classify parts of the body that were impossible to fake. Even the best confidence man’s performance, they argued, could not obscure the truth that was evident in his body. I’m sure you and your readers know about some of the sciences (though we’d now call them pseudosciences) that emerged from this body classification search—especially phrenology, the reading-the-bumps-on-the-head science that even Bugs Bunny was practicing into the twentieth century. But what historians didn’t really know before this book is that the hair, too, was studied (and trusted) in the same way as the body’s flesh-and-bone parts. Hair, nineteenth-century people believed, could reveal the truth about who a person really was—their innate qualities of personality, behavior, race, and gender—regardless of how that person wanted to be perceived, and regardless of any tricks they were trying to pull.

And that’s what makes this nineteenth-century story so different from the way hair functions in American culture today: although hair and social identity are still very connected, our understanding of hairstyling emphasizes agency and self-discovery. Hair is a medium for self-expression that allows us to convey our sense of identity to the public however we please. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, most Americans believed almost the exact opposite: that the body itself revealed its intrinsic, authentic truth through the hair. Hair, in other words, was a tell.

I found myself deeply engaged in every chapter (we’ll talk more about that in a bit) but I had somehow never thought deeply about the seismic shift (visible even just in presidential portraits) from the periwig to “one’s own hair” (and, as you point out, the even more seismic shift from long hair to short) over the course of the late 18th to early 19th century. You pay such nuanced attention to how race plays into these discourses, so I’d love for readers to hear an overview of what was going on and why the Puritans were so bossy about all of this.

The whole chapter on long hair started from basically this exact question, which was posed to me by one of my advisors in grad school, a brilliant historian of American art: “Why did men all of a sudden have short hair at the start of the nineteenth century?” she asked me, and I had no idea!

It turns out that a lot of scholars didn’t really know the answer, either, or they focused their attention entirely on the wigs: in the eighteenth century, white men (particularly wealthy and politically-powerful men) often wore white powered periwigs with elaborate curls, long ponytails tied with a bow, or both. (The wild part of this being a dominant white male hairstyle is that even some of the famous men we know for wearing periwigs were not actually wearing a wig at all—I see you, George Washington!—but instead wore their own hair styled and powered to look like a periwigs!)

But by the 1820s, virtually no American men wore periwigs at all. (James Monroe was our last be-wigged president; his successor, John Quincy Adams, wore his own hair short.) Because periwigs disappeared from the U.S. shortly after the Revolutionary War, when many newly-minted American citizens wanted to distance themselves from English consumer goods and aesthetics, it was easy for scholars to assume that periwigs were the same as, say, English tea—a newly-odious reminder of the crown—and their disappearance just another casualty of the Revolution.

And yet! What I argue in this book is that we cannot treat these white powered wigs as merely a consumer good. We have to analyze the declining popularity of periwigs alongside another massive hair shift that happened at the same time: white men stopped wearing their own hair long, too, as many European-descended men in North America had been doing for generations. (The evidence for Black men’s hair is sparser than for white men’s hair, but available sources suggest the same uniform shift to short hair for Black men, too.) It’s also super important that this shift happened right as the United States became an independent nation and was therefore grappling with how to define the very notion of who counted as an American both politically and culturally—and hair got completely tangled up in this question. (I cannot stress how hard it is to avoid hair puns when talking about this stuff!!)

This interest in how long or short men’s hair was goes back to basically the beginning of English colonization of North America. White men’s hair length was really an obsession for many early Puritan leaders, who trashed periwigs as excessive and thus unchristian. However, they weren’t just worried about the wigs—their criticism was part of a broader condemnation of long hair on men, regardless of whether that hair was their own or not. Puritan ministers cited biblical mandates about hair and gender, most often 1 Corinthians, when Paul said, “Doth not nature itself teach you, that if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a praise unto her: for her hair is given her for a covering.”

So when white Christian men in New England chose to let their hair grow long, they were signalling to their community that their faith was faltering—that they were not carrying themselves as good Christian men. Some Puritan leaders were so concerned about men’s hair length that they even passed legislation: in 1649, the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s leadership wrote a proclamation condemning men in the colony for wearing long hair and empowering local leaders to police men in their community to make sure they kept their hair short; Harvard incorporated this same prohibition into their dress code six years later.

So while to us, it may seem like an absurd triviality to force men to wear their hair short, for Puritan leaders in the English colonies, short hair was as foreboding and serious as failing to attend church. Another order passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1675 explained the stakes: because colonists had been behaving in such unchristian ways, God had “heightened our calamity, and given comission [sic] to the barbarous heathen to rise up against us.” Warfare with Indigenous tribes, in other words, was the direct result of colonists’ provoking God’s wrath with their inappropriate behavior—including, crucially, long hair on men. This is the same reason Puritan leaders tried to force the Indigenous men they converted to Christianity to cut their hair short, too: short hair was a powerful, visible, and not easily reversible signifier of Christian faith (unlike wearing English clothing or shoes, for example).

About a hundred years later, as these English colonies were transforming themselves into the new United States in the aftermath of the Revolution, hair length once again became important. As early American political leaders conceptualized who could be (or become) a political citizen of this new nation—and especially the gender and racial borders of American citizenship—conversations about long hair and short hair grafted on to conversations about American identity itself.

Hair length thus became this kind of visual shorthand in early America. Short hair signaled white masculine political power and social citizenship; a white man’s short haircut, simple and basic and easy (and cheap) to maintain, communicated what early Americans would call his self-mastery. (The racial undertones of “mastery” are absolutely on purpose!!)

On the other hand, long hair signaled the absence of political and social power; it was the style of Indigenous people resistant to assimilation, women too subjugated to men to be fit to vote, and immigrants—including Chinese men who wore long ponytails called queues—ineligible for citizenship. What was exciting to discover is that these conversations about hair length can really help us see how American conceptions of masculinity and male political citizenship were racialized as white from their very inception—a whiteness that was in tension with (and often defined in opposition to) not just African-descended men, but also Indigenous North American and East Asian men, too.

Can you talk a bit more about men’s facial hair, the idea that “the Caucasian is the only bearded race,” and the maintenance of patriarchal white supremacy? (Also, how that discourse transformed to the point that writers in the 1920s were effectively eulogizing the beard, convinced it would never return?) (I think this answer will explain a lot of things to anyone who’s had someone born before 1950 chastise them about their facial hair)

The chapter on facial hair is actually where this whole book began back when I was a first year graduate student! I was fascinated by freak shows as this extremely popular type of popular entertainment in the nineteenth century, and especially by what audience members might be learning about gender and race and American identity when they attended these shows. So I wrote this paper on Bearded Ladies—who became basically ubiquitous in American freak shows after the 1850s—and I kind of stumbled onto the fact that the era of the Bearded Ladies mapped almost perfectly onto the era in which white and Black American men began wearing beards, mustaches, and other forms of prominent facial hair to an astounding and unprecedented degree in U.S. history. (Here again we can see evidence in the presidents’ faces: from the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s term in 1861 through the end of William Howard Taft’s term in 1913, all but two presidents sported a beard or mustache or both. Before 1861 and since 1913, not a single president has worn a beard or mustache of any kind while in office.)

Especially juxtaposed with the Bearded Lady, we can see the gendered meanings of facial hair pretty immediately—but what’s so fascinating is that the mid-nineteenth-century beard was also deeply racialized, too. Beards became symbols of not just manhood and male supremacy, but specifically of white male supremacy. In Western European culture, beards had long been linked to masculnity—even during periods when few men actually wore beards, such as the entire eighteenth century!—but in the nineteenth century, white scientific and cultural authorities took an old story about the masculine beard and imbued it with new political urgency: beards indicated which bodies fit within the bounds of political citizenship, and, just as importantly, which bodies did not.

So what happened in the mid-nineteenth-century is that white men who were already deeply convinced of white supremacy—many of them scientists by training or trade—basically dragged the beard into their body of evidence for why white men were both superior and, crucially, best-suited to political and social rule. (If you’re thinking wow, this sounds like the opposite of the scientific method, you are absolutely right: the conclusion—i.e., white men should be in power—preceded the evidence—i.e., many white men are now growing beards. The evidence was an attempt to shore up, with the prestige of science, what many white Americans believed was the self-evident truth of white supremacy.)

The guy who yelled about this the most was a Canadian-born doctor named John Van Evrie, who self-published a bunch of pamphlets and short books in the 1850s and 1860s, when tensions over race and slavery in the U.S. were at their absolute highest. Van Evrie was the one who declared that “the Caucasian is the only bearded race” in a pamphlet-turned-book first published in 1853. Van Evrie claimed that white men were characterized by a “full, flowing, and majestic beard,” whereas the facial hair found on the faces of men of color was merely a pale imitation—“nothing that can be confounded with a beard.”

Black men’s facial hair growth was “the furthest removed of all” from “the full, flowing, and majestic beard of the Caucasian:” it was, instead, a mere “little tuft on the chin and sometimes on the upper lip.” (This probably goes without saying, but this claim is bullshit nonsense. Plenty of Black men grow facial hair, as Frederick Douglass pointed out to Van Evrie directly.)

But Van Evrie wasn’t just yelling at clouds here: in a book published a decade later, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Van Evrie insisted that Black men’s minimal facial hair was the most important bodily metaphor—even more than skin color—for the impossibility of Black equality: only when white Northerners had “endowed the negro with the full and flowing beard of the Caucasian” would there “be some prospect of the success of their efforts in ‘reconstructing’ the race.” Facial hair, in other words, proved to Van Evrie that white supremacy would remain even after the abolition of slavery.

For the next fifty years, beards, mustaches, and other forms of prominent facial hair were hugely popular among white (and Black) American men. (Truly some incredible photographs of wacky facial hair come out of this period!!) And then, in the 1910s and 1920s, they almost completely disappeared. This is a moment when we are really reminded that history is complicated because I don’t think there was just one simple reason for the beard’s decline. It was likely a combination of factors: the invention and marketing of the safety razor made shaving cheaper, easier and safer, for example, and new understandings of science and the body (especially the discovery of germ theory) made a bushy beard seem like just a complete germ cesspool.

But the beard’s disappearance was also part of the broader shift in hair’s cultural meaning—the declining consensus, in the early twentieth century, that hair was a body part capable of transmitting internal truths. This shift drained much of the power from narratives about the beard as biological evidence of white male supremacy. After the 1920s, the beard went back to signalling, as it had done in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, something antisocial and unsettling or even threatening: a hermit, a radical, an agitator, or (gasp!) a Communist!

You write that “hair disguises threatened the very foundation of the culture of hair: the narratives of hair’s stability and legibility that many Americans — but especially the middle- and upper-class white Americans who held the most social and political power — trusted so fervently.” Can you share some of the stories of how hair figured into “martial cross-dressing narratives,” how Chinese immigrants got their “hair right” in order to cross the border after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the ubiquitous stories of hair transformation as a component of criminality?

I’m so glad you asked about this because the stories of hair disguises I read for this book were some of the most fascinating pieces of evidence! I read so many news reports from the late nineteenth century of men and women arrested by police officers, particularly in those newly-bustling big cities, whose collection of criminal accessories included a wig or fake beard. It felt almost like a trope—so much so, that simply to be wearing a wig or fake beard might draw the suspicion of a cop and the presumption of criminal intent. One of the most bizarre examples was local to me: in the 1880s and 1890s, the San Francisco Police Department arrested at least six people for the crime of wearing a false beard! In the context of a culture that believed hair communicates who a person really was, a hair transformation wasn’t just a way for someone to look less like a police detective’s description of their appearance after committing a crime; it disrupted hair’s very ability to reveal the truth.

But what I point out in the book is that stories of hair disguise aren’t just about police power—they also showcase the way that hair’s fundamental malleability (in a way so unlike flesh and bone!) left open exciting possibilities for play, for reinvention, and even for subversion.

I loved learning about Loreta Janeta Velazquez, for example, who served in the Confederate Army under the alias Lieutenant Harry T. Buford. As Velazquez wrote in her memoir The Woman in Battle (1876), simply donning a uniform was not enough to allow her to pass as a man on the battlefield—she needed to change her hair, too, to be believed. Velazquez cut her hair short and purchased a fake mustache that she glued to her face; her friend suggested the mustache would not only give her appearance “a more manly air” but would also, crucially, make her disguise more convincing.

She even devoted a whole section of a chapter to her mustache—a section titled, delightfully, “My Mustache in Danger”—in which she described how she was worried she might be unmasked as a woman because she drank a glass of buttermilk (normal!!) and was scared the buttermilk might loosen her mustache glue. (Spoiler: the glue was strong and the mustache didn’t budge.) Throughout the rest of the book, Velasquez frequently twists her mustache during moments of doubt about her identity, but she is never unmasked. Her mustache and short hair make this possible.

Another even more incredible story of hair disguise is that of José Chang, a Chinese–Mexican man who ran a border smuggling operation along the U.S.–Mexico border during the Chinese Exclusion Act era (between 1882 and World War II), when the U.S. forbade nearly all Chinese people from immigrating to the United States. Chang disguised Chinese immigrants as Mexicans to help them enter the U.S. without arousing suspicion. To enact this disguise, Chang didn’t just make the immigrants change their clothing—he also cut off their queues. This story points to exactly why a hair disguise could actually be a much more powerful tool for transformation—especially across gender and racial lines—than clothing (which could be removed) or artificial skin darkening (which would rub off or fade): most kinds of hair alterations would remain in place, at least for a little while. I argue in the book that hair indexed national belonging in the nineteenth century—and sometimes, hair fraud could undermine even federal immigration laws designed to keep the United States white.

As a way of connecting us to the present, I’d love to hear your thoughts on hair autonomy and self-sovereignty — it comes through so vividly in the conclusion of the book, and in the ways hair is still regulated in so many arenas today.

I think this is one of the most powerful ways we can see the legacy of this nineteenth-century story in the present: Americans may no longer define our hair as a body part, but I think for many of us the link between bodily autonomy and hair autonomy feels intuitive (though I'd love to hear how your readers feel about this connection in their own lives and communities!).

There are strong historical precedents for this connection, too, where institutional control of the body extended to control of the hair. This includes institutions like the military and prison, in the past as it is in the present. In the early 1800s, for example, Colonel Thomas Butler was court-martialed twice because the Army implemented a policy requiring a short haircut for all U.S. soldiers, and Butler refused to comply. (This badass took his protest all the way to the grave: he told his friends to cut a hole in the back of his coffin so his hair could hang through it.)

But stripping a person of their self-sovereignty by forcibly controlling their hair—that also describes the institution of slavery, as well as federal policy towards Indigenous people. In the book I describe some of the harrowing stories of enslaved women whose hair was forcibly cut or shaved by their enslavers and Indigenous children, who received compulsory haircuts when they arrived at federal boarding schools. Thus, controlling one’s own hair is a crucial part of self-sovereignty.

We still live today with a version of this institutional control of the hair—one of the nineteenth century’s more troubling hair legacies—particularly for Black men and women, since some school and workplace dress codes still prohibit hairstyles like box braids, locs, and afros. But I am also optimistic about the possibility for change. I write in the conclusion about the Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair Act (or, CROWN Act), which prohibits discrimination based on hair texture or style. It became state law in my home state of California in 2019, and in the six years since has become law in a total of twenty-three states total. (A federal CROWN Act passed the House in 2022 but got stuck in committee in the Senate. Senator Cory Booker reintroduced the CROWN Act earlier this year.)

One last meta-question: this book is so delightfully readable while also being rigorous and absolutely filled with gorgeous archival finds. It was published by a university press, and I know the road to publication was a long one, but how did you think about audience and prose and style as you crafted this book, and what advice would you give to others trying to craft a similar book?

I appreciate this question so much! It was really important to me that this book felt interesting and readable for any curious reader, not just a few dozen fellow academics, and I’m so thrilled to hear that you read it this way, too. The stories that knit together to form this book have always been weird and wacky and actually fun to talk about at parties, and I wanted the book itself to reflect that, too!

Because I am a non-tenure-track lecturer (meaning: I have a full-time long-term teaching position at a university that I love, but unlike the traditional professorial position, my job is wholly structured around teaching, not research), it took me three years after finishing my Ph.D. to even write a book proposal, and then five more years after that to publish this book. I was really fortunate to sign a contract with Harvard University Press in March 2020, about a week after everything in the U.S. started to shut down. (My editor and I were both like, oh this will probably last a few weeks and then I can go do all that archival travel I want to do! Hah!) So part of why the book took so long to publish was about COVID, and a big part of it was about the difficulty of squeezing in writing and revision while also teaching and designing a lot of classes.

But I also think my teaching has been a major positive influence on my writing: I try to write the way I talk to my students—like I’m just REALLY EXCITED to nerd out with you about all these kind-of-bizarre-but-also-kind-of-familiar things people were thinking and doing and writing about over 150 years ago. Writing hundreds of lectures over the last eight years has helped me hone my writing voice: I write shorter sentences, I incorporate clear signposting and reiteration of the main ideas, I provide lots of context (and try not to assume prior knowledge of the subject), and I really try to stay away from jargon. I was also lucky to have worked with fantastic editors at HUP who were on board with this book reflecting my own voice. They didn’t push me to be more jargon-y or theory-heavy, or to cut out the little jokes that I wrote mostly to make myself chuckle.

One thing I believe so deeply as a teacher and as a historian is that accessibility and rigor are not antithetical. I don’t think you have to choose between readability and broad appeal versus lots of detailed historical examples in-text and a dense forest of endnotes at the back of the book. I always tell my senior thesis students to trust your scholarly voice, and I think that’s the advice I’d give here too: academic writing doesn’t have to just be one thing! Gaining confidence in your own scholarly voice also really benefits from reading. Reading a lot and reading a lot of different kinds of writing—academic and otherwise—is powerful because it showcases the different kinds of voices that are possible as you are working on crafting your own. ●

You can buy Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth Century America here — and find out more about Sarah Gold McBride’s work here.

**ALSO!!! I have two extra copies of the book and would love to send them to two lucky Culture Study Readers. Comment below with a question and/or your favorite part of the interview, and I’ll pick two comments at random (and then get in touch to get your address!)**

***ALSO ALSO: Seattle area Culture Study readers, Sarah is going to be at Elliott Bay this Thursday, July 24th at 7 pm! Go see her talk about periwigs in person!!!

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This Week’s Things I Read and Loved (Gift Links Whenever Possible; Remember Instapaper is Your Friend)

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This week, Christine Driscoll interviews Christine Wenc about her new history of The Onion — how it started, how it developed its sensibility, and the sort of work environment (and ownership structure) allowed it to thrive. If you have a spectacularly good idea for a future interview, you know where to find me (aka, my email: annehelenpetersen at gmail dot com)

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I first met Christine Wenc when I picked her up for an hour-long car ride to a mutual friend’s home. From the time she got in the car to our arrival, we did not stop talking. We’re both named Christine, Big 10 alumni, moved to Madison, WI from the East Coast (though she’s actually from Wisconsin); and seriously into history and oral histories. I do a version of this work as a podcast producer, but Wenc was writing a book. A history… of The Onion.

It was like meeting a celebrity I didn’t know existed. She wasn’t only writing the book, she was part of the social group that started the paper in Madison, WI in the late 80s. Its founder was her roommate, she did some of the early copy editing and sometimes drew cartoons, but then she moved on. Wenc went to Seattle where she was the editor of the alt weekly The Stranger.

The Onion was the first website I regularly read. Its existence helped form my own political sensibility. I migrated as a reader from The Onion to The AV Club to Dan Savage’s explicit, sex-positive, and funny advice column. Reading Savage Love at age 12 was not only titillating but inoculated me from much of the early 2000s conservatism I could have otherwise absorbed.

I suspect that for others who grew up with it, The Onion was a signal that there were other people who were skeptical of the establishment. And because it was funny it could travel far. For instance, as a teen girl I had to sit through lectures about how magazine images of the perfect body weren’t real. Okay sure, I guess, but it looks pretty real. The Onion made the power of Photoshop explicit with illustrations like Christ Returns to NBA or later, Diamond Joe.

Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire is not just a history of The Onion but the last thirty-five years of the news industry it evolved to mock. We get to meet the writers and designers who pulled all-nighters and rushed to constantly tweak and master new mediums to make the satire seamless. By profiling the individuals who made it, Wenc’s book becomes a study of how attitudes towards work have shifted, too.

Before “Gen X” was a label, it was simply young people living at a particular moment in time reacting to the world around them. Early Onion writers watched their radical college peers go work at investment banks. Those bankers are also Gen X. But the Gen X writers and designers who created The Onion had little reverence for careerism or making tons of money as an ambition. Yet they found enormous success.

And so by necessity, Wenc’s history of satire examines the conflict between making money and making art.

An early source of tension is between Pete Haise, a founding owner who ran the ad department and the staff writers. Most of the writers were simply funny people with part time jobs in Madison. One person was hired from the liquor store because he wrote funny signs.

The writers were cool; Pete Haise was not. And worse, Haise cared about money. He was industrious and packed every issue with ads - their primary source of income. Then as The Onion starts to get some national acclaim, Haise creates another job for himself: owner of two sub shops an hour away in Milwaukee. The writers are equally amused and angered. Does he even care about this? Is his priority selling sandwiches?

Haise loves The Onion but eventually sells his shares of it, and the paper goes through successive owners.

The new owners’ demands for the paper didn’t necessarily affect how readers encountered the paper, but they dramatically shaped the lives of the people working there. And so Funny Because It’s True becomes a tale of modern creative work, or any passion job. It’s funny as hell and full of anecdotes about projects that didn’t work or failed spectacularly. The writers came up with some of the most incisive political commentary despite poor management and ownership indifferent to what made The Onion special. It makes you want to start an art project with your friends.

One of Haise’s critics told Wenc: “Looking back, The Onion’s best ownership, The Onion’s best business mind, was a Milwaukee sub-shop owner, because he paid the staff salaries and left us alone.”

I wanted to talk to Wenc more about the nature of writing an oral history and the social and economic conditions that made The Onion possible and if we can find those conditions today.

CD: How did you get interested in writing a history of The Onion? I know it started as an oral history and then moved into a more reported work. We’re both big history nerds, so can you talk about that decision and how your reporting has changed some of the history?

CW: When I moved from Boston back to Madison in 2017 — a place I hadn’t lived in 25 years — I naturally started thinking about my college days at UW-Madison, which included being on the original staff of The Onion. (The Onion was founded by my friend Tim Keck when we were 19-20 years old. I met Tim in the dorms our freshman year. He asked me to be the art director but I didn’t know what that was. I became the copy editor instead. I also drew illustrations and did some writing.)

I went on to do other things a couple of years after The Onion was founded, I had nothing to do with making The Onion famous in the mid-90s. So in many ways, when I started this project, I still thought of The Onion as this funny thing my friends made in college. I had no idea of how highly regarded it was in the comedy community nor how influential it was. I did not know there had been Onion print editions in about a dozen different cities, I didn’t know anything about the Onion News Network, I hadn’t read any of their books after Our Dumb Century. I found out about all that stuff over the years I spent researching the book and interviewing people. It was a much more interesting story than I had expected.

Another reason I wanted to write it was because 2017 was the beginning of the first Trump administration, and everyone was talking about “fake news” all the time. On one especially ridiculous news day, I thought, “Man, I wonder what the old Onion folks think of this.”

Finally, the last reason I wanted to write this book was that when I started googling “onion history” I discovered, to my surprise, that there was a lot of inaccurate information online. Even the Wikipedia page was wrong. But when I tried to edit it, it got changed back — and the reason was because there weren’t any published sources to support the edits! The situation kind of made my head spin. I hope it now gets corrected. As a historian I’m well aware that documentation and sources really matter, and that if the information in your sources is wrong, your idea of history is going to be wrong too.

I also just had sort of patriotic feelings for The Onion and it made me mad that the people who made it — especially the 1990s staff who created The Onion’s voice — were not getting proper credit. (I don’t mean me, since my role there was limited and a long time ago and I had nothing to do with making it famous.)

CD: The Onion came out of Madison, WI in the late 80s. What is it about Madison, WI or the Midwest that made it the place The Onion was born? There is a distinctly Midwestern "nowhere" humor in it that's hard to identify, but it didn’t come out of D.C. or Austin, or even Chicago. Though eventually it moves between New York and Chicago. How important is place to The Onion?

CW: The Midwestern sensibility has been really important to The Onion for many reasons, especially when it was still in Madison and written mostly by Wisconsinites in the 1990s and early 2000s. One is that even though The Onion often has really excellent writing, the place has not been about individual star writers or egos. There are no bylines and a lot of the work is done collectively. In the Midwest, it’s really frowned upon to be visibly ambitious or aggressive in your desire to get ahead. I lived in NYC long enough to know that this is definitely not the case elsewhere.

But creativity is a basic human activity — so people still do it. And having space and time outside of the entertainment industry takes off a ton of pressure while you are developing your creative voice. As one person in the book says, in Madison you can do whatever you want in your performance or your band or whatever: be free and experiment. It’s not like some big agent is going to come to your show. As a result, the focus really goes to the work — the process and the fun and exploration.

Intellectually, it’s similar. I knew brilliant people in Madison, who knew so much and had such vast stores of knowledge about all kinds of stuff, and who could talk about it intelligently and creatively. I later then studied and worked in some pretty fancy parts of academia and discovered that people I knew in Madison were just as smart–and sometimes more–than these fancy Ivy League types. They just weren’t in a place where people performed and professionalized their knowledge the way you’re expected to do in the Ivy League. They just talked about stuff because they liked it.

Of course, location can also stymie you, but in some ways that’s an illusion too. Being in the vicinity of all that money and power doesn’t mean any of it is going to come to you. I think that a lot of young artists/writers/musicians move to a place like NYC and discover that unfortunately it’s so expensive and cramped to live there that they have to spend all their time making money and riding on the subway, and so they lose all the time they used to have back in their cheap hometowns to make their art and hang out with their weirdo artsy friends. (That’s basically what happened to me.)

The Onion’s original Midwestern-small-business model kept all its money in-house. The money went to pay writer salaries and keep the office lights on. Stuff that existed in a material reality. As if The Onion was a local auto body shop or something. Of course they wanted to make money, but it was just a different idea and a different scale than when it became an investment and thereby much more wrapped up in imaginary things. And people who were not actually working there, or were not there day-to-day, 9-5, became the ones who got most of the money.

And I think the book shows that The Onion cannot be looked at or used as an investment. It’s a public service, like journalism is ideally supposed to be.

CD: Let's get simple: why is it important to satirize the news? We've all felt a deep tug of recognition at some Onion headline and I bet most people reading right now could recite one. But why was news such a perfect target? And as the power of news as an industry is on the wane, and our political reality feels beyond parody, does news satire still work?

CW: News is a good target because it is such a good straight man. And because it’s supposed to be simply describing reality “objectively,” though of course people like Noam Chomsky have shown that news is actually often just shaping and describing reality the way that the powerful would like it shaped and described.

Yet sometimes the reality news shows perform isn’t so much an expression of the powers that be but rather this bizarre middlebrow, status quo thing that can feel ludicrous and surreal. The tension between what news says is reality and what reality actually is for many people shapes some of the best Onion humor.

The format and structure of the news was built for a time when politicians and the public generally followed certain norms. Now, though, they don’t —even while the format continues to pretend that they do. That’s why the news now often seems like a real-life Onion story. Real life actually is doing what The Onion does. We are all participants in this bizarre performance art project now.

Whether news satire works in this situation anymore is a good question. I don’t know. I quote one former Onion head writer in the book who says that today’s total fragmentation of the media environment and the firehose of fake news means that there is no longer any straight line to go with your punch line. So to him, news satire is maybe pointless now. But a different former Onion writer disagreed: he told me that if you can’t satirize the current news, then you aren’t trying hard enough.

Satirizing the news is important because it points out the flaws in the way we frame and characterize “facts” — a frame that is built so deeply into our culture that we can barely even see it. Satire makes that framing funny and exposes how weird it is, which then maybe allows an opening to think of a new way to frame and talk about real things. Which we really, really need right now.

CD: There’s so much drama as The Onion is sold several times and groups of people try to wring money out of it. It moves to New York, there are new demands on profitability, and then it’s sold to an investment group who just wants to make money. Mostly through advertising. At one point the bigwigs want to photoshop brands into old illustrations as a way of getting brand money. It doesn’t happen. So The Onion persists but it also just doesn’t make money the way these owners want. Are satire and humor inherently incompatible with profit? There’s also an interesting generational and class difference in how writers responded to it.

As former head writer Todd Hanson says in the book, “satire is about speaking truth to power. Marketing and advertising are about telling lies on behalf of power.”

Has there ever been a wealthy satirist? I don’t know. You do have to have an outsider’s perspective to do good satire, and it’s very difficult to get a lot of money and continue to be an outsider. Even if you think you’re some kind of “rebel,” really the only rebellious thing you could do would be to give most of that money away to people who need it way more than you do. Or do things like buy a few million acres of cornfields in Iowa and spend the rest of your life restoring them back to prairie. Now that would be radical (and have profoundly beneficial effects long into the future).

The Onion’s creativity was best served back when it was a small local business and not an investment in somebody’s portfolio, as it started to become when it first was purchased by a wealthy investor and the editorial office moved to New York in 2001-2003. The old model just wasn’t going to work anymore because of how expensive it is to live and rent office space and the competitiveness of the media market. Then about 10 years later it was sold to a big media company and then to a private-equity type group where they don’t care really what the companies they own do, just whether they can make money again when they sell them. (AHP note: The Onion is now owned by Global Tetrahedron, with former NBC News journalist Ben Collins as CEO — and has been doing some pretty interesting stuff, like this recent ad buy in the New York Times).

Still, satirists need to eat and have a place to live and access to health care and a good therapist. If we had a society that made it easy to have enough, to give everyone a decent ordinary life — instead of the one we have now — you would see so much art and creativity that is currently being crushed by people’s financial circumstances. That would include satire.

It’s possible that some of the later generations of Onion writers — the ambitious ones that came from more connected, savvy, and privileged backgrounds — did not have quite the same edge and rage as the earlier generation. They were still very funny, but they were just coming from a different life experience. (But of course everybody thinks that their generation is the most interesting one, so.) And the later generations also were just working in a different environment–their content production expectations were a lot higher and they were now expected to respond to current news. The Gen X staff in Madison did not. That alone would change how The Onion read and felt regardless of the background of the people writing it.

CD: One of the most fun segments of this book, and there are a lot, was The Onion News Network (ONN) portion. Why did ONN matter?

CW: I’m not a TV scholar but I think ONN exposes the structure of the typical video news story — and how so much of what is on cable news is just BS–filler between advertisements, filler to fill up time, to just have something on the screen 24/7 and keep butts in seats, rather than serve the community by providing essential, important, and interesting information. In the book I talk about the ONN video “Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere” which is a master class on how cable news creates its nonstories.

I recently did a live local TV interview for this book, which I had never done before, with the robo-cams changing their focus from the anchor on the anchor desk set to the weatherman in a purple suit doing his weird gesturing dance in front of the green screen to my interview on the white leather couch set with a giant picture of the book cover behind me and the teleprompters going.

It was one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen yet everyone was acting like it was normal — which to them of course it was. I could not stop thinking about the Onion News Network and how they (and the print Onion too) take this bizarre “I will now tell you about reality” format that our society has somehow evolved (and which we stopped noticing is actually something people created several generations ago in the context of particular social, cultural and economic norms) — and just put different content into that format than is supposed to be there. Like when people make cake that looks exactly like lasagna or something. There are sort of infinite opportunities for comedy there. Or manipulation.

Then there’s other forms of creativity like Nathan Fielder does with his TV shows. He’s messing with stuff a lot bigger than TV show formats, though it’s possible that maybe that IS all he’s messing with — we’re just so totally absorbed in a TV show mentality that we actually live our real lives like we’re on TV and honestly can’t tell the difference anymore because TV-style narrative is all we ever see or experience, and was what our parents saw and experienced so they taught it to us. There seems to be a lot of other surreal and absurdist comedy and even drama out there; Severance, for example, is really digging into how we decide what is real and what isn’t and what happens when that stuff gets mixed up.

I have a kid in his early 20s who’s been pointing this stuff out to me since he was about 13 – YouTube shows like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Alan Resnick’s work, and others who generate really deep, intense and often extremely funny and terrifying stuff by messing with these very deeply culturally ingrained narrative formats. The Onion News Network definitely fits into this genre. Experimental theater has been playing with this kind of thing for decades also.

CD: You interview so many people in the book about working at The Onion, and I loved getting to be a fly on the wall for office gossip — this is essentially a workplace story, filled with people who have made being smart and being funny the absolute center of their life and finances. But people also get hurt and burnt out by it. After reporting and talking to so many people, do you think about creative labor differently? Should a funny person try to make a living at it?

CW: I keep going back to infrastructure. It’s not so much about whether individuals should try to have a creative career, whether it’s comedy or anything else. It’s that we have an infrastructure that is absolutely brutal to anyone who wants to live a creative life. The United States is vicious and abusive to writers, artists, musicians, anyone who has a calling or talent or desire to do the very very human activity of artistic creation. We treat this (and so many other deeply human things, like the need for connection with others, connection with nature) as frivolous activities one should do as a hobby if at all.

Even the cultural infrastructure has made art into something done by “special” people — or, at least, people without caregiving responsibilities or people who need to make a living. For instance, for writers there is almost no grant or other funding to just sit down and write your book. There are, however, about a million residencies and workshops. But that format is just not accessible to 90% of people who need material assistance to finish a project.

On a simply practical level I would advise any young person who is not independently wealthy to do what I tell my own kids to do: Find some kind of work that pays you as high an hourly rate as you can find so you can cover your expenses and still have time and energy for creative stuff.

CD: Final question: your top three Onion headlines and why? Go.

CW: There are so many and three is not enough, I always have a soft spot for the silly ones though.

1) Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People (Dec 8, 1999)

Even after reading this 50 times it still makes me weep with laughter. When I was a little kid I wanted to be an archaeologist, though in college I only took a couple of classes in the subject. And the classes taught me that archaeological interpretations are very culturally inflected, with finds being interpreted according to whatever their discoverers already believed was true about humanity and gender. For instance, I wrote a paper for a classical archaeology class comparing two different interpretations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were these Demeter-Persephone rituals involving a pit filled with rotting pig meat, into which women would jump and have psychedelic bacchanalian experiences. (I may be getting a couple of different rituals mixed up here, it was a long time ago…) I found two different scholarly interpretations of the ritual – one written by this stuffy 1950s guy, and one by this 1980s feminist scholar, and naturally they were totally different. (The feminist one was correct, of course.)

So I love this headline because it’s making a joke out of the literalism in archaeology. It’s also extremely silly.

2.) Everyone Involved in Pizza’s Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High (Oct 7, 1998)

I went to college in Madison, Wisconsin, where pretty much every restaurant and store downtown and in the student neighborhoods was both staffed by students and patronized by students. Cannabis was very popular. I would not be at all surprised if this headline came out of some Onion writer’s real-life experience.

The story is also one of the best Onion stories ever written.

3.) “Woman Begins to Regret Dating Someone Spontaneous” (Feb 9, 2005)

You have to read the article here also. Especially if you are a woman who has, um, dated someone spontaneous. ●

You can buy Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire here.

About the Interviewer: Christine Driscoll is a podcast producer in Madison, WI. She’s produced shows about The Chippendales, January 6th, and climate change. Her favorite Onion headline is “Nation Unsure Which Candidate's Plan To Destroy The Environment Will Create More Jobs.”

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Other Culture Study Stuff You Might Have Missed This Week:

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• Why is Katy Perry So Embarrassing?

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Public art matters, because everyone — no matter their belief system or politics — deserves art. You deserve art you love and you deserve art that pisses you off and you deserve art that makes you think. We also deserve art that’s not subject to the whims of capitalism or individual taste; if we only fund art that’s “pleasing,” or “inoffensive,” we end up with a bleak art world composed of Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from the Trolls soundtrack on repeat forever.

But public funding for art has been dwindling for decades — in part because many people, but particularly conservatives, only think the government should fund things that match their politics precisely. Foundations and other non-profits have helped to fill that gap, but we’ve found ourselves at an impasse: the Trump administration’s massive, devastating cuts to the federal government not only effectively eliminated arts funding, but significantly slashing the budgets of many non-profits that depend on federal grants. At the same time, global economic instability means many people, of all income levels, just have less to give — or, to be more precise, a lot of rich people are giving less and holding on to more.

The public money has dried up, in other words, but so has a whole lot of the private money. You might not have noticed the ramifications quite yet, but you will. It’s in the increasingly ardent pleas from your local NPR station, of course, but it’s also just absence: the film festival or day camp or curated exhibition or concert series that just doesn’t happen. Maybe you didn’t go to that thing or care about that thing, but that thing was one of many that made where you live feel vibrant and alive. Communities without art — in all its various, ridiculous, beautiful forms — are communities that are dying.

In my ideal world, we rebuild our entire societal framework with an understanding that paying taxes is paying for civilization, and art is foundational to any flourishing civilization. We might return to that idea at some point in the future, but right now, we have to do some triage.

Writer, storyteller, teacher, heavy-metal musician, Montana poet laureate and beloved-man-about-town Chris La Tray has become very good at triage over the past few years. He’s figured out how to live a writing, teaching life in Montana through a combination of his newsletter, An Irritable Métis, teaching poetry to elementary school kids, traveling to speaking gigs across the state, selling a book or five, and leading writing workshops in beautiful places. He’s also raised money to get more and more Indigenous people places in those workshops, and has thrown himself into planning the first annual IndigiPaloozaMT, a totally free celebration of Indigenous arts and storytelling happening in Missoula on August 1st and 2nd.

Chris knows what it’s like to scramble when public funding sources fall apart. He knows how difficult it can be to depend on the whims of private foundations. And he also knows that a bunch of people without a lot of means can still make things happen. So read on — and make sure you make it to the bottom to see how we’ve been funding IndigiPaloozaMT for the last year (and how you can add to the total!)

I want to talk about our shifting understanding of how we fund art and culture in this moment. In my ideal world, we all contribute to art and culture — even art and culture that doesn’t speak directly to us — because art is a public good, full stop. I think there have been various points in our nation’s history when more people have been on board with that idea (and we should also underline that there are millions of people who are still on board with it) but our government, on so many levels, is not.

You just finished a two-year stint at the Montana Poet Laureate — a publicly-funded position. You’ve also been a part of a lot of different programs and initiatives with a mix of private and public funding. I’m wondering if we could just talk about your experience with ratios of all sorts and the ways it affects the process and the audience the art ultimately reaches.

My term as poet laureate hasn’t quite wrapped up; it will some time in August. It’s worth pointing out that the position technically isn’t funded at all, but we — the Montana Arts Council, who manages the position, and Humanities Montana, who provides all kinds of speaker opportunities for communities all over the state, and me — kind of rigged the system to get me compensated for most of the appearances I’ve made (50K-plus miles of driving worth over the last ten months or so). And as anyone who pays attention to such things knows, both of those organizations were absolutely gutted by our current bullshit administration; we’ll get to that in the next question.

But funding … ugh. I think one of my biggest revelations of the last decade or so, when I started engaging heavily with arts-based nonprofits and conservation organizations (and, in a supreme case of WTF?!, healthcare organizations!), is how much the world runs on fucking grants. Or, the “non-profit industrial complex” as described in the mighty book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. The whole system is just another way we kow-tow to rich people and it makes my teeth grind. Then if we consider the federal government and how they just up and canceled contracts they’d already agreed to (sounds a lot like treaties, eh, cuzzins?), a practice that you or I would likely be tossed in jail for doing — it just spotlights how ludicrous it is.

For all of the distasteful rhetoric in the Substackosphere, what this format has taught me is that we people are capable of funding stuff directly. How that translates to the wider Art world, I don’t know, but I think there is a seed here. It’s challenging; for every person willing to throw $50/year at a newsletter written by someone they like, there is a mountain of them who have never heard of newsletters like this who get indignant that they have to pay $7 more for a hardcover at an indie bookstore than they do at Amazon, completely ignorant of how that behemoth actually sells the book for less than bookstores can get them wholesale. Real change will require a societal-wide shift in understanding — or education, really — of how the world actually works when it comes to funding things that matter. It feels overwhelming sometimes.

This is clearly also me teeing you up to talk about what’s happened to Humanities Montana. One of your speaking gigs (sponsored by Humanities Montana) was canceled, and a bunch of different groups stepped up to sponsor it in their stead.

It made me think of an initiative you spearheaded last year to provide scholarships to get more Indigenous scholars participating in your Freeflow Writing Institute workshop on the Salmon River — which turned out to be an enormous success.

Can you talk a bit more about both efforts — how they differed, how they didn’t, why they mattered?

When the feds cancelled all the contracts for the National Endowment for the Humanities, it killed a multitude of programs nationally and cost several people in Montana their jobs. These weren’t contracts or grants Humanities was applying for and was subsequently turned down on, mind you — these were contracts already signed and agreed on to fund programs booked months in advance. Basically, the way these particular grants work is they get approved. Then the arts organization sends their presenters out and bills those expenses against the grant and then they get the money. It’s not like the grant gets approved and the feds sends them the $1M or whatever, there are still loopholes. In my case, I actually had pending expenses from previous gigs that Humanities couldn’t bill against their contract.

That the feds believe that reneging on an agreement of this nature is okay is a staggering indication of what we have allowed our society to become. As a result, Humanities Montana had to cancel all programs (excepting a couple that are privately funded) for the foreseeable future, including ones that had already been approved, and the program manager I’ve worked with for several years now lost his job. It sucks and it’s bullshit.

It’s also worth pointing out that I didn’t let that force the cancellation of any of my scheduled events; I think there were eight or ten approved and scheduled at the time of the cancellations. Communities rallied and I did a couple things for free and they all happened. Moving forward I think there will be challenges but I’m fortunate to have a newsletter audience who is very generous and seem committed to keeping me on the road doing what I do. That’s a huge deal. It’s a kind of mutual aid that makes it possible for artists like me to do what I do. I really can’t celebrate it, and my readers and supporters, enough. That’s what I mean about there seeming to be the seed of a solution in what we do here!

What ignorant people seem to think is that these kinds of Humanities programs are some kind of “liberal” undertaking and, from my experience, that is hogwash. I’ve been in front of audiences of all sizes in every nook and cranny of Montana — a seethingly “red” state by all such measures. For some places, whether places like schools and museums or even just a theater full of mostly old timers, the only way they can get visitors from people like me is through programs offered by folks like Humanities. And they deserve them as much as anyone else. It is also a way to mend all the dysfunction in our interactions because it gives us a chance to share experiences that remind us of all the things we have in common — far beyond the tiny, often petty differences that make someone vote for a Trump, or a Tim Sheehy, or anyone of that loathsome ilk.

One thing Montana has going for it is called Indian Education for All. The state constitution mandates schools K-University teach students Indigenous culture and lifeways in all subjects. It’s a long story, with many bumps along the way, and probably worthy of a discussion on it entirely, but I bring it up because schools and teachers receive funds for this kind of education but don’t really get much instruction for how to use it. So my friend Anna from Chickadee Community Services and I are working on a plan to help schools do that, and also connect them to speakers like me who can come and visit schools. I think a lot of my energy in the next year or two (at least) will be dedicated to this mission, at least so far as this aspect of my work is concerned.

As for the workshop question, a couple years ago I was scheduled to present one at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch under the auspices of Yellowstone Forever, the nonprofit educational arm of Yellowstone National Park. In my experience, they are great people and I love working with them (I just agreed to lead a couple cultural tours in the park for them in August, in fact, something I love to do). They asked me how I’d feel if they opened up five free scholarships to Indigenous students and I was all for it. When those were scooped up in just a couple days, YF asked how I would feel if they offered those scholarships until the class was full. I said hell yes, and ended up with a workshop of something like ten Native students and two non-Native people.

That never happens. It’s usually the opposite, maybe one or two Native folks surrounded by non-Native. The experience was transformative. So when I did that workshop you mention on the river the following summer, I put out a call via my newsletter for donations to fully fund at least two Native attendees along with me. My newsletter supporters — my “Irritable Readers” as I call them — donated enough for six, I think it was, which was a big deal. This is an example of people doing something simple for someone else even though there are no direct benefits to themselves, though the non-tangible benefits are many. This is what we are capable of even at a small level, and the ramifications are exponentially huge.

The difference between the workshops and a thing like Humanities is there isn’t layers and layers of bureaucracy and bullshit. Yes, our tax dollars fund things like the NEH and NEA, and should, but the results are almost invisible. I think the immediacy of direct communication like we have here make a big difference. When you can see a smiling face as a direct result of something you did … I don’t know. I think it matters. We can’t solve all of our ills by just handing over money but doing so is certainly a tool in the toolbox of getting to whatever the next thing is.

What do you think is the future of mutual aid and funding the arts, just generally? What should we celebrate — and what should make us wary?

I think a lot of these arts organizations taking it in the face from the current administration have been pretty bipartisan for a long time and we haven’t seen the end of them. Maybe what rises from the ashes — and I suspect something will — will be better. I had an opportunity recently in D.C. (where I’d been invited to help judge the glorious national finals of the Poetry Out Loud contest, a beautiful program happening in every single state likely to stagger to an end after this year because of these DOGE shenanigans) to speak with a high ranking person at the NEA (who has subsequently left her job and told me then that she was planning to do so) that these programs, while necessary, also need some substantial improvement. So I do my best to remain hopeful that we will be able to revive the corpse once the current regime is run out of town. That is a thin hope to cling to but I am not going to give up on it, even though the alternative political party hasn’t done a lot to protect these organizations either.

What really frustrates me is the amount of money still greedily clung to by rich people who consider themselves supporters of the arts and are maybe philanthropists … to a degree. There are folks in Missoula, for example, who could have revived Humanities with one check and wouldn’t have even felt it.

As a percentage of wealth, I suspect many of us are paid subscribers to newsletters at a percentage of our incomes far greater than these so-called “arts supporters” give and that sucks. And if, if, that statement is hyperbole then it is to a degree far short of what I usually trade in! The point I am making is that the wealth in our communities is staggering. We think of the capitalist monster as something that only billionaires unleash on us, or squeeze us with, but there are many, many layers to it and, generally speaking, rich people on both sides of the voting ballot are often very stingy when it comes to loosening the purse strings to serve local communities. This must change.

Now let’s talk about a very tangible application of these ideas: making IndigiPalooza MT happen. Tell us what you imagined for this event — and what will make it happen.

To quote our website, IndigiPalooza MT (IPFEST for short), which is happening this coming August 1st and 2nd in Missoula, is “a vibrant, two-day celebration of Indigenous creativity, culture, and community. Centered around the power of story in all its forms, the festival features an inspiring lineup of Indigenous artists, writers, musicians, and makers sharing their work across multiple mediums from poetry and literature to visual art, traditional foods, and music.”

The most exciting thing about it is to say we have Joy Harjo coming to headline the opening event the evening of August 1st, which I never get tired of talking about. As for what will make it happen … it’s happening no matter what! And that is very exciting.

The idea for the festival has its earliest origin in the James Welch Lit Fest that happened in Missoula in 2022. [AHP note: you can read the Culture Study interview with Sterling HolyWhiteMountain about the festival here]. That gathering was spectacular and the wider Missoula community embraced it big time, and for the subsequent two years after it, as arguably the most visible person local to the event (as in, from Missoula, and not Lois Welch [James Welch’s widow]) who was constantly being inundated with questions about when it was going to happen again, I wanted to see it continue.

And maybe it will and I hope it does. The same group of people planning IPFEST — besides me, my friends Anna from Chickadee Community Services and Selya from the Missoula Public Library, both of who should get more credit for its actual coming to fruition than I should — offered our services in 2023 to help organize a return of WelchFest in 2024 but it didn’t happen. Then Anna suggested we do a storytelling event tied to an Indian education conference in 2024, also in Missoula, but the time frame was too short. Then I wanted to do some kind of event related to the end of my tenure as Montana poet laureate so that entered the realm of possibilities. There are likely other seeds too, if I reflect harder. The result is what is going to happen this August is kind of a mashup of all these things, though anything related to my poet laureate thing has kind of been sublimated by this bigger, more beautiful idea, which I love.

When talk shifted to action, the very first thing we did was contact Joy Harjo’s agent in hopes we could secure her and have her involvement an indicator of our seriousness once we went looking for money. She agreed to our invitation and we set about raising funds. I was confident we’d get a big chunk of funding via my newsletter, based on the experiences with workshops and such that I’ve already described, but I was stunned by how much we did get. A large chunk of that money came as a result of a class Anna developed called “Native American Studies for Everyone” that I promoted to my readers where anyone who signed-up would see their price of admission donated to IPFEST. She offered the class on a sliding scale for payment and more than 500 people signed up, bolstered when some institutions (like the Montana Historical Society, for example) sponsored members of their community to attend. That enormous chunk, combined with the generous donations of a multitude of other people meant that in just a matter of a few weeks we knew we would have the money to make it happen.

I’m really stoked where the money has come from because it proves that the traditional ideas — stupid grant applications and kowtowing all over the place — aren’t always true. Those small private donations did the heavy lifting, along with some money from a couple foundations. A few organizations I’ve done work with also sent checks and I love that. I THINK think we received money from only two grants (you can see all these folks on our Sponsors page if you’re interested), one of which, weirdly, doesn’t even fund until after the event has happened, which leads me to think we either have to commit to doing it again or tell them, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

It’s worth noting that every single local financial institution that we approached turned us down. At least one is going to hear about it too.

Pulling something like this off is expensive. We are paying all of our presenters, and a decent amount too. We are covering travel and hotels. We have a couple venues to book (though the bulk of the events are at the library, which is free). There’s advertising and all manner of odds and ends and, most importantly, we aren’t charging anyone anything to attend. So we need the money up front.

Interested people fired up to help still can! The best thing anyone can do is come to the event! Barring that, spreading the word to people you know in the area who might be interested in attending is also very helpful! I’d love to pack the venues for these wonderful people we’ve invited.

If you want to throw money directly into the IndigiPalooza pot, you may do so HERE. As I said, one of the only grants we applied for doesn’t fund until months after the thing is over. We think we’re covered, but a cushion would be helpful for emergencies, or to have on hand as starter for whatever we do next year. Shit happens and we want to be in front of it.

Finally, Chickadee is offering another “Native American Studies for Everyone” course beginning in late September. There is more information on that program HERE. [AHP note: My mom took this class and loved it and will tell anyone who will listen; listen to AHP’s mom!] I think it’s excellent and has previously reached a ton of people. Any money raised there will fund more programs in the future, and possibly future iterations of IPFEST. Everything Chickadee does is devoted to Indigenous education, so any money sent their way will be money well spent. It’s important work and they’ve done many great projects already and I’m thrilled to be part of every opportunity I get to pitch in.

Phew, this is a lot so I’ll wrap it up. I want to say in closing that if IPFEST plays out anywhere close to how the wonderful WelchFest did, I think people will love it. And I believe it will. Our three-person organizing crew is small but we’ve been mighty, and we (mostly) still get along. I hope folks can get excited about the festival; that it exists, and that it has really been a community-based, crowd-sourced process every step of the way. That is a good indicator of bigger things on the horizon for all of us. ●

If you haven’t already, I can’t recommend Chris’s newsletter strongly enough. It’s my must-open of every week.

An Irritable Métis

Email newsletter from Chris La Tray, member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, author of "Becoming Little Shell" from Milkweed Editions (8/20/2024), and 2023–2025 Montana Poet Laureate.

By Chris La Tray

Culture Study will be donating the entirety of our Bookshop affiliate dollars for the past year — $2418.8, but I’m going to add whatever comes in for the next few weeks — to Chickadee Community Services to fund IndigiPaloozaMT and Indigenous education programs in Montana schools.

That’s amazing. But will you help us donate even more?

You can donate directly here — it’s a 501c3 — or, if it’s easier, you can Venmo me at annehelen or send money through PayPal. As always, I’ll post all cashout and donation receipts in the weeks to come.

Further Reading:

• Talking Chris about his phenomenal book, Becoming Little Shell, in the newsletter last year.

• One of my favorite conversations with Chris, all the way back in 2020, about why his newsletter is my favorite.

• Chris talking about what happened when he turned on paid subscriptions for his newsletter in 2021 — and was able to say no to shitty writing assignments.

If you appreciate this work, if it made you think, if you want to be part of the compelling conversation in the 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. And if you’re already a paid subscriber: thank you so much for making this work sustainable.

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It’s difficult to articulate all the ways Alix Dick’s story, which you’ll read below, matters right now. But unless you’re personally intimate with what it means to navigate the United States without citizenship, you’ll come away from this interview with new understanding, new context, and new anger about the policies, longstanding and new, that force people to live with this sort of fear. I say “force” with intention here, because this entire scenario would be very different if there wasn’t a massive demand, a necessity, for the sort of labor that immigrants without citizenship provide.

The economy demands unprotected, vulnerable workers without labor protections, and the global political climate creates streams of people who face a horrible choice: stay and almost certainly die, or watch your family members die, or live in fear of death….or leave everything you’ve known and loved to live in a different sort of fear. It doesn’t have to be this way. I hope this interview helps all us move closer to an understanding of why the entire system that at once relies on the existence of undocumented Americans while also criminalizing their existence is not just cruel, but immoral.

The book that houses Alix’s story — The Cost of Being Undocumented — is an unprecedented act of collaborative scholarship and storytelling between Alix, an artist and storyteller, and Antero Garcia, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. You can buy The Cost of Being Undocumented here.

Can you tell readers a bit about how you came to write this book? The note on your research process that begins the book is unlike any I’ve encountered — but also made me much more invested in the book.

We should probably begin by stating the obvious: this book shouldn’t have to exist. Neither of us wanted this to be the story we shared. And yet, here we are.

One thing we allude to in the note at the beginning of the book is that this project began, initially, as a research project proposed by Antero. We planned to adhere to traditional research strictures, including Stanford’s Institutional Review Board protocol (e.g. the thing that ensures academic research is conducted safely and ethically because of things like The Stanford Prison Experiment).

However, this approach was abandoned due to two events that occurred around the same time. First, Alix made it clear that she would not be an anonymous individual in someone else’s research. And, second, Stanford’s IRB rejected the proposed research, stating that work on a small sample size (one individual, in this case) was not generalizable. In some ways, both of these responses — one personal and one institutional — get to precisely the same quandary about the purpose of research and the lives of those the academy scrutinizes in the first place. Namely, what good is academic scholarship that merely distances, de-identifies, and dehumanizes those that are placed under its gaze?

Ultimately, we decided to move forward conducting research together, as co-designers of the questions, approaches, and analysis that we undertook.

But, here’s the problem: readers could read the prior paragraphs and assume that they’re in for a scholarly jaunt across the landscape of immigration research. That is not at all the end product that we produced. Hopefully that’s not how the book reads. In discussing the personal experiences around immigration — in reflecting on the real tears, traumas, and lasting impacts of xenophobic policies in this country — we felt that the only way to convey the costs of undocumented survival is by doing so as up close and personal as possible. The book we created is, in many ways, Alix’s memoir. Sure, it’s got a few more endnotes than most memoirs, but we wanted it to center Alix’s story: her family, her ongoing insecurities, her dreams.

This probably isn’t the way most folks go about writing memoirs, but we engaged in a Chicana feminist methodological approach called “pláticas.” There’s a long, scholarly lineage for this approach and, for us, it really centered a critical and sustained dialogue. This wasn’t about us getting to an agreement about some of the points in the book so much as to get to a place of understanding and perspective taking. While this book centers Alix’s story, it is informed by ongoing conversations (that still remain unfinished) between the two of us. Probably the obvious places to point to this within the book are the ways we talk about religion — Alix is a devout Christian and Antero is squarely agnostic — as well as exploring power hierarchies when it comes to labor.

Really, what all of this comes down to is trying to challenge whose knowledge “counts” in the broader community. If you are watching mainstream media coverage in this present assault on immigrant communities, you’re seeing plenty of well-intentioned scholars and pundits talking about the undocumented community and relatively few individuals from within this community getting the same kind of space to share their tacit expertise. This book’s journey — from flipping a research process on its head to finding the right voice — has been one of resituating Alix and the undocumented community as valued experts too often overlooked in times when their voices are critical.

You describe being an undocumented person in the United States as an “exhausting mental game.” Not just exhausting, but a game — which suggests that there’s this feeling that you can win or lose, that there are spoken and unspoken rules, and figuring them out (and how to play by them, or not play by them) is part of what makes it so exhausting. As you point out, it’s not that you’re trying to make yourself invisible — that’s a myth. The government knows exactly where you are — you are “conspicuously documented.” You know that the government could find any reason to deport you, so you try very hard not to give them one — which works because the government understands there are real benefits to your presence.

That last part — that’s what I don’t think a lot of people understand. I’d love to hear how you came to understand it. And, as a secondary question, how the recent escalation of ICE raids by the Trump administration has changed the rules of the game…..and made it even more exhausting.

For me, Alix, I came to most clearly see this country’s reliance on my labor when I finally saw just how difficult it was for someone in my position to continue my studies to become a lawyer in this country. I realized I was more useful as cheap labor for this country rather than as someone compensated for my intellect. The United States doesn’t help undocumented people primarily because it’s good for the economy to have people in my position. We’re doing the jobs that nobody wants to do but are necessary for this country to thrive. Exploitation of people like me is why billionaires exist. Up until the recent focus on horrific ICE abductions in my community, coverage of immigration reform often focused on “good” undocumented students — dreamers — persevering in elite universities. While we must continue to fight for them like we fight for all members of the undocumented community, their narrative often takes away from the real barriers to education I’ve faced.

We’ll offer a small tidbit behind the scenes about the book: When we first pitched this book with our amazing agent, our working title wasn’t The Cost Being Undocumented. The full first draft was actually titled The Cost of Convenience. This idea of undocumented people functioning as something convenient to this country was fundamental to what we want to convey throughout the book. Ultimately, the title wasn’t quite direct enough in signaling the book’s focus on undocumented immigration. We changed the title, but still hold a soft spot for the book’s original incarnation.

In terms of the recent escalation of ICE raids by the Trump administration, the rules haven’t really changed. The game has just gotten far more exhausting. As we are writing out these answers together, Alix is more stressed than at any other point of our work together. It’s not just the fear of ICE, who we see on the streets regularly right now. The overlapping costs we talk about in the book are heavier than ever. Prescriptions Alix needs for some of the health challenges alluded to near the end of the book are both difficult to get fulfilled and increasingly more expensive. Mental health is just totally out the window right now.

If a primary goal for Trump — on the campaign trail and now that he’s back in office — was to instill terror in the lives of immigrants, he’s been incredibly effective. In this way, it’s not that this country no longer needs us. We are seeing many aspects of our economy buckle under the lack of immigrants showing up as a result of this current assault. However, we have a new kind of convenience as well. This country needs immigrants as a scapegoat for this presidential administration. Deporting immigrants right now, in abhorrent and violent ways, is still convenient for the leadership of this country, distracting folks from myriad lawsuits, unfulfilled promises, and other very real threats to America’s well-being.

As an elaboration on that question — can we talk a bit about the anxiety and labor of trying to “pass” as a documented citizen? At checkpoints, but also in other corners of everyday life — and the deep sadness that being in a place where you surrounded by other Latinos actually feels profoundly unsafe?

For me, Alix, right now I’m not in a place where I am even thinking about how I can “pass.” For people that want to do me harm, I look “Mexican.” I’m not looking for ways to look or sound more white. There’s no way to hide who I am. Seeing what is happening on the streets around me, I am absolutely terrified. I came to this country fleeing cartel-related violence only to find U.S.-funded thugs abducting people like me. Instead of trying to pass, I am trying to hide as much as possible.

This notion of passing is one we’ve been thinking about particularly as it relates to promoting this book. In all seriousness, one “cost” of being undocumented in this present moment is not feeling safe enough to even go and see your book on the shelves of local shops. We are in this strange space with this book — it is both incredibly timely and an absolutely terrible time for us to try to promote this work. We’ve had a few in-person celebrations for the book’s release (and some more coming up if readers are interested in connecting with us). However, for all of these, Antero suggested repeatedly that we cancel these events. And yet, it feels necessary to celebrate the small things we still have left. Celebrating this book is an act of resistance for me.

We worked tremendously hard on the story and research we share in this book. Years of collaboration and a lifetime of hardship. We are so proud of the work that it encompasses and want to celebrate this with the broader community this work represents. Doing in-person events, even as I am not able to “pass” while doing so, feels necessary for myself and for our audience.

The framing of the book in terms of “costs” is incredibly effective — and given my previous work on exploitation and burnout, I was particularly compelled by the chapter on work, and the sort of work that can be coerced out of people with no (or very, very few) labor or legal protections. This is incredibly convenient for so many industries — and for families that want a certain level of service but also don’t want to pay a living wage for it.

Can you talk us through the costs of finding employment while undocumented — and how that connects to the (to my mind, fairly noxious) habit of caveating that various people deported by ICE were “hard-working?”

Finding jobs as an undocumented person is sickening. We can’t think of a better word for it. There is so much anxiety. Walking into an interview, you know that abuse and unfair payment are a given. You hold anxiety in your body, anticipating having to negotiate the hell out of the terms of your employment and still settle for the bare minimum.

Many of the long term jobs we write about are harder to find in the summer. There is so much space for employers to abuse undocumented workers. They know you are desperate. They know you have probably been job searching for several months and that there is always someone else waiting in line for your position. There are no consequences for individuals to offer you far less than what you’d make if you were hired “above the table.”

Particularly for domestic laborers, like nannies, the hypocrisy of these negotiations feels mind blowing: oftentimes you’re negotiating with affluent, liberal-leaning families. They have all the right yard signs and political stickers, but when it comes to compensation and terms of employment, they are absolutely ruthless. Yes, we talk about wage theft and sexual harassment in the book, but we want to make clear that the costs to the undocumented community when it comes to labor are transacted inhumanely in people’s homes all over this country every day.

You’re right that the framing of “hard working” immigrants does no favors to the broader immigrant rights movement. Fighting over “good” or “hard-working” immigrants is pulling us away from a bigger picture of kidnapping and abduction that is happening on U.S. land at this very moment.

As our book hopefully makes clear, no individual chooses to leave behind a home, a family, a fully developed life without dire circumstances forcing them to do so. The myth of the good immigrant is one that continually cleaves our community and reduces for whom we fight, as if one individual’s life is less worthy than another’s. And of course, the positioning of individuals as gang members, criminals, and threats allows media consumers to not look at the fact that we’re talking about people. Despite everything we’re seeing on TV, let’s not forget the fundamentally American idea of due process. Every single person in this country — regardless of immigration status — is legally allowed the opportunity to make their case for presence in this country.

5) To close, I’d love for us to talk a bit about a point that comes up over and over again in the book: that people forget that undocumented people aren’t just workers, aren’t just numbers. They’re people with real lives. People with hopes for love and family, people of faith who can’t practice their religion the way they want, people who are homesick but can never return home.

The book as a whole is a powerful corrective to that narrative, and I’m wondering what you’d like to see more of (or less of) as we write about and fight back against the dehumanization of immigrants. What sort of advocacy — and reform — that aims to restore that humanity look like?

Thank you for this question. We drilled down to the memoir that this book became because it felt impossible to ever fully tell the stories of the millions of individuals labeled undocumented in this country. We hope readers get a glimpse at one person’s life, the circumstances of her move to the United States, and the costs that daily life imposes on her. In this way, we want readers to be open and receptive to the human stories around them. Perhaps obviously, we want people to know the stories of immigrants so that they know why we need humanizing immigration reform. We’d be remiss not to mention that alongside writing this book, we’ve been co-editing La Cuenta for the past three years. It’s a small but mighty substack that works to broaden perspectives about the undocumented community. We invite folks to not only subscribe but to consider submitting questions, essays, poems, or other contributions to our community.

At the same time, we also don’t want to underestimate the role of money in the current climate. (The final chapter of this book attempts to approximate a dollar amount of the costs incurred for being undocumented for Alix.) As our book hopefully makes clear, the costs for surviving while labeled undocumented are exorbitant. Given how many people are losing jobs, losing family members, and losing hope, if you have income to support mutual aid networks or to buy the products and services of local food vendors, that is absolutely something we want people to do. Your dollars can go a long way. And it’s not just about the financial support but about what it does in this moment. The sooner the person selling flowers on the side of the freeway sells out of their product, the sooner they are safely off the streets and away from the eyes of ICE.

People who are U.S. citizens can use their privilege in many ways right now. You can show up for demonstrations that the undocumented community cannot. You can confront and document ICE to help protect communities under threat. You can contact your local elected leaders and ask why state police forces are protecting masked federal agents who are hurting our communities. Your tax dollars are funding these efforts. You can distribute know your rights cards and help be a better on the ground advocate right now. You can sign up to deliver groceries to people that cannot safely leave their homes. Some of these actions might feel scary. To go back to our working title of the book… they might even feel inconvenient. However, this is a responsibility you can shoulder in this moment. ●

You can buy The Cost of Being Undocumented here and subscribe to Alix and Antero’s newsletter, La Cuenta, which they co-edit, below:

La Cuenta

Tallying the Costs of Undocumented American Living

And if you appreciate this work, if it made you think, if you want to be part of the compelling conversation in the 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.

**My apologies for no links this week, but we’ll have a mega-links next week.**

Second: This week’s episode of is all about how private equity wrecks the stuff you love and the services you depend on — I’ve already had half a dozen people text me to say “Oh THAT’S why my dentist/vet/pharmacy sucks so much now.”

Third: Don’t miss the discussion on The Ultimate Summer Reading List — my own 22 books were just the beginning.

And if you want the full Culture Study experience — all the reading suggestion threads, the movie/tv concierge, the mega links/recs posts, and everything else that goes behind the paywall, become a paid subscriber today.

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I have been waiting to publish this interview for MONTHS! I had high hopes when I first sent my questions to Elizabeth Evitts Dickenson about her new book on the life, work, and legacy of women’s clothing designer Claire McCardell, and those high hopes were met and then some. If you’re interested in fashion history, this is obviously the interview for you, but it’s also a fascinating look at how design can change the way we move around in the world. Pockets, athleisure, the ballet flat, side zippers, the women’s swimsuit as we know it — all of it goes back to McCardell, whose aim was so simple and yet so important: make clothes for the way women actually live.

You’re gonna devour this the same way I did — and then, hopefully, move on to the book, which you can buy here.

As a means of introducing readers to Claire McCardell, maybe we should talk about what first gripped you about her story — and compelled you to turn it into an entire book.

The first time I saw a Claire McCardell dress, it was the late 1990s, and I was fresh out of college and working in the development office at a museum in Baltimore. The curators had spent months on an exhibition of McCardell’s life and work, but I’d never heard of her. I didn’t yet know that much of what was in our closets—the wrap dresses, the mix and match separates, the ballet flats—were because Claire McCardell forever changed American fashion in the 1930s and 40s.

Back then, New York was little more than a textile warehouse copying the designs out of Paris. But McCardell broke the rules and created clothes for American women and became one of the first to get her name on her own label. She was a global sensation. Everyone wore her designs. Housewives, career women, Hollywood stars like Lauren Bacall and Greta Garbo, and artists like Georgia O’Keeffe. These women tended to be creative, confident, and most of all comfortable in what they wore. The night of the exhibition opening, I was struck by how timeless McCardell’s clothes remained.

I, on the other hand, wore the ugliest suit in the world to that event. I’d been ambushed by a saleswoman at a department store who said I needed the latest spring color trend—a “tasteful amethyst” she called it. I looked like a lavender easter egg. The pockets were fake, of course, and I had no idea what to do with my hands. I was uncomfortable not just because the suit was poorly made, but because this outfit wasn’t me. I stood there wishing I could slip into a McCardell dress instead. And I feel like this is a universal experience: We’ve all been talked into wearing something we shouldn’t have at some point in our lives.

Honestly, this seems to happen to me a lot, and writing this book got me thinking about why that is. I’ve always felt a bit outside of “fashion.” I never cared much about it as a kid, probably because my first experience with clothes was my mother dressing me like a living doll. Her weapon of choice was the Polly Flinders dress, a cotton confection in pale pink or yellow with embroidered smocking at the chest. I can still feel the restrictive hold of that elastic. The clothes were uncomfortable and, more importantly, they got in the way of my plans. I liked to climb trees near our house in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and hike along the creek (the one made famous by the writer Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). There was a massive weeping willow tree, with a canopy as big as a house. I liked to grab several of its thin branches to make a vine and swing, and the chlorophyll green of crushed leaves stained my fancy dress. I always got in trouble.

I learned from my mother that there were rules for dressing, and they were written along gender lines. My older brother’s outfits of pants, t-shirts, and sneakers were much more practical for our Appalachian upbringing. My mother had been raised on 1950s Betty Crocker rhetoric, and she really tried, I think, to catch up to the feminist revolution of the 1970s, the decade when I was born. But she couldn’t abandon her fastidious attention to dress codes. She infused in me a belief that something else was at play whenever I got dressed, something more vital and important than my personal style or comfort. I dressed as though someone was watching and judging the result; some nebulous force that could dictate whether I was Right or Wrong in how I, as a girl, presented myself to the world. I never quite knew how to be myself in what I wore.

Thanks to that exhibition in the 1990s, I learned that McCardell had grown up in a similar way—a “tomboy” in a rural town in Maryland—and that she’d set out to design clothes that were practical and beautiful and that derived from a woman’s point of view. I always wanted to know more.

Before we get to the fun stuff (like pockets) I want to take a second and position McCardell’s designs in the post-war period. Because of my work studying post-war Hollywood stardom, I know a lot about Dior’s “New Look” and its influence on the desired silhouette (and what I think a lot of people just generally understand as a ‘50s look’). But I don’t think I ever fully understood it in the context of a post-war backlash to women’s “incursion” into the public sphere. I’d love to have you situate the New Look — and McCardell’s resistance to it — in time.

Post-war Hollywood stardom is such an interesting subject, as is that post-war silhouette, which is the classically exaggerated hourglass: broad shoulders, tiny waist, a skirt that blooms out, high heels. One of my favorite discoveries in McCardell’s archive was a letter from Joan Crawford, asking McCardell to please design clothes for her. Crawford exemplified that post-war aesthetic of broad shoulders and tiny waist in many of her films, so I found it fascinating that she wanted McCardell’s clothes for her everyday life.

I’d always had it in my mind that McCardell deserved a book, but I knew I needed to write it after I came across an article in her archive. It was a profile of her from 1955, and the headline read “The Gal Who Defied Dior.” It was written by a young Betty Friedan, about eight years before she published The Feminine Mystique. Friedan was already thinking about the “problem that has no name,” which was the post-war backlash to women’s independence. In the 1930s and 1940s, women made extraordinary gains. They were going to college in larger numbers, working outside the home, building careers. I’ve always been intrigued by the feminism between the wars, which gets unfairly hurdled, I think. We often move from Suffragism to the Second Wave that Friedan helped to spark, and we skip the many accomplishments of women like Claire McCardell, who built an empire at a time when a woman couldn’t open her own bank account without a male signatory or apply for a line of credit.

When the war ended, women were increasingly being funneled into the white picket fence ideal of postwar America, and many were deeply unhappy. One housewife equated the swift regression of female independence to being “trapped in a squirrel cage.”

I discovered Friedan’s article around the same time that I was noticing the rise of the tradwife, which you write about so brilliantly. Today’s tradwife messaging, and now our political rhetoric, sounds an awful lot like the social and cultural messaging I was reading about in McCardell’s post-war America. So I was really interested in understanding how, exactly, McCardell had defied Christian Dior. What did that look like? And why was someone like Betty Friedan so interested in McCardell, a fashion designer?

What I learned is that McCardell’s primary concern was the lived experience of women. She defied the Parisian trends. In the 1920s, when she began designing, Paris reigned supreme as the fashion capital of the world. There was no fashion industry in America. Manufacturers in New York’s Garment District mostly stole and copied Parisian ideas and tried to translate them into water-downed knockoffs for American women. American designers at the time were copyists, not originators.

McCardell didn’t care about what was considered fashionable. She was more concerned with what made the most sense for a woman’s real life. She designed for herself. And she advocated for women to find their own style. “Fashion is fickle,” she liked to say, so don’t bother being led by the nose over trends. It exasperated her when the women she passed on Fifth Avenue in New York looked dressed for the Champs-Élysées.

McCardell pioneered what became known as “The American Look:” casual, stylish, ready-to-wear clothes that were more affordable and more accessible than the Parisian haute couture. She became one of the first designers to successfully join high fashion with the new technology of mass production.

And she defied how most clothes were made. They were highly structured—you needed corsets, girdles, bras, padding, and boning in the bodice—to create that hourglass silhouette. McCardell hated corsets and shoulder pads. She sometimes had her models walk without shoes or bras. She never used crinoline under her skirts, which is what gave Dior’s dresses that poofed-out 50’s shape. It was hard to take the subway or the bus in a Dior. “I don’t hate crinolines as such,” McCardell once joked. “I hate them when they try to get in elevators.” She was always pointing out how ridiculous women’s clothes could be.

When France returned post-war, the Parisians were looking to reclaim their status as the fashion capital of the world after the Nazi occupation. McCardell and Dior were the exact same age—born just months apart—but he was newer to fashion. And Paris was pinning all their hopes on his collection. He released a hyperfeminized style that had padded shoulders and hips, waists cinched to 18 inches in a special corset, and high heels. He said he wanted to “save women from nature” and it prompted Coco Chanel to retort that “Dior doesn’t dress women, he upholsters them.”

The press dubbed Dior’s collection the “New Look.” To McCardell, though, it was a return to the old ways of manipulating a woman’s body. If you were cinched into a corset, unable to breathe, without pockets, needing help to get dressed, you were a showpiece not an autonomous individual. It was an aesthetic of repression. McCardell designed ready-to-wear sportswear, she said, because when the “preoccupation with clothes and its problems [were] solved, women had time for many things.”

After the war, McCardell noticed the increasing backlash against women working in fashion. The question of whether a woman should work at all after the war was far from settled; in fact, it had once again become a vigorous debate. “You can’t go back,” she told Friedan. “You have to design for the lives American women lead today.” Of course, it’s Dior’s name we all remember, even though the clothes that we wear daily are thanks to McCardell. I wanted to explore why that is in my book, and part of it is that there was a concerted effort to shut women out of the narrative. There was an epic media spat between McCardell and the male Parisian haute couture designers, which I write about in my book. McCardell was having none of it.

My goal for this next part is sort of….rapid fire fashion analysis? I’m going to name a McCardell innovation/design….and can you give us a few sentences about its import?

THE POPOVER DRESS

During World War II, women had a clothing problem. First, there was nothing to wear to the wartime plants where many had begun working, so designers had to quickly figure out how to safely dress women for factory jobs. This was the Rosie the Riveter overalls solution. At home, most domestic help had left for better paying factory work, leaving women to care for their houses alone, and often with their spouses deployed abroad. The fashion editor Diana Vreeland, then at Harper’s Bazaar, asked McCardell to design something that would be easy and practical for women to live and work in, and the Popover was McCardell’s solution.

She created a wrap dress out of denim, which was a material rarely used in womenswear at the time. Her business partners freaked out that she had so much denim in their Seventh Avenue warehouse, but she saw the fabric as durable and easy to wash. She designed the dress with a massive patch pocket, big enough for a book or a garden trowel or a flashlight for when the blackout drills happened. You could “pop it” over your clothes to keep them clean, like a wearable apron of sorts, but it very quickly evolved into a wrap dress that women wore all the time. McCardell iterated on her popover, and it remained in her collection from then on.

WOMEN’S POCKETS (I love the bit about how they’re a place to put your hands in order to feel composed in front of a boss!)

Yes! I love that, too. McCardell understood the psychology of clothes. She liked to say that “men are free from the clothes problem — why should I not follow their example?” She believed women should have functional, well-designed pockets and she fought hard with her male bosses to include them in her clothes. She understood they were valuable not just for holding items, but for having someplace to put your hands when you felt anxious.

McCardell was often described as being “shy” in the press during her lifetime, but now that I know more about her, I don’t know if it was shyness. She was often the only woman in the room when it came to business decisions. She frequently put herself out on a limb by taking risks in her work and in her life. Her quietness was more strategic, I think. And she knew that a woman looked effortlessly cool when sliding one hand in a pocket and slouching back a little. A pocket is practical, but it’s also a power move.

THE BALLERINA FLAT

McCardell preferred flats to heels, and she loved the simplicity of sandals. But there really wasn’t a strong alternative for a closed-toed and flat heeled shoe that she thought looked good with her clothes. In 1941, she had an idea to dress her models in ballet slippers made of fabrics that matched the outfits. She partnered with the ballet shoe company, Capezio, to design them. Store buyers were totally flummoxed when her models wore them at a fashion preview. The consensus was that she’d lost her mind, because the flat shoes went against the idea of heels being the most flattering on women. Women loved them, though, and now ballet flats are one of the most popular and enduring shoe styles.

SIDE ZIPPERS

McCardell lived alone for much of her adult life—she didn’t marry until she was nearly 40—and she wasn’t an uber-wealthy woman. She didn’t have a maid to help button her into an outfit. She got dressed by herself. A woman may live alone and thrive, as McCardell did, “but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place,” she once said. So she put the closures of her dresses within easy reach. And she made them an elegant design element. Some of my favorite McCardell outfits include buttons or brass eyes-and hooks on the side that serve not only as a closure, but as an elegant design detail.

THE ‘DIAPER’ SWIMSUIT

In the 1940s, it was considered scandalous for a woman to wrap fabric between her legs. McCardell, though, was a swimmer and she wanted her bathing suits to perform. This suit was made of a lightweight, fast-drying wool jersey and cut from one piece of fabric. A woman could wrap it around her body to cover her buttocks and breasts and then tie it behind the neck like a halter, leaving most of her back exposed. McCardell cut the material high on the thighs, and it looked a bit like underwear to those used to a skirted bathing costume. McCardell jokingly called her one-piece halter the “Diaper Suit.” She didn’t want anything to impede the experience of swimming, or inhibit fast and easy drying of material afterward, so she got rid of the linings and bust pads found in most suits. As a result, a woman’s nipples might be visible beneath the fabric, causing even more sensation on a 1940s beach.

Something I came to respect about McCardell is that her primary goal wasn’t to shock, it was to provide. She wanted women to have swimsuits that were flattering and practical. If a woman couldn’t swim in one of her suits, if she couldn’t sit comfortably on a beach without it shifting on her, it didn’t matter how stylish she looked. McCardell cared about the full spectrum of the experience. Could she swim? Would it dry quickly after? What happens when she wants to go grab lunch? As someone who has spent more hours than I care to admit fidgeting with my bathing suits, I really appreciate this.

Another interesting research discovery for me: McCardell received thousands of letters over her career, and what survives are the ones she personally saved. Sometimes an archive is very instructive in what a person chooses to keep. So mixed in with all the fan letters from everyday women gushing about how much they loved her, and letters from famous women like Joan Crawford, there’s a handwritten screed about how a McCardell bathing suit ruined a woman’s Italian vacation. The suit didn’t hold its shape. I can’t say for certain what McCardell did in response to that letter, but my suspicion is that she kept it to remind herself of who she was working for. She likely would have revisited the design, the fabric selection, the manufacturer responsible for making the suit. She would have worked to fix it. The lived experience of women mattered deeply to her, especially the ones who worked hard to afford her clothes. That a woman had saved up for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy and McCardell’s suit had failed her on that trip would have deeply bothered her.

THE PLAYSUIT

Have you ever seen those pictures of women from the early 1900s hiking mountains, and they’re wearing a full regalia of dress, heeled boots, and a fancy hat? In the late 1800s, women didn’t have clothes to wear when participating in outdoor activities or sports. The history of women’s sportswear is so fascinating, and there are a couple of great histories I read, including this book and this book. In the early twentieth century, women had been restricted to wearing these new sports clothes in private, female-only spaces. McCardell brought the clothes out into the open and transformed them into everyday street wear. The playsuit is, effectively, what we might now think of as athleisure. But McCardell’s plaid rompers were way cooler!

There’s a version of this book that could’ve just focused on what you did above: talk about each item of clothing and its feminist import. Why did it feel important to craft this book as a narrative of McCardell’s full life and early death?

You’re so right, there’s absolutely a version of this book that could have been a robust fashion history meets feminist history. McCardell was one of our most prolific mid-century inventors and there’s a design-focused book that could simply have placed her in the pantheon of other artists, architects, and industrial designers of her era. In fact, there’s been quite a lot written over the decades about McCardell’s fashion designs, particularly if you go back to the newspaper and magazine articles in her lifetime.

The question that I kept coming back to was: How did she do it? How did a woman born in 1905 in a rural Maryland town become one of the most prolific pioneers in fashion? The articles from her lifetime told me what she cooked for Thanksgiving dinner in the 1940s (quail), but no one bothered to ask her how she became a partner in her firm, or where her business acumen derived from, or how she managed to remain career focused when most women are pushed into marriage. So, that’s what I set out to learn. And I’d love to say that we’ve grown wiser as a society, but how often is a professional woman still asked about her domestic and family life to leaven her work and achievement? It remains true to this day that ambitious women scare people.

At the beginning of the book, you connect McCardell’s work to the suffragette idea that a woman’s freedom “began with her clothes.” At the end of the book, you write that “McCardell understood that the most powerful aspect of clothes is in how they inform our experience. Our right to choose how to dress is a sartorial symbol of our right to choose the way we live.”

What part of contemporary women’s wardrobe/clothing/fashion do you think McCardell would have appreciated as a way of choosing, and owning, the way women live? The easy answer is “athleisure” (which she inspired!) but I feel like you’ll have a much less obvious (or more complex!) answer to this one.

This is such a good question. Interestingly, I’m not sure how she would feel about the prevalence of athleisure wear. Particularly the messaging by clothing brands that promote “wellness” as a code for dieting, thinness, and subservience to an athleticism devoid of joy and experience. McCardell liked to go fishing with her grandfather, swim in the ocean, hike and ski in the mountains, play golf with her brothers and friends. It was sports as freedom, as connection, as respite. She loved being in nature. What cult brands offer today doesn’t feel like the sartorial or personal freedom that she championed. And when you learn more about what it’s like to work in places like this, it’s precisely the opposite of what McCardell promoted in her life and in her workplace, which was women living lives of autonomy, agency, and joy.

McCardell was certainly of her time, so she had body image concerns that related to thinness. I write about those contradictory realities in the book. Athlesiure wear has become its own version of an oppressive trend, not unlike Dior’s rigid hourglass silhouette. Today you’re meant to look good in a pair of tight yoga pants and that sucks, frankly. We may have ditched the corsets, as McCardell desired, but now we’ve replaced it with an internal corset. We’re supposed to take enough hot yoga and pilates classes to have a taught armature of abdominal muscles and shapely glutes.

What she would have loved about these clothes, though, is the material science behind them. McCardell was, at her core, an inventor. She was wildly experimental in her lifetime, making clothes from new human-made materials like rayon and corn and redwood tree fibers. During the rationing of the war, she used mattress ticking to make pants and overstocked parachute material from the military for dresses. And she also took fabrics that were siloed into gender—like tweed—and brought them into womenswear in new ways. It’s wild when you think about fabric as being gendered. Researching this book, I kept thinking of that Ru Paul quote: “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.”

McCardell was always interested in how a material could solve a problem. I’m about to travel to New York by train for a book event, and I need to go straight from the station to the program. It just occurred to me that my favorite linen dress will crumple from sitting for three hours.. McCardell would probably put me in a light wool jersey dress, because it would hold up to the travel. She thought about every last detail.

What might inspire her the most today, is the small but mighty movement away from fast fashion, by the designers and everyday people thrifting and crafting their own clothes and fashioning their own styles. I can’t stop thinking about this: McCardell was a world-famous fashion designer but she never told women to buy clothes they didn’t need. She encouraged thrifting, sewing, repairing. She empowered women to be themselves. And she pushed herself to invent clothes that women truly needed. ●

You can follow Elizabeth on Instagram here and buy Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free here.

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Remember this interview from January on American Bulk? I said: just trust me, this shit is good — and a lot of you did. So here’s another interview about an essay collection that does so much, and so skillfully, that I struggle for the words to convince you to keep reading — but if you do, I know that Alice Bolin’s words, about her new book Culture Creep, will convince you. This is the good shit. This is the stuff that allows us to do the never-ending and yet endlessly essential work of unpacking the ideas that infused our lives in the ‘90s and 2000s.

Maybe you’re the same age as me and Alice, and maybe you, too, grew up in a place that felt pop-culture-less — or maybe you’re older, or younger, or spent your formative years in very different contexts. Nevertheless: all of this was (and is) in the water. And it’s not a coincidence that this book comes out just weeks after Sophie Gilbert’s look at the feminism of the ‘90s and 2000s (which I interviewed her about on the Culture Study Podcast). We’re making sense of the relatively recent past in the way that twenty years’ distance allows us — and Alice’s collection is particularly skilled at identifying the ideological rot that inflicted the core of so much of 2000s feminism. It’s cathartic, traumatic, infuriating, and nostalgic, all at once.

This sort of reckoning is so weird!!! But also essential — particularly if we want to move forward. So just trust me again, and I’ll see you in the comments.

You can follow Alice Bolin on Instagram here and buy Culture Creep here.

The essay on teen magazines feels like the beating heart of the book, and I think there are a lot of readers here who will remember the feeling of being at once addicted to and repulsed by these magazines; they were bibles but slightly nauseating ones. I found so much joy reading the essay, in part because we grew up 30 minutes from one another in Idaho, in very similar contexts.

And while there are few joys as intense as someone mentioning your long-gone childhood grocery store (Tidyman’s!!!) the bit that really struck me was your description of our area of the world as not culture-less, but pop culture-less. No pop stars came our way, the top 40 station “seemed to lag mysteriously behind MTV,” the music stores had gone out of business leaving only badly stocked Hastings and Wal-Marts in their place, the movie theater played a blockbuster and a kid’s movie and maybe, MAYBE something like The Talented Mr. Ripley. No wonder we clung to our teen magazines (purchased at Tidyman’s).

You do this beautifully in the chapter, but I’d love for readers to hear more of how you think teen magazines fill this sort of hole — and the somewhat insidious effects of it. (I often explain that there were just so few ways to be where we grew up; I wonder if replacing the static messaging of the magazines with the wide world of the internet has changed the potential repertoire. I fear not.)

I had a friend who grew up with me in Idaho who told me he would read The New Yorker as a pretentious teenager and circle the events he would go to, were he in the city and not 2,000 miles way in a rural college town. This really hit at something for me about the stranded feeling I had as a kid. There were so many things that were discussed in teen shows or movies, which generally revolved around the Eastern Seaboard and California, that I could not situate within this isolated world where I (we) lived. I remember asking if an unincorporated farm community of less than one hundred people ten minutes outside of town might count as a “suburb.” I didn’t even know what a freeway was until I was probably 18. I looked it up on Google: “What is a freeway?” [AHP note: I learned to drive at 14 and was very skilled at passing on single-lane roads but didn’t drive on a freeway until I was 20]

Magazines felt like a crucial way to fill this gap, to make me feel like I wasn’t living on some other planet. And they filled actual gaps in for me when some pop cultural artifact was out of my reach. Basic cable where I lived didn’t carry the WB, the crucial Y2K hub for teen soap operas like Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I couldn’t keep up with them consistently and would have to catch reruns when they would air irregularly on UPN. [AHP note: I felt this absence so keenly and feel like no one gets it — some places just didn’t get the WB! Literally nothing you could do about it!]

I read in magazines about these shows’ stars and got caught up on the drama that had happened on episodes I had missed. I suppose this was information I couldn’t really use at all except to feel like I was part of this broader teen zeitgeist that was taking over America in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s and seemed to threaten to leave me behind.

I see now that this was exactly how magazines were designed to make me feel: like a savvy, popular, normal teen (even as a ten year old), which is all any kid wants to feel. Teen magazines were explicitly instructional, providing endless advice columns, sheets of beauty tips, quizzes to determine if your crush likes you back, even features pages on consent and birth control. For someone who felt like an outsider, shut out from knowledge that it seems like other people are born with (and maybe that’s all of us), having a guidebook to teenage life delivered to my doorstep every month was an alluring prospect.

I’m not saying they served no purpose or that what I learned from them was all bad. But this set up a dynamic of dependence where my magazine advisors wielded a lot of control over what I believed about the world, and my and other readers’ trust was exploited to advertise nearly endless products to us, positioned as the solutions to our teenage angst.

Looking back, it’s amazing how unbothered I was by this onslaught of marketing, being both naive to how calculated it was and innocently satisfied by the vicarious retail therapy magazines offered. As a little kid I would spend hours looking at the piles of catalogues in my grandma’s kitchen, examining the pictures of everything from plasma lamps in Sharper Image to quilted Chanel bags in Neiman Marcus.

At that time I could not differentiate between magazines and catalogues and thought the two words could be used interchangeably. I had clearly intuited something with this conflation, and the unity between the two has only become more complete, with much of the entertainment social media content provides being more like a catalogue than a magazine, complete with clickable links to purchase. Teen magazines were clearly grooming us to be, as the classic Juicy Couture slogan went, “Nice Girls Who Like Stuff.”

“True crime watchers will have noticed a thematic creep in the genre’s subject matter in recent years,” you write on the first page of your new book. “Dead girls are out. Cults are in.”

Your first book was Dead Girls. This current book, Culture Creep, focuses on the fever dream of the last, oh, eight years? I think it’s a good starting point to hear you talk more about how you see that transition — from dead girls to cults — structuring larger shifts in pop culture as a whole.

I think in some ways this transition from more of a fetishistic obsession with dead women to stories of creepy cults is a positive thing. I see it as a harbinger of more systems thinking and even — could it be? — class consciousness, as people think not only about the havoc that individual sociopaths can wreak on a family, a town, or a region but the ways that organizations can take on lives of their own, becoming machines that victimize people even as those same people are deputized to victimize others.

This trend seems like a direct result of a lot of people reexamining their childhoods, particularly in the wake of the Christian conservatism that was so ascendant from the ‘80s to the ‘00s (and has reached what I can only hope is its height today) and seeing the ways that they were indoctrinated into groups that they didn’t understand and wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to join.

Of course, cult stories very often do revolve around an individual sociopath, the famous “charismatic leader” archetype. This is where I think the true crime transition was fairly smooth from serial killers to cult leaders. This fascination makes a lot of sense to me in an age when demagogues in politics and business have reshaped the world around them, amassing more individual power than any humans have ever had in a remarkably short amount of time.

People want to understand what causes us to follow leaders, even to the death. They are dismayed by how extreme political movements, hate groups, and conspiracy theories that seem so irrational can transform people we love into strangers. And of course, there is a lot of fear of doomsday right now on every part of the political spectrum, which is eerily echoed in the beliefs of many cults. Extreme times draw us to extreme beliefs, whether we are subscribing to them or just watching as they spread.

I’m pretty obsessed with the ‘Enumerated Woman’ essay, in part because I’ve gone through so many of my own phases of tracking (and disavowing tracking) and buying the rhetoric about how the “quantified self” would allow us to have better knowledge about how our bodies work and deciding that’s manipulative bullshit and ultimately finding myself in this weird spot where I wear a watch that tracks a lot of stuff, and compete with my partner on nightly sleep scores, but ALSO think the sleep score is often bogus. A classic case of “you can think something is bullshit and still be obsessed with it.”

I’ve often thought of tracking as part of the larger compulsion to self-optimize but I hadn’t quite connected the dots to the compulsion for women without safety nets to seek this feeling of productivity and control.

As you write: “with no childcare or paid family leave, women are often stuck with part-time, freelance, under-the-table, or direct sales work. It is no wonder, then, that the Fitbit or the Apple Watch becomes a welcome productivity tool, a way to do more with less time and support, to hustle both literally and figuratively.”

I’d love to hear you talk a bit more about this connection between precarity (enforced through neoliberal policy) and tracking, just generally.

The most concrete connection between the two is the lack of affordable healthcare in this country. Self tracking is one solution that tech has come up with to this emergency, giving us a way to monitor health data ourselves rather than relying on professionals to do it. There are many problems with this solution, including that the data is of questionable accuracy and relevance to overall health; we also seem to ignore the question of whether tracking itself is a healthy habit, especially mentally. It’s indicative of most tech solutions, which tend to simulate individual empowerment, all the while enforcing more dependence on the tech itself.

Community advocacy groups like the Black Panthers historically responded to the lack of medical services with “self health” programs, with the Panthers setting up free clinics and programs to screen for sickle-cell anemia, in addition to starting the first free school breakfast programs in the country. Tracking feels like the opposite of these community solutions, casting each of us as an isolated, one-dimensional instance of “health.” Even more insidiously, it makes us believe that we only have ourselves to blame for our relative wellness, ignoring social determinants and factors beyond our control to emphasize optimizing performance. This is an ingenious ideological gambit to deflect governmental obligation to care for citizens’ health in the only wealthy country on earth without socialized medicine.

The other problem is that tracking data mostly revolves around fitness, a concept that is ineluctably associated with thinness and normative beauty standards. Sadly, these concerns are not irrelevant to (especially) women’s social status and security, since studies have shown that thin women earn more than heavier ones do, but I do think that we have been a bit too quick to accept this conflation of the pursuit of optimum fitness and actual health. This isn’t to say that getting more steps in isn’t good for overall well-being and longevity, though community solutions like public transit, sidewalks and trails, and less car-centered urban planning would go further than step trackers to encourage it.

For the most part, tracking feels like just another way to enable people to obsess over their bodies while disconnecting from their actual intuition. And this is nothing new — calorie counting and exercise tracking have always been dieting staples, with tracking providing more efficient ways to micromanage them and the alluring illusion of hard data. The seeming objectivity of these numbers is emotionally powerful, and for me personally it has been hard to get back in touch with my body’s signals even though I left tracking behind more five years ago.

This is an aspect of the tech dystopia so obvious that has been parodied on actual Black Mirror episodes, but it is disheartening to think that we are using this advanced technology to fulfill some 1980s dream of the perfect weight loss regime. And on a larger ideological level, it represents how much we are willing to cede to tech: the daily upkeep of our most basic bodily needs.

I’m going to ask for something big and tricky with this question but you are pretty much the only person in the world who could pull it off. In the final blockbuster essay of the book, you explore the legacy and twisted ideological logic of Playboy — and argue, quite convincingly, for its status as a cult. Elsewhere in the book, you off-handedly mention a religious organization (WE WON’T CALL IT A CULT!) that’s slowly taken over your town. (If you want to read more about what it looks like when a church that believes in theocratic national rule buys up your downtown and becomes the de facto pastor of the New Right, Politico just released a pretty stunning profile)

I know a lot about that organization, and I know you do too — and the ways it’s successfully preached indoctrination (and patriarchal control) as freedom. How are these two organizations operating similarly? How do they take advantage of cultural vacuums and manipulate others’ opposition into “persecution”?

I love this connection, especially because we could become distracted by their seemingly opposed cultural positioning. Hugh Hefner was once an enemy of the Christian right, and the particular church leader you’re talking about is so conservative that he advocates for making pornography illegal. Hefner had an impressive ability to always cast himself as the reasonable, progressive civil libertarian, making his feminist critics one one side and Christian conservatives on the other seem like hysterical scolds inciting a moral panic. Feminists had more substantive complaints than Republicans, criticizing not only the infantilization and exploitation of the nude models in his magazine, but the labor conditions at his Playboy Clubs and sexual harassment and abuse within the company. But Hefner was able to triangulate his opponents to such a degree that by the time the Reagan administration started their Commission on Pornography, many feminists were collaborating with them.

Hefner’s was a tactic I see abusive religious organizations using too, abstracting every complaint to the realm of the ideological: people who don’t like Playboy are just against pornography and therefore free speech; people who don’t like my church just resent Christianity and oppose freedom of religion. It distracts from the actual, concrete nature of the accusations, which for Playboy included absolute mountains of sexual abuse allegations towards Hefner and many others in his inner circle.

Hefner was also able to downplay these accusations (for decades!) because the women who were making them were models working for a notorious pornographic magazine. Many people still consider women in the sex industry as more or less “asking for it” when they are raped or abused, or they discount their stories as lies to cover for regret or embarrassment. The circumstances are different when a church group harbors abusers, although the more I think about it, the more similarities I see.

In fundamentalist organizations like the one in my hometown, the belief in patriarchy is so complete that women are considered the property of men, permanent children whose natural tendencies to be dishonest, vindictive, and overly emotional need to be curbed by their husbands and fathers. This is the ideal cover for abusive men (many of whom seek out these kinds of groups) who know that any women who they victimize will be taught to ignore their own intuition and gaslit and silenced if they do come forward. And sexual purity is a cudgel in both cases, with the fundamentalist catch-22 often being that if a woman is violated, she has also sinned and therefore lost some of her credibility to report it.

Ultimately I think you can trace the ideology of both Playboy and Christian Nationalism to the persistence of American patriarchy, with our national daddy issues going all the way back to our revered Founding Fathers. Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy (a bizarre 200-page manifesto arguing for uprooting of Puritan values to allow unfettered capitalism to flourish) lays out a vision for a secular theology of American life, where business titans would become the beloved saints of American capitalism.

Hefner bemoans the populist celebration of the common man during the Great Depression and says that instead we should praise “Uncommon Men” — which was, of course, how he saw himself. He believed he would be looked back on as an American hero, and this megalomania was the perfect basis for the organization he set up around himself, a compound where both men and women worshipped at his feet and came to him for favors and advice, where he had the last word on everything. His supposed progressivism means very little when juxtaposed with this inherently undemocratic belief in Uncommon Men, which happens to be the value that unites the entire American right at this moment.

It makes me think of the recent unholy crossover of the amoral misogynists and pickup artists of the manosphere and right-wing Christian influencers — they can all get behind the demagoguery, racism, sexism, and authoritarianism that MAGA stands for, united by the basic belief that some people (men) are worth more than others and that what this country needs is a strongman to lead it like a father leads his family. ●

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Also, I’m feeling a burst of writing energy this month and have a bunch of ideas bonking around in my head — but I need stories/perspective from all of you. Story #1: If you have ideas about the rise of kids’ flag football, particularly the NFL-sponsored leagues, and how it’s changing how you/others think about the sport…I want to hear about it. Story #2: I want examples of emails, texts, social media posts, WHATEVER that you’ve asked some form of AI to help write for you. I’m trying to pinpoint something about AI’s ‘style’ for this type of writing, but I need more examples than the ones various programs are generating for me. [I would delete ALL identifying information if I quote from these, don’t worry]. Here’s the Google Form to submit your thoughts on either of these topics.

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

Our first entries in the series were from a freelance audiobook narrator and a gardening ceramacist. Today, you’ll hear about what it’s like to be an engineering grad student trying to build solutions to climate change in this moment. If you’d like to volunteer to talk about a day/week in your life for a potential interview — crucially, this work does not have to be for pay; I’d love to hear from caregivers — here’s the very simple sign-up.

Now, let’s hear from Shashwati Da Cunha about trying to figure out a new way to make chemicals, how to break up big and slow research projects, resisting the temptation to spend a ton of time doing the stuff that’s easiest to check off your to-do list, how she avoids losing all her research in a lab fire, and the ongoing effects of cuts to publically-funded labs. Shashwati is passionate about making engineers understandable to people who aren’t PhD students, so I promise you won’t get lost!

We met when I gave a talk to graduate students at the University of Texas, and I loved how evident it was that you were at once committed to your PhD work *and* trying to think holistically and contextually about the world around you. Can you talk a little about your specific research and why you’ve pursued it?

I wanted to build solutions to climate change, and to leverage the technical skills I already had. My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering – chemical because I love the excitement of reactions and the physicality of materials, and engineering to learn how to Get Things Done. My PhD is in electrocatalysis, a technology that could revolutionize the way we manufacture chemicals.

Coming out of undergrad, I saw its potential to solve multiple climate problems, had some relevant experience in catalysis, and thought it was cool. My thesis focuses on asking the right questions to scale up this technology.

Before I began my PhD, I didn’t realize how many climate solutions already exist. The corollary that even fewer people may realize: so much effort in climate technologies is centered around lowering costs. We have so many options that already work, but aren’t the cheapest way to get something done. Sometimes high cost is reflective of resource scarcity or technical complexity. But many times, a technology hasn’t scaled because there’s no market at its price point — on a societal level, we just aren’t willing to pay a premium to protect the planet. This is why simulations suggest that a carbon tax may be the most powerful tool to address climate change.

If you look at climate-centric technologies that achieved scale, some were deliberately supported until the unit cost came down enough to create a market (e.g. solar panels). Others were marketed as premium products, with the corresponding pricing and audience (e.g. vegan meat substitutes). Yet others were subsidized through policy levers, with compliance or research paid for by taxpayers (e.g. catalytic converters in cars). As an engineer, I can work on improving technology to bring down its cost, but we need people who can move these other handles too.

But when it comes to my work — I specifically study carbon dioxide electrolysis (“CO₂ reduction”), a process inspired by photosynthesis. Plants use solar energy to convert CO₂ from the atmosphere into useful stuff like sugar, which they later eat, releasing CO₂ back into the air. Our goal is similar: convert CO₂ into useful stuff using renewable electricity, thereby creating a circular economy.

Humans urgently need to manage CO₂ because we emit gigatons of it annually, mostly by burning fossil fuels. CO₂ strengthens the natural greenhouse over the planet, driving anthropogenic climate change. On the flipside, we use gigatons of carbon-based materials annually, including fuels, plastics, resins, textiles, lubricants, medicines, cosmetics, cleaning products… But nearly all are made from crude oil and natural gas, often via high-temperature processes that are heated by burning gas.

Through CO₂ electrolysis, we use CO₂ to make building blocks for fossil-free carbon-based chemicals. This process is driven by electricity, rather than heat, so it can be coupled to renewable energy sources like solar panels or wind turbines. It’s currently too expensive to compete with petrochemicals, so I determine critical research directions to move forward. How do we tailor products to meet consumer demands? How should we operate electrolyzers in a real power grid, where renewable electricity is not continuously available? How should we structure electrolyzers to fit into existing plants?

To answer these questions, I conduct economic and emissions assessments on industrial-scale CO₂ electrolysis, accounting for the complex physical and chemical relationships in an electrolyzer, and recommend design changes and performance metrics.

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

My work schedule is guided by what the project needs and structured by fixed meetings and my energy levels. Although it’s flexible, I try to work business hours in my office (close to 9 – 5). Depending on upcoming deadlines and my energy, I may work additional hours, preferably at home so they feel less like work. Extra work time is Sunday afternoons or weeknights after dinner. Given the flexibility, I can easily account for repairs or doctor’s appointments during the workday.

In my field, a PhD thesis is typically a series of academic papers, each a single research idea or project. Completing a project – presumably by answering a research question – takes months to years, with proportionate emotional breakdowns. My research process follows these stages, albeit nonlinearly:

• Ideation: identifying needs; figuring out what’s been previously tried and why it failed; coming up with crazy ideas; eventually picking an initial idea or question; evaluating the strategy (e.g. Is this physically possible? If our hypothesis is right, would it even matter?)

• Design: designing models, experiments, or techniques to answer a question; outlining derivative questions and supporting analyses that will be required; learning necessary skills

• Execution: building the structure of the model; writing code, making spreadsheets, using industry packages; collecting data inputs; troubleshooting; sanity checks; reading and learning more methods

• Analysis: extracting meaning; analyzing results, secondary and tertiary data processing; checking calculations; testing sensitivity to assumptions; contextualizing and comparing with prior work

• Communication: making oral and poster presentations; writing academic papers; creating open-access tools

Retrospectively mapping out stages in my most recent project

An older student advised me early on that there’s always one more line of code you can write, one more experiment you can run — so you have to draw a line. Also, research is really hard and really slow. I try to set one to three daily or weekly goals, depending on the stage of the project. I can’t work effectively on multiple research projects, even prioritizing them. Instead, I try to split them across different days or even weeks.

I present an update to my advisor biweekly, which I use to reflect on progress and structure next steps. I also outline the journal paper early on and work towards filling in the blanks. It never turns out the way I planned, but I find this very effective for breaking down overwhelming projects and to prevent rabbit-holes from getting me off track. I also deliver major presentations my research group or externally every few months. Because of the range of timescales over which I need to aggregate information, I note what I do every single day in a few bullet points. This makes it easy to keep track of everything I need to consider in “the story so far”.

Early in my PhD, I found myself prioritizing admin and logistical tasks outside of the research workflow, because they are more defined and can be checked off in one shot. After battling with that tendency, I’ve accepted that the first half of Mondays is for miscellanea. Monday afternoons are when I get into the swing of research. I often work late on Mondays, since I have more energy early in the week but only build momentum late in the day.

The rest of the week, I often spend the first hour or so reading. This includes learning new methods or skills, keeping abreast with research developments, and reading lots of technical and non-technical writing. That open-ended time, for which I don’t set goals, has hugely shaped my knowledge of my field and structured my thinking.

I don’t want to spend too much time organizing information (or forget the color-coding scheme, or which journal was which…) Therefore, I keep a single to-do list for work and life, with a high priority and low priority section. When this gets out of hand, I’ll have an entry like “do experiments” to point me to an external, more detailed planning document. My notebook for day-to-day notes, seminars etc is in Microsoft OneNote. The downside is that I can’t draw or write math directly, so I scan in handwritten notes frequently because too many famous scientists have had labs burn down.

How do you organize your future? (Planning for future work, planning for time off, etc.)

I make lots of mind maps, because if I don’t write things down, they occupy brain space and stress me out. I have a giant mind map of sectors of my life in the present and future, on the basis of which I set goals each semester and year. Although I rarely achieve any professional ones (and maybe 30% of the personal ones), they focus my attention and prevent me from panicking about the infinite alternatives. I also write an annual reflection in December, and I usually go back to the list of goals and laugh.

I keep a huge running list and mind map of research ideas. I revisit these at decision points, but as I’ve progressed in my PhD, the next project has followed more naturally from the previous one. Research is very unpredictable, which makes traditional long-term project management tools like Gantt charts very difficult to follow. I check in every 3-6 months on my overall research progress and re-assess timelines for projects and graduation. Since I don’t plan to stay in academia in the short term, I also keep in touch with my industry network, attend professional events/ conferences, and read industry news. This helps me think about career directions while also steering my research to stay relevant.

How do you think about “coworkers?” (I’m particularly interested in this one because I know that some of the more existential/systemic issues in academia we discussed at my talk are not always easy to talk about within a cohort)

I’m very lucky to have an excellent group of lab mates, a large cohort, and a friendly and welcoming department – the people have been the best thing about graduate school. This group provides technical feedback, informal mentorship and motivation; we keep each other hanging in there. I’m also grateful for the diversity of the class, which has taught me many different perspectives on science and on life. Since we share the training to think about complex questions in a very organized way, we have great conversations even when we disagree.

Being both students and employees of the university puts us in a strange no man’s land between colleagues and students. On the one hand, we have a more personal connection, but on the other, we are not protected by a strict organizational structure, which can cause problems with conflict management.

How do you think about funding and future economic realities, particularly in our current climate? What’s changed over the last year? (If you’re comfortable, I think people would appreciate knowing details about stipends, loans, etc.)

A PhD PROGRAM PAYS STUDENTS. I am NOT paying for school – the school is paying me as a researcher. Some circumstances around funding are more complex (e.g. if research grants are unavailable, you need to teach a class to be paid as a teaching assistant), but students should still be paid. At an R1 engineering program, I am paid enough to live (as an able-bodied non-parent), which is not the case across programs and disciplines. The line between employee and student is tenuous. For instance, a student’s stipend could list them working for 20 hours/week, but they actually work 60 hours/week to meet graduation expectations. Since it would be too difficult to work a second job, they’d be earning only ⅓ of the corresponding hourly pay.

In my field within the US, a student’s funding typically covers (1) tuition for being enrolled at the university and (2) a living stipend. Since I attend a public university, state residents (defined here to include grad students) are eligible for subsidized tuition. Universities and departments may have some budget for graduate stipends, often through donations, maybe for 1 year (out of 4-6). The bulk of scientific research is funded by research grants, which vary in source. In my field, they come mostly from (1) federal agencies (e.g. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy), (2) independent organizations (e.g. American Chemical Society, donor foundations), or (3) industry (e.g. oil and gas majors, pharmaceutical manufacturers). The breakdown between these sources depends on the research topic, legal requirements like who owns the intellectual property, and so on. However, the majority of research in American universities is funded through federal agencies.

Federal funding cuts are affecting many agencies, and therefore the graduate students working on their grants. (These students are highly trained professionals who could have high-paying jobs. Instead, they’re working on very difficult research problems that are important enough to spend tax money on.) A system already existed to prioritize research that’s critical enough to be funded by taxpayers: agencies convert legislative priorities into calls for research proposals, then award grants through a highly competitive process. There is not much clarity or certainty on how this is changing, probably by design. Funding cuts may make it impossible for research labs to buy consumables (like gloves), pay electricity bills, or keep administrative staff. Students are being pushed to graduate early, or universities are recruiting fewer PhD students. This change will also probably push academics to solicit and accept more grants from the private sector, deprioritizing research that does not benefit a corporate bottom line, and introducing bias into the types of questions that researchers can afford to ask.

There’s a phrase I think about a lot that’s generally attributed to a German infantryman in World War II: “With us it was always ‘sweat saves blood’, but with [the Allies] it was ‘equipment saves men’.” (italics mine) This soldier saw the consequences of an enormous effort, particularly in the US, to develop an advanced, highly organized research and development program. Technology was built to respond to the existential conflict of the time. Whether the next existential threat comes from ecosystem collapse, broken weather systems, or devastating illnesses, we need scientists and engineers to be trained and ready.

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

I would like to support Project Drawdown, a non-partisan organization focused on scientific research on climate solutions and storytelling for a general audience. Their catalog of climate solutions has rekindled my hope many times. They also classify the financial costs and societal impacts of each solution, which is the kind of intersectional work I want to see more scientists and engineers doing. Most importantly, non-partisan storytelling on climate is desperately needed right now. The Culture Study community might also be interested in their efforts to train people so that “every job is a climate job”.

Shashwati da Cunha is a PhD Candidate in Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She models electrolyzers that convert CO₂ into chemicals, researching the intersection of climate solutions, energy infrastructure, and the chemicals industry. She is passionate about broadening engagement with research, and has previously led the university’s Chemical Engineering Women organization and served as the graduate representative on its Presidential Sustainability Steering Committee.

Now….what questions do you have for Shashwati? This can be a space for some engineering nerdery (Shashwati’s a subscriber, she’s here and would love to answer questions!) or we can talk about how you’ve figured out how to balance and organize massive, slow-moving projects in your own worklife.

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