This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. This is a newsletter about people enduring the pandemic alone. I have read hundreds of articles, actually hundreds, on parents’ difficulties during the pandemic, which feels appropriate: it is really fucking hard to be a parent right now. But within the American experience in particular, nuclear families and their experiences are privileged. I don’t mean that in the “they have more money” sort of way (although sometimes, even often times, they do) — more in the “they take center stage” sort of way.