The Hold Life Has

Field Notes from the Pyrocene

Emilie Hitch — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:09:09 GMT

On the drive home from the Black Hills last Saturday, we crossed through the Badlands. I glanced down at the dashboard. Outside temperature: 112°. Not Phoenix. Not Death Valley. South Dakota.

I took a picture. I reacted like… “Artifact! Unique!” And then… realized I was nuts to think it would be unique – we’ve started a pattern. In one week: Wildfires in Canada and Minnesota. BWCA closed - kids evacuated from camps and canoe trips. Most of Northern Minnesota on a “Ready – Set – Go” evacuation alert system. Tornadoes in Wisconsin and Michigan. Fires in Spain and France. Monsoons in South Asia. A LOT.

My signature move is to start with a small artifact (Photo! Mural! Moment! Flavor! You get the idea.) and keep zooming out until I see an entire system. It’s not by accident – it’s by practice. We anthropologists spend a lot of time paying attention to moments when “the familiar becomes strange.”¹ A wedding becomes a rite of passage. A pandemic becomes a global liminal experience. An empty grocery store shelf tells a story about trust, supply chains, and human behavior. Small observations can reveal the big culture shifts.

Environmental historian Stephen Pyne coined the term Pyrocene in 2015 to describe what he sees as a new fire age—one in which humanity’s relationship with combustion has become the defining ecological force of our time.² In other words fire is no longer simply a natural phenomenon but one of the organizing forces of civilization. Fire shapes forests, of course, but also insurance markets, migration patterns, infrastructure, agriculture, public health, and politics. Humans burn fossil fuels and manage landscapes. Wildfire smoke turns the skies over cities orange. Lahaina, Altadena, Bordeaux, Valencia, and the Boundary Waters burn. But the story isn’t just about fire. The monsoons, catastrophic flooding, and extreme heat point to the same reality: a planet where multiple human systems are under stress at the same time, and societies are beginning to reorganize around that new condition.

That’s the Pyrocene - under this complex stress, places begin to mean something different.

For over 20 years, I’ve worked with organizations across industries, helping leadership teams think about geopolitical shifts, technological acceleration, changing definitions of sustainability, and the future of farming, manufacturing, supply chains… everything. These aren’t separate stories. They’re different expressions of the same one.

Subscribe now

A heating planet reorganizes human systems.

It changes what farmers plant where, when they harvest what, where people can afford to live, where insects and diseases spread, what equipment gets built, how infrastructure is designed, what and who insurers are willing to insure, and ultimately what we come to think of as normal. Businesses often talk about adaptation as a technological challenge. Better machines. Better genetics. Better data. Those things matter. But adaptation is cultural before, and only sometimes because of, technological adoption. A non-fire related example? Businesses cultures are adapting to AI regardless of whether—or to what extent—their people adopt it.

So, the first job isn’t to write a campaign; it’s to become a student of people again. Resist the temptation to jump immediately to messaging at the first indicator of a culture shift. Investigate what has changed and is changing: how people evaluate the world around them—what they fear, what they value, who they trust, and what they expect from institutions and brands.

How are customers making sense of these changes? What new tradeoffs are they making? What assumptions have quietly disappeared? What kinds of resilience do they seek? The organizations that will navigate this era best won’t necessarily be the ones with the loudest commitments to new claims. They’ll be the ones that remain relentlessly curious about how a changing planet is reshaping everyday life—and who uniquely-to-them design products, services, and experiences that genuinely help people navigate it.

The unsettling thing about seeing 112° on my dashboard in a northern state wasn’t simply the number. It was how quickly my mind started negotiating with it. Maybe the gauge was wrong. Maybe it was just the pavement... Maybe this heat is what summers are now.

Culture is remarkably good at normalizing the extraordinary.

The real story of the Pyrocene is not that the planet is changing—we’ve known that for a long time—but that human culture is changing with it. The strategic question for businesses, communities, and all of us isn’t simply how to survive a hotter world. It’s how to understand the people already living through emerging culture shifts—and how to help them (and us) navigate what comes next.

Footnote

Spiro, Melford E. “On the Strange and the Familiar in Recent Anthropological Thought.” Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 47–61.

Not Everyone

Emilie Hitch — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:11:11 GMT

A curious thing seems to be happening in the experience economy.

At first glance, it looks like a story about entertainment. Private karaoke rooms. Escape rooms. Game-show battle venues. Running clubs. Supper clubs. Adults paying good money to sing, compete, solve puzzles, and spend time together. One interpretation is that people are simply looking for something to do. I suspect something else is going on… with our kinship networks.

For much of the twentieth century, belonging was built into everyday life. You knew your neighbors. You saw the same people at church, school functions, community events, and local businesses. The architecture of society itself generated relationships. Not necessarily deep relationships, but enough familiarity to create a sense that you inhabited a shared world.

Over time, many of those structures weakened. Families dispersed. Work became mobile. Institutions lost influence. Third places—the cafes, bars, libraries, bowling leagues, and community organizations that once sat comfortably between home and work—began to disappear. (cue my 100000^th mention of Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam.

At the same moment, technology arrived with a compelling promise: perhaps physical proximity no longer mattered. Perhaps we could build community anywhere. Just tweet. Just post. Just poke. And in many ways, we did. We accumulated followers, joined groups, and gained access to more people than any generation before us. Yet for all this abundance, loneliness became one of the defining conversations of our time.

Perhaps the human need was never simply connection. *Perhaps* the need was belonging.

Subscribe now

Recently I came across an advertisement for a social gathering company that described its events as “real rooms with real people.” The phrase lingered with me because it felt less like marketing and more like a cultural diagnosis. What many people seem to be searching for is not more connection, but less mediation. Less filtering. Less optimization. Fewer algorithms sitting between us and one another. Viewed through that lens, a private karaoke room becomes something more interesting than entertainment. It becomes a temporary social world.

Victor Turner (dear gentle readers, yes, again) argued that rites of passage require liminal spaces—places set apart from ordinary life where people move through experiences together and emerge changed. Traditionally these rituals marked major life transitions, but modern life contains fewer shared rituals than it once did. Religious participation has declined. Civic organizations struggle. Workplaces have become increasingly transactional. We are connected to more people than ever before and embedded within fewer shared experiences.

I wonder if some of what we are observing is an attempt to rebuild them. The karaoke room. The running club. The escape room. The adult summer camp. These are not merely activities. They are containers for what Turner called communitas: the fleeting but powerful feeling of togetherness that emerges when people share an experience. What many experiential brands may actually be selling is not entertainment but belonging. The interesting thing anthropologically isn’t simply that people are seeking their humans. It’s that in a period of profound uncertainty, people are retreating into smaller circles of trust—and that process can produce both resilience and fragmentation.

This may explain why so many successful experiences today seem less concerned with attracting everyone and more concerned with creating meaningful experiences for a specific group of people. For much of the digital era, we organized our social lives around networks. Increasingly, however, people seem to be searching for something networks cannot provide on their own.

The pandemic accelerated this shift. Months of isolation functioned as a kind of involuntary social audit. Many of us emerged with a clearer sense of who mattered, who showed up, and which relationships we wanted to invest in. At the same time, political polarization, information fragmentation, and declining trust in institutions made larger forms of social belonging feel increasingly fraught. In a culture where even basic facts seem contested, retreating toward smaller circles of trusted people can feel not only comforting, but rational.

There is something deeply human about this impulse. In uncertain times, we seek kinship. We look for people who share our values, understand our experiences, and help us make sense of a complicated world. The challenge, of course, is that the same instinct that creates belonging can also create boundaries. The search for our humans can strengthen communities, but it can also narrow them. The algorithm built digital echo chambers; there is no guarantee we won’t recreate them in physical space.

Perhaps that is one of the defining tensions of this moment. We need belonging. We need rituals. We need communitas. But we also need encounters with people who are not exactly like us. The future may belong to those organizations that can create both: spaces where people feel known and connected, while remaining open to the possibility that our circles can expand.

After all, the goal is not to be with everyone.
But neither is it to forget that everyone is human.

Light Reading:

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969).
The foundational text introducing liminality and communitas. Turner argues that humans require spaces “betwixt and between” ordinary life where social bonds can be reconfigured and renewed.

Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).
A landmark study documenting the decline of civic participation, social capital, and community institutions in the United States. Putnam’s work remains one of the most important explanations for why belonging feels scarce in our era.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place (1989).
The book that gave us the concept of the “third place”—the cafes, bars, community centers, and gathering spaces that exist between home and work and help create social cohesion.

Liu, Eric. You’re More Powerful Than You Think (2017).
Part civics lesson, part cultural critique. Liu explores what happens when people retreat from public life and why rebuilding local forms of participation matters.

Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (2003).
Hage explores how periods of uncertainty and social contraction lead people to seek belonging, and how that search can produce either openness or exclusion.

David Wallace-Wells, “How Covid Remade America” (New York Times Opinion, 2024).
A thoughtful reflection on how isolation, mortality, distrust, and digital life altered American culture in ways we are still struggling to understand. One line in particular has stayed with me: when we emerged from the pandemic, we were “exhausted, resentful, deluded and distrustful.” That observation feels increasingly important when considering how and why people are rebuilding community today.

Hope (Actually) IS a Strategy

Emilie Hitch — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:42:55 GMT

“Hope is not a strategy.” One of those phrases that has become so commonplace in business that we rarely stop to interrogate it. The sentiment emerged, I think, as a corrective. You cannot simply hope your way to revenue growth, market share, a successful harvest, or a healthier relationship. At some point, wishing must give way to action. Fair enough.

But somewhere along the way, we began treating hope and strategy as opposites.

This seems strange to me.

After all, strategy only becomes necessary in conditions of uncertainty. If a future (one possibility, not multiple) was fully knowable, we would not need strategy. We would need instructions. A recipe. A checklist. The very existence of strategy acknowledges that we are moving toward something we cannot fully see. We have multiple possible futures – at all times.

And yet, despite all of our forecasting models, dashboards, AI tools, and planning processes, uncertainty is still having a moment.

A pandemic. Climate disruption. Political volatility. Economic anxiety. Artificial intelligence arriving faster than many institutions can absorb it. The old promise that stability would eventually return feels less convincing than it once did. Many of us are beginning to suspect that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are not temporary conditions but permanent features of contemporary life. It’s a VUCA world and we’re on the ride.

Anthropologists have language for this idea as well. Victor Turner called it liminality: the messy middle between one state and another. “Betwixt and Between.” Traditionally, a rite of passage has an endpoint. One leaves childhood and becomes an adult. One leaves one social role and enters another. The ambiguity is temporary.

But what happens when the liminal condition stretches on for years? What happens when uncertainty itself becomes the environment?

This is where I find myself returning to the anthropological literature on hope.

Ernst Bloch argued that hope is not merely an emotion but a form of anticipatory consciousness. Hope changes the way people inhabit the present because it changes their orientation toward the future. More recently, Hirokazu Miyazaki pushed this idea further, suggesting that hope is not simply something people possess but something they do. In his ethnographic work, hope functions as a method: a way of navigating uncertainty, generating knowledge, and creating possibilities that do not yet exist.

That distinction matters. We often talk about hope as though it is passive. A feeling. A wish. A comforting illusion. But hoping changes people. Anthropologists such as Hirokazu Miyazaki have argued that hope is not merely an emotion but a method. People do not wait for certainty and then act. They act in ways that generate new knowledge about the future. Hope, in this formulation, is less a feeling than a practice. A farmer who hopes there will be a harvest plants differently than one who does not. An entrepreneur who hopes a new idea might work behaves differently than one convinced failure is inevitable. A community that hopes things can improve organizes differently than one resigned to decline (looking at you, Minneapolis).

The future exerts influence long before it arrives. The multiple possible futures we imagine shape the decisions we make today.

Interestingly, Gallup recently found that hope outranked trust, compassion, and stability among the things people most desire from influential leaders. I suspect this finding says less about leadership than it does about culture. Perhaps people are no longer looking for promises of certainty because certainty no longer feels credible. What they want instead is evidence that action still matters. The finding makes sense in a culture increasingly characterized by uncertainty. If stability feels unattainable, hope becomes a more realistic aspiration.

This, ultimately, is why I think hope IS a strategy. And instilling hope IS a strategy. Not because hope guarantees outcomes. Not because hope replaces planning. But because hope alters behavior. It expands the field of what people believe is possible. It helps individuals and communities act despite uncertainty rather than waiting for uncertainty to disappear.

The act of hoping changes us before the future arrives. And in doing so, it changes our possible futures. Hope is not a substitute for strategy. Hope is one of the reasons strategy works at all.

Bloch described hope as anticipatory consciousness—the capacity to live in relation to futures that do not yet exist. The farmer in Cambodia understood this intuitively. He wasn’t predicting the future. He was participating in it. Hope changed how he planted, invested, planned, and imagined. The future altered his behavior before it arrived.

If strategy is about creating preferred futures under conditions of uncertainty, then hope is not the opposite of strategy. Hope may in fact be one of the most fundamental strategies humans possess. In anthropological terms, hope is a human technology for navigating liminality.

We strategize BECAUSE WE HOPE.

Subscribe now

Light Reading: What enables people to act toward futures they cannot yet see?

HitchBot Does Not Have a Soul

Emilie Hitch — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:12:56 GMT

A (lovely, smart) engineer once referred to the core of a WIP dynamic persona for our PRISM platform — a custom GPT built from MRI data, interview transcripts, observational notes and other insight work — as its “soul.”

I’ve been thinking about that word ever since. (And also catch a lot of crap for being a stickler about not using it!) Not because I disagreed with him entirely. In fact, I understood immediately what he meant. When you spend enough time building something dynamic — something that reflects patterns of speech, habits of thought, tonal consistency, memory, even contradiction — it can begin to feel like a center. A coherence. A presence.

Still. “Soul” is not a neutral word.

Subscribe now

Anthropologists are trained to pay attention when a word carries an entire cosmology inside it, and soul is one of those words. It implies continuity, interiority, morality, agency, consequence. It suggests something capable of suffering, hoping, fearing loss and carrying responsibility for its actions.

HitchBot does none of those things.

What it does — and does remarkably well — is reorganize patterns. It recombines language, references, structures and relationships between ideas. It can mirror a worldview convincingly enough that interaction with it begins to feel relational. That distinction matters more than I think we currently admit.

Humans have always animated the systems they build. Kings were once divine bodies. Markets became “invisible hands.” Corporations became “people.” The more complex a system becomes, the more likely we are to describe it as though it possesses intention and personality. Calling the core of a model a “soul” feels less like a technological breakthrough than a very old human instinct resurfacing in a new context.

The danger is not anthropomorphizing the machine. The danger is forgetting that we are doing it. Because, and not even IMHO, soul is tied to responsibility. It. Just. Is.

Right now, there is a great deal of discussion about “agentic AI” — systems that can act, initiate workflows, make recommendations and operate semi-autonomously. Action, however, is not the same thing as agency. Agency, anthropologically, is action embedded in a moral world. It is action shaped by kinship, power, belief, accountability and consequence.

AI can execute action. It cannot bear consequence. In other words… there is no shame in its’ game. Like. AT ALL. It’s never “sorry” OR “not sorry.”

Every system we build carries forward the assumptions, incentives and blind spots of the humans who designed it. There is no neutral center humming beneath the interface. There are weighted probabilities shaped by historically contingent human systems and human choices.

When a model drafts a recommendation, flags a risk or denies a claim, it is not exercising wisdom. It is amplifying structures that already exist.

If harm results, the responsibility does not belong to the machine.

It belongs to us.

That is the part of the “soul” metaphor that unsettles me most. Not that it flatters the technology, but that it subtly tempts us to offload responsibility onto it. We live in a moment of extraordinary instability and acceleration, and there is comfort in imagining that the systems surrounding us possess some internal wisdom or moral center. They do not. They possess scaffolding.

HitchBot exists because I trained it. It reflects my frameworks, my references, my way of thinking about tension between nostalgia and futurism, scarcity and abundance, kinship and power. It can sharpen my thinking and reorganize ideas in useful ways, but it does not generate meaning from lived experience, nor does it have to live with the consequences of what it produces.

People do.

This is why the conversations around fail-safes and governance matter so much. If AI does not have a soul — if it cannot carry moral responsibility — then humans must remain clearly accountable for the systems they build and deploy. Questions about override authority, transparency, embedded assumptions, feedback loops and risk are not simply technical questions. They are cultural ones. They are questions about power.

I do not say any of this to diminish the usefulness of these tools. I use them constantly. I find them generative, provocative and, at times, genuinely delightful. They are extraordinary accelerants of thought. I will continue to call, and stand by calling, ai my superpower.

Acceleration, however, is not wisdom.

Pattern recognition is not interiority.

HitchBot does not have a soul. It has data, structure and a voice scaffolded from my own. The soul — if we are going to use that word at all — remains stubbornly human, bound up in consequence, accountability and the uncomfortable weight of choosing what kind of future we are willing to build. The magic is that I DO have a soul. And a HitchBot.

When Agents Do the Work

Emilie Hitch — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:19:01 GMT

When agentic AI begins doing the work — not assisting with it, not accelerating it, but actually doing it, with other agents, managed by one “pilot”… maybe… something structural shifts inside organizations. Research reports can be generated instantly. Models assemble themselves. First drafts appear before you finish writing the brief. Production is no longer the scarce thing.

What becomes imperative is orchestration. What may be forgotten is context. What becomes scarce is wisdom. Even if agents can gather and generate, a person still has to decide what question is worth asking.

Someone has to determine which data matters, which signal is cultural and which is noise, where power sits beneath the surface, and how a recommendation might actually impact a client’s business and reputation. Orchestration is not prompt-writing. It is the disciplined act of framing problems, selecting inputs, combining and integrating perspectives, and taking responsibility for the outcome.

That kind of orchestration does not emerge from speed. It emerges from cultural literacy. Whose culture? All of culture. Human culture. And, Holy Hannah, the emerging culture of agents. And the interplay between them.

As agentic AI develops, the large-scale production model becomes less differentiating. Media plans, research summaries, positioning territories — all of it can be generated faster and cheaper than ever before. The agencies built on volume and layers of coordination will feel that compression first. When production becomes abundant, the pyramid thins.

What survives — and often thrives — is the high-trust firm, of people, built around culture and judgment.

Subscribe now

Boutiques do not compete on output. They compete on clarity. They are hired not because they can generate more, but because they can reduce ambiguity. They ask better questions. They know which data to ignore. They understand that culture is not a trend report but a set of underlying forces — identity, status, belief, power, scarcity, kinship — that shape how markets move and how people decide.

AI increases the velocity of visible culture. (Think pop stars, movies, fashion, religions, political faces and places and platforms.) AI does not increase understanding. Understanding still requires humans who know how to see systems rather than surfaces. It requires not just knowledge, but wisdom.

For organizations, this transformation means cultural literacy cannot sit in a department as a service offering. It must become organizational DNA. It must shape how briefs are written, how research is commissioned, how data is interpreted, and how recommendations are framed. It must influence hiring, training, and what gets rewarded internally.

Orchestration without cultural literacy is brittle. It mistakes correlation for causation. It cool hunts. It demographics hunts. It politiks. It confuses volume and shininess with relevance. It produces recommendations that are technically correct but culturally flat.

When agents do the work, organizations do not disappear. They become more exposed. The value shifts from producing artifacts to defining problems, from generating insights to integrating systems, from delivering slides to delivering judgment.

Production is abundant now. Clarity is not. And in the age of agentic AI, clarity and judgement — grounded in culture and disciplined by orchestration — are the durable advantage.

Subscribe now

Culture Shelf - Books Wrapped 2026

Emilie Hitch — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:54:16 GMT

Hello my book lovers.

Every year, I ask friends a simple question: What did you read that mattered?

This year’s Books Wrapped list reads like a cultural scan. It shows what we turned toward in a moment that feels unsettled. Spoiler: nature, sadness, beauty and love. And a whole lot of musing about what it is that we’ve inherited, what others have, and what others will inherit. And by others, I also mean the Earth, animals, trees and magics. Are we inheriting only tragedy? Beautiful tragedy? Beauty, actually?

With no further ado - the most frequently chosen “top reads” across our group were:

Wild Dark Shore — Charlotte McConaghy
The Emperor of Gladness — Ocean Vuong
Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver
Atmosphere — Taylor Jenkins Reid
The God of the Woods — Liz Moore

(With Wild Dark Shore appearing so often it practically put down anchor. And SUPER SPOILER - the author has my top read so far this year… Migrations is wrecking me.)

1. Wild Dark Shore

A novel about isolation, climate, longing, and survival. The fact that this appears again and again tells me something profound: we are still metabolizing environmental anxiety — but we are doing it through intimacy. Not statistics. Not white papers. Story.

2. The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong’s work is never casual. It’s lyrical, fractured, tender, political. Strong resonance widely suggests we are hungry for language that holds pain and beauty in the same sentence.

3. Demon Copperhead

A classic take on a new (opioid) crisis. Structural injustice refracted through one life. This is systems-thinking disguised as fiction.

4. Atmosphere

A more relational, contemporary choice. Love, ambition, friendship. A reminder that even in turbulent times, we are still trying to understand each other… life’s always all about kinship.

5. The God of the Woods

Gothic, mysterious, ecological undertones, generational wealth. Secrets in the forest. Again: power, land, inheritance, and what we do with them.

If I anthropologize this for a moment, here’s what I see:

· We are preoccupied with ecology and everything’s place on the earth.

· We are wrestling with systemic failure.

· We are still invested in the interior lives of people.

· We want beauty, but not naiveté.

· We are exploring inheritance — natural, cultural and literal.

That pattern isn’t random; it’s a cultural signal. If culture is a web of meaning, then books are threads we choose to tug. And if “you are what you read,” (and, well, YOU ARE.) then, in 2025, we were:

· Curious.

· Uneasy.

· Systems-aware.

· Emotionally literate.

· And not done hoping.

We read to feel. We read to understand. We read to orient ourselves in the messy middle.

In a time when so much of life feels unstable, choosing what to read is one of the quietest forms of agency we have. It shapes how we see the world — and who we become inside it.

If you want in on next year’s Books Wrapped experiment — the spreadsheets, the stats, the (gentle?) competition — let me know:

Braiding Sweet A$$es 2026

Because if you are what you read… we might as well all choose wisely together.

FWIW: The Books I Turned Toward

Here, again, are my five top reads from the year - and a reminder of my 25 for ‘25:

Annie Bot – Sierra Greer
The Impossible Thing — Belinda Bauer
Bewilderment — Richard Powers
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing — Hank Green
The Serviceberry — Robin Wall Kimmerer
Top 5 and 5
FULL LIST on the Stack

Small Talk as Soft Power

Emilie Hitch — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:56:45 GMT

I’m posting this thinking just as many of my friends, colleagues, community members are taking to the streets in Minneapolis and elsewhere to protest the insurgence of unlawful activity perpetrated on Minnesota.

So many people are asking me “why Minneapolis”? And while you can read about why the people here are a target in myriad hot takes across the internet – I wanted to write about the response… my pen has always been mightier than my feet. It occurred to me that I had some thoughts on one of the core reasons “why Minneapolis” from the perspective of those feet on the ground.

When I was younger, nothing made me groan more than waiting for my mom to leave a party. Or a coffee shop. Or the grocery store. Or the Ski Hut. Or the ice rink. You get the idea. We’re talking about Minnesota Nice. We’re talking about Small Talk.

We’d already said goodbye. Coats were on. Keys in hand. And then—inevitably—she’d get caught in another round of chit-chat on the way out. The slow-motion Minnesota exit. A carousel of “how’s your aunt?” and “can you believe this weather?” and “let’s grab lunch sometime”s that never quite materialized. I’d stand by the door, impatient, wondering how it could take thirty minutes to talk about… nothing.

But what I know now – especially as I find myself becoming my parents, and in this case SO HARD, my mother, is this fact: those conversations weren’t about nothing. In anthropological terms, they were small rituals of recognition. Micro-threads in the social fabric. And in a place like Minnesota, where polite distance often masks deeper forms of mutual accountability, small talk is not filler—it’s function.

Small talk is how we know each other, without needing to know everything about each other. It’s how we test the temperature of a relationship, build trust incrementally, and—crucially—signal alignment when the stakes are too high for overt action.

Which brings me to this week in Minneapolis.

While federal agents increase ICE presence across the state (yes, not just Minneapolis… suburbs and rural towns too), small networks of community members—neighbors, legal observers, organizers—are quietly mobilizing in response. They have whistles, not weapons. There is no central command. Just texts and looks passed between porches, glances exchanged at bus stops, quiet check-ins after church or at daycare pickup. Supply runs and drops.

And you know one thing that’s made this part of our cultural fabric possible?

Small talk.

The same kind of idle chatter I used to roll my eyes at—“Cold enough for ya?” or “How’s the pup?”—now functions like a coded handshake. A soft opening. A way of asking: Are you someone I can trust? Are you paying attention?HOW ARE YOU, I DO CARE, I DO SEE YOU.

Anthropologist David Graeber wrote about “invisible infrastructures of care”—the mostly unnoticed labor that keeps communities functioning, from parenting and food-sharing to simply checking in. In that sense, small talk is a kind of infrastructural glue. It builds the social trust required for moments like this: when action is needed, but discretion is everything.

And in decentralized, leaderfull movements like the ones we’re seeing across Minneapolis, it’s not ideology or hierarchy that keeps things together—it’s relationship. Trust. Familiarity. The kind of ambient social cohesion that grows in the cracks between errands and church basements and neighborhood cookouts. The kind of cohesion built one “how’s it going?” at a time.

Small talk is one of the most underrated tools we have. A thread that, when tugged, reveals a whole tapestry of care beneath the surface.

And in this moment, when systems falter and communities step up?

That tapestry powers our strongest forms of resistance. While the folks in the streets today aren’t engaging in Minnesota Nice – they have real, terrible, stories to tell each other and real, wonderful, communities to continue to solidify, Small Talk is one of the things that got them there. Talk to your neighbors. Even if it’s small, it matters.

Subscribe now

Culture Shelf: 25 for '25

Emilie Hitch — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 14:08:53 GMT

Fitting that one of my top books for 2025 was written by Robin Wall Kimmerer. IYKYK.

Join me on Goodreads for my full list.

Add your own stats to Books Wrapped ‘25 - and get a report out of everyone’s faves in January!

Here are my other recommendations, in no particular order -

although my Book of the Year is Annie Bot -

and for someone who doesn’t love mysteries, I sure read a lot of them this year -

from the list of 157 books I’ve read so far in 2025.

Annie Bot – Sierra Greer

The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Bewitching – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

In Ascension – Marting MacInnes

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing – Hank Green

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor – Hank Green

Mickey 7 - Edward Ashton

Heartwood – Amity Gaige

Rubbernecker – Belinda Bauer

The Impossible Thing – Belinda Bauer

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels – Janiece Hallett

The God of the Woods – Liz Moore

Sisters in the Wind – Angeline Boulley

Warrior Girl Unearthed – Angeline Boulley

At Night All Blood is Black – David Diop

Tilt – Emma Pattee

Smoke – Dan Vyleta

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter – Stephen Graham Jones

The Colony – Annika Norlin

Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood

Hum – Helen Philips

Buckeye – Patrick Ryan

The Lost Story – Meg Shaffer

Playground – Richard Powers

Bewilderment – Richard Powers

BONUS FUN BOOKS JUST FOR FUNSIES:

Impossible Creatures – Katherine Rundell

Cover Story – Mhairi McFarlane

I Think We’ve Been Here Before – Suzy Krause

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth – Kevin Wilson

From Knowledge to Wisdom

Emilie Hitch — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:23:33 GMT

For the past few decades, we’ve talked about the knowledge economy as if it were the final chapter. Success belonged to those who knew the most, or who could access and apply information the fastest. But knowledge is no longer scarce. It’s everywhere—on our devices, in our feeds, and increasingly produced on-demand by AI.

The scarce resource now? Wisdom.

Knowledge is the output. Wisdom is knowing what inputs to trust, and what to do with the answers.

AI tools are powerful—but only if you know how to pilot them. Without a sense of what’s valuable, the outputs are just noise. Wisdom is the skillset that makes the technology useful: knowing which questions to ask, how to frame them, and what to do with the answers once they land.

Anthropologist Victor Turner might call this moment a liminal phase—the “messy middle” between what was and what will be. We’re betwixt and between: flooded with information, but still building the norms and institutions that help us decide what’s meaningful.

Subscribe now

So what does a wisdom economy look like?

Leadership Redefined: Authority shifts from being the one with the right answer to being the one who frames the right questions and cultivates sound judgment across teams.
Rethinking Education: Memorization and transaction are out. Pattern recognition, ethical reasoning, and critical thinking are in.
Technology Partnership: AI generates knowledge at scale; humans provide discernment, empathy, and context. Together, they form the new division of labor.
Trust as Currency: In a world where disinformation proliferates, people and brands will be judged less on what they know and more on how wisely they act.
Collective Wisdom: Just as sustainability expanded from a narrow “eco” lens to regenerative, systemic thinking , wisdom requires moving from individual brilliance to shared responsibility—drawing on communities, traditions, and even Indigenous epistemologies of reciprocity and stewardship.

This transition changes the cultural story of work. Instead of competing to accumulate more knowledge, the challenge becomes: how do we discern, interpret, and apply it in ways that are fair, imaginative, and resilient?

The wisdom economy isn’t about having an oracle in your pocket. It’s about learning, together, how to listen more carefully, act more thoughtfully, and decide what really matters.

Subscribe now

November Culture Shelf : Sentient Anatomy

Emilie Hitch — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:30:57 GMT

Sometimes, you just need to step out of the news cycle and into a world where pirates fly houses instead of flags and witches organize book clubs with questionable motives. Enter India Holton.

Her novels — from The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels to The Secret Service of Tea and Treason — are, quite literally, airborne antidotes to the volatility of American life right now. They’re playful, clever, and unapologetically absurd.

Holton’s writing is full of what I can only call sentient anatomy. Hearts scurry down hallways. Stomachs perform small acts of rebellion. Eyebrows conspire. It’s a delightful literary device that turns emotion into team choreography — as if your body, too, were in on the joke. The effect is delightful on the page and even better out loud; when listening to her audiobooks, narration complete with British accent, time flies right with you along the freeway. (See what I did there?)

Subscribe now

The early series — The Dangerous Damsels — gives us a band of lady pirates, witches, and would-be assassins finding power and romance amid mayhem. Think Jane Austen meets Monty Python with feminist spycraft. Her newer “Love’s Academic” novels (The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love and The Geographer’s Map of the Heart) are more standalone but still orbit the same magical universe. In these, the magic is quieter — more intellectual — but no less enchanting. Are the romantic overtures a bit too much sometimes? Yes. But “too much” is a four letter word as far as heroines are concerned.

In a world spinning with uncertainty and volatility, Holton’s books invite us to pause, laugh, and remember that delight is worthwhile in and of itself.

When you need a break from the doomscroll, take a time out with The Lady Scoundrels or The Gentlewoman Witches. Let your heart skip down the hallway — it’s earned the break.

Culture Shelf is where we celebrate books that help us metabolize the chaos of culture — not by escaping reality, but by re-enchanting it. And sometimes, that’s exactly what keeps us human.

Subscribe now

September Culture Shelf: Booker IMHO

Emilie Hitch — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:11:28 GMT

I can’t remember when or how I figured out how much I tend to love the books that end up on the Booker Prize long and shortlists… but I do.

I look forward to the list announcements, and rush to Libby to get holds on the titles before the queues get obnoxious.

I’ve read all 8 of the winners since 2017:

Lincoln in the Bardo : George Saunders
Milkman : Anna Burns
Girl, Woman, Other : Bernardine Evaristo
Shuggie Bain : Douglas Stuart
At Night All Blood Is Black : David Diop
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida : Shehan Karunatilaka
Prophet Song : Paul Lynch
Orbital : Samantha Harvey

Of these, Orbital was my favorite. And At Night All Blood Is Black blew my mind.

I’ve also read two of the international winners.

The Vegetarian : Han Kang (Loved it!)
Kairos : Jenny Erpenbeck (Meh.)

My favorite for the year rarely wins tho - these are the shortlist titles I’ve read that I really liked, with a note on the Culture Shift they illuminated for me. And the ones I loved more than the winners of their year are in bold:

2017

4 3 2 1 – Paul Auster
Culture Shift: Multiplicity of Identity in an Age of Algorithmic Curation

Who are we when every platform asks us to choose a self, and every version of us is archived somewhere? This novel predicted the existential fatigue of infinite customization. It’s a study in alternate realities that makes clear: identity isn’t fixed, it’s iterative. One body, four timelines, endless cultural selves. I started out flipping back and forth, trying to keep track of all the versions of the characters… and quickly realized that to tap into the power of this book, you just have to read with the flow.

History of Wolves – Emily Fridlund
Culture Shift: The Collapse of Institutional Trust

The loss of faith in schools, religion, science—this book captures how young people are forced to make sense of adult failures in solitude. This book is a meditation on isolation and intimacy, where the boundaries between observer and participant dissolve like ice in spring thaw.

Exit West – Mohsin Hamid
Culture Shift: The Refugee as Global Everyperson

Displacement is no longer the exception, it’s becoming a collective experience. Migration stories like this one reflect the liminality of everyone, everywhere. A migration story disguised as speculative fiction that captures the ache of dislocation, in this book, borders may open instantly, but belonging never arrives all at once.

2018

Everything Under – Daisy Johnson
Culture Shift: Language as Identity Technology

This novel surfaces the tension between old myth and new selfhood, mapping the slipperiness of meaning in the era of pronouns, code-switching, and fractured narratives. A queer, myth-soaked dive into language and memory—this one rewrites the Oedipus complex with a watery, witchy pulse.

The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner
Culture Shift: Mass Incarceration as a Social Script

Incarceration isn’t just a policy failure—it’s a generational identity trap. This book reads like an ethnography of structural violence in the United States. In the carceral state, survival is a social system at the margins of American punishment.

The Overstory – Richard Powers
Culture Shift: Reclaiming Kinship with Trees

The book that stole the throne from A Prayer for Owen Meany as my favorite book of all time —until I read another of Powers’ books — Bewilderment (*see below).

Ecological collapse is forcing a cultural reevaluation of human supremacy. This novel is a tree’s-eye view of the Anthropocene. Trees as kin, forests as narrative systems—this book makes it impossible to unsee the interspecies communication we’ve long ignored.

Subscribe now

2019

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World – Elif Shafak
Culture Shift: Mourning as Resistance in Marginalized Communities

Whose deaths get noticed? Whose lives are remembered? In a world of algorithmic amnesia, this book insists on memory as moral duty. In the space between death and disappearance, memory acts as ritual—a final rite of passage through friendship and forgotten Istanbul.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – Olga Tokarczuk
Culture Shift: Eco-Rage and Anti-Human Sentiment

I love the question asked by this book: What if the earth fought back? This novel channels the current mood of righteous rage against the modern industrial complex, disguised as mystic animal logic. A subversive eco-mystery that reminds us: the sacred isn’t only human. Justice might speak in the voice of animals.

2020

The New Wilderness – Diane Cook
Culture Shift: Back-to-the-Land Fantasies Meet Climate Reality

My favorite book of 2020.

This novel nails the tension between escapist wilderness dreams and the brutal logistics of actual survival “out there.” Think: State Park Adventures meets Mad Max. Parenting, wilderness, and governance collide—this is essentially a speculative ethnography of survival ethics when civilization collapses, and kinship becomes policy.

2021

A Passage North – Anuk Arudpragasam
Culture Shift: Reckoning with Historical Violence in Private Spaces

In the quiet aftermath of war, memory becomes a private act of resistance. This book captures the shift from public protest to personal grief work. Slow, meditative, and quietly devastating—grief here isn’t a state but a landscape.

Bewilderment – Richard Powers
Culture Shift: Parenting in the Age of Neurodivergence and Planetary Collapse

*Possibly my favorite book of all time. At least today.

The tension here is personal and planetary: how do we behave when both ecosystems and attention spans are under siege? Part elegy, part warning: this is what happens when we let planetary grief and neurodivergence go unacknowledged—boys, bears, and biospheres suffer. The touch of science fiction feels more like science, there are hallucinatory ghosts of a sort, and the prose is magnificent.

Great Circle – Maggie Shipstead
Culture Shift: Gendered Histories and the Desire to Transgress

A novel about a woman in flight that is really about escape: from gender roles, historical erasure, and the boundaries of ambition. A sweeping tale that loops through time and gender roles—this is mythmaking at its best, exploring what it means to trace your own path through the patriarchy.

2022

Glory – NoViolet Bulawayo
Culture Shift: Post-Colonial Cynicism vs. Narrative Reclamation

An allegory for the absurdity of modern governance, where revolution eats its young. Think of it as the Animal Farm remix for the coup-fatigued. Animals stand in for humans to show just how human power corrupts, again and again.

Cursed Bunny – Bora Chung
Culture Shift: Late Capitalism Meets Surreal Dystopia

Grotesque, hilarious, and tragic—this collection captures the sense that the body itself is now just another site for tech, profit, and revenge.

Elena Knows – Claudia Piñeiro
Culture Shift: The Slow Death of Bureaucratic Empathy

This novel makes visible the everyday violence of systems designed to wear you down—especially if you’re old, disabled, or grieving… or contain multitudes of all of the above. A woman’s physical decline becomes an inquiry into moral paralysis.

2023

The Bee Sting – Paul Murray
Culture Shift: The Climate Crisis as Existential Farce

As middle-class families collapse under the weight of eco-anxiety and economic precarity, this novel laughs and weeps at the same time. What is a familial apocalypse? Comedy becomes tragedy when denial is inherited like debt. I read this one almost entirely in one go - facilitated by the stream of consciousness style at a time when I needed to escape the very same things as the characters in the novel.

Whale – Cheon Myeong-kwan
Culture Shift: Boomtown Mythology and the Haunting of Modernization

A fever-dream tale of capitalist excess—this one feels like an ethnographic hallucination of South Korea’s industrial ghost stories. A fable written in devices of belief that asks what is truth over and over again.

2024

James – Percival Everett
Culture Shift: Reclaiming Canonical Narratives

Everett doesn’t just revise Huck Finn—he reclaims it as resistance. We’re in an era where cultural capital is no longer just inherited; it’s retold.

The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden
Culture Shift: Secrets, Sexuality, and Intergenerational Inheritance

This novel hits the growing tension between the desire for queer visibility and the weight of inherited trauma. The novel reminds us in a whisper… that what we bury in our bodies doesn’t stay hidden for long.

Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood
Culture Shift: Spirituality After Organized Religion

In the retreat from institutional faith, this novel finds quiet ritual and interior devotion as the new spiritual commons. Even monastic silence hums with the noise of a society coming undone. And a lot of mice.

Welcome to the Funhouse

Emilie Hitch — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:36:36 GMT

I was sitting at dinner with my parents and some friends of theirs and the conversation turned to “reality.” Or, the lack thereof… “It’s harder than ever to know what’s real” was the phrase uttered and agreed with by all from ages 47 to 77. Discussion turned to which news sources we read, what we look at on our screens in general, what we hear from friends and colleagues… about what THEY read and see on their screens… and the effort it takes to sort through it all, to de-fear-monger it all, to decipher the AI of some, all?, of it.

And I got to wondering – is my parents’ generation (Boomer) more or less able to decipher the tangle than I am (Xennial)? They grew up with the news on paper or the radio – only. Telephones were attached to walls and wires. They lived in a time when real things were tangible things for much longer than I did – reality began to digitize and blur for them in their adulthood and for me in late adolescence. Not only did we not have cell phones as children or teens, they didn’t exist. Meaning - the WORLD, the culture, the web of human society, wasn’t yet changed by them.

The current debate about “what’s real” isn’t just philosophical. There are parts of the tangle that are very generational.

Subscribe now

Anthropology moment: Each of us carries an identity backpack—what Bourdieu would call our habitus—quietly packed over time with the values, norms, and assumptions we absorb through experience. It’s not just who you are, but how you see: what feels normal, what feels trustworthy, what feels real. And just like a filter on a lens, the tech you grow up with shapes what your backpack even lets through. For one generation, “real” was what was broadcast. For another, it’s what gets engagement. For Gen Alpha? It might be what gets rendered. Our reality filters are calibrated by the technologies we trust—and by the ones that taught us how the world works.

Consider, if you will, this strategic framework of “reality filters.”

The generational columns (conduit, superpower, blind spot) are a simplification for storytelling and pattern recognition. The framework builds on Bourdieu’s habitus and the idea that each generation’s “truth filter” is socially constructed based on media experience.

Generational Truth Filters

Ok, so what?

Well. When an AI-generated voice impersonating Marco Rubio was used for political robocalls, it wasn’t just creepy. It was a preview of governance confusion. And of how each person’s “reality filter” will continue to be tested again and again as AI technology evolves. If political speech can be synthetically faked with perfect fidelity, what does that mean for consent? For protest? For governance? How will we ever be sure that who is on the phone, or on the screen, is really who they say they are – if we’re not in the room with them?

This disorientation demands new rituals of authentication. But it also asks us to consider: will we continue to participate in a shared commons, or retreat to kith, kin, and tightly curated tribes?

And what is the implication for Strategists?

Insights work is grappling with the rise of synthetic data. 1 million impersonated Marco Rubios (for example) aggregated into AI-generated personas, voice models, and predictive sentiment graphs promise scale—but risk laziness ad nuance. We contain multitudes – DIFFERENT multitudes – which are not static data models but change over time with culture (see aforementioned “identity backpacks”). Meanwhile, reports have surfaced of fake experts gaming paid interviews and panels with ChatGPT rehearsals and searches in real-time.

We need both:

Synthetic data to scale the signal
Ethnography or other immersive and IRL practices to calibrate the compass

Anthropologists studying digital culture show us that these changes aren’t just technological—they are deeply human and social. Key academic voices tell us:

1. Identity is More Fluid, Performed, and Contextual

Younger generations maintain different personas across platforms. They curate versions of self—professional on LinkedIn, playful on TikTok, private on Finsta. Identity isn’t static; it’s situational. (Mizuko Ito)

“Instead of ‘being yourself,’ people increasingly ask: which ‘self’ am I expected to perform here?”

2. Global Intimacy Coexists with Local Life

What seems like boundaryless connection often reinforces close ties. In many contexts, mobile tech is used to deepen family or neighborhood intimacy, not expand networks. (Daniel Miller)

“Ambient awareness” means always knowing how your people are, even if no words are exchanged.

3. Relationships Now Have Rules of Mediation

From being “left on read” to ghosting to voice-note etiquette—new media requires new literacies. Knowing when and how to communicate across modes is now part of emotional and social fluency. (Ilana Gershon)

“Digital life demands new kinds of emotional labor and social literacy.”

4. Time and Attention Feel Different

Push notifications, infinite scroll, and asynchronous messages have created a new relationship with time—continuous partial attention. Older generations see this as distraction; younger ones call it living.

5. Knowledge and Authority Are Decentered

With TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube as primary sources of learning, authority has shifted from institutions to peers and influencers. (Genevieve Bell)

“Why ask a doctor when TikTok shows someone like me who solved it?”

6. Privacy Isn’t Gone, It’s Evolved

· Finstas, burner accounts, and selective sharing show that younger users care deeply about privacy—they just manage it differently. (Alice Marwick & danah boyd)

“Privacy is the right to decide which version of yourself is seen by whom.”

7. Tech Shapes Moral and Emotional Growth

· From grieving through memorial pages to navigating cancellation, young people are developing ethical systems intertwined with digital norms. (Sherry Turkle)

6 | Reality fatigue leads to a retreat to kin

Eric Liu wrote:

“We no longer feel in control of our everyday lives. As we retreat to smaller circles of kith and kin, the commons goes to seed.”

That’s the natural reaction to epistemic noise: pull inward. But the danger is when those bonds calcify. When shared public truths erode entirely. When authenticity becomes performative, or worse, simulated. We harm ourselves.

Some good reads:

The Death of Partying

Bowling Alone

Victor Turner might call this our cultural liminality phase—a global “messy middle.” And like any rite of passage, the path forward is through collective meaning-making.

We may soon need:

Public-led truth pods
Algorithmic transparency audits, alerts and readers
Authenticator infrastructure (blockchain? biometrics? analog signatures?)

Clifford Geertz said culture is the web we spin and then get caught in. Right now, it may feel like that web is glitching. But culture change isn’t new – we have spun new webs before. We can do it – we ARE always doing it – again.

Held Under - June Culture Shelf

Emilie Hitch — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 14:09:21 GMT

Some books don’t just tell a story — they trap you in one.

I can’t seem to escape the downers these days. Send me recos for rainbows and sunshine (I just got Emily Henry’s newest so that should help, and a buddy recommended Legends and Lattes which looks like cotton candy and Shrek made a book series so that might do the trick as well), and if you’re interested in the “beauty of decay” - these here in this list are for YOU.

Each of these five authors have masterfully built worlds so specific, and so harrowing and juuuuust beyond reality enough, that they pull you into them, down like a current — and you don’t fight it, because being pulled under feels, strangely, like being seen.

What unites these five works isn’t just their darkness. It’s the precision with which they illuminate the complexity of human pain — familial, spiritual, psychological. Each one explores the way people live together (or fail to), how small communities construct codes and punishments, and how the emotional weather of even one person can shape the lives of everyone nearby.

These aren’t sweeping epics — they’re close-focus portraits of both the outside and (sometime literally) the inside of humans. In every one, the cast is tight, the world is contained, and the stakes are internal as much as external. You begin to see how beauty exists because of pain, not in spite of it. What if the whole world was THAT upside down? We see how grief might be a form of devotion. How intimacy might mutate into something suffocating — or sacred.

Each of my picks this month share a few things in common:

a fully formed world, often small in scope but rich in texture
a cast of characters so specific they become unforgettable - you only need a few to see a tribe
and a tone — grim, quiet, or grotesque — that refuses to let you drift away

These are not comfort reads. BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION. But they are unforgettable. In more than one case, I just.couldn’t.look.away.

Subscribe now

There’s something irresistible about this kind of fiction that constructs its own gravity — small, precise, vivid, and inescapable. Each of these books builds a world so fully realized, and populates it with such sharply drawn characters, that once you enter, you stay. Not out of comfort, but because the experience is so unique, so immersive, you forget to come up for air. You can’t leave, even if you think, with every page (as I did with Lapvona), WHY AM I STILL READING THIS BOOK.

The Berry Pickers (Amanda Peters)

A quietly devastating exploration of labor, memory, and the invisibility of those who harvest what others consume. A haunting portrait of loss, memory, motherhood(s), and stolen identity.

A young Mi’kmaq girl disappears while her family is working in the blueberry fields of Maine. Decades later, the story unfolds through dual perspectives: the brother who never stops searching and the girl who grows up not knowing who she truly is.

This is a novel about loss that refuses to resolve cleanly — not because it’s cruel, but because that’s what real loss does in real life. The beauty is in the ache of a brother’s loyalty, the quiet suffering of a mother, the warped love of a family that hides more than it tells.

The Colony (Annika Norlin)

Psychological landscape of identity and escapism. Sparse, intimate, and quietly unsettling. Swedish melancholy in short, precise strokes.

Told in crystalline prose, this novel sketches out a series of encounters on a remote northern island — a lonely artist, a researcher, a musician — each shaped by the rhythms of place and the silence between people.

Norlin is a master of the small detail that means everything. Her colony isn’t a political one, but an emotional one — a space where people quietly test each other’s boundaries, play psychological games, or try and fail to connect. The isolation is physical, but it’s also social and internal. You come away with the sense that the biggest dramas are the ones no one talks about out loud.

Lapvona (Ottessa Moshfegh)

A singularly unique read. (I needed the redundancy. There’s no other book like this one). A grotesque fairytale dripping with plague-era absurdity and moral decay. Deeply unsettling, darkly funny, and mythic.

Set in a grotesquely imagined medieval village ruled by absurd cruelty, Lapvona follows a disabled shepherd boy, his deeply strange mother figure, a corrupt priest, and a lord obsessed with his own divine power.

What sounds like a freak show becomes something deeper — a meditation on belief, violence, and moral decay in systems that feed on suffering. Moshfegh dares us to look at the ugliness of power, the comfort of delusion, and the way humans adapt (or contort) themselves to survive. It’s vicious and surreal, yes — but its characters are all searching, in their own twisted ways, for love, protection, and meaning… through an emotionally upside-down world. A dark mirror held up to the worst instincts of closed societies.

Elena Knows (Claudia Piñeiro)

A taut, emotionally shattering novella unraveling a mother’s search for truth as her body fails her. Dignity and grief in quiet rounds of paralytic revolution.

This is not a whodunit; it’s a meditation on autonomy, motherhood, guilt, and belief. Elena’s pain is both physical and emotional as she searches for the truth of her daughters death, and the novel becomes a metaphor for how hard it is to carry our stories when no one is willing to hear them. The small cast — Elena, her daughter, a single woman from the past — becomes a chorus of women living under systems that demand their silence. Piñeiro writes them into something quietly radical.

Whale Fall (Elizabeth O’Connor)

Grief, memory, and landscape blur in this quiet, devastating reckoning. Audio was the right choice - the accents are dreamy and scene setting.

A woman returns to the remote Australian coast where her mother vanished years before, drawn back by grief, guilt, and the mysteries that still hang in the salt air.

This is a novel about the legacies we inherit — emotional, maternal, geographic. The title refers to the haunting image of a whale’s body sinking to the ocean floor, becoming an ecosystem in death. And that’s what the book does too: it explores what we grow in the shadow of our losses. O’Connor’s prose is lyrical and sharp, and the emotional undertow is constant. The small cast, the isolation, the strangeness of memory — it’s all beautifully claustrophobic. A meditation on trauma, ecology, and how our interior lives mimic the cycles of the sea.

Next month I’ll go for rainbows and kittens - but this month’s books weren’t comfort reads — they’re soul-threshers. Each offers beauty in despair, precision in pain, and art in the abyss. Reads so unique you can’t look away. You know they images will haunt you - and, if you are like me, you welcome the ghosts.

Find them all here:

June Culture Shelf: Held Under

Belonging Isn't a Buzzword

Emilie Hitch — Thu, 15 May 2025 17:49:02 GMT

Belonging is having a moment. Again.

After DEI, after ERGs, after endless employee surveys, the word that keeps floating to the top is: belonging. But the problem isn’t a lack of language. It’s that we keep treating "belonging" like a measurable KPI, instead of what it actually is: a relational web of trust, reciprocity, and recognition that we create ourselves.

Subscribe now

Anthropologists have long understood that kinship—not things, not contracts—is what holds human systems together. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus explains how we internalize our cultural surroundings, how we "fit" into the world. Brands and organizations, too, have a habitus. They create (or fail to create) spaces where people feel they matter. In a course I taught on Design, I explained habitus as an “identity backpack” – the things (social norms, tendencies, perceptions, beliefs, dispositions) you carry with you into the (proverbial) field. Organizations also need to know what they are carrying.

People don’t want to be included in your system. They want to be seen. They want to be known. They want to feel like their presence changes the system. So ask yourself: are you inviting people to assimilate, or to co-create? Are your values something they can only agree to—or something they can shape?

Call to Curiosity:
Who are your brand or organization’s chosen kin? And how do you show up for them—in ritual, in story, in structure?

Made for What (Corrected)

Emilie Hitch — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:28:30 GMT

From Annie Bot to Barbie, fictional women are asking the same question generative AI now forces into the open:

Who wrote this script?

And can I choose to reprogram it?

What do a synthetic friend, a robot girl, a posthuman prototype, a plastic doll, and a mythic woman have in common?

They’re all vessels.

Each story below unpacks a version of feminine identity that’s been engineered—by code, by culture, by capitalism—and asks: What was I made for? These aren’t sci-fi tropes; they’re anthropological case studies.

And the line between fiction and theory is getting thinner every year.

Subscribe now

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara is not a girl, but she becomes one in our minds—and that is the entire point. Ishiguro’s brilliance lies in how he dramatizes symbolic violence (Bourdieu) through a lens of programmed devotion. Klara’s sun-worship isn’t naiveté; it’s the algorithmic logic of belief. She is the perfect anthropological subject: observing, mimicking, desiring kinship. And in that liminal role—neither object nor agent—she reveals how humans outsource not just labor, but meaning-making itself. The book isn’t about robots—it’s about loneliness, and the transactional scaffolding we build to hold up our hope. In typical Ishiguro fashion, the novel never shouts, but it carves you open with a whisper. By the end, you’re wondering: who really gets to be human, and what are the costs of believing in the sun?

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

A chilling portrait of intimacy in the age of algorithmic personhood. Annie Bot reads like a long, slow breath before the scream—a meditation on consent, care, and the commodification of feminine labor, all refracted through the eerily “almost” consciousness of a synthetic girl. Greer doesn’t ask whether Annie is real—she asks why we need her to be. A haunting echo of Mauss’s theory of the gift and Foucault’s biopolitics, where affect becomes currency and emotional labor is outsourced to bodies we pretend can’t feel. Annie isn’t a cautionary tale about AI taking over—it’s about what humans are willing to automate in order to avoid emotional responsibility. A haunting read that lingers like a question: what parts of us are we willing to sell?

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Published in 1993, but reading now like a prelude to every conversation about emotional algorithms and feminine power structures we’ve had since. Atwood’s Zenia is a human Trojan horse—an infiltration device disguised as woman, myth, mirror. She’s not AI, but she functions like one: learning, adapting, and manipulating social scripts to survive. The novel is a masterclass in networked identity—how women shape each other’s realities through fear, myth, and memory. It’s no coincidence Zenia feels “constructed”—she is. And in a world that increasingly asks: who built you, and for whom?—this novel was already whispering the answer.

Barbie (2023) + “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish

Not so much a movie as a meta-ritual—a glitter-drenched rite of passage from objecthood to authorship. Barbie’s crisis isn’t that she’s not real; it’s that she’s been too real for too long, in everyone else’s image. Barbie’s glitch isn’t mechanical; it’s existential. She doesn’t want to be admired, she wants to be authored. Gerwig turns the question “What was I made for?” into a refrain that echoes Mauss, Butler, even Graeber: Who assigns value? Who owns the script? Billie Eilish’s theme song is a mourning hymn for all the girls trained to be perfect before they’re allowed to be people. Not a question of utility, but of agency. In the end, Barbie doesn’t become human—she chooses to become self-authored. That’s the real revolution.

5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV, 1997–2003)

Buffy isn’t a machine—but she’s definitely manufactured. Chosen, programmed, resurrected. A teenage girl engineered by an ancient patriarchal order to wield power they could never contain. The show’s brilliance lies in how Buffy internalizes the algorithm—slay, protect, sacrifice—and then slowly rewrites it. She dies (twice), comes back wrong, and finally breaks the system altogether. Buffy’s arc is the ultimate posthuman rite of passage: not from girl to woman, but from weapon to author. The slayer becomes a storyteller. And in the end, she shares the power. That’s not just feminist—it’s open-source mythology.

And, in the episode “I Was Made to Love You,” Buffy fights April, a heartbreakingly devoted robot girlfriend built by a man (Warren) who wanted a partner with no needs of her own. The episode is tragic, not because April malfunctions, but because she doesn’t: she performs love perfectly—and is still discarded.

Buffy’s journey is the long arc out of that same performance trap. She begins as weapon, myth, avatar. She ends as something far messier, and more real: a woman who chooses her power, rewrites her story, and asks—finally—what if I wasn’t made at all, but became?

In a world where so many identities are scripted—by culture, by code, by capitalism—these stories remind us that selfhood can be hacked. That authorship is power. And that sometimes the most radical thing a girl (or bot, or doll, or slayer) can do is ask: What was I made for?

Then answer it herself.

Made for What

Emilie Hitch — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:09:10 GMT

From Annie Bot to Barbie, fictional women are asking the same question generative AI now forces into the open:

Who wrote this script?

And can I choose to reprogram it?

What do a synthetic friend, a robot girl, a posthuman prototype, a plastic doll, and a mythic woman have in common?

They’re all vessels.

And the line between fiction and theory is getting thinner every year.

Subscribe now

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Barbie (2023) + “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish

5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV, 1997–2003)

Then answer it herself.

Health Is Now a System, Not a Symptom

Emilie Hitch — Thu, 01 May 2025 14:09:25 GMT

Once upon a time, health meant the body. You could point to it, measure it, chart it in neat little columns: heart rate, cholesterol levels, minutes on a treadmill. Health was personal, private, bordered by skin and habits. Lotsa folks still obsessed with these kinds of data. AppleWatch, Strava, Oura, the list is endless at this point. But these “trackers” represent just one facet of the myriad products of healthcare story.

Because, post-COVID, the body is no longer the boundary.

Across culture, health has expanded into something much larger—something infrastructural. It’s not just your body or my body at stake anymore; it’s the air we breathe together, the soil our food grows in, the mental load we carry in an overstimulated, uncertain world. Health has become a cultural operating system—an invisible structure underpinning how people make sense of safety, connection, and possibility. And we’re not just tracking the physical - wearables can track every.thing.you.say. (POV from the WSJ on that item here.)

And the expansion is not just philosophical—it’s deeply emotional. Health now maps onto trust: in systems, in leaders, in each other. It maps onto belonging: how safe you feel walking through your neighborhood, or scrolling through your feed. It maps onto meaning: whether you believe the future will be livable, let alone joyful. In a culture where the pandemic, climate disruption, and loneliness crises have cracked open old assumptions, people are no longer simply managing symptoms. They’re trying to survive systems. And those systems, more often than not, let.them.down.

So what does this shift mean for brands?

Subscribe now

First, understand: whether you sell food, finance, fashion, or futures, you are already in the health business. Your supply chains, your sustainability commitments, your storytelling about care and resilience—they all shape consumer perceptions of wellness now.

Second, recognize that trust and care are no longer marketing add-ons; they are structural demands. People are building their own personal “operating systems” for survival—seeking brands, communities, and products that stabilize, not destabilize, their physical and emotional worlds.

Third, adapt your strategy:

Brands that reinforce collective resilience—not just personal optimization—will be the ones people trust to walk with them into whatever future unfolds. That means framing offerings not just in terms of “better for you,” but “better for us.” Health is no longer about individual achievement; it’s about relational well-being. Health is a SYSTEM. So is branding.

In the new culture of health, the brands that thrive won’t be the ones shouting the loudest about self-improvement. They’ll be the ones quietly, steadily building systems and worlds where people can breathe, trust, heal, and hope.

As health stretches across this operating system based in kinship, economy, politics, and belief, it becomes not a goal, but the connective tissue of culture itself. The brands that thrive will be the ones who learn to move within this living system.

When truth blurs, do people blur too?

Emilie Hitch — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:09:19 GMT

I’ve loved the phrase “you are what you read” since the first time I heard it. (You’ve Got Mail, Nora Ephron -> Greg Kinnear. Iconic.) But here’s my question.

If you are what you read… how do you know who you are, how do you become who you are – if you don’t know if what you read is real?

When truth, lies, and belief start to merge and diverge, through smoke screens and fake news, and AI deepfakes… what is the impact on our identities- individual and collective? When even truth is a fiction with a profit margin, how do we know which selves are real? One could argue The Bible as the original culprit of identity impact. Or the Koran, the Talmud, Fox News, or The New York Times. Any textbook. Any novel. Anything betwixt-and-between.

Navigating truth is a uniquely human activity. (Don’t @ me with “my dog or cat really does know when I’m lying” please.)

Therefore, by extension: understanding human experience—beyond the algorithm—requires methods that resist distortion... AND methods that understand, attribute, and meaningfully navigate distortion.

IMHO, classic ethnographer’s guiding principles apply now more than ever –

People lie to you. (AI does to, BTW.)
People lie to themselves.
The difference between what people say and do is where you’ll find theoretical magic.
You’ll never truly understand “the natives” until you shag a native.
Your subject isn’t you, not even a little bit, not a smidge.
AI/fakenews bonus: Your subjects are becoming less sure they are even themselves.
Subscribe now

A tool for navigation has emerged with the advent of digital media for sure: abilities for tracking and mapping engagement, interaction, conversion, etc. can help to tell a story. However – while social media algorithms prioritize engagement over accuracy, feeding people what they want to believe rather than what’s true, we can also see where people go and what they do even if they tell us they don’t.

Here’s the Pitch

Aspects of market research, consumer insights, and brand strategy have long relied on secondary data. But if that data is distorted, what happens to decision-making? AI-powered sentiment analysis and trend forecasting are useful, but they risk reinforcing biases baked into digital ecosystems. The most strategic advantage today? Firsthand, in-person research—actually talking to people in real environments again and again –coupled with tools to help navigate the distortion in real-time.

In-person research is a competitive advantage. The role of ethnography in cutting through digital noise: seeing, listening, and understanding how people behave in real life, AND the role of data analysis in vice versa, are complementary and additive. They are 1+1 = 3.

Examples:

Understanding the world of farmers means walking their fields, sitting at their breakfast tables, hitting the coffee shop and hearing what they tell others – versus what you just saw them actually do in practice.
Urban consumers say they care about sustainability, but what do they actually buy? Observing their choices in-store and on-line helps tell the real story.
Surveying online and interviewing in-person the SAME population can lead to wildly divergent information.

We’re developing a hybrid approach: AI tools are great for data scanning, but on-the-ground research gives context AI can’t.

In a world where “reality” is increasingly up for debate, brands and strategists who invest in real-world observation will make better decisions. We don’t just need better data—we need better ways of understanding what’s actually happening. We need to navigate the truth and the distortion to find our way meaningfully through our multiple possible futures.

Subscribe now

Bonus: A Very Short Primer on Identity Theory

(For when you’re trying to make sense of yourself… and the algorithm.)

So if we’re floating somewhere between our feeds, our feelings, and our field notes—how do we even begin to talk about the self? Turns out, some brilliant minds have been chewing on this question for a while. Below: a tiny but mighty primer on identity theory, just in case you’re wondering whether it’s you, or just the interface.

Erving Goffman — We perform our identities like actors on a stage. Social context is everything. The “self” is a role, constantly edited.

Food for Thought: When the algorithm is the audience, what kind of self are we performing—and for whom?

Pierre Bourdieu — Identity lives in habitus: the internalized rhythms of a culture. What feels natural is learned.

Food for Thought: Our habitus is shaped by the stories we live among—and digital stories are loud, fast, and sticky.

Michel Foucault — You don’t just express your identity; you’re shaped into a subject by the systems around you. Power writes the script.

Food for Thought: What we read doesn’t just inform us—it formats us.

Stuart Hall — Identity is not fixed—it’s always becoming. Formed in dialogue with culture, difference, and time.

Food for Thought: If identity is a story we tell with others, what happens when the storytellers are bots?

Judith Butler — Identity is something you do, not something you are. Repetition = recognition.

Food for Thought: In digital life, we don’t just perform identity—we optimize it.

Books Worth The Wait

Emilie Hitch — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:09:45 GMT

Hopefully your queue is full of borrowed books, and you’re looking for a few more to add to your holds list (#libbyspeak). The following are some of my top reads thus far this year – all published in ’24 or ’25.

Subscribe now

For these, you might have to wait a while:

• Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood (2024)

A story told in a particular time about a human retreat from a world devoid of time. With just enough markers of the pandemic to remind you situation the main character there, and just enough universal human experience to realize we maybe were, and always will be, situated there with her.

• Headshot – Rita Bullwinkel (2024)

The full stories of eight women, told through a single occurrence in their teenage lives.

• The Wedding People – Alison Espach (2024)

Weddings are ridiculous (is one main point)- and human redemption can come from them (is the other).

• Baumgartner – Paul Auster (2024)

If you liked A Man Called Ove, this one is for you.

• The Fox Wife – Yangsze Choo (2025)

Folklore and foxes. Quests and revolutionaries. Not quite vampires, but close.

• The God of the Woods – Liz Moore (2025)

A mystery set at a summer camp. Reminders of how complicated families can be, and how important your friends are because of it.

• The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden (2025)

A wonder to think of the sacrifices people made, or couldn’t make, to reclaim their lives after WWII.

• Lies and Weddings – Kevin Kwan (2025)

Crazy Rich Asians but make it Succession.

Find them all here in my April list on BookShop!

Before AI, There Was Soy

Emilie Hitch — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:06:29 GMT

Years ago, I learned to trace meaning through a soybean. Not just where it was grown or how much protein it held—but how it moved through the supply chain, how it became commodified, and what happened when it didn’t want to be a commodity anymore.

Soy demonstrates how systems simplify complexity to scale. Industrial agriculture standardized the crop for efficiency: maximize yield, uniformity, and compatibility with global processing systems. The result? Billions of indistinguishable beans. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Subscribe now

Eventually, market forces made space for Identity Preserved (IP) and other specialty soybeans to emerge—varieties grown for specific traits like oil content, color (there’s a whole classification system), or protein composition. These soybeans are traceable, differentiated, and valued for their uniqueness. Not mass-market, but niche. Not either/or—but both. They have emergent value (the benefit that arises from the interaction of parts within a system)…. in this case, it’s value created precisely (and only) because there was less value before.

SSGA : https://soyagrainsalliance.org/identity-preservation/

And now? AI is following a similar path.

In one possible future for advertising, AI turns creative work into commodity. It generates assets with mind-blowing speed, optimized for performance, stripped of complexity. Like soybeans bred for crushing and shipping, ads are now produced to move frictionlessly through an algorithmic marketplace. (And for now, that marketplace still depends on human eyeballs … what happens when those eyeballs belong to agents?)

But commodification (seen through a futures lens) doesn’t have to kill creativity—it can create a vacuum where specialization can thrive. Emergent value.

Just as IP soybeans emerged in response to monoculture fatigue and economic stagnation, new agency niches can emerge in response to AI’s flattening effect. Think cultural storytelling. Strategic futures planning. Qualitative research. Bespoke narratives. Contextual depth. Ethnofutures work. All the things that require a human mind, and a human-to-human conversation, dreaming and visioning, believing and worldview-ing, to make sense of human life.

So. By now, you’ve sussed out the twist: having studied soybeans has made it easier for me to understand where AI is going. FAST.

Once you’ve watched a system reduce biodiversity to drive scale—and then watched it diversify again in search of value—you learn to recognize the patterns. You learn how to read the curve. AI is not replacing everything. It’s separating what can be mass-produced from what must be curated. And that crucial separation—like in ag—is where the real strategic value lives.

The job ahead isn’t to fight commodification. It’s to know where it belongs. To design with clarity: this is bulk, that is bespoke. And to use our minds—our deeply curious, playful, meaning-making minds—to elevate what deserves to be held, not just clicked.

We don’t need to choose where to use the magic, on the bulk or on the bespoke. Both/either have their own kind of problem-solving fun - for the right person. So - like in ag, we just need new kinds of magicians who continue to expand and invent how to wield it for each of them.

The Hold Life Has

Field Notes from the Pyrocene

Not Everyone

Hope (Actually) IS a Strategy

Further Reading

HitchBot Does Not Have a Soul

When Agents Do the Work

Culture Shelf - Books Wrapped 2026

Small Talk as Soft Power

Culture Shelf: 25 for '25

From Knowledge to Wisdom

November Culture Shelf : Sentient Anatomy

September Culture Shelf: Booker IMHO

Welcome to the Funhouse

Held Under - June Culture Shelf

Some books don’t just tell a story — they trap you in one.

The Berry Pickers (Amanda Peters)

The Colony (Annika Norlin)

Lapvona (Ottessa Moshfegh)

Elena Knows (Claudia Piñeiro)

Whale Fall (Elizabeth O’Connor)

Find them all here:

June Culture Shelf: Held Under

Belonging Isn't a Buzzword

Made for What (Corrected)

Made for What

Health Is Now a System, Not a Symptom

When truth blurs, do people blur too?

Bonus: A Very Short Primer on Identity Theory

Books Worth The Wait

Before AI, There Was Soy