PicoBlog

“What gets measured, gets managed” is a famous quote from Peter Drucker’s 1954 book “The Practice of Management.” When we seek improvement and forward motion it’s crucial to identify the key drivers to making that happen. Then by measuring them we can test tweaks and changes to see if they are moving us in the right direction. I think a variation on Drucker’s phrase is also important. “What gets measured, matters.

This is the midweek 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. When I first learned of the four-part LuLaRoe documentary coming to Amazon, I knew exactly who I wanted to talk to about it. For the uninitiated: LuLaRoe is an MLM, or multi-level-marketing scheme, that exploded over the course of the 2010s.

I have a lot of pop culture moments that live in the forefront of my brain at all times, ones I see in my mind’s eye every time I try to meditate or get some rest. They’re tentpoles that have informed my life and my tastes, occurrences that I keep coming back to over and over. I can’t stop thinking about them because I simply have so many unanswered questions. One of those indelible moments is the night Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, and Ellen von Unwerth all had a slumber party at the Chateau Marmont.

Clean water is incredibly important, and honestly, it’s something so many people take for granted. At this point, about 1/4 of the world’s population doesn’t have access to a clean, reliable source of drinking water. That’s impressive when you realize that city tap water (that most people know better than to drink) is considered a “clean water” source. Growing up in California in the 90s, we’d get regular notices from the state warning us not to drink the water because it was contaminated with dangerous levels of nitrites and pesticides.

Real talk: I made the decision to keep this long, reported essay outside of the paywall, because I want to keep as much Culture Study freely accessible as possible. But this post is the result of many hours of labor — and without your subscriptions, there’s no free Culture Study. If you believe in this project, consider subscribing: Subscribing gets you access to the weekly Things I Read and Loved at the end of the Sunday newsletter, the massive links/recs posts, full Garden Study access, and all the weekly threads, like yesterday’s extremely useful thread on Clothes Maintenance and Repair (how do you repair kids’ blasted-out knees in pants?

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 With that out of the way, here’s today’s Exhibit A, from Twitter user @collnsmith: Obviously, I am intrigued. Colleen, our tweeter, said in the replies that “I was searching a gif archive and kept seeing the sextoon watermark, then looked at wayback machine lol.” In early 2012, Sextoon asked its members to accept Jesus Christ. It’s cut off in that Twitter image but the full snapshot directs curious users to "

MDMA could soon become the first psychedelic to be approved in the U.S. as a prescription drug. In mid-February, Lykos Therapeutics announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved their New Drug Application for MDMA — and that the application was given “priority review,” with a ruling expected by mid-August 2024.  To understand what could happen after the FDA arrives at a decision, The Microdose spoke with attorney Kimberly I. Chew.

A few weeks ago, I found myself rewatching The Originals, the CW Network show about the first vampire siblings, which found them vowing to stay by each other “always and forever.” I started pondering why so many shows with cult followings focus on the evolving relationships between siblings or long-time friends. Despite our general cultural obsession with romantic relationships, Supernatural, Buffy, Boy Meets World, How I Met Your Mother, and other shows all held family — those that are chosen and those given from birth — at their core.

It is quite common for folks to come across my significant strikes landed/absorbed per minute scatter plots on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter and comment on the absurd placement of Justin Gaethje’s dot. Gaethje made his UFC debut in 2017, and he already had the reputation of being an action fighter thanks to some ridiculous contests under the World Series of Fighting banner. In his UFC debut, he landed 104 significant strikes, absorbed 91 significant strikes and ultimately finished Michael Johnson last in the second round.