➺ February 19, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. I've been feeding the rather unfriendly possum living under my porch eggs, which reminds me of that joke from Annie Hall. A guy tells his shrink, "My crazy brother thinks he's a chicken." The shrink asks, "Why don't you turn him in? The guy says, "I need the eggs."

I suppose I'm the brother. Bird-brained, but committed to the bit. – AB

➺ Performance Reviews: So far, Upper Middle’s new jobs survey seems to suggest most employer-employee relationships are past their sell-by date Take the survey or become a member to get results.

Lithium stock prices grew 2X+ from June to January. $ALB climbed 227%. $LAC hit 151%. $SQM, 159%. But the real winner may be a private stock, EnergyX. Their tech can recover 3X more lithium than traditional methods, leading General Motors to invest. Now they’re preparing to unlock up to 9.8M tons of lithium. Buy private EnergyX shares alongside 40k+ people before EnergyX’s share price increases after 2/26.

Invest in EnergyX Today

_{This is a paid advertisement for EnergyX Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.energyx.com. Under Regulation A, a company may change its share price by up to 20% without requalifying the offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.}

What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Managing Uprising
Why aren’t we talking about downsizing as incitement?
A new Atlantic piece by Annie Lowery captures the blind spot in AI job-loss discourse – not because Lowery is wrong that “white-collar workers could face years of structural unemployment,” but because she doesn’t acknowledge what else could happens if our culture is irrevocably altered. Lowery obliquely acknowledges (in paragraph 18) that white-collar culture is central to American life, but doesn’t acknowledge it’s strange beauty (aphoristic OOO messages, the Seagram's Building, Stella McCartney blazers, recurring office bits…) or the downside of its narrative focus. Lowery’s notion that the downsized will be jobless long term, ignores how quickly workers with free time can reskill and start businesses – also that doing so requires ending one story and starting another, losing social and financial standing along the way¹. This will engender enormous anger because, as the tiny lady with big glasses said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” White-collar culture could curdle and or go bad.

There's better precedent for that than the Rust Belt resentment politics Lowery cites. We may think of unruly proletariats as a threat to social structures, but the working class didn't start the American Revolution or the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution or the British Civil War or the fight at the end of Mean Girls. Elites did because they perceived themselves to be victims of economic or social violence. It’s wrong to suggest that credentialism and 9-5 productivity are the only elements of white-collar culture. There’s beauty too. And belligerence.

TASTE ➽ Inn Crowd
Why are influencers getting into hospitality?
WLast week, fashion influencer and former Harper’s Bazaar contributor Alyssa Coscarelli posted a collection entitled “Shopy My Home” to Rec League, a new Substack clone focused exclusively on affiliate commerce. Highlights included a graceful wooden Amazon shoe rack, a wild olive number from Lola Blankets, and a striped lumbar pillow from Morrow Soft Goods. But there were only 31 products, a fairly limited selection. Coscarelli's home is, unfortunately, more humble in size than a Saks. But a few influencers are going big. Last year, Wing-founder Audrey Gelman² raised $3.8M in VC money for Six Bells, an inn that cannot mathematically reach the kind of nine-figure valuation demanded by investors like Lerer-Hippeau without becoming a chain, which would take forever, or becoming a commerce play. Already, the gift shop outranks the inn on Google. The hospitality business just widens the aperture of "Shop My Home."

Gelman may be a special case – she's got impeccable taste in funding – but hospitality-driven ecomm looks like the wave of the future. For every Richard Christiansen, who built the brand Flamingo Estate around images of his sprawling mission-style manse in, there will be a B&B or a small inn that serves as the backdrop and pretense for influence. None of this is bad, per se. Coscarelli's home looks lovely. But it's generally not a compliment to say someone's home looks like a hotel – even if it's giving Eloise at the Ace.

MONEY ➽ Pub-ish or Perish
Why did trivia night get canceled?
The knock on the suburbs has long been that they lack community because they lack third places. People in Silver Spring may not be bowling alone, but they're golfing alone, gardening alone, and Pelotoning alone. A new analysis of Britain’s pub-pocalypse by Lauren Leek suggests the reason may be structural and financial rather than cultural. Using data on ~50,000 pubs, Leef found the pubs that closed between 2016 and 2024 were, on average, about 640 meters from their nearest competitor, while pubs that survived were roughly 280 meters apart. Closures accelerated in the late 2010s as private-equity pub chains pruned debt-burdened locations. Each closure increased pub isolation, triggering a spatial death spiral.

The findings suggest that the cold fish that move to the ‘burbs for the schools wind up swimming alone because they can't drift toward social life. It's not that there's no place for trivia night, but that there's no place down the street from trivia night. Unless a chain pulls a 1990s Starbucks and double-stacks locations or liquor licensing laws for residential spaces get looser, that won’t change – even if the attitude of folks on the local muni do..

Opera and the troubled state of “high culture.”

Caitlin Vincent is funnier than one would expect a librettist to be – and significantly less precious. The recovering singer behind the 90-minute bangers Computing Venus, about the 19th-century astronomer Maria Mitchell, and Camelot Requiem, about the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, is far too clear-eyed to reach for rose-colored opera glasses; she just loves the work. Thus, Opera Wars, her dishy new tour de fartsy artsies, which grapples with several hard truths, the hardest of which is that the be-tuxedoed patrons of yesteryear are going the way of the Eocene Mega Penguin. That leaves an important artform balanced on he shoulders of its underpaid, immiserated practitioners.

Yes, Opera Wars is a book about opera, but it’s also a book about cultural values and divestment from the subjective and beautiful. Upper Middle spoke to Vincent about sneaking food out of galas and what it’s like to dream and impossible dream. (Opera Wars is available on Amazon or Bookshop.org if you happen to wish Don Giovanni’s fate³ on Jeff Bezos).

There's an illusion that opera singers live glamorous lives. What's the reality?
Inside the business, there's this constant fear about the future of the art form. I think that leads to rationalizations – a focus on art rather than people who make art. Companies excuse bad behavior by stage directors and conductors. Singers excuse working conditions that wouldn’t be acceptable for any other worker in any other context.

What's the social experience of introducing yourself as an opera singer?
It's a little bit like dropping the H-bomb and saying you went to Harvard, right? There's always just a little bit of a stop. And it surprises people, because it is unusual and it's art. You must do it because you love it, not because you get paid. They think ball gowns; they think flowers; they think orchestra; they think galas. And, yes, there are galas where I was wearing a ball gown, but then I was sneaking the free food into my purse. For 98% of singers, it’s hand to mouth. I’ve eaten a lot of Hot Pockets.

Opera has always been expensive. Why is the patronage system collapsing now?
Back in the 1950s, 1940s and earlier, there was prestige associated with being the patron of an arts organization. There was that social capital. There was also an understanding you contribute to the public good. That shifted over time. Rich people now do what government’s used to do. They focus on social causes. They focus on malaria. If you're choosing between saving dying children and funding an opera company, obviously you're going to save the dying children. You should. But that sort of thinking does present a cultural problem and existential risk when the financial risk associated with art is born almost entirely by the people who make it.

The real threat, however, may be that in combination the bias toward traditional work and the lack of patronage creates a situation where opera caters to a small audience that doesn’t give back. The most alarming stat in the book is that 80-85% of first-time operagoers go to one opera and never come back. That’s death. It’s also bizarre. If you read a nonfiction book and you don't like it, you wouldn’t write off nonfiction. If you don’t like Bridgerton, you don’t write off television. That would be insane. If you want to get goosebumps, you’ve got to figure out what you like. You’ve got to go back.

There's a tension between opera being subsidized by the middle and upper-middle class while being perceived as entertainment for the rich. How did that happen?
When opera used to be for the people. If you could pay for a ticket, you would go. It was not elevated. That's a fairly recent phenomenon that occurred in the 1880s when the canon calcified. Look at the The Marriage of Figaro. It's not high brow. There are jokes; there's body humor.

Also, Wagner deserves some blame. Before he came along, people were drinking and talking during all the arias. It was social thing. But he was like, no, no, we must focus on the art. So he implemented the sunken orchestra pit and closing the curtains for scene changes and dimming the lights in the theater and also having seats that were all facing the stage. Now, we're being quiet, facing forward. We're in school again. 

How would you describe the gamble people make when they try to become opera singers?
I think everyone wants to be special. And there is something about opera or being a classical ballet dancer or being the elite of an art form perceived as elite, that is really compelling. The people that I interviewed who have pursued singing for such a long time, despite the challenges of the industry, love the art form. They feel compelled to do it. Multiple people describe it to me as a drug.

It’s worth noting lots of these people have families that can spend $150,000 for a voice degree. I grew up upper-middle class. My father was a doctor and my mom was a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1970s. She at least insisted I get a degree that prepared more for a second act in academia and writing – not that ’s much more lucrative.

The “EViL JOBS SURVEY” uses Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, Loyalty framework to understand how Oat Milk Elites think about their jobs and about professional optionality.. Full results will be shared with members and those that complete the survey.

HAVE FAITH

“I’m an agnostic,” the battle cry of hyper-literate A.P History grads too math-adverse to count their blessings, doesn’t describe a faith – it describes the space where a faith would go. It’s a space modern gnostics fill with arcane mythology⁴, elaborate rituals, and, if all else fails, a quiet extracurricular activity they obnoxiously refer to as a “practice.” Over time, what occupies God’s empty parking space changes, but in a country where opiates are the opiates of the masses the apostle of indecision always clinging to some ersatz faith.

[2] Gelman is an interesting character because her core competency is getting attention, but she also earns it. Six Bells is cool and interesting. The Wing didn’t work, but it was definitely verrrry interesting. Anyway, I dig Barnum-style characters, especially when they hawk very nicely glazed primitivist pottery.

[3] Dragged down to hell by a vengeful statue.

[4] My son is somewhere between “Mom” and “Dinosaurs” on this chart, which requires me to act like a dinosaur in front of his mom. I like to think of it as transubstantiation for toddlers.