➺ March 10, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. You can tell where a person is coming from by looking at their shoes. Most of the time. But mud season is the great equalizer. No one can tell who clogs or wedges or pumps or sneaks or boots. Blundstones proliferate then get left by the door.

And everyone turns out to be precisely 1.7 inches shorter than you thought. - AB

➺ The Good Place: Our “Dream Second Home” survey is now live. Time to find out if we’re all moving to Europe.

➺ Château Boy: For the record, if the upper-middle American dream is now moving to Europe. Pacaso (today’s sponsor) is the white-collar American dreamcatcher.

BECOME A LOCAL
Tourists leave reviews. Locals just come back.

The dream isn’t just to own a second home. It’s to feel at home in a second place. To have a go-to restaurant and a favorite neighbor and a place your kids go to swim or wade or walk or sit and think away from the f*****g iPad.

The team that built Zillow watched families walk away from that dream – not because they couldn't afford it, but because the upkeep, the empty weeks, and the full price tag weren’t worth the hassle. So they built Pacaso. True ownership in a luxury home, shared among 2–8 owners max, in 40+ destinations worldwide. You're there 5–6 weeks a year – enough to stop being a visitor and start being a local. They handle scheduling, maintenance, and management so your time there is actually yours.

Now you can get the joy of having that second, special place without the stress of having to manage it all on your own. It’s not a rental. It’s an asset. And it’s also a place you can come back to again and again. This isn't the experience of being a local – it’s becoming a local, starting now..

What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Getting Stuffed
Why is a show about a stoned bear the most human thing on tv?
The 17th-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld observed that "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue” – by which he meant that people faking being good is itself proof they aspire to goodness. In the aughts,  ubiquitous psychologist/know-it-all Jonathan Haidt put a spin on this formulation by pointing our that working class Americans (generally more conservative) fake goodness by being rigidly moralistic while professional elites (generally more liberal) fake goodness by being performatively inclusive. Together, La Rochefoucauld’s and Haidt’s formulation offer an optimistic unpopular view of class tension: Everyone is aspires to goodness. This is (give-or-take) the thesis of Ted, Seth MacFarlane’s good-natured Peacock series about an ex-Hollywood star turned townie circa 1995, which offers a Boston spin: If everyone’s a prick maybe no one is.

On the show, working class moral rigidity is performed by Matty, an ginger moron who refuses to serve a man tea while working at Dunkin’., and Susan, his Irish-Catholic martyr of a wife. Performative inclusivity is the domain of Blaire, the show's proxy for the sort of NBC viewers who 30 Rock themselves to sleep. Blair constantly castigates her family for their small-mindedness, but is invariable the beneficiary of their largess. In perhaps what is perhaps the most telling story arc, Susan brings a male stranger into their bedroom to help her husband get an erection (don’t ask) after Blaire suggest she ignore the Cosmopolitan magazine where she got the idea. Either way, it works. Three pumps and no more tension.

TASTE ➽ Warm Fronts
What does $100 oil do to a living room?
Oil briefly topped $119 a barrel this week. The last time energy costs spiked on chaos in Tehran, the causal chain went something like: blood in the streets → oil up → inflation → Volcker jacks rates to 18% → mortgage rates follow → saving on heat becomes a thing → everyone buys heavier drapes. And a lot of design decisions live downstream from heavier drapes. When sheers give way to lined damask or crewel, rooms gets darker so lights get warmer and lower, which means dark wood looks better than light, which means the Knoll credenza gets replaces walnut highboy. The entire chintz moment of the '80s – the Ralph Lauren Home tartans, the Laura Ashley florals, the Colefax and Fowler glazed cottons, the explosion of skirted tables and balloon shades and toile – tracked the price of a barrel of crude.

And if oil prices get really high and room-sizes shrink, crown molding, wainscoting, chair rails, and pattern-on-pattern wallpaper become a near inevitability. Traditional decorating returns when energy prices hit traditional highs. We’ll see how extreme things get, but it’s worth noting both that Martha Stewart's Christmas (1989) was packed with candlelit rooms layered in textiles and that Millennials are already moving that direction¹. Victorian case goods and carved mahogany dressers are booming at auction, with “young” bidders now constituting 30% of buyers. Their goal may be to insulate themselves from algorithmic sameness, but it also gets chilly from time to time.

MONEY ➽ Burning Members
Why does Costco inspire genuine loyalty?
Costco leads the ragtag resistance to corporate enshittification. Last week CEO Ron Vachris told investors that if the company recovers any of the tariff duties it's suing the government to recoup, it will return the money to members "through lower prices and better values” rather than treating the illegally renditioned cash as found money. Costco can do this because it’s not structured like a normal retailer; it’s a cooperative in a trench coat. Because that $65 membership fee is the key profit center – a whopping $1.329 billion in Q1 alone (up 14%) – merchandise can be sold at a quaint 11.32% gross margin, roughly a third of a conventional retailer. Everything follows from that single alignment. Costco’s 81.4M U.S. customers renew at a 92.2% rate. At this point, that’s higher than christianity.

The tailwind responsible for Costco’s growth is ever-increasing differentiation. Enshittification is the process by which services that were once good for users gradually degrade as their focus shifts from customer acquisition to value capture (think: why does Etsy suck shit). For Costco, this kind of pivot doesn’t make sense. Being good how it captures value. That’s why its Kirkland brand keeps lowering prices (bacon down from $18.99 to $16.99, chicken pot pie down from $4.29 to $3.99, walnuts from $14.49 to $12.99). By refusing to frack its customers, Costco attracts more and more. New warehouses opened in 2025 are already generating $192M in annualized sales. It’s obscene. Or, rather, it’s not obscene², which is why it works.

The “DREAM SECOND HOME SURVEY” looks at where Oat Milk Elites want to be when they’re not home and whet. Full results will be shared with members and those that complete the survey.

What can we learn from successful mediocrity?

Call him Kyle. He went to GW or Tufts or American. One parent is a lawyer. One is a white-collar journeyman. Both are invested in Vanguard funds, consistency, and a really nice sectional. He’s a decent hang and he doesn't skip leg day. He sometimes quotes The Good Place, which his girlfriend loved, or Margin Call, which he first saw on a plane. He works in finance or insurance or at a SaaS startup. You can't quite remember. He's got college friends and work friends and that girlfriend, whose name also starts with a "K." As an individual, Kyle is not interesting. But he’s a prime example of North America’s most fascinating species. 

Homo directus, results-oriented hominids animated by general ambition rather than specific conviction, are what ecologists call a keystone indicator species. So goes Kyle, so goes America.

And Kyle already went. In the mid-2000s, he went to Booz Allen, Lehman, or Accenture. In the 2010s, he went to Deloitte, Salesforce, or Workday. In the 2020s, he went to Palantir, Amazon (and got fired), or Guidehouse. That's the stuff you gotta do if you're going to be at in growth equity by forty.

In 1974, the psychologist D.W. Winnicott observed that dread of impending catastrophe is common after an unacknowledged catastrophe has already occurred. This is, more or less, the state of the discourse about “elite circulation,” Vilfredo Pareto's term for the inevitable and shockingly frequent replacement of the powers that be with other powers that be more powerful. NPR moms are freaking out right now about Bari Weiss, the Jeffrey Epstein Social Club, and Erika Kirk Instagram memes, but the circulation implied by those shifts happened fifteen or twenty years ago when Kyle took a gig at Aon.

Pareto called history the “graveyard of aristocracies.” We know circulation already happened because LinkedIn provides a fossil record.

Low conviction people are highly instructive because elite circulation is often the result of personal passivity. Yes, some elites compete – thus the whole “canceled” discourse – but more elites allow themselves to get circulated. Consider Sam Rogers, the freshly fired company man played by the Tooch in Margin Call. A particularly self-aware example of H. Directus with a particularly on-the-nose backstory, Rogers was a structural engineer before becoming a senior risk officer at an investment bank. "I built a bridge once," he tells Paul Bettany with a voice full to overflowing with wist.

But a financializing economy creates specific incentives for those with Sam’s facility for abstraction. The 97-second bridge monologue is an elegy for the infrastructure aristocracy, the engineers and planners who built America’s now sclerotic arteries, now consigned to Pareto's graveyard.

The infrastructure aristocracy was one part of an aristocracy Barbara and John Ehrenreich dubbed the professional-managerial class: journalists, academics, public servants, doctors, lawyers, and engineers for whom credentials did double duty as class identity. This was the non-financialized elite. The Boomer Elite. The Production Elite. The meek who inherited the Earth then lost it to card counters. 

In the early 1970s, roughly one in twenty Harvard graduates entered finance or consulting. By the 1990s, one in four. Today, 53% of the class of 2025 went into finance (21%), tech (18%), or consulting (14%). Meanwhile, newsroom employment is down roughly 60% since 2008; tenure-track academic positions have been declining as a share of PhD outcomes since the 1970s; the FIRE sector – finance, insurance, real estate – went from approximately 10% of U.S. corporate profits in 1980 to nearly 40% by 2007. Incentives sucked an entire class off into spreadsheetland³. Newsrooms, universities, and the federal civil service didn't lose talent and pull then become mediocre. They lost pull on mediocre talent, which turns out to be undervalued. H. Directus migrated elsewhere.

Specifically, H. Directus migrated toward derivatives, instruments whose value is determined by the shifting values of asset rather than from those asset themselves. Yes, that includes the trade in futures (and mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps), but it also includes insurance and SaaS startups founded on the old VC logic of selling picks and shovels to miners rather than chasing gold. Once a shift in that direction began and those kinds of jobs became both plentiful and socially acceptable, elite circulation was inevitable. As anthropologist David Graeber convincingly argued, the suppression of genuinely disruptive innovation under financialized capitalism is a feature rather than a bug. Because disruption threatens existing capital structures, innovations and new ideas are suppressed. New elites antagonize old elites even as they ask them for advice on what to wear to the office.

An evolutionary argument can be made, of course, that H. Directus is merely a misidentified Homo Economicus. Primatologists do get these things wrong. But consider the behavior. Kyle isn't optimizing for income. A master electrician in a high-cost metro earns a median wage roughly on par with an Accenture consulting associate. Adjust for four years of credentialing, two subpar associate years, the real probability of not making partner, and private equity roll-up dynamics, a plug and play approach to life makes more financial sense than going corporate. But H. Directus doesn't do trades. The species' instinct is to balance a need for financial capital with a need for social capital, which is to say legitimacy in the eyes of whichever members of the old production elite paid for those four and half years at GW or Tufts or American. 

A bone gets dug up from Pareto's graveyard and thrown to mom and dad.

The circulation that NPR moms are currently dreading happened somewhere between 2000 and 2010. We can date it to just prior to the financial crisis, when complicated financial instruments lured new grads with a siren song. The panic has arrived about twenty years late, which is exactly what Winnicott would have predicted. The dread of the breakdown seeps in once the breakdown is in the rearview. Objects in mirror are further than they appear. 

The useful implication of Winnicott is the obverse: If the discourse is currently catastrophizing the last rotation, it's ignoring the next⁴. Pareto's graveyard is an active dig site and if stock performance is any indication, the hole for SaaS execs is already half shoveled. H. Directus understands this. Kyle’s girlfriend made him watch The Good Place twice and what Pareto said about elite circulation isn’t so different from what Jason Mendoza said about Florida: "If you don't like this funeral, just wait a minute.")

Upper Middle is an independent publication helping oat milk elites reframe their relationships with status, taste, and money. Please help us keep the lights on (dimly) by joining Upper Middle Research, which pays mid-career professionals as much as $200/hour to take targeted surveys.

OBSESS OVER THE TRIVIAL

Jeopardy is both a show and a metric for general intelligence, a means for regular viewers to measure their command of the sort of liberal arts arcana that serves as a tribal shibboleth for alumni magazine readers. Unfortunately, Jeopardy scores are highly variable by design, which is makes following along tricky. That’s why, in 1996, Karl Coryat – a two-game Jeopardy champion with a lot of free time – invented a scoring system that allows for better statistic analysis of cord cutting Americans’ favorite game show. Coryat scoring strips wagering. Daily Doubles are face value and Final Jeopardy isn’t counted. The result is that players can be consistently benchmarked against a maximum score of $54,000 for 60 correct answers. A bell curve rings.

According to J-Archive – a crowd-maintained database cataloguing every clue and answer since 1984 – the average contestant Coryat sits below $11,000, representing +/-16 correct answers (a .280 batting average). Current host Ken Jennings averaged $27,861 while his outclassed opponents averaged just $5,683.

The issue with Coryat scoring is that doing it in real-time requires a notebooks. For sexually active viewers, that’s a non-starter so a slight twist is necessary. Ditch the money. Correct answers score +1, incorrect answers score −0.5 (preserving Coryat's asymmetric penalty, normalized to clue count), unanswered clues score 0, and clues where viewers couldn't retrieve the word but could, post-facto, provide supporting context score +0.25. This ensures knowledge is valued alongside recall. Scores are then sorted into categories based on J-Archive contestant distributions. Those are as follows:

[2] The trouble with shareholder capitalism is that it creates a system under which cynicism is more defensible from an executive decision-making perspective than generosity toward the consumer. It’s a trap. Costco didn’t fall in it and, because of that, is more profitable. Bloodthirsty MBA types are often very wrong about what constitutes a strong, long-term business strategy.

[3] Sinners in the hands of an angry Claude.

[4] There’s a big social bias here because, unlike Nicholas Kristof, most people don’t like to be publicly wrong all the time. As such, op-ed writers in particular tend to spend a lot of time analyzing a present that, on closer inspection, looks an awful lot like the recent past.