➺ March 12, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. The phrase "red carpet treatment" comes from the 20th Century Limited, a luxury rail service that rolled out a literal rug for commercial travelers going from Grand Central to Chicago every day from 1902 to 1967. After that, the carpet went west.

The treatment became something people traveled for. - AB

➺ The Good Place: Our “Dream Second Home” survey is now live. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

➺ Spring Break+: Lots of folks are at the beach right now. What Pacaso’s co-owning platform posits is… what if they stayed longer?

DON’T DEFER
Future you doesn't need a second home. Current you does.

You’ve got a solid plan: work, defer joy, work, defer joy, work… have a coronary and die in medical debt. Sounds great. But what if, instead, you got that dream second home now and tried to live a little before your right ventricle explodes? 

It’s easier than you think.

A few years ago, the team that helped build Zillow observed that more and more high-earning Americans are putting off their dreams. So they built Pacaso, a platform that offers true ownership in fully furnished luxury homes shared among 2–8 owners max in 40+ destinations worldwide. A real asset. A real investment. Not tomorrow. Today.

Pacaso owners get the joy of a second home now. The unhurried weekends, the long dinners, the place your family returns to again and again – without the guilt of overextending or the stress of doing it alone. Some things can wait. Some things shouldn’t.

What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Jock Itch
What does it mean that we're negotiating redistribution with the NBA?
A proposed amendment to the Washington state millionaire tax that passed yesterday would have delayed the 9.9% levy on income above $1 million until the SuperSonics returned to Seattle. The amendment went nowhere, but it wasn't nonsensical. So-called "jock taxes" force athletes playing in states with income taxes to pay pro-rated monies for earnings generated in-state – say, 5/82 of compensation given the league schedules. Obviously, the NBA hates this because it's a recruiting liability for the Lakers, the Knicks, and the Bulls¹. Commissioner Adam Silver has suggested it could be an obstacle to the expansion folks in Seattle have been clamoring for since their team split for Oklahoma City in 2008. In essence, the amendment was an attempt to take basketball hostage.

Theodor Adorno, your vegan cousin's favorite philosopher, argued that the culture industry functions as a pressure valve for unequal societies: The working classes (including the white-collar workers) wind up wanting stuff so badly enough that the wanting itself becomes a tool of social management. The proposed SuperSonics amendment was the perfect example. Don't tax the rich until they give you back your team. Of course, the whole thing assumes that athletes are as coin operated as GOP reps. Some are. Some aren't. When TMZ asked SuperSonic all-start Gary Payton if he had a drink with Dubya during his 2006 post-championship visit to the White House, he made it emphatically clear he hadn't. He didn't play like that.

TASTE ➽ Comrade Timmy
Why won’t ballet dancers let it go?
The odds of Timothée Chalamet taking home an Oscar cratered over the last few weeks as the opera and ballet communities lambasted him for going on a CNN/Variety town hall with Matthew McConaughey and calling those art forms "things no one cares about anymore." Misty Copeland (dancing at the Oscars) called him out by name. Megan Fairchild, principal dancer at NYCB, questioned whether he could survive ballet training. While clout-chasing was part of this backlash, artists genuinely hate and fear anti-formalist aesthetic populism, which is an attempt to politicize art by belittling the people who support it. Having grown up with a mother and sister in the New York City Ballet, Timmy presumably knows this. He knows who Dmitri Shostakovich was.

In 1936, Pravda published an editorial attacking Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District for the crime of making art that required education to receive. Stalin's cultural enforcer Andrei Zhdanov then convened show trials for both Shostakovich and Prokofiev, demanding they confess to artistic failure. Shostakovich's gorgeous (and pretty accessible, tbh) Fourth Symphony wasn't performed publicly for 25 years. Timmy doesn’t have that kind of pull, but he made the same argument: Mass legibility is the only legitimate test of cultural worth². Not smart. Megan Fairchild may kick his ass if the Academy doesn't do it first.

MONEY ➽ Listless Listings
Why is everyone in Denver becoming a landlord?
Zillow reported this week that a near-record share of unsold homes are quietly becoming rentals, as owners who couldn't get their price decide to wait out the market rather than take the hit. There's a name for this cohort: accidental landlords. About a quarter of all American landlords didn't set out to rent and roughly half of single-property landlords originally bought their property as a primary residence. All-in that's about 1.675% of Americans – an increasing number in Miami and Denver, where home markets are softening faster than rental markets – who didn't plan to be in the landlord business.

It's counterintuitive given the rise of the HGTV industrial complex and all the evangelism for passive income that only 6.7% of Americans are landlords. But there seems to be a real aversion – part cultural, part political, part neurotic (tenant protection laws create important, but frightening asymmetries) – to collecting rent. What the new numbers suggest is that aversion < math. In Denver, nearly 1 in 20 rental listings (4.9%) is a home that failed to sell. In Houston it's 4.2%. Austin 4.1%. In markets where home prices are stagnating and rents aren't, the calculus is shifting. Get what you can when you can. That 1.675% is going to grow..

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.

Why auctions feels better.

The choosiest piece of furniture in my living room cost $275. It’s a maybe-antique Mario Buatta-style sofa – elaborate fringe, floral upholstery, chainstitched details – the kind of “piece” that retails for thousands in Georgetown and Savannah and whatever town in the Berkshires antique-mad homosexuals are currently colonizing. When I collected it from the warehouse, the online auctioneer expressed shock (and a touch of dismay) it went so cheap.

In the the land of uncertain values, couldawouldashoulda is currency of the realm.

I buy most of my furniture and decor at auction because my taste runs toward what the hopped-up interior designer Bunny Williams calls “traditional American.” You know that look of sedimentary cultural deposition. Gallery walls. Chinoiserie. Chintz. A little bit of leather. Generally, creating that kind of atmosphere requires years of collecting and a significant outlay, but I have neither patience nor an earmarked budget. What I have is a LiveAuctioneers account, a certain amount of discipline, and the willingness to drive a rented U-Hauls to warehouses run by people with more interest in Tiffany Lamps and federalist cabinetry than inventory management or personal hygiene. Every once in a while I get got, but for the most part the getting is good. Lots of auctioneers with musty odors and plenty of couldawouldashoulda. Very little certainty.

In 1989, Charles W. Smith wrote a short, dull book I can’t recommend – save a few sentences – called Auctions: The Social Construction of Value, which argues that auctions "are not primarily or even in the first place exchange processes" but rather "processes for managing ambiguity and uncertainty of value.” Pulled loose of the bubble wrap, that means auctions create value by imprecisely revealing the willingness to pay of ersatz collector communities formed around specific objects. The auction's power, Smith writes, is "this capacity to confer value – and not to reveal it – to goods without clearly defined value."³

Smith’s work, which has a conferred value of $0 online and $58 in hardcover, raises a question about what it means to buy an 88” faux leather Ethan Sofa at West Elm. One can argue from a revealed preference perspective that all prices are perfect if they get paid. But price tags don’t confer value by moving up, they generally determine willingness to pay by moving down – and, more often than not, they’re affixed to commodity products designed to limit uncertainty. Beyond selling access to Millennial beige, the essential service provided by places like West Elmis the elimination of uncertainty.

But uncertainty is fun. Uncertainty is interesting. Uncertainty is valuable – to me at least – because it produces imperfect systems in which its possible to win. It’s why my dog gets to nap on a really nice sofa.

In his essay "The Cultural Biography of Things," Igor Kopytoff argues that most objects’s commodity status shifts constantly until they disintegrate. That Ethan Sofa s a commodity in the store and kind of a commodity on Facebook Marketplace, but it won’t be a commodity at all decades from now when it washes up in a tent full of “turn-of-the-century antiques” at the Brimfield Fair. As Kopytoff put it: "the period that begins to usher in sacralization is approximately equal to the span of time separating one from one's grandparents' generation."

Auction bidding is, in a sense, gamified sacralization. Players are dropped into a world of of Friedeberg hand chairs and bad watercolors and damask armchairs and endless cabinets of Murano glass (that one is specific to New Jersey) and asked to determine not only the personal value of objects, but their current placement on a commodity spectrum. As Kopytoff acknowledges, there’s a “yearning for singularization in complex societies.”

Somewhere before it reached me, the sofa in my living room had a life – other rooms,  other dogs – and despite the fact that I have no idea what any of that looked like, that’s valuable to me. Singularity doesn’t require specificity. Stuff feels like it has a backstory when its main fselling point isn’t its lack of backstory. 

And stories do matter. Non-algorithmic consumption, which is to say collecting, is essentially a form of reading. The collector extracts meaning from sacralized objects. The next collector extracts a different meaning. Uncertainty builds.

When I tell people about my wins (say, in a short essay sent to 134,000 people), I’m not suggesting that I have expertise or skill. I don’t. What I have is a highly imperfect process by which I extract meaning, assign it a value, and assert that value as part of a value creation process. After all, determining what constitutes a win is a tautological process. It’s a win because I say so.

Also, I lose constantly. Recently I lost a large 19th century landscape because I refused to go over $250. It sold for $300 and the frame was probably worth twice that. But these things happen. As Smith pointed out, non-professional bids – specifically in the sort of sealed-bid second-price auction auctions (start with your highest bid, pay just over the second highest) held online – function as a moral commitment. I refuse to let others determine the value of what I buy, which is the whole point of not shopping at West Elm in the first place. This is why I feel a sense of shame when I go to high – don’t ask me about the theater box I bought for firewood. I lost a game I chose to play.

Because overpaying is inevitable and pickup is a pain in the ass, I’m not at all certain it makes economic sense to buy furniture or art or Murano glassware at auction. But that’s precisely not the point. The point is that the process also has value and I’m comfortable, having spent years bidding on folk art chests, being uncertain about the precise price that ought to be assigned to amusement.

Uncertainty also opens the door to different viewpoints. Silly as it may sound, my dog can also assess the value of a sofa. Her system is just a little different than mine because she knows the backstory⁴. She can smell it.

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.

CALL THE PLUMBER

Call it Super Mario Theory. You can tell what any knowledge worker does for a living by how they describe a blocked pipe. Professional training doesn't just change what you know — it changes how you think about connection, flow, and obstruction. Ask ten knowledge workers to describe a clogged drain and you'll get one very annoyed plumber and ten different ways to end the following sentence: “The pipe is ________.”

[2] This argument gets recycled because it dismisses the intelligencia, who tend not to like autocrats very much. As an example: *waves hands*.

[3] The idea that any given product is worth what you’re willing to pay for it is extremely pervasive, but also make very little sense.

[4] I always go out of my way to let the dog sniff new purchases, specifically anything with fabric. It’s probably a silly thing to do, but the last thing I need in my house is a murder couch.