➺ March 17, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. The snow piles left near the end of the driveway by the plow finally melted this week, revealing a stash of New York Times print editions from the day of each major storm – an authoritative archive of a long, cold season.

I guess that’s why it’s still the paper of record. - AB

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You Ran the Numbers. Here's What You Missed.

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What we’re drinking about while talking.

TASTE ➽ Gwyneth the Mwyneth
Why does acting still matter in the age of non-professional casting?
During Sunday's Oscar ceremony, Gwyneth Paltrow strode onto the stage at the Dolby Theater in a strapless ivory Giorgio Armani Privé gown and made a truly wild claim. Addressing Marty Supreme casting director Jennifer Venditti, nominated for the first casting Oscar, her Goop-lordship¹ sayeth: "Jennifer, you have this rare ability to see people as they truly are and understand exactly how they belong inside a story.... You know the true value of lived experience. It can't be faked." Wait. What? Did she just say that to a room of professional fakers celebrating the art of faking?

Paltrow's premise, if granted, doesn't just big-up the importance of casting, it negates the idea of acting by taking the basic logic of representation (for historical and cultural reasons, only Black actors should play Black characters) to a ludicrous extreme (only svelte blonde faded movie stars in their fifties can play svelte blonde faded movie stars in their fifties). That may not sound meaningful, but in 2023, when studios came under pressure to diversify writers rooms, the result wasn't just representation. As always happens, corporate leaders used a diversity push as a smokescreen to hire less and pay less. Rooms became mini rooms. Agents had to temper contract expectations. Still, no one booed Gwyneth. The people most threatened by her remark – C-listers displaced by the non-trained actors in Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another – weren't in the room. They were at home having their own lived experience.

MONEY ➽ Inflated Expectations
Why are the Dems lying about taxation?
Democrats want two things: a happy upper-middle class base and a welfare state. They probably won't get both. Sen. Cory Booker's Keep Your Pay Act, introduced last week, would double the standard deduction to $75,000 for married couples. Because deductions are worth more at higher marginal rates, the bill's largest benefit – $7,165 on average – would flow to households in the 80th to 90th income percentile. A married couple earning $300,000 would save $10,000 a year. Booker plans to pay for this by raising the corporate tax rate, closing executive compensation loopholes, and taxing stock buybacks. And the political math works. The top third of earners has swung majority-Democratic since 2016. Unfortunately, the actual math doesn't.

The problem is that taxes aren't just a means of supporting government spending. They control inflation. When taxes decrease and benefits expand, demand explodes throughout the economy and prices spike. Taxes on the middle and upper-middle class keep that from happening. Taxes on corporations and the super-wealthy don't. Shave $1B off a $10B fortune and the guy with $9B change spends more or less the same amount. Demand for dentists doesn't change and neither does the price of braces. This is why every welfare state on earth is funded by taxing the upper-middle class. Booker's calculations are, unfortunately for us, pure political.

STATUS ➽ Liberal Farts
What do college kids owe their future selves?
A new UCLA study asked 1,121 Americans to recommend a college major based on a student's socioeconomic background. Respondents steered children of factory workers toward computer science, nursing, and accounting unless those children had full-ride scholarships, in which case they encouraged them to behave like the children of lawyers and follow their interests. What the study suggests is that privilege, experienced as optionality, can be understood as the perceived demands of the future self on the present self. If the future self doesn't have debt, she's less demanding.

What's striking here is that “no debt” was treated by respondent as the only legitimate demand a future self could make. Respondents gave debt-free students full latitude – follow your interests, do Film Studies – despite the economic risks they'd already flagged. That permissiveness clearly recognized the complicated nature of the present self, but not the future self, which was treated as a purely financial player (not someone who might want to leave Bushwick and have a kid). This suggests one reason kids across the socioeconomic spectrum might make bad decisions: The demands of their future self are drowned out by the encouragement of present advisors.

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.

How a German philosopher predicted foodies, wellness culture, and your next trip to Mexico City.

Jürgen Habermas died Saturday at 96, in Starnberg, Bavaria, where he had spent three decades looking at Lake Starnberger and the Alps and the internalized effects of late capitalism on his neighbors. Naturally, the obituaries emphasized his work on the public sphere and his allegiance to the Frankfurt School, which studied the colonization of the “life-world” by market logic². But there were only so many column inches. His concept of the “motivation crisis” – sub-idea and supra-explanation – got cut.

Bad edit.

Explicated in his 1973 Legitimation Crisis, Habermas's writing on motivation may well be his most alarming relevant work. His argument went something like this: Late capitalism relies on but cannot produce a population motivated to work sacrificially within the system because the all market participants have internalized market thinking. As such, the system is fueled by the cultural remnants of a pre-modern era during which sacrificial work was deemed legitimate by workers willing (more or less) to accede to the demands of a Church, guild, or monarch in return for a deep sense of meaning.

Habermas was the guy counting down the miles until the fuel ran out. He watched the working class stop sacrificing for institutions that stopped sacrificing for them. He watched Death of a Salesman. He watched the popularization of the phrase “innere kündigung” in his country and then “quiet quitting” here. He watched the upper-middle class try to solve the problem of late capitalism by reconstituting and monetizing one pre-modern tradition after another in the hopes striking the kind of meaning that might lead to motivation that might, in turn, refuel the tank.

Habermas watched his motivation crisis become our lifestyle one medieval reboot at a time….

Oblation → College Admissions
The medieval practice of oblation was simple: Parents gave their children to the Church. Family’s planned the offering for years before it was made because it ensured prestige and advancement for the child. And if the offering was declined, the family grieved. The kid had to go to a safety cloister.

Stations → Travel 
The medieval pilgrimage was organized around stations – sacred sites along a route where the pilgrim paused to “find himself.” Like Lisbon, Santorini, and Kyoto, Canterbury was geographically differentiated from the ordinary world, worth suffering to reach, and capable of provoking transformation. The difference is that the modern pilgrim’s friends have also spent a week in Condesa.

Refecto → Foodie-ism
Serious food culture insists on the sacralization of consumption. It’s omakase as monkish meal.

Ora et Labora → Hustle Culture  
Benedict's rule held that labor was not what you did when you weren't praying — it was prayer in a different mode, devotion whose value derived from intention rather than output. Hustle practitioners (notably Mark Wahlberg) have rebuilt this theology without its object. The 5am alarm, the standing desk, Atomic Habits. The call to prayer podcast.

Humoral Medicine → Wellness  
The four humors have been replaced by cortisol, inflammation, and the microbiome, but the organizing principle is identical: Invisible forces threaten the self, ritual practices hold them at bay, and an anointed caste mediates access to the knowledge. As long as the body is a temple, it's gotta have some priests.

Paganism → Lord of the Rings
“Much that once was is lost,” says Galadriel “for none now live who remember it."³

Trial by Ordeal → Marathons 
The medieval ordeal subjected the accused to a physical trial designed to reveal God’s favor. The accused who walked across hot coals without injury was innocent. The marathon, the Ironman, and the ultramarathon operate on the same epistemology. The goal isn't to run 26.2 miles. The goal is to seek favor.

The Misterium → Professional Degrees
The medieval craft guild was formally called a misterium. The secret knowledge of how a thing was made was held by initiates and withheld from everyone else by oath. Basically, HBS minus the golf. 

Confession → Therapy 
Insight replaces absolution. The confessor in the more comfortable chair relies on the recurring revenue.

Crusades → Startups  
The calling is the idea and the equity. The pitch deck is the papal bull. The partners at Andreessen Horowitz are the patrons who finance the endeavor in exchange for a share of proceeds. The near-death experiences are short runway and kinked cashflow. The liberation of Jerusalem is liquidity. The likelihood of success is… lower than Linkedin’s town criers would have you believe.

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.

LOOK IN THE MEDICINE CABINET

You can learn a lot about a newish acquaintance by excusing yourself while someone else is in their guest bathroom and, after they point you to the master, rifling through the medicine cabinet. That specific built-in provides an at-a-glance summary of how your hosts manage risk and discomfort as well as how they prepare for life. Not-so-functional adults react to the humiliations inevitably visited upon their aging bodies. Functional adults plan ahead.

Here’s how to score your peers based on their ability to anticipate, adapt, and not buy products with “adaptogens.”

TIERS

40-50: Psychopath
30-39: Highly Functional Adult
20-29: Normal Person
10-19: Wears Strugglepants
0-9: Get Out

SCORING

[2] It still kind of cracks me up that there’s an entire German school of thinking devoted to figuring out why a Europeans and Americans haven’t beheaded more people.

[3] Show me a LOTR fan and I’ll show you someone who, in a previous age, would have danced naked around Stonehenge. And that’s 100 percent a compliment.

[4] Say something before a kid gets hurt.