➺ March 19, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. Last night after our normal post-bath Robyn dance party, I cajoled my son into listening to something new. I asked my Google Home – recently exposed to juice – to play Kurt Vile and John Prine and Kinky Friedman. After that last request, it went rogue and played Timber by Pitbull. Naked and clean as the singer’s scalp, my boy bounced and spun.

Sometimes it’s all good. It really is. - AB

➺ The Best Place: Our “Dream Second Home” survey is still live. Take it if you haven’t already and want to know where the next big boom is gonna hit.

➺ Playlisting: I’m making a list of the most upper-middle class coded songs. Reply to this email with ideas if you’ve got ‘em. Just no Vampire Weekend please.

Well Matched.

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What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Spider-Men
Why do Finnish elites sell salty licorice?
In Finland, social status is derived from public service and real power is derived from a food coop. A new University of Helsinki study mapped 4,141 elected officials across democratic institutions in the Helsinki metropolitan area – Parliament, the city council, the national Lutheran church, the university student unions, and the consumer cooperative HOK-Elanto. Only 2.1% of that group, 87 individuals the researchers dubbed "spiders," held positions in three or more simultaneously, putting them in a position to exercise much greater power. Of that group, a stunning 64 had been elected to the board of HOK-Elanto – a cooperative owned by 700,000 voting members that runs a few hotels and gas stations in addition to groceries. More members of Parliament were ex-HOK-Elanto board members than vice versa.

Modern democracies are built with an idea in mind: no one can abuse power if it's dispersed across many institutions and varied institutional elites. What the data shows is that this separation of power leaves space for an infra-institutional, arachnid elite to emerge from a single institution. The grocery store is the power center whether the Finns wish to admit it or not. And, to be clear, they don't. As the researchers note, those inside these networks understand the dynamic but treat it as taboo in public rhetoric – it doesn't fit the narrative of meritocratic service that Finnish democratic culture runs on..

TASTE ➽ Green Day
Why does gardening on TV suddenly seem punk?
In the trailer for his upcoming Netflix show, Zach Galifianakis looks down the barrel of the camera. "If I were to offer a remedy to the human condition, it would be a garden," he says. "Or acid." He goes on to describe the food system as "perverse" and asks, with studied outrage, "how dare you get your food from a supermarket?" The point is, of course, that This Is a Gardening Show is a totally radical and new kind of gardening show. But it isn't. It's Gardeners' World for Americans. Galifianakis is doing Monty Don¹ – the presenter who fought the BBC for his right to both criticize pesticides and wear incredibly expensive tweeds on air.

The two men are more similar than they look. Don has patrician wardrobe and bearing, but he spent his twenties in a self-described haze of sex, drugs, and rock and roll before going nearly bankrupt and having a breakdown. Gardening was a last resort. Galifianakis is framing it in similar terms. As gardening has become more popular with Millennials – Don has a cult following stateside thanks to BritBox – it has also become a form of refusal. It doesn't scale. It's slow. It's non-algorithmic. It's egalitarian. And it is also a path to independence. Give a man a tomato and he eats for a day. Teach a man to tomato and he starts to go sane.

MONEY ➽ Guccish
Why is a very big brand making very small bags?
Gucci just went all in on luxury derivatives. The ur-Italian fashion house now helmed by the Georgian (the other one) enfant miserable Demna has culled 20% of SKUs with a focus on what constitute "middle" price points for the brand. What remains are wildly expensive Veblen goods – products whose value is a direct function of how few people can afford them – and semi-affordable iterations of those same products. The $3,550 Horsebit 1955, a structured leather bag built around Gucci's signature equestrian hardware, is a Veblen good. The $1,100 Tag mini, a micro bag that looks a bit like the horsebit, is a derivative that borrows cultural value from the O.G. but exists outside the classic Gucci dynamic where the ludicrous price tag is part of the product.

The clearest example is the Jackie line. The $3,450 Jackie 1961 is a ladylike shoulder bag Jackie Kennedy carried that hasn't left the lineup since — an object whose desirability is inseparable from history and price. The $1,690 Small Jackie is a smaller, cheaper versions for people who get the reference, but can't get the genuine artifact. The lower $1,690 price point is supported by the real $3,450 price point – and a few weathered paparazzi shots. Gucci, which has seen sales plummet 40% since 2022, is betting this approach will help it reach an upper-middle audience while simultaneously chasing the super rich. Even luxury is K-shaped now.

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.

Want to know how a leader sees society? Ask about voting rights.

The most contentious claim in Alexander Keyssar's The Right to Vote may also be the simplest: "Class tensions and apprehensions constituted the single most important obstacle to universal suffrage in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s." Though the story of suffrage is often told as a story of racial and gender progress – and it is that – Keyssar's argument is that the people who built and maintained systems of exclusion were not primarily motivated by racism or misogyny. They were motivated by the fear that political power would be redistributed downward if there were too many voters.

The SAVE Act, currently roiling the Senate, requires documentary proof of citizenship – a passport, a birth certificate – to register to vote. Its architects have presented it as a solution to the non-existent (or at least rarely documented) problem of voter fraud and its critics have, more plausibly, dismissed it as an attempt to suppress turnout for the midterms. But that's not really the whole point. What the SAVE Act actually does is demand that citizens provide information to a state unwilling to provide information to its citizens. That is not how a political elite manufactures consent or manages an electorate. That is how a ruling elite ignores one.

The Italian political theorist Gaetano Mosca drew a distinction between a political elite – one that derives its authority from governing and therefore requires the appearance of popular consent – and a ruling elite, which governs through ownership or force and requires no such thing. The difference is the direction of accountability. A political elite releases public records because it’s obligated to the electorate. A ruling elite demands loyalty despite not releasing public records (even if required to do so under penalty of law²).

The political scientist James Scott observed that modern states make populations legible to themselves – through birth certificates, passports, documentation systems – in order to administer, tax, and control them. But a democratic bargain is struck. States are subject to transparency laws. They have to answer FOIA requests and release files demanded by Congress and the public. We see you because you see us.

What the SAVE Act represents is the first part of the Trump administration's modified formulation. We see you and you don't see us.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the SAVE Act's impact on women and the poor. Both are real. But as Keyssar suggests, those impacts have always been in service of something larger than the groups they target. Consider the math: the documentation burden falls hardest on the 69 million married women whose birth certificates don't match their married names – a population that, per Pew Research, skews Republican. The rural poor most burdened by passport requirements are overwhelmingly Trump voters. If this is a straightforward electoral suppression scheme, it is a remarkably moronic one. The more plausible conclusion is that the target isn't a voting bloc or just women who have complicated relationships with their fathers. It's class – a class that's almost invisible because it doesn’t think of itself in those terms.

The sole reason the bill has even a modicum of popular support is that the SAVE Act pulls the political and cultural elites reviled by MAGA into the broader proletariat. Under the new ruling elite, credentials don’t matter. Papers do. For those without credentials, that looks empowering. It's a similar dynamic to the one observed by W.E.B. Du Bois when he watched poor white workers in the Reconstruction South accept lower wages in exchange for the status of not being Black. If you're an asshole, the subjugation of others feels like elevation.

What those supporting the bill may not have fully priced in is the potential cost of punishing a political elite that they feel failed them by elevating a ruling elite that doesn't care about them at all. Trump's ruling elite has demonstrated a profound lack of interest in the will of people not only by embracing the Big Lie but by implementing policies utterly at odds with its leader's campaign promises and stated priorities³. That's because the project of a ruling elite isn't legitimacy, it's centralizing power. The SAVE Act does that by making voting contingent on documentation the state controls – and, more worryingly, by complicating the process to the point where incumbent cheating becomes easier to hide. Chaos ensured when similar rules were implemented in Kansas. That’s the point.

Ruling elites don't play to win. They play not to have to play at all.

The founders, a ruling elite in the absence of any democratic means of establishing a political one, resolved the question of who could vote by tying suffrage to property ownership. The logic, stated plainly by John Adams⁴, was that independent men – men freed from economic dependence – were the only citizens capable of dispassionate political judgment. But Franklin saw that argument for what it truly was: an excuse to rule rather than govern.

The story goes that the "First American" pushed back with this parable:

"Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies. The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers – but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?"

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ADD AN APPENDIX

In 1859, Darwin observed that evolving organisms retain features that have outlived their original function. He called these organs and withered bones and stubby little tails vestigial, and declared the appendix – fully functional in the rabbit, occasionally fatal in the human – to be evidence of our animal origins. The same phenomenon can be documented among aspirational consumers, who retain their status symbols long after their obsolescence. In fact, we retain them because they lack practical value. Vestigial signifiers are the mark of a well-adapted individual.

[2] Cough… cough… cough.

[3] I read a description of foreign wars the other day that stuck with me: The reward for those who fight for capitalism abroad is socialism at home.

[4] My wife loves Adams and is gonna yell at me about this.