➺ March 24, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. Last weekend I got a flat outside Hartford and waited for AAA in a seen-better-days Home Depot full of cheap, astonishingly multifunctional refrigerators. Edgy economists claim America imisserated the working class in exchange for cheaper electronics and appliances, inviting our current chaos.

But the appliances sure are nice. - AB

➺ The Best Place: Our “Dream Second Home” survey is still live because the results have been fascinating. Take it if you want to know where happens next.

Your Next Matchup.

The Miami Open hard courts are about as far from Roland Garros as you can get. No wonder Sinner is a -1463 favorite against the unseeded American Alex Michelsen in their round of 16 faceoff this afternoon, a hurricane-level blowout in the making. But tomorrow’s quarterfinals are a different story: If Fritz gets through Lehecka today, Sinner has a match on his hands. Where that line sits tomorrow is anyone's guess, which is why Novig, the peer-to-peer sports trading exchange, is getting so much traction with American fans to help sportsbooks pad their margins.

Sure, you're (very likely) going to be more excited to see Sinner in the final, but Novig makes the earlier rounds fun – and doesn't take a cut of your winnings. So now is the time to get started.

Use the promo code UPPERMIDDLE and get 90% off up to $45.

Must be 21+ to enter. Please play responsibly. Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary..

What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Blue Skyfall
Why is corporate bullshittery such an effective diagnostic?
A Cornell psychologist built a scale to measure white-collar workers' susceptibility to corporate bullshit — defined as "a semantically empty communication that leverages abstruse corporate buzzwords and jargon in a functionally misleading way." The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBRS) is based on responses to 10 algorithmically generated nonsense statements and 10 real executive quotes on a 5-point measure of "business savvy." People who scored high on the CBRS were impressed by statements like "Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing." As though that wasn't embarrassing enough, high CBRS scores were the single strongest negative predictor of workplace decision-making.

Put simply: people who find bullshit impressive make worse decisions than people who don't. Given that the study also found a number of quotes from Fortune 500 execs that were semantically indistinguishable from generated bullshit, the study suggests executives prone to bullshittery building cultures of credulous deference actually incentivize workers to act like morons. The study also found that those with lower CBRS scores weren't against the use of jargon. They just wanted it to mean something.¹

➼ Just for shits and giggles, we spun up a version of the CBRS test that you, dear reader, can take yourself.

TASTE ➽ Prine Number
Why sing the blues when you can sing the mean reds?
Dan Reeder, a 71-year-old folk singer and weirdo who has spent the last four decades making instruments in Nuremberg and recording folky koans for John Prine's Oh Boy Records, is having a moment. After boygenius covered his song "Stay Down, Man" and Jeff Tweedy big upped him to his audience of suburban white guys, Reeder went on tour (and Colbert) with his daughter and, last week, put out the live album Dan and Peggy Reeder Live, which has 153,000 monthly listeners on Spotify — 0.4% of Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets but not nothing. The 14th song on the album, entitled "Work Song," is particularly moving. It has only one pointed unclever lyric — "I've got all the fucking work I need" — but the $25-an-hour babysitter crowd sings along. It's deeply cathartic. Deeply.²

"Work Song" is not a blue-collar anthem or even a protest song. It's just a thought put to a chord progression. And everyone knows the words.

MONEY ➽ Campus Logic
Why is March Madness becoming contagious?
As UConn's Azzi Fudd dropped 26 first-half points on Syracuse last weekend, the Huskies' content team was already cutting clips. UConn runs a content studio inside Gampel Pavilion, producing branded material for Wendy's and Google. LSU runs a similar operation and now schedules "brand discovery meetings" with every incoming recruit to figure out how to market them as a personality. It's a wild setup — athletes are students, contractors, or brand ambassadors depending on what suits their institutions — but not without precedent. Arguably, colleges have operated similarly for decades: publish or perish is brand discovery minus the mass audience.

That campus logic is spreading into corporate America. Serhant, the New York real estate firm, trains every agent as a content producer and expects them to build a personal audience that doubles as a corporate distribution channel. The Big Four consulting firms expect "thought leadership" output. Even Beehiiv, the newsletter platform responsible for delivering this email, demands employees use its product to grow their own lists. As AI commoditizes much of tech and media as distribution and parasocial relationships become a more effective moat than product, every employee with a story to tell is going to wind up telling it — repeatedly.

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 the press gets wrong about economic hardship.

Oil is at $106 a barrel. Mortgage rates are up half a point since February. Gas is nearly $4 a gallon and climbing. White-collar layoffs just hit their highest year-to-date total since 2009. The economy is K-shaped. No, wait, it's E-shaped. No wait, it's É-shaped.

Ink may be spilling faster than crude in Tehran's 5th district, but the economic sound and fury signifies very little to the average  upper-middle class media superconsumer taking it in – all those heds, deks, and pull quotes from the President of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It feels less trenchant than a protest or Edith Wharton.

When the media writes about the middle class, conflating the lower middle and the upper middle, they are writing about two groups that have little in common besides shared bands of income around $100K. When the media writes about the wealthy, conflating the upper middle and the 1%, they are writing about two groups that have little in common besides resilient spending. We've known for 70 years — probably 140 — that when economics are conflated with class, the toll of turmoil is miscalculated. And that's particularly true for the upper-middle class because what's at stake is not just money. Sure, the extra $1.32 on Oat Milk stings. But displacement is what kills you.

Thus Wharton, who wrote about what gets lost when a person cannot "figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room." That's Wharton's description of Lily Bart, who spends The House of Mirth getting displaced very hard in the ass.

"I have tried hard," Bart says, "but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole?"

The hole Lily fits into isn’t a VP-level marketing role at a mid-sized agency. It’s the aristocracy. And, off-putting as it may sound, the upper-middle class largely functions as an aristocracy superimposed on the logarithmic graph of Americans’ net worth. We self-replicate through institutions rather than through inheritance, conferring standing through credentials and connections, but… pahtato, pootato. As Lily learned, the sure sign of an aristocracy is that what's valuable in it is pretty damn worthless outside it. A lot of people in what has come to be understood as the upper-middle class – the top two deciles minus the top 1% (fuck-you money, not fuck-everyone money) – have those kinds of valuables. A film degree from Vassar counts.

In 1963, getting from the median to upper-middle class required multiplying your wealth sixfold. By 2016, it required multiplying it twelvefold, a 2x increase. Over the same period, a degree from Vassar went from costing $13,500-a-year to costing $93,000. The top two wealth deciles left the pack behind, but the material circumstances of those in the lower half of that group (at minimum) didn’t actually change for the better. In New York, the median home now costs 7.3 times the median household income. In Los Angeles, 10.8 times. That's 2x up in the last 40 years. The result is profound precarity exacerbated by the fact that many of the decreasingly unaffordable mechanisms the upper-middle class has historically used to self-reproduce, aren’t as effective as they once were. Legacy admissions are illegal in much of the country. Unpaid internships too. Careers that once allowed those with cultural capital to cash in are disappearing. 

C. Wright Mills saw this coming in 1951 when he described a cultural change brought on by the rise of white-collar work: “the basis of security shifted from property ownership to education for a career.” Mills went on to pull a Nostradamus, foretelling the collapse of that credential-based systems due to the inflationary pressure of elite overproduction and an arms race to claim ever-more credentials in order to secure ever-more ordinary jobs. Displacing people who own land requires force or a really big wave³. Displacing people who own land equivalents requires nothing more than patience and a P&L.

Poverty was the smaller of Lily Bart's problems. Displacement was the big one. People who don't understand that write dumb copy. Consider Newsweek noting that "for the first time in a long time, white-collar workers are feeling the pinch of job insecurity that many blue-collar workers have felt for a long time." The phrase "for the first time" is pretty wild given that Mills identified the ever-increasing structural fragility of credential-based class position and its attendant anxieties 75 years ago. What makes this moment unusual is not the precarity of white-collar jobs, but the coincidence of that precarity with the breakdown of the aristocratic upper-middle class project of self-replication.

The project matters. It’s not only a source of feelings. It’s a source of spending. A K-shaped economy suggests divergence. The wealthy spending freely, everyone else pulling back. But within the wealthy there are two groups: rich people unaffected by economic turbulence and semi-rich people overextending themselves to keep what they regard (though they'd never admit it) as a birthright. Headlines like CNBC's "Iran war, oil price surge worsen K-shaped economy" mistake resilient spending for a sign of confidence. Some of it is. Some of it isn’t.

Some of it is a desperate attempt to cling to what used to seem like solid land and now feels like treadable water.

Edith Wharton described Lily Bart as "the victim of the civilization which had produced her." It's hard not to be. Maybe impossible for America's pseudo-aristocrats. Because a poor aristocrat is not lower-middle class or working class or destitute. She's a poor aristocrat. Anyone pretending otherwise is writing fiction.

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.

Mr. Market is Andrew Feinberg, a retired hedge fund manager who has beaten the S&P 500 for the last 30 years. He is the author/co-author of four books on personal finance.

Dear Mr. Market, 

Just saw that the co-founder of Super Micro Computer was criminally charged for illegally shipping Nvidia chips to China. Didn’t the company get caught once before?

Déjà Vu in Dallas

Dear Déja,

Before taking a 33% dive on Friday, the stock had already gotten crushed courtesy of the Justice Department announcing an investigation into the company’s accounting after a whistleblower complaint. Some simple rules to live by here:

1.  All white-collar defendants are guilty until proven innocent.⁴
2. All whistleblower complaints are valid. 
3.  Bad actors will be recidivists. 

The only thing I agree with Jim Cramer about is that if you see one accounting problem it won’t be the last.

The Super Micro fraud is allegedly enormous, which mean almost everyone had to be involved. Ernst & Young, Super Micro’s auditor, resigned. It’s the kind of situation where there’s only one thing you can do: Walk away as the building blows up behind you and don’t look back. (My history here: I made 19% on the stock in early 2024 and sold at about $40, just when its epic ramp began. It’s now $22.) 

Super Micro is a unique case, but it’s also not. Fraudsters gonna fraud. 

Trevor Milton, who made  Nikola’s truck look like it worked by only filming it going downhill, was convicted of securities and wire fraud. Then he gave $3.2 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign and, voila, got a pardon. Now he’s running SyberJet Aircraft, which makes PJs for businessfolk. The planes might remain airborne, but Milton won’t. That kinda guy always crashes.

I’ve tried to get my friend David to sell his Tilray cannabis investment for years, partly because the CEO, Irwin Simon, reached an internal controls settlement with the SEC when he ran Hain Celestial. “Only crooks settle with the SEC,” I said. But David’s friendly with the guy. He’s down 90% on his investment.

Is that Simon’s fault? I don’t know. What I do know is that people who cheat do so for one of two reasons: They’re corrupt or they’re not good enough to play fair and win.

Sincerely,
Mr. Market

[2] Not to be the Millennial Brooklyn hipster guy with a beard (oh shit…), but I’ve loved Reeder for a long time. My favoritest song is “Tulips on the Table” because my mental health is shit.

[3] In the 15th century a bunch of lordly estates in East Yorkshire got wiped off the map by the ocean. So, yeah, that does happen from time to time.

[4] As a policy, Upper Middle is very pro-due process. But like, sometimes that process is a bit more complicated than it needs to be….