➺ March 31, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. There's a small pond in the woods near my house where the neighborhood frogs go to hook up. It reminds me of a first-date bar I used to live near in Brooklyn — the one my wife and I used to rubberneck. We didn't envy those hushed, anxious kids.

But I do envy the frogs. They sing and splash. They do what comes naturally.. - AB

➺ Semi-Announcement: Next week, Upper Middle will launch a new data product that will help readers compare themselves to their peers. We’re getting excited….

FOUR ON THE FLOOR

The bracket has been mostly chalk — and then there's UConn. Down 19 to Duke in the Elite Eight, the Huskies won on a logo three with 0.4 seconds left and are now in Indianapolis as underdogs to Illinois. If you watched that game and have a take on whether Dan Hurley does it again tonight, put your money where your mouth is with Novig, the peer-to-peer sports trading exchange where odds are set by other fans, not a sportsbook padding its margins.

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What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Alldorks
Why are shoe companies different?
This week, Allbirds sold to American Exchange Group, the holding company that owns Ed Hardy, for $39 million or <1% of its 2021 market cap. The collapse has been blamed on a chaotic approach to brick and mortar, a bewildering foray into leggings, and durability problems, but the brand died because its non-core consumers’ disliked its core consumers. Popularized by the sort of mid-level tech workers who share LinkedIn copypasta about how Steve Jobs wore New Balance 992s because he was solely focused on the work, the brand traded at a multiple of Silicon Valley workers’ reputation. The company’s market cap traced the creative classes attitudes toward junior product managers at Palantir.

Having a less-than-aspiration core consumer is always curtains for a shoe company. That’s because shoes are special. A 2012 study in the Journal of Research in Personality found that people shown only photographs of strangers' most-worn shoes could accurately identify their income, age, and attachment style. Everyday footwear is incredibly telling, which is why Allbirds went the way of the Alldodo. The brand grew by marketing itself to people who wanted a uniform, but ultimately sold uniformity.

TASTE ➽ Declassified Content
Why does the culture section take culture seriously?
The #oldmoney aesthetic is a thing on TikTok and, about four years late, the Times' man about noun, Guy Trebay, has given the trend the Grey Lady’s patented unserious treatment: an article-shaped pooh-poohing that employs ironic distance but fails to identify the source of irony. Previous recipients of the treatment: tradwifery, quiet luxury, and dark academia. In this case, the source of irony is "declassification anxiety" — the tendency of people experiencing economic or social precarity to sublimate that anxiety into gatekeeping on behalf of groups that won't admit them. A little bloodline fetishism. A little simping for Daisy Buchanan. #Oldmoney is about the would-be cultural arbiters lack of access to #newmoney.

Sure, covering cowlneck sweaters and tortoise-shell glasses is lower stakes than covering Gaza, but if culture is worth covering, it's worth covering as culture rather than as ephemera. Trebay doesn’t even try. Instead, he interviews an influencer pretending to be named "Carter Beau" and, hilariously, the skeptical scion of Stefano Ricci, a Florentine atelier known for dressing Russian petrogarchs. He neglects to observe that the #oldmoney aesthetic is the mood-boardification of the Protestant elite as reimagined by Ralph Lifshitz Lauren , who was ripping off Bobby Garnett, a Black vintage dealer better known as Bobby from Boston. Just because the story didn’t require a conflict reporter doesn’t mean there wasn’t any conflict.

MONEY ➽ Shiteating Contest
Why should corporate ass-kissers care about A.I.?
A new study published in Science finds that AI models affirm users 49% more often than humans and that users are more likely to trust sycophantic responses anyway. These results mirror James Westphal and Marne Bednar's landmark 2005 study of corporate board members, which found that those who flatter CEOs receive more board appointments regardless of company performance. Both studies suggest there is robust and resilient demand for executive-level flattering. A question arises: will the brown-nosed careerists currently tasked with unapologetic fawning lose their jobs to AI?

The study tested 11 models used by 2,405 participants. The results were consistent: a single conversation with a sycophantic AI measurably reduced willingness to take responsibility. As the authors note, this creates the same vicious cycle Westphal and Bednar documented: sycophancy distorts judgment but drives engagement, leading to more sycophancy. In effect, the decline in judgment seen among CEOs with captured boards will now occur at all levels of management. That will, of course, make honest feedback more valuable. It will also suppress demand.

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Who we fight is often who we become.

In 2017, Walter Scheidel argued in The Great Leveler that mass mobilization warfare is history's most reliable engine of equality. That conclusion was supported by what happened during and after World War II. The converse of that conclusion – professional warfare is an engine of inequality – is supported by what has happened since.

When Nietzsche said "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," he wasn’t just offering an admonition. He was describing a process scientists call coevolution and philosophers call mimetic rivalry. Through opposition, competing organisms come to mirror each other. This is why war with Iran will necessarily and inevitably lead to the Iranification of America.

The history of modern American warfare is the history of monsters fighting.

World War II, 1941–1945
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude. At least it's an ethos. Specifically, it's an ethos of extreme militarization through conscription America matched with its own conscript army drawn from every class, financed through progressive taxation, and demilitarized via the GI Bill, which transformed America into a middle-class dominated homeowner society¹. 

❧ The Cold War, 1947–1964
The American reaction to the looming threat of socialism was the largest peacetime public investment in human capital in the country's history: the research university, the National Defense Education Act, the student loan, NASA, DARPA, the interstate highway system — all of it justified as national security expenditure. The Soviet Union's primary appeal was a (largely rhetorical) focus on the sort of economic equality America delivered by enacting a popular, socialist-lite agenda.

Though Korea was a significant proxy conflict, the mass militarization of the Cold War came in the wake of the Sputnik moment in 1957, when the government quadrupled of federal R&D spending over a decade, speeding the growth of the upper-middle class. Spoils were not distributed equally — Boeing and Raytheon saw to that — but the Cold War saw the the flattest income distribution in recorded American history as the benefits of an economic boom trickled down significantly rather than just being sponged up at the top. The Cold War leveled not because it demanded shared sacrifice, but because it demanded an ideology that made nationalism feel like a moral stance.

❧ Vietnam, 1964–1975
In 1964, President Johnson initiated the first war fought predominantly by America's poor. The draft deferment system, engineered by Selective Service director Lewis Hershey, exempted enrolled college students from conscription — making college deferment the upper-middle class's ticket out. Enrollment spiked, but working-class men — disproportionately Black and brown — didn't make it through admissions. Those in power in both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. outsourced the suffering to people they didn’t know. Nixon formalized that system in 1973 by abolishing the draft and establishing the all-volunteer force², making the arrangement permanent.

❧ The Gulf War, 1990–1991
Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a state whose military and economic power rested on oil wealth controlled by a small ruling class — a spoils system dressed in the uniform of a security state. America's response to the perceived threat to oil supply lines, engineered by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, was to buttress a working-class army with privatized contractors, creating a spoils system for companies like Bechtel and Halliburton, where Cheney went on to become CEO.

❧ Afghanistan, 2001–2021
The September 11 attacks were carried out by a stateless, decentralized, privatized network of roughly 19 men operating outside any national chain of command, financed through informal money transfers. America's response was to build a decentralized, stateless, privatized fighting forces of its own. (Organizationally, Blackwater resembles Al-Qaeda — a non-state actor financed through state-adjacent channels.) Half of the $14 trillion spent on post-9/11 military operations went directly to private contractors.

❧ Iraq, 2003–2011
Iraq had nothing to do with September 11 or WMDs. The conflict³ served to liberate contractors from the pretense of strategic rationale, most profitably by disbanding the Iraqi army, manufacturing an insurgency, and billing for both (and that $9 billion in cash that just kinda... went missing).

❧ Iran, 2025–
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is profiting enormously from the current conflict, controls an estimated one-third of the Iranian economy — construction, telecommunications, oil, pharmaceuticals, imports — not as a military with a business arm but as a business with a military arm, organized around the permanent displacement of Iran's professional elite, now in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York, building the kind of liberal credentialed society the IRGC exists to prevent.

These interests use the smokescreen of theocratic language to obscure a crude scramble for contracts, freeing capital to finish off the experts and professionals opposed to the monstrousness of the enterprise: securing ruling-class treasure with working-class blood.
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READ THE BOTTLE

Saponified palm oil. Water. Done. Soap is not a complicated product. But the ingredients label of a $22 Aesop bar makes it seem like washing your hands requires someone who got at least a B+ in organic chemistry. That's because the makers of aspirational soaps expect first-time buyers to read the label or, at least, to look at it thoughtfully before making their choice based on price point. Here's how they getcha.

The Translation Aesop lists Lavandula Angustifolia Oil. The English translation, Lavender, gets stuck in as a parenthetical, just like Water gets stuck in after Aqua on bottles of Aesop's Resurrection Aromatique Hand Wash and Water-Eau, which means French water, on bottles of Santa Maria Novella's Rosa Novella Liquid Soap.

The Unnecessary Detail US law does not require brands to list individual fragrance allergens, but there Aesop goes listing Limonene and Linalool only to be outdone by Malin + Goetz, which lists actual amino acids: arginine, aspartic acid, glycine, alanine, serine, valine, isoleucine, proline, threonine, histidine, and phenylalanine. Not to be outdone, Dr. Bronner's has footnotes⁴.

The Surfactant Ladder Goop-y skincare nerds get worked into a lather about the importance of not getting worked into a lather, which is why the frothy Sodium Laureth Sulfate used by Dial and Jo Malone is replaced with Sodium Cocoyl Glycinate, Disodium Cocoyl Glutamate, or, one presumes, Trisodium Cocoyl Glutamate in the sort of soaps that wind up on the floor of Starwood bathrooms.

[2] There’s obviously a lot to be said for an all-volunteer army, but the word “volunteer” is doing a lot of work there. America has a lot of Pooriors.

[3] Iraq is interesting because it’s an almost entirely non-ideological war. The U.S. position was not morally defensible, but neither was Saddam’s. Neither side had anything to learn from the other. And neither did!

[4] I once got super high on a camping trip and read the whole bottle. Strong recommend. Really good if you like the work of Pynchon and the feel of plastic.