➺ November 4, 2025

As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.

Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.

Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

➽ Move Fast and Things Break You
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein hits Netflix.
Timely, maybe – but the metaphor is off. Modern monsters chase everyone but their creators. Still, Shelley nailed it: “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

➽ The Great Q4 Reorg
George Packer trades Baghdad for dystopia.
The great chronicler of America’s Middle-Eastern misadventures has a new novel imagining a collapsing empire where urban guilds feud with rural yeomen. Sounds ham-handed, but Packer is probably kosher.

➽ Expansive Kitchen Rock
British saxophonist Venna’s MALIK is elite cooking music.
If you sautéed to Khruangbin in 2021, wok out to this.

EAVESDROPPINGS: Two friends waiting by the bar of a brasserie in D.C. complaining about Trump's new ballroom. One calls it ugly. One calls it horrifying. Then the first leans in over her Manhattan. "On the other hand," she says. "I would not hate being invited to a ball." They clink glasses.

Heard something profoundly Upper Middle. Please share (anonymously if you’d prefer).

The “THANKFUL PEOPLE SURVEY” is an attempt to understand what kinds of relationships inspire the most gratitude in members of the Oat Milk Elite. Full results will be shared with Upper Middle Research members and those that complete the survey.

How we use science to punch down.

It started, as most moral panics do, on morning television. In March, 1983, Dr. Richard Smith sat down with Frank Bough, the tawny host of the BBC’s Breakfast Time, to discuss his study, “Sun Beds and Melanoma,” recently published in the British Medical Journal.  Pale and earnest, Smith described the risks of both ultraviolet radiation and mutagenic exposure. Bough listened and glistened, evincing enough interest not to offend his guest and enough skepticism not too offend his audience.

In her new book The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain – sure to sell tens of copies –historian Fabiola Creed describes what happened next. The Daily Mail ran all caps headlines and The Times sniffed at the vulgarity of it all. Dermatologists, happy to field calls from journalists, piled on. It took a few years, but eventually the scolds settled on a neologism for all those working-class women in Essex and gay men in Manchester: tanorexics¹.

This kind of thing happens all the time. It’s Mountain Dew kills your sperm. It’s Pumpkin Spice Lattes contain antifreeze. Its McDonald’s fries don’t decompose.

The last acceptable form of class snobbery is science-based condescension toward middle-class people making unhealthy decisions. Critiques are dressed up in wellness lingo, but the real conversation is now and has always been about rationality. Science began as a gentleman’s pursuit defined against the self-interested bullshittery of men with commercial concerns, and it still carries vestigial traces of its evolution: linguistic austerity, institutional bias, and expert froideur. The result is often a dismissive and uninquisitive attitude toward mass culture. Dr. Smith wasn’t wrong on the data, but he was wrong about people. They want color. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is proof of this. It is also, ironically, a natural experiment testing whether the masses can behave with scientific rationally. 

Maybe not.

SETTLING ON THE LEFT SIDE OF TOWN
Ironically, the urban semi-rich won’t vote for someone who works for their boss.

Today is the mayoral election in NYC and, much to the chagrin of Cuomosexuals, Zohran Mamdani will likely dominate in neighborhoods with six-figure median household incomes. His popularity with high-earners in the primary shocked pundits, who thought Oat Milk Elites weren’t focus on cost of living. Well, we are and aren’t. For us, it’s not really the cost of living – it’s the cost of staying. Specifically, it’s the cost of staying in one of the three neighborhoods we all occupy….

Ratsburg

Ratsburg is where Vassar theater majors enjoy their “Fantine Era” (haircut included) while living in parent-subsidize housing and applying for social impact or social media gig. Within this dirtbaggification zone, former cum laudes learn to cum loudly and participating in a system of mutual assured destitution requiring them to thrift knitwear, knit thriftwear, inhale blow and blow men with inhalers. Politics skew leftist because cost of living time limits arrested development.

Earnest Heights

Earnest Heights is where futons give way to sectionals. Full of rescue dogs with short faces and downwardly mobile creatives with long faces, this neighborhood attracts the sort of Linkedin Liberals that worry low-six figure agency gigs have turned them into an unstoppable army of gentrification. In fact, these concerns are a polite, circumspect way to voice their real concern – gthat they don’t belong and never did. It’s not about cost of living, but what they could afford in the suburbs at the same price point.

SoBroMoFo

This neighborhood is what happens to Earnest Heights when the fleece vest people buy out the fleece jacket people and invite their private equity buddies over for DoorDashed wagyu sliders. The knock on SoBroMoFo is that it’s a mall. The truth is that it’s a cluster of $1-$5 million dollar assets occupied by wealthy people who have been snubbed or shorted by a millionaire and who experienced their own cost of living crisis when their local Montessori hiked rates.

Some headphones are made for listening to music. Some for listening to podcasts. Some for not listening to strangers on the subways platform. Don’t think of them as noise-canceling; think of them as people-canceling.

[2] Fun little race science tangent: Caffeine is broken down primarily by an enzyme encoded by the CYP1A2 gene. People with the “fast” variant metabolize caffeine quickly. People with the “slow” variant break it down more slowly. Studies suggest that the slow variant is less common among Northern and Western Europeans and more common among Southern Europeans and Asians. Much of the Rust Belt skews massively Northern and Western European so… yeah. Drink up Cleveland.

[3] It’s worth noting that plenty of scientists in the space had spent years voicing frustration with the FDA. Also, parenting- or baby-related behavior is going to get moralized far more if it can be portrayed as unhealthy – even if the evidence is really, really slim.

[4] Funnily enough, many of the people MAHA targets for contempt are “Soy Boys,” a sobriquet for feminized men (like me!) rooted in overstated scientific claims about the effects of consuming soy.