➺ October 16, 2025

WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER

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Good fences make good neighbors. Good neighbors make good fencing teams.

According to a new nationwide spatial econometric study (I know, you just can't get enough of them), it's no longer enough to move to the right town with the best school; you have to move to the right cluster with the strong intra-school rivalries. Students in districts located within high-performing clusters (think: Scarsdale-Bronxville-Pelham in New York, Palo Alto-Cupertino-Los Altos¹ in California) now score 0.35-.4 standard deviations higher in math than students in wealthy enclaves. That may not sound like much, but it's roughly equal to a month of learning per year. 

Study author Samantha Traves, a PhD candidate at McGill, discovered this phenomenon, which she's dubbed “concentrated advantage,” by flipping academic inequality scholarship on its head. Rather than focusing on how poor schools got that way – generally bad state policy and funding issues – she focused on how rich schools got rich. The driver turned out not to be policy or funding or even local taxes. Clusters emerged, she found, because white-collar professionals seek each other out, moving to academically and culturally homogenous areas. It's academic speculation – a sort of gold rush mentality but for National Merit Scholarships. 

Here's why it happens: Once a few adjacent districts get a good rep, high-income families start home shopping, driving up property values, boosting local budgets, and creating both a competitive market for teaching talent and inter-district competition as educators scramble outscore and out-AP class each other². An enclave becomes an area becomes a cluster becomes a fortress (protected by children with swords).

➺ Human achievement peaks in late middle age, between 55 and 60. ➺ The mirror card is the new platinum card. ➺ What does enlightened mean? ➺ The great lesson of history: Sometimes surrender, but never surrender your judgment.

The “THERAPYSPEAK SURVEY” is an attempt to understand how how members of the Oat Milk Elite use therapy to cope and how they cope with therapy itself. Full results will be shared with Upper Middle Research members and those that complete the survey.

Since her death on October 11, a lot of words have been used to describe Diane Keaton. One that hasn’t: fellatrix. It’s the word Woody Allen – a perv and a prick – used to describe his ex, muse, and ex-muse during her AFI lifetime-achievement tribute. A shitty thing to say? Sure. A gross way for Allen to assert co-authorship of Keaton’s public image? Absolutely. Inaccurate? Seemingly not. Keaton was the rare sex symbol whose appeal was rooted less in desirability than in her own desire. She was a nice, educated woman who liked sex. 

Keaton wasn’t coy about it. “I learned I couldn't shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful,” she wrote in her autobiography Then Again. Her characters seemed to share that openness – from Annie Hall (“You wanna come upstairs? I’m gonna sing.”) to Looking for Mr. Goodbar (“I just want to feel something.”) to Something’s Gotta Give (“You don’t understand – I like sex!”) – she played women adept at navigating pricks. Pauline Kael once said Keaton “suggests a woman who might actually like men.”³ That was the core of her very specific shiksappeal; her sexuality was her own. 

Keaton will be remembered as a great actress because she was a great actress and as an iconoclast because she was an iconoclast. But it's also worth mentioning what she wasn't: ashamed. Beneath the neurotic stammering and the suit jackets was a singular confidence and comfort that everyone wanted one way or another. That’s what Annie Hall was about, and it’s why Woody kept popping up wherever Diane went.

➺ No one watches LIV Golf. ➺ No one used to expect you to glow. Now everyone expects you to glow. ➺ California wine crisis! ➺ Swifties are going to the Wiesbaden State Museum to see Friedrich Heyser’s Ophelia. Whatever it takes I guess. ➺ Don’t know what to play while you’re cooking? Bill Evans. Always.

Since her death on October 11, a lot of words have been used to describe Diane Keaton. One that hasn’t: fellatrix. It’s the word Woody Allen – a perv and a prick – used to describe his ex, muse, and ex-muse during her AFI lifetime-achievement tribute. A shitty thing to say? Sure. A gross way for Allen to assert co-authorship of Keaton’s public image? Absolutely. Inaccurate? Seemingly not. Keaton was the rare sex symbol whose appeal was rooted less in desirability than in her own desire. She was a nice, educated woman who liked sex. 

Keaton wasn’t coy about it. “I learned I couldn't shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful,” she wrote in her autobiography Then Again. Her characters seemed to share that openness – from Annie Hall (“You wanna come upstairs? I’m gonna sing.”) to Looking for Mr. Goodbar (“I just want to feel something.”) to Something’s Gotta Give (“You don’t understand – I like sex!”) – she played women adept at navigating pricks. Pauline Kael once said Keaton “suggests a woman who might actually like men.”³ That was the core of her very specific shiksappeal; her sexuality was her own. 

Keaton will be remembered as a great actress because she was a great actress and as an iconoclast because she was an iconoclast. But it's also worth mentioning what she wasn't: ashamed. Beneath the neurotic stammering and the suit jackets was a singular confidence and comfort that everyone wanted one way or another. That’s what Annie Hall was about, and it’s why Woody kept popping up wherever Diane went.

➺ No one watches LIV Golf. ➺ No one used to expect you to glow. Now everyone expects you to glow. ➺ California wine crisis! ➺ Swifties are going to the Wiesbaden State Museum to see Friedrich Heyser’s Ophelia. Whatever it takes I guess. ➺ Don’t know what to play while you’re cooking? Bill Evans. Always.

The Fed’s October Beige Book, quilted together by the 12 districts, paints a pointillistic picture of a bifurcated economy. Nationally, spending has “inched down,” yet retail sales and tourism in Boston, New York, and San Francisco have been buoyed by luxury segments. In Atlanta, the high-end home market is “resilient” though demand for starter homes is sliding. Outside Chicago, spending on landscaping is “healthy" though fast casual restaurants are feeling a pinch. Beige story short: semi-rich high earners (wassup homie) are spending enough to obscure a middle-class recession. The “Trump Economy” rests mostly on the shoulders of people who didn’t vote for him.

There’s precedent for coastal American elites having this kind of leverage over a government hostile to their best interests (Trump II’s policies make it clear Don is fine King George-ing the ’burbs). In 1768, Boston’s merchant class signed the Non-Importation Agreements, pledging to halt purchases of British goods. Their boycott was deliberate, measured⁴ reaction to the Townshend Duties of 1767, which taxed imported glass, paper, paint, lead, and tea. Those new duties didn’t crush commerce, but they set a dangerous precedent: taxation without representation. Within two years, London exporters, losing revenue, pressed Parliament to repeal most of the duties.

Today’s professional class sits in a similar position: antagonized by a government hostile to the institutions and cities that define them. A quiet economic abstention would be powerful, but… will we do it? It’s hard not to be skeptical. We don’t seem ready to throw our Chase Sapphire cards into the Hudson just yet. But maybe it gets there.

➺ Job seekers don’t negotiate. It’s a big problem. ➺ The new floor for “comfortable” in New York is apparently $184K. That’s reductive, of course, but cost of living is nuts. ➺ The state of radiology explains what automation will (and won’t) do to your job.

“The greatest mystery about a human being,” Sinclair Lewis wrote in Main Street, “is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day.”

The fight over free speech matters, but the fight over paid speech will ultimately determine the direction of American culture (whether the New York cocktail party crowd likes it or not).

Survey results suggest that though most members of the professional managerial class benefit from some form of familial advantage, many are reluctant to admit it or to fully acknowledge the degree to which they are (probably) responsible for their own success.

[2] Educators are super competitive. People forget that.

[3] Pauline Kael suggests a woman whose work you should revisit if you ever get a chance. Not always spot on, but always deeply interesting.

[4] One of the undertaught truths of the Colonial American history is that the British could have maintained power in the New World if they had employed a simple strategy: Don’t act like craven dickheads. Being British, they were not able to pull this off.