CLASS NOTES
Personal Time BanditsCorporate America was built by war heroes then rebuilt by hippies. No wonder Silicon Valley went from white collar to brownshirt.
For most of our history, professions were heritable in the form of tools, land, and know-how. All the changed when Horace the tinsmith and Zebulon the wheelwright skittered toward the factories....
Good taste use to be a good business. Now, it’s an obstacle for big businesses looking to scale ad revenue. It’s why you’ll be reading more and more about cruises and less and less about Umbria.
Targeting data makes culture into a diagnostic rather than project, driving down – in a very real financial sense – the value of the sort of curation most lifestyle publishers were created to do.
As the American frontier closed, violence became entwined with ambition. Why would it be any different in the NIMBY-filled suburbs?
Sometime around 1880, Mark Twain leaned back in a Morris chair or a stupor or both and quipped: “Buy land. They’re not making any more of it.” That quote is now regurgitated birdlike by every visiting drunkle with a BA in economics. But Twain wasn’t talking about investments.
Rabbi-Curious
Yids and Micks locked out of elite industries built the modern media then used the modern media to rebuild the elite. Guess who ain’t so happy about it? The Mayflower Mafia.
Just beneath reactionary caterwauling about liberal media bias lies a Protestant cultural anxiety about the intellectual ascendance of non-Protestants in America. The real objection is to a religious – yes, religious – preference for shared truth over individual truth.
Yids and Micks locked out of elite industries built the modern media then used the modern media to rebuild the elite. Guess who ain’t so happy about it? The Mayflower Mafia.
Just beneath reactionary caterwauling about liberal media bias lies a Protestant cultural anxiety about the intellectual ascendance of non-Protestants in America. The real objection is to a religious – yes, religious – preference for shared truth over individual truth.
America used to be run by a cabal of gin-soaked Protestants with Mayflower blood and a tennis match scheduled for 3PM EST. Obviously, most of their employees hated these hopped up aristocats, but life without them ain't going great.
After JFK – a Harvard man so indoctrinated into WASP culture he survived the Pacific Theater but not a trip to Dallas – took one for the team, the political center held together by fibrous Yankee institutionalism began fray like a front hall oriental.
Rabbi-Curious
Yids and Micks locked out of elite industries built the modern media then used the modern media to rebuild the elite. Guess who ain’t so happy about it? The Mayflower Mafia.
Just beneath reactionary caterwauling about liberal media bias lies a Protestant cultural anxiety about the intellectual ascendance of non-Protestants in America. The real objection is to a religious – yes, religious – preference for shared truth over individual truth.
Yids and Micks locked out of elite industries built the modern media then used the modern media to rebuild the elite. Guess who ain’t so happy about it? The Mayflower Mafia.
Just beneath reactionary caterwauling about liberal media bias lies a Protestant cultural anxiety about the intellectual ascendance of non-Protestants in America. The real objection is to a religious – yes, religious – preference for shared truth over individual truth.
Interior decorating isn't just about turning a house into a home. It's about turning a home into a social certification. But things can go badly awry.
After the totes, it was frayed Persian rugs, Eames chairs, Herman Miller chairs, Shaker chairs, barn-door tables with leafy Bordallo Pinheiro dishes on top, baby grand pianos, baby music classes, tennis bracelets, tennis rackets, änglaspels, apothecary jars, framed diplomas, frayed passports, Top Siders....
Parlor Games
The original upwardly mobile professionals subdivided their homes to impress the neighbors. Now they bemoan the villas in the subdivision down the street.
As American homes got bigger, the spaces inside those homes got smaller. The daughters of the sons of the daughters of the sons of factory managers who grew up with money now associate ‘comfyness” with affluence and the open-plans with new money.
The original upwardly mobile professionals subdivided their homes to impress the neighbors. Now they bemoan the villas in the subdivision down the street.
As American homes got bigger, the spaces inside those homes got smaller. The daughters of the sons of the daughters of the sons of factory managers who grew up with money now associate ‘comfyness” with affluence and the open-plans with new money.
Lots of people worry about gentrification, but no one has ever drowned in the first wave. It's the second one that gets you (rich).
We aren’t among the 25% of Americans that skew the mobility numbers by staying put. We move to multicultural urban neighborhoods real estate agents assign clumsy neologisms like “Sodomofo” or exclusive enclaves they just call “Town.” Often, we do it in that order. It’s almost as though we have no choice.
The only thing better than having money is having more money than your friends. Or yourself a few years ago. The problem? Eventually this self is yourself a few years ago.
Data suggests that well-off children from high-income areas have worse expected health outcomes than less well-off children from middle-class towns. There’s an obvious explanation: anxiety.