How toUpper Middle
It’s not just about money. It’s about affect, choices, and the things we choose to keep and forget. It’s about what we do because that’s what we do and what we don’t do because it’s just not done. If someone is driving over for a visit, tell them where to park even if it seems profoundly self-evident. Confident people panic when it’s time to parallel.
Always compliment a fish monger before making a purchase. Assume there’s a not-so-great piece of salmon in the mix and that he knows which one it is.
Every once in a while decide that you’re in the mood to listen to classical music then remember that you don’t know very much about classical music and stare blankly at a smart device for a minute and half. Have Alexa play a Chopin nocturne.
If you can avoid it, never speak ill of the Buffalo Bills. It will make you sound like the worst kind of snob.
If you're fortunate enough to have old family photos, put them out. They were taken for you. Don't be ungrateful.
Doctors, lawyers, and other Jewish mother-approved careerists with academic credentials, mixed feelings about the people they serve, plans to buy a place upstate, and precisely 1.75 kids humping around an onerous tax burden while scanning the horizon for the next brass ring.
Respect assigned seats in the living room, especially during streaming hours. Not the time or place to experiment.
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Self-Important Pillows
A “flanged border” is a strip of fabric running around the edge of a pillowcase used by designers – notably designers employed by Williams-Sonoma and Schumacher – to give decorative cushions a formal look. The flange – that little collar – is the surest sign a household is suffering from “bedroom inflation,” a phenomenon that occurs when making the bed no longer feels sufficient and the focus turns to making the bed great. ($259)
The Eames Elephant
Charles and Ray Eames liked elephants, so they origami-ed one in 1945 while experimenting with molded plywood MoMA put it on display the next year. Then, in 2017, Vitra started selling plastic versions for up-scale nurseries. Big posthumous hit.
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Depression Glassware
Many if not most of the colorful goblets manufactured in the Rust Belt between 1929 and 1939 and sold to struggling Americans were discarded or destroyed in the Post-World War II boom years. The glasses, patterned and playful as they were, also represented a reminder of bad times. Then, in the early 1980s, Martha Stewart began using them to punch up her elaborate tablescapes and they got popular again, this time with a hipper crowd that didn’t mind using a pedestal dish as an ashtray. Many of these cups now share cabinets with Waterford crystal. And probably feel pretty good about it. (Cheap, Etsy)
Put a “Chef’s Towel” on your shoulder when you’re cooking. It gives you something to grab when you inevitably burn yourself making dessert.
In 2009, Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, consultants and partners at Boston Consulting Group made a career-defining claim in the sweat-stained pages of the recession-era Harvard Business Review: “Women now drive the world economy.” It was a provocation targeted at old schoolers still counting the subprime mortgages stuffed in the inside breast pockets of their Brooks Brothers hopsack blazers. The real point was that women control the bulk of consumer spending. And not 51%.
At the time, Silverstein and Sayre put the number at 73%.
Consultants gonna consult so Silverstein and Sayre broke down female consumers in six categories: Fast-tracker, Pressure cooker, Relationship focused, Managing on her own, Fulfilled empty nester, and Making ends meet. Of these, the “fast-tracker,” an economically liberated Upper Middle lady in a hurry, represented the big opportunity. At some point, someone – it’s not readily clear who because… Reddit – named this woman Becky and created the $BECKY ETF.
$BECKY is not a real, listed ETF. (Michael Lewis gets this wrong in Going Infinite, which is unlike him so we’ll let it go this once.) $BECKY is an investment hypothesis wrapped in a thought experiment: A person can bet on the economic might of professional women by investing in specific companies catering to their desires and needs: Apple, Coty Inc, Decker's Outdoor Corp (Uggs), Diageo, Estee Lauder, Etsy, LB (Victoria's Secret), L'Oreal, LuluLemon, LVMH, National Beverage (LaCroix), Netflix, Nike, Planet Fitness, Snapchat, Starbucks, Target, Tiffany & Co, Ulta Beauty inc, Under Armour, VF Corp. (Google Sheet for the dweebs.)
After the Silverstein and Sayre article was published, $BECKY overperformed the market, 10xing “investors” investments by 2021. Since then, $BECKY has crashed the X3. $BECKY has now underperformed the market since 2009 [3]. That said, you can’t keep a good girl down. Time to update the stock list. - Upper Middle will be rolling out an $UPPERMIDDLE ETF inspired by $BECKY next week. We salute our foremother and appreciate her driving us to soccer.
The Upper Middle Shelf Buy these books. Read 2/3rds of 2/3rds of them.
If a friend comes over before 5pm and it’s not explicitly for a meal, put out a plate of cookies. No one complains about a plate of cookies.
Take miniature golf more seriously than actual golf. There's a real chance you could get good at it.
If you brought a kinda shitty bottle of wine you don’t have to call attention to the fact it’s a kind of shitty bottle of wine. If the host cares, he’ll clock it. If not, he won’t.
Tell the clerk that you’re “just browsing” even when you know exactly what you’re looking for.
Acknowledge that there is only one cardinal sin that forever brands a person as unworthy of polite society: failing to recycle espresso pods
Have a good idea of what’s going on with SNL even though you haven’t watched it live in over a decade (if ever) and have generally mixed feelings on the current cast.
Eat weird meets – mostly venison, but also elk and ostrich. Experiment occasionally with vegetarianism, but don’t get dogmatic about it. Worry a bit about what you’ll tell your kid when they’re old enough to ask where the cut came from.
Feel good about your investing strategy even though you can’t articulate it and don’t know if you under- or over-performed the market.
Creative professionals with “content,” “strategist,” or “marketing” in their titles.
Order top-shelf tequila and scotch, middle-shelf bourbon and gin, and bottom shelf vodka. Also, bruschetta for the table. Your treat.
Try on a turtleneck sweater. You don’t have to buy it or anything, but try it on. They work more often then you think.
Try to break in a pair of hiking boots while walking to brunch.
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Bordallo Pinheiro Roughage
Before a ceramic sculpture he made of a populist sold for big money in the early 1880s, Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro was a well-known Portuguese political cartoonist. He made a career pivot, setting up a factory to produce funky, majolica-style ceramics. His cabbage leaf plates and bowls quickly caught on in the U.K., but Portugal went fascist in the 1920s and the economy tanked. Non-Portuguese brands in the U.K. and started making Pinheiro-style vegetable bowls. U.S. manufactures copied them. Eventually, shelves at Williams-Sonoma were fully stocked. (Check Out the Real Deal.)
Horsebit Loafers
Dreamt up by Gucci in 1953, horsebit loafers are a cavalier nod to equestrianism with a Florentine feel (Coppola is a fan) and a FiDi jangle (so is Jordan Belfort). Obnoxious? Sure, but beloved by those ready to pony up.harles and Ray Eames liked elephants, so they origami-ed one in 1945 while experimenting with molded plywood MoMA put it on display the next year. Then, in 2017, Vitra started selling plastic versions for up-scale nurseries. Big posthumous hit.
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The Briefcase Backgammon Board
Backgammon is having a moment, but unlike last time that happened (1973), the Skor-Mor board game company isn’t around to take advantage. Vintage Skor-Mor sets are popping up on eBay, but the modern move is to find a lookalike set made with better materials. Get the vibe (and the handle), but avoid the faux leather. The best of the bunch, the High-Gloss Ebony Wood set from Brouk nails the brief. ($300)
Understand the rules of almost every sport regardless of whether or not you can name a single team or player. Form strong feelings about referees.
Creative professionals with their best days behind them clinging to low-paid prestige jobs in spiraling sectors while trying to get that next project off the ground and avoid taking a job with “content,” “strategist,” or “marketing” in the title. Constantly wondering when they became unfuckable.
Assign your dog a specific towel and then, when you get behind on doing the laundry, use that towel to dry your hair. Feel just a little weird about it.
If you brought a kinda shitty bottle of wine you don’t have to call attention to the fact it’s a kind of shitty bottle of wine. If the host cares, he’ll clock it. If not, he won’t.
Highly competent and totally replaceable members of the ops, product, and UX orgs of post D-Round tech companies with heavily diluted options, an idea for a start-up, a professional coach, and a low-key interest in libertarianism directly proportional to the positive reinforcement received from their fathers. Likes Vegas more than they let on.
Try to like things. If you can’t manage it, fine. But try. This goes double for pop music. And family.
Every two or three years go to an NFL game. Make a big production of it and then remember that it’s a better to watch on TV.
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Winter Car Sunglasses
Because prevailing winds used to push factory smoke the other way, most affluent suburbs in America are west of downtown, which means that most people driving an Audi home in December are going to be squinting into a slowly setting sun. All the more reason to keep a spare pair of aviators (probably Ray-Ban, maybe Randolph) in the center console.
Williams-Sonoma Peppermint Bark Tins
The actual peppermint bark never lasts long – it’s delicious – but the tins stick around for years, accommodating the latest batch of sugar cookies, a few special ornaments, or cards meaningful enough to keep, but not meaningful enough to put on the mantel.
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The (Personal) U.S. Constitution
Having a personal copy of the U.S. Constitution in a bedside table wasn’t unheard of before President Josiah Bartlett gifted his former aid Charlie his personal copy on the finale episode of the West Wing, but it was a lot more common after. Now, it’s a common present for a certain kind of man – liberal, not leftist – to give his kids before they have any idea what it means.
Tableau Piège
In the 1960s, the Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri (lots of Swiss people in this issue) got obsessed with post-meal tables and started capturing them by gluing everything to the table, taking off the legs and hanging it on the wall. In 1960, he took over Gallery J in Paris and turned it into a restaurant, stopping one group of diners mid-meal every night and turning the detritus of their meal – lots of ashtrays [3] at the time – into a mixed media collage.
Spoerri called these pieces “tableaux pièges” or “snare pictures.” The idea was to mix artifice and incidence. But also… Spoerri just really liked going to dinner with friends. In 1968, he opened an actual restaurant. The thing about his art was that he couldn’t make it alone. He had to share a meal.
Public sector and academic lifers with one-degree too many, a coworker they care more about than their spouse, family money, and a tendency to stack books around the house like sandbags before a flood. Fluent in at least one romance language they refuse to speak when abroad.
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A Spartan, seeing a man taking up a collection for the gods, said that he did not think much of gods who were poorer than himself.
→ Plutarch
A Spartan, seeing a man taking up a collection for the gods, said that he did not think much of gods who were poorer than himself.
→ Plutarch
A feedback loop kicked off. Instagram brought Tulum, previously a retreat for cultural elites, to the mass market and Tulum conformed to the incentives of that platform, embracing a totally portable, non-Yucatec aesthetic. Amansala Eco-Chic Resort, the first local hotel to effectively cater to a broad swathe of American professionals, was constructed in a Balinese style, blessed by Buddhist monks, and given an Arabic name. It could have been anywhere. Or, more precisely, it could have been at the edge of anywhere.
Because “Tulumification” is not just pastiche. It’s placement. Unlike hyper-stimulating, “this must be the place” Jimmy Buffet-style Caribbeana, it embraces the aesthetics of the “pleasure periphery,” the places out in the dark past the neon lights of Margaritaville. Like Tulum itself, 80 miles south of Cancun, Tulumification thrives at the highly accessible edges – Uber-able, but not walkable. Off the beaten path, but not really.
Spend more time on Zillow than your ex’s Instagram. Feel the pang of romantic loss when houses that you like but couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for go off the market. Occasionally spend a few minutes with your partner mocking other peoples’ wallpaper.
Find a time between Thanksgiving and Christmas to work in a soup kitchen. Think of this more as a way to “touch grass” than as a practical way to give back. Feel genuine joy having done it. Don’t do it again for another year.
Financial services and biz dev professionals focused on two-sided markets with risk-forward portfolios, a job offer they aren’t interested in, but haven’t turned down, and at least one slightly taboo fetish. Foodie that doesn’t cook. Never understood why their English teacher in high school seemed to hate them.
Watch Jeopardy on a semi-regular basis and nurse a persistent belief that you could both beat and beat up most of the contestants. Get all the European history questions wrong.
Halloween Candy Problem
Upper Middle English is looks at idioms, ideas, and bizarre turns of phrase that describe the experience of having a lot while doing too much.
The “Halloween Candy Problem” is a common spend down puzzle used to frighten retirees [3] that can also be incredibly instructive when thinking about using vacation days during the Holidays. The idea setup is simple:
The candy giver must make an educated guess as to how much candy they need to meet trick-or-treater demand.
The candy giver must figure out how much candy to give each trick-or-treater in order to get rid of as much of the candy as possible without running out.
The most pragmatic solution to the problem is to stock up on slightly more candy than is likely needed then start by handing out candy at a rate commensurate with a more reasonable estimate. From there, treat dispersal can be titrated up or down depending on the number of trick-or-treaters.
This all but guarantees there will still be candy at the end of the night, but it also results in a 50%+ chance that trick-or-treaters arriving later in the evening will get more.
In terms of vacation day usage, that means a lot of professionals wind up with vacation days left to “spend” in November and December, but no vacation planned (that’s the candy guaranteed to be left at the end). What to do? Titrate! Don’t think about it as Q4. Think about it as “3-Day-Weekend Season.”
Subscribe to the New York Times for the pictures.
Sit down in early December and do the math on whether a February ski trip to Colorado or Austria would cost more. Really work through the lift and flight pricing. Book a trip to the Bahamas.
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