5-Sec Costumes → Office Parkour

Hey Neighbor. Ostensibly, What We Do in the Shadows is about incompetent vampires preying on the people of Staten Island, but it’s also a New York real estate fantasy shot in Toronto. A massive, rambling Victorian just a short ferry ride from Wall Street sounds less plausible than eternal life. That said, one just hit the market for under $2 million. 2475 Richmond Road is insane and definitely haunted, but the scariest part is still the locals

If you’d rather not receive this newsletter, click here.

If you’d like a friend to receive this letter so they are less boring, click here.

If we were at a cocktail party, you might hear me say the following....

❝Starbucks is bringing back the wooden stick thing.❞
....or....
❝The Monster Mash makes $1M annually.❞
....or....
❝Remember Saabs. I liked Saabs.❞

A few drinks later, I might add that If you tell a Google smart device to “play the one good song from Hamilton,” it does. This also works for most Disney movies and Elvis.

I might also try to talk about....

Not long ago, investors were chasing rocketship startups in hopes of a huge payday.
Boy how times have changed.

Those overvalued, buzzy startups just aren't as attractive anymore. You know what's cool? Undervalued companies that earn real profit.

WebStreet finds these companies, acquires them, improves them, and sells them. (And lets you invest)

• They buy overlooked businesses already earning money

• They improve operations, so they make even more money

• They bundle everything into a single, powerful fund that you can invest in.

• It's like micro private equity on autopilot.

Unlike a lot of startups, WebStreet is doing great.

→ The number of liposuctions and buccal fat pad removal jumped 7% YoY in 2023 amid a low-key, we’re-not-gonna-talk-about-it professional class craze for minimally invasive cosmetic surgeries (”tweakments”). On a potentially related note, John Mulaney is hosting SNL this weekend. (READ MORE)

→ British artist and annoyingly persistent pop cultural figure Damien Hirst has created special window installations in London for Tiffany’s that feature the fame light blue splashed across pill bottles. Sounds like edgelord bullshit – and there’s some of that – but the truth is that pills, specifically anti-depressants and stimulants, are more available to wealthy people. Pills are culturally adjacent to jewels. (READ MORE)

→ Paid search is finally on the verge of becoming the new normal among elites. Up until today, paid AI search engines like Perplexity didn’t facilitate searches for data in real-time, meaning they were a lousy way to get news. Now, ChatGPT is launching real-time search within its chats. Google will remain the default, sure, but not for the Internet elite. (READ MORE)

The conversation about return-to-office mandates – more lament than back-and-forth – is more plaintive among commuting Directors and VPs than among the rank-and-file because…

• They live further away. Employees earning between $100K and $200K live 29 miles from their office on average. Employees making north of $250K live 42 miles out (a number skewed somewhat by c-suiters in Jackson Hole).

• They know the difference between a solution and resolution.

Though back-to-office mandates solve some problems – diminished corporate culture, Zoom fatigue, tax liability, not enough sex in the copier room – they force higher paid employees to live within or just outside the cities they demonstrably wish to leave. And there’s no need for it. America has office parks.

Ervin Jackson and Newman Waters opened America’s first suburban office park – inspired by Bell Labs campuses – Mountain Brook, Alabama in 1955. Big hit. At the time, nearby Birmingham (and other cities) were facing white flight driven by crime, racism, and the Valium-laced call of the suburbs. Similar office parks followed, most of them built on cheap land near highways.

Then, starting in the 1990s, office parks began to empty out. And for very good reasons.

• Many were constructed by opportunistic builders who spared every expense. They fell apart.

• As safer cities attracted more talent and competition for talent got fierce, companies moved to city centers.

• Chipotle.

The last point sounds minor, but isn’t. Access to so-called “hybrid neighborhoods” (HR for “mixed use) makes it massively easier to hire. Modern employees don’t want to be dehumanized. A modernist slab surrounded by a parking lot is dehumanizing.

Kinda. But less so than the packed Metro-North train to Grand Central.

The Greenwich American Center, a 589,784-square-foot brutalist semi-masterpiece by Gordon Bunshaft, who won the Pritzker in 1988 [2], sits on an unraked campus of dredged lakes and graded hills across the highway from a cluster of four-bedroom colonials with Volvo SUVs parked out front. It’s remote and has been a bit empty since Disney folded Blue Sky Studios, (the animators behind Stone Age and Scrat the sisyphean squirrel). Quiet? Sure. Depressing? Not really. Practical.

Back in 2020 as business leaders looked on their mighty work spaces and despaired, the architecture firm HLW proposed a reimagining of the untenable American Office in the pages Harvard Business Review: lose the sprawling multi-floor HQ in favor of “a series of distributed nodes throughout multiple locations would result in more mixed-use office buildings that serve a more diverse cross-section of workers.” Their model? One of the former Bell Lab campuses that inspired the first office parks, now a mixed use center in Holmdel, New Jersey (now dubbed “The Metroburb”) with a sushi joint, a few cocktail bars, a place to buy bikinis, and, of course, a golf simulator.

But the solution proposed by HLW wasn’t just spatial, but behavioral. They wanted businesses to have workers commute to “offices” rather than “the office,” thus solving cultural and communications problems while providing workers with more lifestyle flexibility. The proposal represented a reasonable compromise – more plausible than going fully remote – that would be totally implausible if there weren’t already spaces sitting empty. But….

The Greenwich American Center has 107,000 square feet of available office space and the views are great. You can almost see the city.

→ Cinephiles are returning to 1999’s “Breakfast of Champions,” the adaptation of every cool Gen Xers favorite Vonnegut novel. It’s a mockery of “simulation theory” and suburban reactionaries that predates Musk and features a goofball Bruce Willis going full Altman. (WATCH IT

→ Netflix’s big Martha Stewart documentary was pretty fun – she expressed a desire to put Jim Comey in a Cuisinart [3] – but apparently she hated it. Among other things, she told the Times that it didn’t have enough rap music and that she’d offered to help get Fredwreck, who produced this summer’s Eminem album, to score it. Imagine ignoring Martha Stewart. (READ MORE)

→ The trailer for Presence dropped and it looks amazing. The Soderbergh film follows a suburban family haunt by a ghost – literally. It’s shot from the perspective of the ghost. (WATCH IT)

 → Time to preorder “Didion and Babitz,” the new non-fiction book about a friendship gone wrong, for the Cool Girl in your life. It’s mandatory that every 40-year-old who owns a Schott Perfecto has it by Christmas. These are the rules. (GRAB IT)

1. The Columbia Undergraduate: Dress casually and bring a tent. Erect the tent in the middle of the host’s living room. Refuse to leave.

2. The Atlantic Push Notification: Periodically shout banalities with a bizarre sense of urgency. For example:

• “Are you a platonist or an aristotelian?”

• “Americans are hoarding their friends!”

• “Throw out your plastic spatula!”

1. The Nervous Putter: Dress in a polo shirt, pants, and sneakers. Carry a putter. Keep squatting down and squinting as though you’re trying to read the contour of a green. Shake your head. Squat again. Never putt.

2. The NYT Headline Writer: Get so drunk you can’t communicate an idea.

3. The Vamping Broker: Carry a dark paper folder and back around the host’s home pointing out spaces that “have potential” or could be “spruced up a bit.” Make everyone take off their shoes.

4. The Apple TV+ Star: Wear a suit. Tell everyone you’re dressed as “Cole Davis” from “Fly Me to the Moon,” the $100-million film starring Channing Tatum and Scarlet Johansson. During the confused pause that follows, think about how you used to tell people you were gonna work for National Geographic.

5. The Tesla Autopilot: Bump into people. [4]

6. The Desperate Candidate Text: Unexpectedly insert yourself into conversations and, apropos of nothing, demand money. Make sure the requests sound vaguely threatening. For example:

• “We can CRUSH them in PA, GA, MI, and NC! But we need your help!”

• “Time is almost up! Seven days is all we have to decide our future!”

• “With just hours left, we're failing to hit our end-of-month fundraising goal of 1,500,000 donations.”

1. The Podcast Guy and the NPR Woman (Couples Costume): Wear airpods. Engage in loud political conversations. Get all the details wrong.

2. The Guy Who Took and Edible and Doesn’t Know When It’s Going to Kick In: Take an edible. Tell everyone.

→ People who took out mortgages in 2019 when interest rates bottomed have seen an average benefit of approximately $158,000 according to a new analysis from First American Financial Corp. Given that the average cumulative rent 2019-now is $89,00, we’re talking a $247K swing. (READ MORE)

→ If you have two phones and enough time to install the Robinhood trading app on both, you can take advantage of the obviously Trump-skewed betting market by taking both sides of the bet. You could also, you know, play with your child or make love to your spouse. Individual choices.

→ Morningstar conducted a big new study on why people fire financial advisors and found that many ex-clients agreed to the following statement about their former advisor: “He was pressing one button and charging me for it when I could do it just as easily.” We need not mourn every job lost to AI. (READ MORE)

NOTES & FOOTNOTES

[1] At least that’s what it feels like. Has anyone even seen a choke collar in the last three years? Not a bad thing. Just weird.

[2] Bunshaft, who nominated himself for the award, gave one of the greatest acceptance speeches of all time: “In 1928, I entered the MIT School of Architecture and started my architectural trip. Today, 60 years later, I’ve been given the Pritzker Architecture Prize for which I thank the Pritzker family and the distinguished members of the selection committee for honoring me with this prestigious award. It is the capstone of my life in architecture. That’s it.”

[3] So, yeah, Comey was the guy who went after Stewart on charges she lied to the FBI. Whatever else can be said of Comey, he certainly has a type.

[4] If you really want to go all out with the Tesla Autopilot concept, kill 51 Americans. That’s the current 2024 total.