American Ghostland → Tennis Beer

Hey Neighbor. The looming NBA debut of Bronny James has beat writers talking nepotism. But NBA nepo-picks are not like Hollywood nepo-babies. Nepo-picks statistically overperform, yielding 2.15 career win shares – more than the 1.65 win shares forecast based on average draft slot. Long shot short: Nepotism may be kinda bad, but blind anti-nepotism is kinda dumb.

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

A few drinks later I might mention that Roy Wood Jr.’s panel show Have I Got News For You is way better than any show airing on CNN at 9PM on a Saturdays has any right to be.

I might also try to talk about....

→ Meta fired two dozen employees for spending their $25 meal credits on… not meals. The crackdown feels like a real shot across the bow for highly paid tech professionals used to getting away with a lot worse than buying lip gloss instead of Sweetgreen.

→ Donald Trump has been talking a lot about IVF, an odd choice given that reproductive health is clearly not his strongest or preferred subject. The decision to lean in on the subject only really makes sense in light of demographics. College grads with incomes above $150,000 – the people Trump has struggle to win over – are by far the most likely to take advantage of reproductive technologies. He’s trying to reassure professionals [1] that he’ll act as a firewall should the pro-life judges and legislators he’s empowered target their backup plans for conception.

→ Hugh Grant, whose flirtatious affectations were adopted buy a generation of men attempting to bed college-educated women, is renouncing what he calls “Mr. Stuttery Blinky.” Speaking to the Times, he explained that he never much liked the act: “I used to do interviews where I was… ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky.’ And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne published the first popular American haunted house story, The House of the Seven Gables, as Salem, the book’s setting, filled with transient young men on the wrong side of a growing wealth divide. A decade before the National Bank Act of 1863 allowed lenders to administer home mortgage loans, property was the only path to financial security and many struggled to find the trailhead. Hawthorne’s haunted characters, paranormally pursued by crimes their forebears committed to secure the title property’s deed, know this. It’s why they hesitate to leave. It’s why the quasi-hero Clifford, a wrongly accused murderer, has a chilling take on homeownership.

“What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.”

Hawthorne, the grandson of a Witch Trial judge, wields a scary truth: All land is taken by force and all claims to ownership can be contested. It’s the animating idea of all haunted house fiction (except Hereditary) and the reason Millennials, who saw their collective real estate holdings balloon from $2.9T in 2018 to $8.2T in 2023, might want to steer clear of home horror flicks like Insidious, Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror as Halloween looms.

Let’s consider the last VHS on that shelf – the one based on a true story. In 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into a three-story Dutch Colonial in Amityville, New York that they’d purchased on the cheap after the previous owners were murdered by their son. Less than a month later, the Lutzes signed over their interest in the house to the bank holding the mortgage and fled. No one died. No one got dragged to hell. The real Amityville horror? The Lutzes lost money on a house with a pool. [3]

Jay Anson’s nonfiction(ish) book on their experience went on to inspire 16 movies and TV shows.

Stephen King understood the resonance: “It’s about a young couple who’ve never owned a house before … and the horrible part is not that they can’t get out, but that they’re going to lose the house.”

King, who tortured both the Creeds (Pet Sematary) and the Torrances (The Shining) for the crime of living near/on Native-American burial grounds, understands better than most that past violence creates contested claims and that all claims to American land are contested. No one in this country has had family land for very long. This is presumably why 90%+ of the world’s haunted house businesses are in North America and perhaps why there seem to be very few haunted apartments in popular fiction. (In reality, apartment hauntings are most often reported by renters trying to keep prices down. [2])

Land is the thing we want to own, the thing we have to defend, and the thing that can never be totally ours.

That reality haunts us in the form of specters floating just at the edge of our peripheral vision. In a 2023 survey, slightly over 16% of homeowners reported supernatural activities in their home. Of those haunted homeowners, more than 60% had researched the history of their houses. Only 4% had moved out.

→ The average size of a wedding ring diamond has ticked up significantly – jewelers estimate about 50% – thanks to Gen Z buyers’ embrace of artificial stones. As the price of the rock came decoupled from the size of the rock, the sort of people that worried about ostentatious rings (or lowball salary offers for professional women) moved on to other pressing concerns. And, yes, even the average natural stone got bigger.

→ Banana Republic is shutting down its furniture business. The retailer was one of many, many clothing brands – Tory Burch, Kate Spade, Anthropology, Missoni, Tommy Bahama – that tried to move into the interiors space. It is among the first to pull out. It won’t be the last. Expect great deals on tasteful couches as others follow.

 → French novelist and deeply talented dickhead Michelle Houellebecq has announced he’s done writing novels. Perhaps because of his unappealing public persona – he’s said a ton of creepy stuff about girls and also shot a porn – Houellebecq never got popular in America, but he remained sharper than anyone on the pain of middle age: “The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favor of the one that replaced it”

This week, actor and friendly neighborhood Spider-Man Tom Holland debuted Bero, his non-alcoholic beer brand, with pics of preppy, pretty people drinking from preppy, pretty bottles between tennis matches. It was a smart rollout for a smart product. The non-alcoholic, post-workout beer is to Gatorade what the sneaker was to cleats: a better option for casual competitors who know what’s what.

Just over the last year, non-alcoholic beverage sales – led by brands like Athletic Brewing and Patagonia (partnered with Deschutes Brewery) – are up 30 percent. Some of that is driven by the sober, sober curious, and California sober, but a lot of it is driven by athletes. And for good reason: Beer is an electrolyte-packed post-workout hydrator. That was a trivial fact when O’Doul’s and St. Pauli Girl were the only available NA options because they taste like piss. But no longer. Bero has roughly the same caloric content as a Gatorade, way less sugar and salt, and looks a hell of a lot cooler on a courtside bench [4].

Throw one in the racquet bag. If nothing else, it’s an interesting shot choice.

→ Shelter CPI, which tracks rents, theoretical rents (where homes are owner occupied), and the cost of travel lodging, is down for the first time in a minute. It was a big element of the spike in inflation. 

→ Financial advisors are terrified of what’s going to happen during the Great Wealth Transfer (™). That’s a key finding from the According to a new survey by the Natixis Center for Investor Insights, 41% of advisors consider the shift an “existential threat” to their business. Good time to do some comparison shoppig.

→ Rich people are rushing toward private markets. BlackRock took in $221 billion of client funds in Q3, which means it now has $11.5 trillion in assets under management. Granted, Blackrock is running ETFs, but it’s also reporting $170 billion of illiquid alternative assets. That’s a lot and very good news for people with art, wine, or house collections.

NOTES & FOOTNOTES

[1] IVF is a particularly sensitive subject because many adults (at least a million) are products of the process, which caught on in the late 1980s. I’m one of them. And it’s interesting from that perspective to hear one’s creation politicized.

[2] It’s worth blurting out the main thing: It’s a super nice house. And, yes, someone lives in it.

[3] This famously happened in Brooklyn, where a bunch of renters made up a spectral presence in one of the park-side buildings to stop the place from going condo. God bless.

[4] Wandering around with an NA beer in hand is a bit odd because it feels at once rebellious and like the most square thing a human being could possibly do.