Driving Miss Goodhead → Woody Mulaney → Hammburglar

Hey Neighbor. The only non-profit board game company in America is quietly releasing strategy-focused military games focused on international flashpoints. “Littoral Commander: Baltic” and “Littoral Commander: Indo-Pac” are basically “Risk” for real risks.

Perfect if you want to make game night topical. That always works.

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🔎 Stray Thought: The Ryder Cup is going to be nuts.

🫗 Errata: I feel like Tuesday’s lukewarm argument for the effectiveness of “civility politics” misled readers into thinking I don’t want to punch members of the Politeness Caucus. Two things can be true. Also, I called a friend’s Hyundai an “Ozempic Aztec”, which did not go down well, and bumped my sons head into the door of the fridge.

🥂 Share with a friend: Upper Middle is growing fast. This digital cocktail party has 109,086 attendees (at least half of whom are cool). Please help us double down by sharing what we do with a friend – and get some merch for doing it.

Upper Middle Research matches readers with professional expertise with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour while keeping them abreast of what’s up in their field.

→ In June,  Live Near Friends, co-living start-up in San Francisco, published a blog about a 12,610-square-foot, $5.3M multi-unit occupied by 14 adults, 11 children, and two seniors – each more photogenic than the last. It looked a lot like this friend group consisting mostly of tech and finance professionals had achieved the Millennial dream, a successful answer to that old dinner party chestnut: “What if we could just live together?” Pretty cool. The less cool bit, the eviction of a prior community under the Ellis Act, which allowed the friends to use an LLC to buy the building and remove it from the rental market. Kind of evil. Kind of enviable. (READ MORE)

→ You may have noticed that the national conversation about economics is being conducted in wingdings. It turns out there’s a reason for this: Disagreement spillover. Over the last 10 years, both parties have increasingly conflated social and economic issues, creating a partisan schism on economic issues that was previously more of a crack^[1]. (READ MORE)

On Bond, rakes, and stepping on rakes.

Last month, Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of famed producer “Cubby” Broccoli, sold Amazon the rights to James Bond, shoving the beloved spy into the lusty grasp of executives she’d previously dubbed “fucking idiots.” Since the sale, rumors have swirled, stirred by irony. Jeff Bezos, a camp-collared American cabbage, seems like the worst possible buyer for Bond. Cold warrior or not, 007 spent the last few decades cucking and punching anarcho-capitalists. Strange bedfellows indeed.

The weirdness is partly a sex thing. In the same way leisure connotes sophistication among the privileged and sloth among the poor, sensuality suggests dashing libertinism for the aristocratic and deviancy for everyone else.^[2] This is why sex is central to the Bond franchise. The Spy Who Loved Me doesn’t just have a license to kill—by dint of his class, he has license to do a lot of other fun stuff most moviegoers (and even plutocrats) do not.

Despite being portrayed as an avatar of muscular Britishness (if that’s not a contradiction), Bond is less English than he is of "The Village." In sociologist Norbert Elias's formulation, The Village is a class-based community where favors are traded in kind based on implicit understandings. The Village contrasts with “The Town,” where everything costs money. The Town is dull, while Elias's Village offers "all the pleasurable excitement one can have without hurting others and one's own dignity."

As a villager, Bond is chided but never punished for sleeping with Holly Goodhead, Domino Derval, Vesper Lynd, Kissy Suzuki, etc. The sex does not hurt others or his dignity. It is not coercive. Like his clothes, all that humping is proof of Bond’s civility. And, of course, there are the clothes: Sea Island cotton shirts, cotton lisle socks, tropical worsted suits, slip-on loafers, and more pajamas than expected. Bond isn’t a label whore—he’s a comfort guy, more sensual than carnal.

Contrast that to his enemies getups: Largo’s eight-button blazer, Blofeld’s dumb collar, Le Chiffre absurdly peaked lapels, Zorin’s pinstripes, and Silva’s Prada shirt^[3]. It’s telling that Auric Goldfinger, poured sloppily into that two-tone tux, borrowed his surname from an architect neighbor Ian Fleming loathed for his attempt to “modernize” a victorian home. These are men that covet Bond’s impunity (and Fleming’s too), but can’t be trusted not to hurt others in pursuit of excitement. After all, they’re from The Town. 

The same could be said of Bezos, owner of a $500M, 417-foot sailing yacht that presumably anchors off Fuck Island, population Jeff. The idea of blowing that floating temple to tax-dodges out of the water and swimming into the arms (or what have you) of Ursula Andress circa 1962 does not lack for appeal. The Bond daydream is to police the behavior of others without being policed oneself. 

“The libidinal fantasy-stream only becomes significant for other people… if it is socialized through fusion with the canon,” wrote Elias. He was talking about Mozart, but he might as well have been explaining why people care so much this particular slab of IP.

The Bond fantasy is canon because the Broccoli’s worked hard to ensure it would be. The question of whether the fantasy Bond represents can survive a trip to The Town can only be answered over time. But one thing is clear: If he ever stops screwing, he’s screwed.

→ Times puzzle editor Will Shortz is back at his desk after some health scares. As a timely profile points out, the returning riddler may be the last truly powerful “national columnist.” At a time when the Times can’t seem to change what people think, Shortz is changing how they think. Times readers finished 11 billion puzzles last year. (READ MORE)

→ Apple TV+ dropped a trailer for Friends & Neighbors, the Jon Hamm vehicle about a struggling exec burgling his… you get it. We’ve all had the thought. Who’s house do you hit? (WATCH IT)

→ Haim has a new music video out and, worryingly, it stars carpeting. Less worryingly, it also stars a really nice modernist microsuede couch. (GET IT) 

→ Anti-algo listening is the new college radio. (TRY IT)

→ White tablecloth dining out. Checkered tablecloth dining in. Vive la France! (READ MORE)

→ The New Yorker has updated its style guide. Internet is now internet. That probably took longer than it needed to, but there’s something beautiful about an organization that does not assume culture and technology ought to iterate at the same rate. (READ MORE)

John Mulaney doesn’t play dumb. He also doesn’t play smart. Mulaney, who kicked off a 12-week run talk show run on Netflix yesterday, has gotten good and famous by embracing a classically Upper Middle “Nobrow” sensibility. He’s pulled a Woody Allen^[4] – though we probably shouldn’t call it that.

Woody Allen got big in the late 1970s in large part because his jokes ping-ponged between very smart (“You know nothing of my work”) and very dumb (“I’m into leather”). Allen leaned into this, famously telling and interviewer: “I read [Dostoevsky] more out of obligation than enjoyment. For enjoyment, for me, it's a beer and the football game.” 

Allen’s culturally omnivorous approach appealed to educated normies; they got all the references. Similarly, Mulaney, who holds an English degree from Georgetown, appeals to people familiar with The Death of a Salesman (there was Willy Loman skit last night) and Cypress Hill’s “Hits From the Bong.” That nobrow taste – the term shaves H.L. Mencken’s “high” and “low” brows – speaks to a belief quietly held by a lot of people with similar degrees. As another cultural anarchist, John Waters, put it: "To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.”

→ There are rumbling about a move to tax college endowments and, more specifically, to tax college endowments’ investment earnings. As far as Republican tax pushes go, it’s not totally unreasonable. Having 56 institutions holding over a trillion in largely untaxed dollars seems, well, excessive. But if taxes come it won’t just be bad for the institutions, it’ll be bad for alumni. We’re going to get so many fucking fundraising letters. (READ MORE)

→ The market is the weather.

→ New data suggests that the lower Upper Middle has way less access to private schooling than the upper Upper Middle. That’s fairly intuitive. What’s surprising (and worrisome) is that the cutoff is creeping closer to a dual-earner professional household income. All those lawyers and doctors in the pickup line may soon be replaced by finance bros and tech execs. Pity teachers on Parent’s Day. (DATA)

[2] British hypocrisy around sex, which extends to prep school tomfuckery, is the stuff of legends and probably emerges from the tradition of the Rake, who chases the tavern girls around despite being very erudite. Isn’t it Byronic. Don’t you think. A little tooooo Byronic. I really do think.

[3] Gotta be honest, I liked the Prada shirt. Bond always looks good, but I’d argue that it’s sometimes better to look fun.

[4] Bananas is back in the news in the worst way possible.