Ballpark Figures → Wife Addiction → Above-Ground Sex Symbol

Hey Neighbor. The streetwear kids waiting for the big Nike x Supreme drop, got a bit of a shock this week when the collection landed in the form of a bunch of sweater vests and rugby shirts. If taking up golf was the cool move in 2021, the cool move in 2025 is looking like you took up golf in 2021.

Actually being good at golf remains irrelevant.

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🔎 Stray Thought: If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.

🫗 Errata: I definitely bothered some readers with the Tuesday’s email sign ups for Upper Middle Research (but, hey, it’s how we keep the lights on). I also got a bit of heat from the hardcore Bond nerds arguing he’s not an aristocratic figure. There’s a debate to be had, sure, but it’s a silly debate. Yesterday, I did that thing where you sort of slip and slide on the last step and twisted my ankles because I was wearing Weejuns without socks. Oh, and the BIG EXCITING SURVEY (below) contains I typo I can’t get out of the code. My apologies to all concerned.

The market is on an umm… disconcerting ride and, TBH, wealth managers seem confused. To help six- and seven-figure investors make sense of the moment, Upper Middle is launching the 2025 Money Guy Survey. We want to know what you thinking about the people that think about your money and whether those thoughts are changing.

Results from the three minute survey will be shared with the Upper Middle Research members and participants – a guaranteed return on time invested.

→ The annual “World Happiness Report,” a rather sad survey of human wellbeing, dropped this week. In order to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons, the report’s authors use their own unit of measurement, the Wellby. The Wellby is a one-point increase on a 0–10 self-reported life satisfaction scale for one person for one year. Standardizing happiness into a measurement helps manage a glut of qualitative data, but the Wellby also presents an interesting mental model. How much would you pay for a Wellby? How far would you go to get one?^[1] (READ MORE)

→ Vanity Fair has an interesting piece exploring the rise of Christianity in Silicon Valley. The piece posits that there has been a sea change and faith is replacing militant agnosticism. This misunderstands the situation. Palo Alto is full of people trying to find ways to solve for human behavior. Technology presents a certain kind of solution – one that can be imposed. So does religion. There’s no real tension between religion and tech, only certainty and ambiguity. The latter seems to be in short supply. (READ MORE)

Baseball is for everyone. Little League is not.

Watching baseball is one of perishingly few popular American activities without any cultural vector. Golf and WWE fans are equally likely to watch – boxing and gymnastics fans too. Not every American watches baseball, but every kind of American does.^[2]

If watching baseball unites us, playing baseball does the opposite. Little League, which kicks off this week and next, doesn’t just introduce kids to a game—it introduces them to the idea that not all games are for all kids.

It starts on opening day, when Little League parents show up with different goals. Researching Little League parents in 1977, Geoffrey Watson found that working class parents saw participation as “training in learning to respond to authority” whereas middle-class Upper Middle parents saw participation as “training in cooperation and adaptation to middle class values.” If that doesn’t sound too concerning, consider that competitiveness has become a middle-class value. 

Now consider a nervous nine-year-old sweating in the on-deck circle as his parents look on.

“Concerted cultivation,” Annette Lareau’s shorthand for the active management that characterizes intensive parenting in privileged environments, is all about optimization. The parents who never miss a game tend to embrace one of two strategies:

1. Specialization.
2. Domination.

Less culturally sophisticated and more profligate Upper Middle parents  – many of them based in Florida or Texas –  lean into domination. They treat Little League as an investment then double down. They buy the nine-year-old batting gloves, a $400 Rawling Icon bat, and maybe even a pair of Oakleys. They keep fresh balls in the back of their Ford-F150s.

More effete and ascetic Upper Middle parents – many of them based in the Northeast and Northwest – lean into specialization. They treat Little League as an on-ramp to college application-bolstering competitions. They buy the nine-year-old a squash racquet, a $150-an-hour math tutor, and maybe even an oboe. They keep flashcards in the back of their Volvo.

The other nine-year-olds wait a few years, take a few cuts then quit.

In 2020, 3.4 million children ages 6 to 12 played baseball (second only to basketball), but only 1.8 million children 13 to 17 did. For parents willing to spend $10,000 a year on private team dues and $150-an-hour on swing coaches, that drop-off isn’t a problem; it’s the plan. Fewer players mean fewer competitors for the kids whose parents can afford to keep them in the game. That’s what domination looks like for the F150 crowd. It’s why Triple-A ball is packed with two kinds of players: Latin American prodigies and kids named Mason.

It’s how baseball—the sport every kind of American watches—became a game only one kind of American plays.

→ Karen Russell, whose The Antidote is about to become a book club requirement, is a fascinating figure because she seems a normal person doing great work. Her one weird trick? She chews ice as she writes. Might be worth a shot even if you’re just bouncing through emails. (READ MORE)

→ Attractive married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie made a movie about a guy who can’t pull himself away from his wife. Good concept. (WATCH THE TRAILER)

→ Thai resorts are seeing a White Lotus-driven surge in website traffic and spring bookings. That’s cool in theory but Bangkok is absolutely sweltering from late April into June. Monks are going to be stepping over unconscious white women in wrap dresses.

→ Richard Roeper is leaving the Chicago Sun-Times after a 37-year stint as a critic. That sounds like a lot, but it kind of… isn’t? Critics need a lot of time to find their voice – a decade at least. Few get it. 

→ One of the best recurring bits on John Mulaney’s talk show is the chyron descriptions of the show’s guests. Richard Kind is “Giving Lover.” Hannah Gadsby is “Picasso critic.” These weird half-jokes are written by Langston Kerman – the last man in show business who seems to be truly winging it.

Before Kim had Skims and Gwyneth had Goop, Esther Williams had pools. One of the first Hollywood stars to launch a full-on celebrity brand, Williams was a competitive swimmer turned MGM contract player known as the “Million-Dollar Mermaid.” She made swimming glamorous at a time when most of American could only doggy paddle, turned around, and sold backyard dunk tanks to women who admired her shoulders and men who admired her waist.^[3]

But it was a bit more specific than that. Esther Williams made in-ground pools a status symbol and above-ground pools… not so much.

It was her big deck energy. Esther Williams Swimming Pools were sold with interchangeable decks and advertised not only as places to swim but as places to socialize. Williams sold a whole sippin’ and dippin’ lifestyle – and she sold it for almost precisely the cost of a Thunderbird. Some seventy years later, there are a lot more Esther Williams pools in use than Thunderbirds – though both are classics.

→ Hoping for better mortgage rates is a bit like going to acupuncture – generally harmless, but unlikely help. Trump has been aggressively needling the economy for weeks now and the 10-year is still north of 4% so it seems like 6.5% for a 30-year conventional mortgage is probably the new math.

→ “Micro-Retirement” is the new “sabbatical.” (READ MORE)

→ Stocks slump further when people with slumping stocks stop spending. That’s more or less where we’re at. So… go buy stuff please? I don’t want to lose more money.^[4]

→ Freakonomics Radio put out a genuinely helpful episode about the politicized way Americans talk about (and misunderstand) taxes. A particularly compelling snippet from guest Jessica Riedl: The liberal narrative is an equity-distribution narrative. It is that the middle class pays all the taxes, big business and wealthy individuals don’t pay anything, the reason we have deficits is because of these tax cuts, and we can fix deficits if we just do what Europe does and tax the rich and corporations at high levels…. But the numbers are very clear that that narrative is extraordinarily exaggerated, and that actually the rich pay most of the taxes…. We actually have in America the most progressive tax system in the O.E.C.D. It is more progressive than Europe, not less. (LISTEN)

[2] Or at least thinks they do. I haven’t watched a game on TV in a few years, but would still say that I watch baseball because I grew up with it and know most of Field of Dreams by heart. Watching baseball is an ethos as well as an activity.

[3] Williams was a big sex symbol. Not only was she one of the first celebrities to really understand brand, she was one of the first celebrities to understand the branding power of getting married a lot.

[4] There is a sort of begging quality to a lot of stories in the Wall Street Journal right now. The idea seems to be that because wealthier people now constitute more of the economy, they have some patriotic duty to spend. I’m not even sure this is wrong. I’m just saying it’s odd.