Quarter-Zip Foul → Marthello

Hey Neighbor. According to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the payment required to get the average affluent homeowner to accept a high-density development in their neighborhood is between $150,000 and $265,000. Everyone says they love walkability, but do they? Do they really?

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

❝Serious people turn down promotions.❞
....or....
❝Long Island Cheese Pumpkins are just better.❞
....or....
❝Linkedin is for VP-level thirst trapping.❞

A few drinks later, I might add that Autumn is over north of D.C. If you can’t pick apples or stare at yellow trees, Fall has given way to Dog Season. Dog Season is when it feels awesome to wear a fur coat and nothing else. Try it.

I might also try to talk about....

Over the last seven elections, this asset class has outpaced the S&P 500

Instead of trying to predict which party will win, and where to invest afterwards, why not invest in an ‘election-proof’ alternative asset? The sector is currently in a softer cycle, but over the last seven elections (1995-2023) blue-chip contemporary art has outpaced the S&P 500 by 64% even despite the recent dip, regardless of the victors, and we have conviction it will rebound to these levels long-term.

Now, thanks to Masterworks’ art investing platform, you can easily diversify into this asset class without needing millions or art expertise, alongside 65,000+ other art investors. From their 23 exits so far, Masterworks investors have realized representative annualized net returns like +17.6%, +17.8%, and +21.5% (among assets held longer than one year), even despite a recent dip in the art market.*

→ Researchers have found that women perceive men in clothes with prominent brand logos to be more interested in sex than relationships. This mirrors studies of pronounced secondary sexual characteristics (peacock feathers, narwhal tusks, banker vests). Endowment – physical or economic – is not an inoculation against fuckboi-ness. (READ MORE)

→ The Yankees are likely going to lose at home in front of a crowd of bankers. When Yankee Stadium III was constructed, a lot of ink was spilled about the proliferation of expensive corporate [1] luxury boxes and the pricing out of the common fan. In actuality, less affluent fans were priced out by season ticket holders able to make hefty one-time, pre-season payments. There were always rich people in the boxes. There just used to be fewer quarter-zips down the first-baseline quietly doing win probability math as Judge whiffs. (READ MORE)

→ The meme costume has become a way for the Extremely Online to flaunt their deep knowledge of trivial bullshit. We’ve got one or two more years before people start going as vampires rather than “demure gentleminions” (or w/e). Here’s to that day coming soon.(READ MORE)

There’s no marker at 48 Turkey Hill Road in Westport, Connecticut, just a Harris-Walz yard sign beneath a plain mailbox and a stone wall overshadowing piles of leaves raked by the gardener, whose late-model RAV4 sticks out like a fly in a creamy bisque. No plaque says a media empire started here. No sign commemorates the artist who lived inside.

Nothing.

When “Martha,” the Netflix documentary drops tomorrow, America’s first self-made female billionaire will be mislabeled “the first influencer” and offered winking absolution for her sins (insider trading, extramarital fucking). She will not, however, be portrayed as a martyred saint of the outer suburbs even though there’s something deeply tragic to her story. It’s easier – comforting really – to believe the billionaire is a snob.

In 1971, when Andrew and Martha Stewart (née Kostyra) bought the farmhouse at 48 Turkey Hill Road for $46,750, it was nothing like Alison Roman moving to the Catskills. Westport was obscure [2]. Stewart, a stockbroker and model, was doing what Thoreau did when moved to a shack by a pond to “live deliberately.” And she knew it.

“We were happy liberals living in a liberal environment, with fresh air to breathe, salt water to swim in, surrounded by other young couples, gardens, pets -- and by a sense of history.”

But notoriety isn’t always a function of attention seeking. “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams…,” Thoreau wrote, “be will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

In 1982, Crown Publishing President Alan Mirken, still riding high on the sticky success of 1972’s The Joy of Sex (itself an illustrated recipe book of a kind) attended an event Stewart catered. The food was good; the decorations were perfection. He asked her to do a book. The result, Entertaining, was (like Walden) both bizarre and immensely popular.

Some of the “recipes” in the book:

• Summer Omelette Brunch, Outdoors for Sixty

• Russian Buffet for Twenty-Four

• Hawaiian Luau for Twenty

What made Entertaining great was the pictures, which gave readers a vision of country-fied, house-proud WASP exuberance that appealed instantly to Reaganite new-money elites tired of bemoaning urban blight. Stewart and Mirken had a recipe. They reworked it for years. Martha and the house. The house and Martha.

Naturally, the Reaganite new-money elite came to Westport, the place where Martha had cooked up an idyll. They built Georgians and McMansions. Then they drove her out.

In 2000, wrote in the Times that “almost every property owner on my block (including me) has constructed a high stone wall and electronic gates, creating a sense of claustrophobia and unfriendliness.” Any reasonable town would have prevailed upon its most famous resident (sorry Paul) to turn the old place into a museum or at least put up a marker, but not Westport. The local paper described a “pompous and unpleasant neighbor.”

She sold the place for $6.7M – money she didn’t particularly need. No museum. No marker. There’s now a Lexus dealership around the corner not far from the Crate and Barrel and a bit of a hike from the HomeGoods.

Martha Stewart’s has long been – recent reputation rehabilitation notwithstanding – the face of suburban unpleasantness; the physical embodiment of policed perfectionism and unbreakable social codes. But she wasn’t that. Her neighbors were. And maybe her fans too. But Martha was nothing more or less than a woman living deliberately. She just looked good doing it.

→ There’s a problem with the word “offended.” There’s no way to use that word that does not confer outsized importance and power on the perceived offense. There’s no word that says, “I think that was tasteless and dumb, but whatever…. Fuck ‘em.” Annoyed is close, but not quite right. Americans could really use that word right now. [3]

→ Flamingo Estate has sold out of $75 bottles of honey made on the estate of painter Ed Ruscha. Silly? Sure. Pretentious? Yes. Cool? A mean… a bit, yeah. (Window Shop)

→ The next preschool power sweater dropped. Insta-classic (Buy It)

→ The Birkenstock x Filson collab has yielded the London Methow, a low slung trapper shoe designed perfectly for Dartmouth undergrads and vintage Porsche drivers. (Try It On)

→ A 58-year-old British marketer and author who looks like Andy Serkis if he went fully ape on craft services has become an unlikely TikTok star by explaining how marketers create the illusion of choice. In one video, he explains how restaurants use pre-placed glasses and the “wine list” (not “Drinks List”) to push customers towards a higher margin product. A viral thing that doesn’t suck. (Watch Him Cook)

Lifestyle brand builders are still trying to knock Martha Stewart’s Entertaining off the shelf with their own takes on whimsical, decorous, or aspirational hosting. No one has done it. But recent tomes from three pretenders to the throne deserve a place near the O.G.

How They Entertain: At Home with the Tastemakers by Pierre Sauvage. Sauvage, an octogenarian French filmmaker, and his team have spent years nibble at Europe’s upper crust and securing invites into the drawing rooms (where contested borders were drawn). The books are loving exercises in the unachievable. Better for making daydreams than plans. ($75, Rizzoli)

Swing By!: Entertaining Recipes and the New Art of Gathering by Stephanie Nass. Look, no one wants to get graded on the Martha Stewart curve. It’s not fair. But Stephanie Nass, better known as Chefanie, is the closest Millennial corollary. Definitely not a coincidence that Nass is a caterer from just outside New York. The best thing about this book is also the worst: There’s nothing in it that feels out of reach. ($45, Rizzoli)

The Dinner Party: A Chef's Guide to Home Entertaining. Australia is not the place that springs to mind when thinking about black tie events, but Benn and his partner Vicki Wild (the kind of name that does spring to mind when thinking about Australia) have built a brand on studied – and frequently subverted – formality. This is very much an entertaining manual for a nation of criminals. And that’s not a bad thing. ($42, Hardie Grant)

→ Startup employees are likely overvaluing their equity according to new numbers from Carta that show how many new hires make it through the typical four-year vesting period. Some 47.6% of startup employees hired in 2016 stuck around for four years, 62.6% stuck around for three, 83.9% made it two, and 93.9% finished out one. As interest rates have come up and raising capital has gotten harder, those numbers have changed substantially. In 2022, only 76.7% stuck around past year two. That obscures the value of options. (READ MORE)

→ The S&P 500 is putting on the best performance of the century so far. (Look at a Pretty Graph)

→ A potentially timely study shows that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 – for those who got high during that lecture, it suspended all but halted laborer immigration and cut off paths to citizenship – resulted in a drastic decrease in the labor supply and in the quality of jobs held by white dudes in big hats. Xenophobia might not be so awesome for the economy. (Read More)

→ The Times did a big breakdown of who has benefited most from America’s economic growth since the 1980s and here comes a shocker: The news is better for computer programmers than miners. (Read More)

NOTES & FOOTNOTES

[1] One weird thing about Trump is that his big tax cut made it impossible for corporations to completely write off T&E expenses (the E part, anyway). Just not what you’d expect, y’know?

[2] One wrinkle in regards to Westport being obscure: The coolest man in the world lived there. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward moved there almost a decade before the Stewarts arrived. Paul started a salad dressing company the year Martha published her first book. And, yes, the neighbors liked him more.

[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] Yeah, that. Not gonna light my hair on fire about it, but also fuck that dude.

* The content is not intended to provide legal, tax, or investment advice. No money is being solicited or will be accepted until the offering statement for a particular offering has been qualified by the SEC. Offers may be revoked at any time. Contacting Masterworks involves no commitment or obligation.

“Net Annualized Return” refers to the annualized internal rate of return net of all fees and expenses, calculated from the offering closing date to the date the sale is consummated. IRR may not be indicative of Masterworks paintings not yet sold and past performance is not indicative of future results. For additional information regarding the calculation of IRR for a particular investment in an artwork that has been sold, a reconciliation will be filed as an exhibit to Form 1-U and will be available on the SEC’s website. Masterworks has realized illustrative annualized net returns of 17.6% (1067 days held), 17.8% (672 days held), and 21.5% (638 days held) on 13 works held longer than one year (not inclusive of works held less than one year and unsold works).

Contemporary art data based on repeat-sales index of historical Post-War & Contemporary Art market prices from 1995 to 2023, developed by Masterworks. There are significant limitations to comparative asset class data. Indices are unmanaged and a Masterworks investor cannot invest directly in an index.