Sexual Economics → Echeveria Elegans → Eavesdropping Science

Hey Neighbor. The Sims turned 25 this week. Ostensibly a gamified celebration of frictionless upward mobility, the social simulation owes its popularity to the joy of making suburbanites do crime, cheat on each other, and fail without consequence.

Also, one popular game mod allows “high autonomy” Sims to rip each others’ hearts out. Beautiful.

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 Vox Fortuna: No poll today. Giving that space to our sponsor, Remade, a product I actually use!

🫗 Errata: In Tuesday’s email, I neglected to thank five readers who found a typo in the previous issue. I like when people do that. I proves they can read, an important skill in regards to newsletter consumption. I also forgot to note that “meritocracy advocate” Jon Lonsdale was accused of sexual assault.

🥂 Share with a friend: Upper Middle is growing fast. This digital cocktail party has 127,888 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.

Remade isn’t just part of my pre-sleep ritual, it’s the most important part. The melatonin-free formula – infused with magnesium and mycelium extract – focuses me so I can sneak past my anxieties^[1] toward deep sleep and real rest. When my kid invariably wakes me up before the alarm, I’m never groggy or grumpy. I no longer cry over spilt cereal milk.

Remade came up with an exclusive offer for Upper Middle Readers: a FREE one-month supply with purchase!

→ A new audio study out of Indiana University demonstrates that cocktail party attendees trying to eavesdrop on other peoples’ conversations should engage in gradient listening, attempting to follow the general flow of the conversation rather than trying to pick out sounds or phrases (discrete). It takes a bit longer, but it’s much more effective. Also, it’s really hard to eavesdrop on people behind you. IU out there doing the good work. (READ MORE)

→ The Atlantic has a long piece on the rise of sex parties for rich people. These flesh buffets seem to somewhat validate the fringe idea of “Sexual Economics,” a theory that popped up in the early aughts that suggests sex is marketplace and, more specifically, that “sex is something that women have and men want.” Men who don’t get what they want feel poor so deals get struck. It’s an odd formulation and many people think it’s nonsense^[2], but it does feel instructive at a time when the richest men tend to be the least fuckable. (READ MORE)

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field.

How gardeners became an antidote to corporate sterility.

It’s too early to plant, but not too early to know that suburban gardens will look different this year. President Trump has promised to deport millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants, many of whom tend to peonies in the shadow of 4-bedroom homes. Though the cost of that policy – whether necessary or politically cynical – is best measured in human terms, all those unsprung tulips and wilted asters matter. They will be a reminder Mexican gardeners have spent decades transforming the Upper Middle’s frustration into beauty.

Suburban gardens are, like the Catholic Church and OrangeTheory, elaborate expressions of self-loathing. That has always been the case. In the mid-1900s – before he redid the White House lawn – Andrew Jackson Downing got Martha Stewart-level famous for arguing that the new towns blooming on the edge of industrializing cities should look like leafy, rustic Belmont, an early Boston suburb built on the grounds of an opium smuggler’s mansion. Downing’s argument wasn’t just aesthetic. He was worried about the virtue of the professional managerial class.

“Whatever… leads man to assemble the comforts and elegancies of life around his habitation, tends to increase local attachments, and render domestic life more delightful; thus… strengthening his patriotism, and making him a better citizen,” he wrote in “A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening,” illustrated copies of which littered tied parlors from Lincoln Park to Ellicott City.

The idea that, as poet Wendell Berry later put it, “the careerist’s life generalizes the world, reducing its abundant and comely diversity to ‘raw material,’” became deeply embedded in the psyche of white-collar workers. In the post-WWII years, as amphetamine-addled middle-class homemakers whitewashed their picket fences and plotted careful plantings, Upper Middle college grads let their honeysuckle grow long.

When the Boston Strangler went on a spree in Belmont in the mid-1960s, he had plenty of rhododendrons in which to hide.

But neither flowering shrubs or sex murder were top of mind for Upper Middle suburbanites. Staying in the Upper Middle was. By the late 1970s, that meant dual incomes, which would have posed an existential threat to Belmont’s bushes if surging demand for agricultural labor hadn’t inspired thousands of Mexicans to illegally cross the border. Suburban gardeners passed their trowels^[3] to experienced seedsmen from a country where plants were less regularly pruned and, out of respect for the Virgin of Guadalupe, roses proliferated.

As office culture became American culture, undocumented workers tended the land.

Instead of withering in the absence of female care, Belmont’s gardens exploded with color. The joyfulness of blooming “elegancies” transmuted white-collar workers’ concern with the sterility of their lives – compounded by that sticky Hippy idea of the “selling out” – into a personable wildness. When middle-class homeowners began emulating the celebrity homes in YouTube vids by constructing sprawling patios and walls, Belmont just got greener. Low hedges grew together into what Downing would have seen in all that greenery as an expression of good citizenship. 

Sure, some Bain consultants got dirt under their clear coats, but mostly it was Mexicans. And they weren’t just doing a job. They were humanizing a town and the professionals in it. They were ensuring land remained more than an asset. 

In a very real sense, they were protecting us from ourselves. That protection has not been reciprocated.

→ Heather Cox Richardson, your MSNBC-loving mother’s favorite Substacker, has changed her author portrait to one in which she’s wearing a baseball cap. The cap in question is from The WoodenBoat School in Maine, which sits a few miles from where E.B. White^[4], the most prominent anti-imperial American writer post-WWII, kept an office (and chickens). She knows this. (READ THE O.G)

→ In Embedded, Alison Belcher makes a strong case for collecting physical media (DVDS, tapes, CDs, records): “Those movies and TV shows that you're watching on Netflix and Amazon, they're going to disappear after a certain point in time. And when you purchase a movie or a TV show that you really love and that you will find yourself revisiting in the future, you know that that'll be around.” Companies across the country are currently demonstrating their willingness to delete data. Where’s Sam Goody when you need him? (READ MORE)

→ USM shelves are the new Eames chairs and GQ is on it. One interesting point: The return of Swiss modernism may be less about the lines than it is about a desire for color. USM loves a yellow. They are not alone. (Fuck beige.) (READ MORE)

→ The new Bridget Jones flick drops on February 13 on “The ‘Cock” and Air Mail is heralding it as a proof that the frazzled look is back. This is a weird claim because the frazzled look never left. Frazzled people have consistent looked frazzled. (READ MORE)

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Every year, the art book publisher Taschen has a big sale. That sale is ongoing. The scene in New York is very flirty, but even if you can’t get downtown it’s worth investing in a piece of aesthetic quasi-literature that will make you look classier or fringier than you really are. Here’s a cheatsheet for browsers:

→ Ronaldo, soccer’s aging, greasy, and shirtless frontman (Iggy Pop, but annoying), has announced his intention to buy not one, but several professional clubs. Consider for a moment the message this sends fans about his allegiance. Diversification has become an acceptable fetish and it’s a bummer. (READ MORE)

→ There’s a term sociologists use for people who always know where to get products for just a little bit less: Price Maven. A few years ago, “price mavenism” wasn’t a great look. Anecdotally speaking, it’s back.

→ Super excited to try and get a tax refund this year.

→ The big Luka Doncic trade upset a lot of Mavericks fans. That makes sense not only because Luka is quite good at the game of basketball, but also because it served as a stark remind that it ain’t their team.

[2] The theory of “Sexual Economics” has been, to some degree, upcycled by incels, many of whom claim that women have a sexual advantage. That’s probably true, but there are subtler ways to understand that advantage – and the significant tradeoffs that come with it. “Sexual capital” is probably a superior construct. Certainly explains a lot about my marriage.

[3] It’s worth noting that before Mexican gardeners showed up on the scene, many American gardeners were Japanese. Gardening is gendered domestic labor. As such, it’s generally outsourced to immigrants when women aren’t doing it.

[4] My son is named for E.B. White, who comes up a lot in this newsletter because he’s my favorite writer. You know him from “Charlotte’s Web” and, don’t get me wrong, that’s a great book, but… not his best word. Check out “One Man’s Meat,” which is not about sex at all, or “Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do,” which very much is.