Snobbed Up → Against Improv → West Elm Disease

Hey Neighbor. According to a new study of global attitudes toward fairness, “the United States is among the most inequality-accepting countries in the world when the source of inequality is merit” and “in the middle of the distribution when the source of inequality is luck.” It is the most polarized country when it comes to wealth redistribution.

We’re okay sharing what we won, but not what we earned. We’re sure we can tell the difference…. 

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→ The GOP is considering implementing a 40% rate for taxpayers earning $1M+ annually – a 3% hike. It’s a good reminder that high earners (even really high earners) are MAGA targets, not part of the billionaire and working class quasi-coalition. (READ MORE)

→ Gen Z is playing a lot of golf. The kiddos like the aesthetics. As Eve Upton-Clark (solid name) argues in Business Insider: “The fascination with old money speaks to the desire of younger generations, dissatisfied with their lot in life, to leapfrog their socioeconomic circumstances.” It’s less “’til you make” than “follow while you wallow,” but nice to get some new blood^[1] on the course anyway. (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.

In the early 1800s “snob,” Cantabrigian slang for cobbler, became the basis for the phrase “snobs and nobs,”  a ripoff of Oxford’s “town versus gown” description of university town tension. In 1848, when William Makepeace Thackery published “The Book of Snobs,” he abbreviate the phrase to a single word defined as a “man or woman who is always pretending to be something better” – a status obsessive. He also made it clear that the aristocracy did not have a monopoly on snobbery. To the contrary.

This week, Trump mounted an attack on Harvard  that wreaked of middle class snobbery. Though he used instances of campus anti-semitism to justify withholding $9 billion in federal funding, Trump didn’t insist on more latkes in the cafeterias. Instead, he demanded power to audit and eliminate Harvard’s DEI programs. He literally accused Harvard of being too inclusive. 

Put differently, he accused the Harvard’s nobs of failing to behave how MAGA snobs think they ought to behave.

Over the last decade or so, it has become clear that American reactionaries – uniformly middle class in sensibility – have much stronger opinions on how elites should act than actual elites. This makes sense. From the outside, status is about behavior. That’s what they can see through the window. But within the confines of Widener Library it’s about temperament. As Einstein put it, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” What is a Harvard Man but a man with a crimson temperament? Woke politics – like ‘em or not^[2] – are not at odds with that temperament. Blind ambition is. Also, pretension. 

Thackery’s definition of a snob suggest that finding one is as simple as figuring out who is pretending. That’s not too hard. The states with the highest credit card delinquency rates? Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Highest rate of personal bankruptcies declared in a wealthy county? Orange County and Palm Beach. A pattern emerges. Two patterns actually. The state with the lowest credit card delinquency rate is Massachusetts. People in Cambridge, MA don’t over-extend themselves pretending because they don’t have to pretend in the first place. A lot of them went to Harvard.

Trump, an Ivy alum himself, is not anti-Harvard. Far from it. He famously likes to surround himself with sycophants who have rubbed John Harvard’s brass shoe. Peter Navarro, Elise Stefanik, Stephen Miller, and Mark Zuckerberg all went to Harvard. They were also all ostracized by the Harvard community because they behaved how MAGA snobs thought Harvard Men ought to behave.

They had the credential. They lacked the temperament.

→ According to the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka we’re already in a “Content Recession” as influencers and streamer push narratives about self-sufficiency and Darwinian struggle that harken (worryingly) back to the bad old days of the late aughts. (READ MORE)

→ L.L. Bean brought its Japan collection – yes, it has a Japan collection – to the States for the second time and it’s very cool. (CHECK IT OUT)

→ ChadGPT is the game where you try to get a tech bro to shut up about AI. It’s good to get in some reps. (PLAY IT)

→ Tariffs are particularly bad for home decor stores like Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and RH^[3] because the goods are from abroad and a huge amount of business comes from impulse purchases of fun little knickknacks to make home feel homier. If those sales decline, West Elm Disease sets in. (READ MORE)

→ Apple, well positioned to get decimated by tariffs, just quietly renamed Apple Search Ads to Apple Ads. The world’s biggest company needs to find new sources of revenue. One potential idea: Blast iPhone users in the fucking eyes.

Watching the hugely popular micro-talk show Subway Takes, it’s impossible not to be charmed by the delight Kareem Rahma’s takes in dumb ideas or struck by degree to which the “yes and…” ethos of improv comedy has brainwormed Upper Middle comics.

The show’s best takes leave room for plenty of debate, but not much exploration. You can disagree or agree with the take that “therapists should not be hot,” but it resists expansion. Likewise, “throw all chiropractors in jail”^[4] isn’t a jumping off point. It’s a joke, not a premise. No one else has to join in.

On the other hand, “I miss the remote control” is a premise. So is “just drink water,” when applied ungenerously to skincare. Both of those takes came courtesy of contributors to the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs section. Both are formulated in such a way that they require a “yes and…” to work. 

If Subway Takes teaches its millions of viewers anything, it’s how to be good at a party – how to do a bit. Frankly, it’s alarming that the cocktail class seems to be so bad at it. The Upper Middle take: Stop making other people do the comedy for you.

→ The proposed Gold Visa program allowing foreign nationals to purchase American citizenship sure looks like an attempt to import a less rowdy class of elites. (READ MORE)

→ In Vanity Fair Quinn Slobodian (great name) suggests that corporate pushback against DEI policies actually didn’t have very much to do with DEI policies – that executives were more concerned with silencing activist employees likely to raise concerns about harder and more expensive to address environmental issues. (READ MORE)

→ There is a very particular type of ennui experienced when trying to figure out how to profit on the end of American exceptionalism. It doesn’t feel good! (LISTEN)

[2] The idea that Harvard is a bastion of far-left politics is laughable on its face. Harvard’s undergrads probably have some silly edgelord politics. That’s normal for teens. But Harvard is a massive research institutions. The gods of biotech have other concerns.

[3] Should be exclusively referred to as “The Artist Formerly Known as Restoration Hardware.”

[4] Honestly, fully agree with this. Having a class of pseudo-doctor on the loose cracking necks is really bad. ERs are full of chiro patients. Also, chiropractors basically funded the OG anti-vax movement.