American Idolatry → δ Hurts → Socialized Headicine

Hey Neighbor. True story. Three men drinking coffee Pease Park outside Austin. “Our friends in Travis Heights are worried school zoning could shift,” says the first. The second picks at his frayed jeans as the third holds up a finger to disagree.

“The real risk is the wrong people figure out where the good trees are.”

➺ The response to our “Self-Presentation Survey” (looking at the white lies we tell in social situations) was so overwhelming we’re letting it run for a bit to get a huge sample size. No big data teardown today.

➺ No one really wants to swim in a lake.

The “Self Presentation” Survey is an attempt to understand how members of the Oat Milk Elite strategically share (or don’t) personal information in social situations in order to seem normal, cool, relatable, or w/e. Full results will be shared exclusively with Upper Middle Research members and those that complete the survey.

MONEY ❧ Intrusive Thinkers

Upper Middle spoke to Kim, now a professor at Columbia, about how reality TV fuels belief in economic and class mobility among those least likely to experience either. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book attacks the most persistent bias of editors, authors, and academics: that they’re part of a politically meaningful discourse. Did you get pushback? Did your peers accept that American Idol might be a worthy topic?
I started grad school as a Korean student claiming puzzles in American politics could be solved by looking at non-political media. So… people thought I was crazy. But we know many Americans – the ones who don’t live on campuses – watch five hours of TV a day. And we have analytics that allow us to push back on the assumption – built on self-reporting in survey data – that people watch news. That real data says people rarely watch or read news. At the time, people thought studying reality TV was frivolous. That has changed.

One of the stunning things about the book is that it goes well beyond arguing that politics are more informed by reality television than news media, suggesting politics might be more informed by reality TV than reality. How did you get there?
Economists think if you live in a town with low economic mobility and high inequality, you won’t believe in the American dream. That makes sense, but there's almost no correlation between where you live and how you think. Consider the New York subway, which I take all the time. Crazy things happen in every car, but New Yorkers don’t give a shit. They're looking at their phone. That begs a question: What matters more, the surroundings you ignore or the content you don’t? I think it’s the content.

This isn’t a totally new idea. You hear the word “copaganda” get thrown around. Why did you want to do this kind of work focused on reality TV?
Cop shows have been popular for 20 years. Public opinion on policing shows that people think cops solve crimes in 40 minutes – that they’re very effective. I thought shows like American Idol might have a similar effect, but I didn’t know what it would be. What I found is that reality TV has become a sort of mural of a classless society. It tells rags to riches stories that reinforce the idea is a classless society, which it very clearly is not.

A lot of the shows you discuss – whether that’s Idol or Shark Tank – are built around performances and auditions. Why do you think that is?
Audition-based programs decontextualize people and strip them of class status. You can’t tell an upper-middle class person from a person in poverty. This is exacerbated by the focus on participants’ struggle. Someone might be rich, but guess what? They have cancer! This creates an illusion that it doesn't matter where you're from – we're all struggling on an even playing field. It’s a nice idea, but not true. It turns out that the thing most correlated with not believing in the American Dream is education.

In order to collect data, you actually got in a truck retrofitted with TV screens and drove around rural Pennsylvania. That’s wild. What made you think that was necessary?
I felt like I was surrounded by people who thought Americans were watching C-SPAN. I didn’t want to source respondents from the same place and I was also being defiant. I’d never driven in America. I worried I was going to die before finishing my dissertation.

The obvious question here: What do you make of the fact people are watching less and less TV and more and more social or YouTube content?
I think TikTok puts forward a similar idea to American Idol. You have a phone. You can make content. There’s a stage. You have no excuse not to make it.^[2]

The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy is available now on Amazon and contains a lot of very, very fun graphs.

➺ Hugh Grant falling asleep in the Royal Box at Wimbledon is arguably the most high-status thing a human has ever done. ➺ The Art School Boom is what happens when the kids say, “Fuck it.” ➺ What is “Canadian Ambition?”

TASTE ❧ Anglophilia

After this year’s British Grand Prix, winner Lando Norris’s jubilant mother, Cisca Wauman, appeared onscreen for all of twelve seconds—just long enough for millions to clock her ostentatiously round, violet eyeglasses. Not flattering. Not discreet. Expensive looking – a visual shorthand for the post-hot, post-economic status of a post-menopausal woman. You don’t need to be glamorous if you know Nigella.

The look owes less to Swinging Sixties London or Elton John’s Rock of the Westies tour than to the NHS. Beginning in the late 1940s, the British state distributed standardized glasses like the NHS 211: bureaucratically dowdy, round, acetate. Once mocked, they were later adopted by art students and soft-left intellectuals—John Lennon, young David Hockney, Quentin Blake—before being reissued and gentrified by brands like Cutler & Gross for people (mostly women) like Wauman.

Her purple tribute to Professor Trelawney wasn’t about fashion but character – her embrace of the kind of personal oddity Brits canonize and Mara Hoffman–wearing American women chase with anglophilic zeal^[3]. The goal of wearing round glasses isn’t to look cool. The goal is to look like you’re over it. Like you already won.

➺ The new Gary Shteyngart is a near-future dystopian Harriet the Spy. Nice. ➺ “I was born in the wrong century.” ➺ Now political lightning rod: French Bulldogs. ➺ The new Lena Dunham joint aims to be the anti-Emily in Paris, but London is kinda romantic. ➺ Brands are ambassadors to smaller brands.

MONEY ❧ False Volatility

Housing inventory is 20–30% below pre-COVID levels. There are several serious reasons for this – high rates, slow building, boomer inertia – and one very unserious reason: Zestimates. Housing price fan pic produced by Zillow’s algo, Zestimates trains sellers to see their home – not housing – as a commodity with fluctuating prices. That’s not possible in the absence of supply and demand, but fake numbers create a real problem. Sellers mentally anchor to high prices^[4]. 

Consider a hypothetical: The Zestimate on a home you purchased for $900K was $1.4M in 2022 and now says $1.25M. You will feel that perceived loss roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure you felt when the price went up. A 2021 NBER paper modeled this thinking:

SalePriceᵢ = α + δ·Lossᵢ + γXᵢ + εᵢ.

And Zestimates are getting more pervasive. In May 2025, Zillow began refusing to list any home publicly marketed (yard sign, social post, etc.) for more than 24 hours prior to inclusion in the MLS database it scrapes. It’s a war on “pocket listings” intended to centralize real estate browsing on a site full of imagined numbers that cause sellers to overprice, wait, or not list at all. The paradox of Zillow? The company built on inventory suppresses it. δ hurts.

➺ Buy sneakers before the prices go up. ➺ Yup. Lex Luthor is just Peter Thiel now. ➺ Just buy the fucking lobster roll.

[2] I’ll never understand why people who don’t have to participate in that pageant agree to do so.

[3] This look is particularly common in New England, Northern California, the Pacific Northwest, and anywhere there’s a Chihully exhibit (god helps us all).

[4] This is a big part of why people get so squirrely talking about real estate and their net worth these days. They, quite rightly, don’t trust the information they’ve been given.