Critical Faculties → Madame Xtreme → Lactic Acid Luxury

Hey Neighbor. True story. Two women talking. One person dead. "I'm invited to a memorial in New York at Frank E. Campbell,” says the first woman. "I'm so sorry,” says the second. “What is Frank E. Campbell?" The first pauses. This should be self evident.

"It's kind of like the Studio 54 of funeral homes."

➺ Thanks to Fred Herz for the anecdote above. If you’ve heard something fantastically Upper Middle recently please share. It’s always a joy.

➺ Welcome to new readers. There are 2,723 new folks joining us for this issue, which makes us so excited we’re gonna throw an ergonomic desk chair through a window.

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Upper Middle’s 2025 Interesting Times Survey is our attempt to understand how the members of the oatmilk elite are reacting to current economic turmoil. Data will be shared with survey participants and, as always, with members.

SYMBOLS ❧ Signals We Send

FINANCIAL BRANDING

When surveyed, 66.7% of Upper Middle readers associated Goldman Sachs with wealthy investors, but only 28.1% associated it with discerning investors – second to JPMorgan Chase. A 10.9% point gap in wealth and discernment scores indicated that Morgan Stanley is perceived as the discerning choice for the merely well-to-do ^[1]. Wells Fargo, BoA, and Citi are less associated with discernment or wealth, suggesting esteem is inversely proportional to marketing budgets.

STATUS ❧ Intrusive Thinkers

Upper Middle spoke to Hess by phone. The conversation has been edit and condensed.

In many ways, the book is about you struggling to be a logical actor in a high-stakes, low-information environment. That struggle – like so many struggles – starts with an app. Can you explain what happened with you and Flo?
Flo is a period tracking app, which I had only used once a month before I get pregnant. But if you're making an app, you don't want users engaging once a month. You build other features. When I got pregnant, I changed modes in the app and suddenly there were new ways to engage. I was looking at it like 10 times a day. But I think what was presented to me by the app as self knowledge – an understanding of my body – turned out to be something else, namely an understanding of the social expectations for me as a pregnant person.

It seems like something similar happened with your doctors. Why do you think you couldn’t get the information you thought you needed.
There both was not enough information and also too much information. Doctors and scientists can't do medical experiments on pregnant women so they don’t know that much. Then there’s the information they don’t provide. Early in my pregnancy, I assumed I’d taken just about every prenatal test, but there are thousands. I didn’t understand how little data I had. There’s always more. It’s just not always helpful.

But you still wanted all the information you could get – even if you couldn’t really do anything with it. Why?
I didn't feel prepared to be a parent to a child and I didn’t know how to prepare because that’s not possible until the child exists and you’re parenting them. I know that now, but I didn’t understand that before.

That feeling of being underprepared is hard for people used to being very prepared. Your son also has a genetic disorder, which added to the anxiety and ambiguity of the situation. How would grade yourself on your handling all those unknowns?
Oh, like a zero. Ambiguity is horrifying to me. It was the first time in my life when I felt like my mind was being run by sub-rational parts. In pregnancy, my critical faculties fell away. 

You write sympathetically – to a certain degree – about freebirthers, who give birth without doctors or midwives. You suggest their irrational behavior is understandable in context. Did pregnancy make you almost most accepting of irrational thinking?
When something went wrong with my pregnancy, I blamed myself. I felt it was my responsibility to ensure that we had a healthy pregnancy even though, rationally, that makes no sense. I can understand a mindset that's like, “I need to be in complete control.” And freebirthers are right that a commodified medical system does not serve us. They're just wrong to conclude that means we don’t need a medical system.  

How have you found navigating the medical system with your son?
Most of the stuff that my son is going through, he’s not going to remember, but it has affected him. The experiences are traumatizing. I know that, years from now, I'll still be thinking about it. He'll be like, whatever.

That’s a very rational insight.
I think that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book. I wanted to retake command.

Amanda Hess, Briefly
Hometown: Spokane, WA
Parent’s Jobs: College Professors
Undergrad: George Washington University
High Level of Education Completed: Bachelor of Arts

➺ Cybernetic psychology is unexpectedly appealing. ➺ AI empowers executive to build technology and it’s awful. ➺ Golf course proximity has been linked to Parkinson's risk.

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. Members get access to all peer survey data.

TASTE ❧ Looking at Art

GILT TRIP

The Met’s new John Singer Sargent exhibition is a bizarre, but timely celebration of society portraiture, which the painter called “a pimp's profession.” The paintings are, of course, virtuosic, but in aggregate they have less to say about the artistic ambition than personal ambition. The fifth room explains, more or less, how Sargent created a referral-led marketing funnel that allowed him to move up market. It’s not exactly inspiring.

As a painter, Sargent had serious game – a Cassatt imitation in the exhibit is more Cassatt than most Cassatt – but he worked during the Gilded Age and understood the value of becoming the aristocracy’s pass-around party Botticelli. After his portrait of Virginie “Madame X” Gautreau (the grand finale of the new exhibit) made him famous, he ensured it also made him rich. He charged $150K in today’s dollars per portrait and he worked quickly. The decades he spent really cashing in are conspicuously not on display.

Famously, Sargent quit portraiture in 1907 to travel and paint Winslow Homeric vistas. But that was more like a retirement than a new chapter. He was in his sixties at that point and you can’t buy back a profitable youth. Though later paintings like “Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries to Carrara,” which hangs a short jog from the current exhibit, make it clear Sargent could have been The Great American Painter if he’d really taken a run at it, he didn’t^[3]. Not really.

That makes Sargent in Paris the rare exhibition about squandered talent. It also makes it oddly, unexpectedly relatable – and greatly American.

➺ Tell your guests to bring dessert. ➺ J. Crew has bad buttons. ➺ The big mural trend is really great except when it isn’t.

MONEY ❧ Totally Spent

LACTIC ACID

In a post-game interview after last week’s cabinet meeting, President Trump, referring to tariffs affecting the import of Barbies, suggested that “maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?” Anti-Dream House sentiment is unexpected from the guy who hot glued gilded plastic scrollwork to the Oval Office fireplace^[4], but point taken. The wrinkle: Mom and dad aren’t buying little Isolde “I Can Be President Barbie” because it’s necessary, but because it isn’t.

The most significant trend in discretionary spending since the Great Recession has been the rise of “Treat Culture,” which is characterized by frequent purchases of affordable luxuries. Treats, which confer status and demonstrate taste, provide working people temporary escape from the spending constraints necessitated by the high cost-of-living. Erewhon smoothies are treats. Glossier moisturizers are treats. And, yes, Barbies are treats too – for the parents who consume the experience of gifting them.

If, as Trump suggests, protectionism means fewer treats, it also means weirder treats. Last week we were cutting down on Barbies made in China. Next week it’ll be French cheeses. The specifics are less significant than the broader trend, a winnowing of options. Over time, this will lead to consumers trying to imbue generic, low-cost domestic products with status. That may sound like whacky crystal bawling, but this exactly what happened in London post-Brexit. Ice cream got psychedelic.

Sugary British dairy brands like Sweet Cheeks, Little Moons, and The Dreamery all leaned into “Good Trip” visuals and brand language. That sounds like a coincidence, but it wasn’t. As researchers at the renowned Filefish agency put it: “In Treat Culture, mental stimulation is more palatable and aspirational than full-bodied indulgence. In this landscape, the new semiotics of pleasure are shifting away from bodily hedonism toward dreaminess.”

Decades before Little Moons started slinging iced latte mochi balls, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that “consumption is not a material practice.” You can get rid of the dream house, but the dream has to live somewhere.

➺ Trump is gonna boost the threshold for the estate tax. ➺ Private equity is taking over dentistry and prices are up. ➺ Costco is limiting squashing goldbugs. ➺ Lots of investors didn’t catch the elevator back up.

[2] The book is broadly applicable to the experience of parenthood, but doesn’t pretend fatherhood and motherhood are the same or that those experiences are similarly fraught, which is honestly nice.

[3] It is worth noting/conceding that Sargent tried to “Do a Sistine” in the Boston Public Library. Those murals pissed off a lot of Newton-based Jews – the embodiment of the temple looks kinda drunk – but are certainly beautiful. It’s just odd, TBH, that even that work consists mostly of portraits (including some of family members).

[4] Mojo Dojo Rococo.