Fractal Snobs → Excessive Thrift → Rich Texts

Hey Neighbor. True story. Two coworkers eating lunch, shooting the collared shirt, and talking real estate. After a while the WASPier of the two makes an unsolicited admission: "Growing up, I thought everyone had a lake house.” There a pause; it’s the sort of thing people don’t to say.

But who could blame a kid for that? You grow up where you grow up.

➺ This issue contains our – gestures broadly toward 100,000+ readers – summer reading recs. If you just want the lists, no offense taken. Have at it.

➺ Cheers to the anonymous reader who submitted the anecdote above. If you’ve got something similar up the sleeve of your oxford cloth shirt come at us.

➺ My son can’t golf, but boy can he fuck up a sand trap.

Upper Middle’s “Small Luxuries” Survey is our attempt to find out what “discretionary” purchases (read: indulgences) are delivering a huge ROI for members of the Oat Milk Elite. Results and dope recs will be shared with survey participants and members.

STATUS ❧ Fractals

In Los Angeles, Waymos—the delivery bots protesters spent last week immolating—have become a smug, mechanical aristocracy, gliding through what Edward Soja called a “fractal city” of privatized, racialized zones. They obey traffic laws no one else respects and ignore the city’s unwritten codes.

They look harmless—those big, dumb headlight eyes—but they’re built to assume. There’s a reason John Mulaney made humiliating one a bit on Everybody’s Live. They’re not evil. They’re condescending^[1]. Designed with technocratic indifference to lived experience, they don’t pay the toll for inequality, which is fear.

Mike Davis once wrote that riots in L.A. create ad hoc public space—at a cost. When Waymos roll through those spaces, indifferent and flammable, they’re asking for it. Burning them isn’t just vandalism. It’s backlash against what has become common practice not just in the Dept. of Homeland Security, but in the villas on Carolwood Drive: looking without seeing.

➺ Stressed out people buy the same stuff again and again (and watch 30 Rock for the 40th time). ➺ Trump’s $5M Golden Visa is live. The suburbs are about to get smell different. ➺ “If it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.”

TASTE ❧ Consumption Spiral

Americans earning $150K+, whose splurges on Away suitcases and Brooklinen sheets drive over 40% of U.S. consumer spending, are pulling back. In the 35 days ending June 1st, the top 16% of earners cut spending across luxury retail, restaurants, travel, and home improvement, per Consumer Edge. And the Patagonia-vest-over-Uniqlo-tee crowd is making a spectacle of frugality, treating spending with vocal suspicion on the grounds that it’s risky, wasteful, tacky or all three. But that’s an expensive premise if you buy it. Maybe we shouldn’t.

In Renaissance Italy, magnificenza held that the wealthy should spend freely to circulate money and create beauty. As Leon Battista Alberti wrote in Della Famiglia, “Great expense in a man of wealth is not only permitted, but expected.” Sure, that was self-serving—he was an architect—but not unprecedented: Thomas Aquinas (born in a castle) called extravagance a form of justice. Both would’ve found “a penny saved is a penny earned”^[2] absurd—not just because it isn’t, but because thrift can be as socially irresponsible as overconsumption is personally irresponsible. All those Bougie Apothicaire Candles, Buck Mason Pima tees (strong recommend), and Great Jones Dutch ovens are not, whatever Spreadsheet Willy says, a waste. 

➺ Said it once. Will say it again. Gentrification is generally pretty okay. Super-gentrification isn’t. ➺ The big money is moving toward the yachtconomy. ➺ Looks like European aristocrats just rug-pulled their bull market.

MONEY ❧ Upper Middle Research

The Upper Middle Summer Reading survey found that the rich are different than you and I (they read more), that high-earners look (desperately) for answers in non-fiction, and that books we recommend are more emotional than the books we seek out, suggesting a kindness at the heart of reading culture. The survey – skewed by who chose to participate, 31% of whom were in book clubs and 72% of whom were women – also found that we are nerds. We read 36.3 books a year on average.

Or we round up.

Rich Text

Net worth was strongly correlated (4.2) with reading, but the relationship wasn’t linear. People with $1M–$2.5M in assets—mostly earning over $250K, and wrangling kids—read less than those with both less and more money. Lack of spare time and exhaustion explains the dip, as well as the spike in reading among those with $2.5M+ and, notably, a much higher appetite for fiction (chalk it up to ye olde hierarchy of needs).

Overbooked

Interestingly, the time-crunched non-readers actually read more nonfiction than any other segment—and recommended titles centered on control, burnout, and meaning. But they weren’t immune to escapism: Their fiction picks leaned genre ^[3]. It's less a rejection of fun than another way of posing a question we often try to answer here: Why doesn’t success feel better?

Must-Reads vs. Lust-Reads

When asked what they were “excited to read” vs. what they’d “recommend,” responses split predictably. People were excited by transgressive fiction (you beautiful pervs) and self-help/explanatory nonfiction, but they recommended canon-adjacent fiction and respectable older nonfiction. We read for ourselves, but we recommend to remind others of our shared humanity—which is kind of sweet if you think about it.

The Lists

Given the disparities in recommendations and anticipations, we create two lists:

Recommended and Exciting

1. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
   → A grieving widow and a wise octopus unravel a small-town mystery.

2. The Maid by Nita Prose
   → A quirky hotel maid is swept into a murder investigation.

3. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
   → A survivor finds purpose through suffering.

4. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro^[4]
   → A robot learns about love and sacrifice.

5. This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
   → Two time-traveling enemies fall in love.

6. The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
   → A thief pulls cons in a dangerous city.

7. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
   → A man searches for meaning after his father's death.

8. Bunny by Mona Awad
   → An outsider is drawn into an MFA girl gang.

9. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
   → A young woman cooks through grief.

Exciting and Soon-to-Be Recommended.

1. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
   → Game designers build worlds, break hearts.

2. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
   → The Martian with higher stakes.

3. Erasing History
   → Fascists gonna fascists.

4. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   → Three brothers wrestle with faith and guilt.

5. Collected Essay by James Baldwin
   → A brilliant, angry man speaks truth.

6. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
   → Fuck it all.

7. Trust by Hernan Diaz
   → A rich man’s story unravels.

8. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
   → More like Suckerberg.

9. Burn Book by Kara Swisher
   → Anarchocapitalist technocrats, toasted.

Now let’s just do the raw numbers. The most recommended books on a votes basis (no single book clear 1.3% of recommendations) were…

Recommended Fiction

1. Stoner by John Williams (1965)

   → Failure and brooding. Dark academia as lit.

2. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

   → Gender fluidity and American identity.

3. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011)

   → More or less required at this point. HBO Max.

4. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (2013)

   → Art, Italy, and motorcycles. Smart but cool.

5. The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (2024)

   → Food and Europe. Airplane reading+.

Recommended Non-Fiction

1. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (2024)
   → Bleak and timely. The Power Broker for normie preppers.

2. The Wager by David Grann (2023)

   → For people who read book that become movies.

3. Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau (2003)

   → Screams “I read footnotes.”

4. The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal (2013)
   → Evolution, morality, and primates.

5. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza

   → An excuse to not.

And, Because We Can, Upper Middle’s Recommendations 

• Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

  • Being unreasonable is okay. Or is it?

• Ways of Seeing by John Berger (Pictures!)

  • Look twice. Think twice.

• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

  • Just beautiful writing

• The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré (Audiobook)

  • Road trip perfect.

• Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuściński

  • High-level wandering.

➺ Hot Wheels Ferraris are legitimately cool. ➺ The new NYT restaurant critics are showing their faces, which makes sense, but isn’t fun at all. ➺ Taste economy reporting is a bit tooooo insistent that AI can’t mimic taste. Actually, entrepreneurs are differentiating themselves by acting like weirdos (wassup). ➺ Restaurant fish are now fishy.

[2] There’s a fundamental disconnect between Catholics and Protestants around spending, which is why Rome looks like that and why Philadelphia looks like that.

[3] Yes, I did ask that question about books in which elves have sex and, yes, this is the group of people most likely to be reading about elves having sex. For the record, I’m not judge-y about this. We’ve all got our thing. I’m really into coffee table books about interiors. We’re all seeking comfort of a sort.

[4] As one might expect given this newsletter, I really like Ishiguro. That said, I feel obliged to give fair warning here. Not a good book.