Blog Feed
Panic! At the Airport Lounge
Something devastating is happening to airport lounges, and those paid to catalog subtle economic and cultural shifts are taking note.The food? “Sad.”…
Selling Sales
I love being lied to by beautiful, rich women on the internet. Not just any influencer will do—my preferred shared hallucination is the business infl…
When We Fight, We Win
For a few hours on the Fourth of July, I did the most patriotic thing I could imagine: joining local Safeway workers on the picket line as they conti…
That Funny Feeling
The surgeon general’s pop-up shop, Robert Iger’s faceDiscount Etsy agitprop, Bugles’ take on raceFemale Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil warThe w…
To Personal Finance, My First True Love
Over the long weekend, I was toying with a creative prompt: “What are you afraid to write?” Reflecting on the last dozen interviews I’d done for Rich…
The Venture Capitalization of Culture
For a recent story published by The Cut, Bindu Bansinath surveyed 102 of the publication’s readers about the most “frivolous thing” they’d taken on d…
Scenes From an Empire in Denial
Every once in a while, a series of mundane events accumulates to produce a moment of out-of-body, blistering clarity. “Clarity” is not a mental state…
Pineapple Suite State of Mind
This essay contains copious White Lotus season 3 spoilers. If you’re not caught up, please stop whatever else you’re doing and go spend the next eigh…
We Can Fix It. But Do We Want To?
International Women’s Day nearly escaped my awareness this year. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one not in the spirit: About a week before, the “…
What Will Make Economic Boycotts Work Again?
There are a few notable examples of overlap between traditional personal finance advice and economic justice movements. Take, for example, last Frida…
The Large American Family Is Becoming a Luxury Good
A cherished milestone of modern American adulthood is rewatching the 1990 classic Home Alone through Zillow-pilled eyes for the first time, witnessin…
Breaking: Richest Man on Earth Tries to Rewrite Reality
The explosion of financial updates out of Washington in the past week has been overwhelming, the “breaking news” equivalent of projectile vomit. (The…
Incentives are Not Instructions
In 2021, I earned more in a month than I had earned in all of 2018. I was 26. Given all the buzz about oligarchy this year, I’ve been reflecting…
What Do the Wall Street Journal Commenters Want?
Originally, this essay was supposed to be about the futility of extreme New Year’s resolutions. There were going to be jokes about announcing your in…
ISO: Patina
For the last four years, we’ve spent Thanksgiving with a few of my husband’s brothers and their families in a Colorado ski town (though the trip is f…
On Time
The “Passion Planner” was first sucked into the gravitational force field of my striving at an internship in 2016, thanks to a young colleague who re…
Redefining the Terms
A few weeks ago, I watched The Substance through my hands. During particularly bloody scenes, I would study Thomas’s face as he grimaced, attempting …
Are We Finally Reaching Peak Awareness of Corporate Nonsense?
As a pathologically ambitious college junior a few months into my first real internship, a generous, well-regarded full-time employee on my team pull…
House of Mirrors
House-hunting in any US city will cause one simple question to bulldoze all the others: How can so many people afford to buy these houses? If you typ…
On Radical Audacity
The other day, a friend asked me what I thought of the “money manifestation” courses she keeps seeing online. Maybe you’ve seen their ads, too: Relat…