7 things I read this month and loved

Hey friends,

September was one of those months that somehow felt both very summery and extremely busy. I squeezed out the last bits of summer in New York, ate an unreasonable number of tacos, joined a new gym and (after a somewhat spiritually extended break) started working out for real again.

I also officially started co-hosting the Markets Brew podcast! Tune in on Thursdays and Fridays to hear me talk about macro stories, cultural moments, and how they move the markets.

What I wrote this month

Who actually gets rich in America?: On the surprisingly boring way a lot of Americans get very rich, and what that tells us about the widening divide between people who work for money and people who own the things that make money.

I want a private equity boyfriend: On the return of the “provider man,” why people are suddenly talking about dating for financial security again, and what romance looks like in an economically anxious culture.

Do you need rich parents to get ahead?: Two people can earn the exact same salary and live completely different financial lives depending on whether there’s a family safety net sitting behind them.

For paid subscribers:

Where is all your money going?: A practical system for figuring out why a good salary can somehow evaporate every month.

How much money is enough?: How to decide what your money is actually for, instead of simply moving the goalposts forever.

7 things I read this month and loved

1. “Eating Alone” — Gabe Bullard, Longreads

Oh my god, this essay! It’s about what we actually trade away when everything gets optimized for ease — delivery apps, ghost kitchens, surveillance tech, the physical spaces we used to eat in — and the argument is way more interesting than just “phones are bad.” Convenience saves us time, sure. But it can also lower our standards for labor, products, social interaction and the physical world around us. All the little interactions and rituals and bits of effort that made things meaningful are what’s getting optimized out.

2. “Paid Phones” — Daniel Kolitz, The Baffler

Excellent and bleak! This essay is about an SEO writer whose work dries up in the AI era and who ends up cycling through cash-advance apps to survive. It moves so well from one person’s financial unraveling into the business model that’s been built around short-term financial precarity. What stuck with me is how financial instability itself has become a recurring-revenue business. If you’re short $50 until payday, there is now an entire ecosystem willing to “solve” that problem … for a fee.

3. “She Got a Great Deal on Egg Freezing. Then She Spiraled” — WIRED

I am currently in the process of freezing my eggs, so I had to panic-click on this article to read it. The piece looks at Cofertility, a startup that lets young women freeze eggs without paying cash in exchange for donating part of the retrieval. And then it gets into fertility anxiety, venture-backed reproductive care, the commercialization of biological optionality, and the question of what “free” actually means when your body is the collateral.

4. “Cool Is a Skill Issue” — EX Research

Once algorithms made culture hyper-visible, measurable, and instantly commercializable, status started migrating toward things that are harder to quantify: IRL scenes, analog media, niche interests, private communities, certain hobbies. In other words: cool increasingly lives where the algorithm can’t see it.

5. “The ‘Main Street Millionaire’ Theory of Inequality and Prosperity” — Katie Gatti Tassin

Katie engages with The Everywhere Millionaire (as did I!) and the revelation that enormous wealth sits with owners of ordinary private businesses: dry cleaners, plumbing companies, auto body shops. She pushes on the tension between treating business ownership as an explanation for inequality and treating it as a universal prescription for getting rich, which I enjoyed.

6. “The Death of the Middle” — Eugene Healey

Healey connects the K-shaped economy with the shrinking appeal of “middle” positioning for both consumers and brands. The old bargain was that staying somewhere near the center bought you stability, and Healey argues that bargain has weakened. You can see it in airlines, hotels, restaurants, housing, entertainment, credit cards, you name it. Increasingly, the economy offers you cheap and shitty or extremely expensive and nice, with less and less in between.

7. “Inside the Perimenopause Industrial Complex” — WIRED

When the traditional health-care system fails to meaningfully address something people care about, a consumer industry appears almost overnight to sell them solutions. And then managing your health starts to also mean managing marketing claims, supplements, memberships, telehealth subscriptions and a large amount of private spending.

What else I consumed this month

📚 Books

• The Corrections— AMAZING. If you like giant, neurotic, sprawling novels where everyone is a little bit unbearable, please read. Fellow Infinite Jest appreciators may understand what I mean. (9/10)
• The Warmth of Other Suns — Sheds light on a period I knew an embarrassingly little about, and really helps contextualize the systemic disadvantages that have compounded into things like the racial wealth gap today. (8/10).
• Jack the Modernist — A book that explores sex, art, desire, and emotional obsession. Delicious! (7/10)
• Open Wide — Oh boy. I went into this hoping it would be similar as The Guest, and it … was not not. (4/10)
• Kin — Meh. BookTok has hurt me again. (5/10)

📺 Watching

Literally nothing — help!!! Please send me your recs because I’m one bad evening away from rewatching Fleabag for the fifth time.

🎧 Listening

Phoebe Bridgers. Specifically, I went to her phone-free concert and loved it. There’s a whole discourse happening around her phone-free concert, an idea that I personally loved. Like sorry, you can go for 2 hours without being on your phone!!! I increasingly think we need to be forcibly separated from our phones in order to remember how to experience anything.

Anyway, thank you for being here — for reading, replying, sending these essays to your friends and generally allowing me to spend an unreasonable amount of my life thinking about why everything is secretly about money.

If you’re not subscribed yet, Your Brain on Money is free every Wednesday. And if you want access to the full archive, including the paid guides above, you can become a paid subscriber below.

See you next month.

Hanna