Welcome back, readers, to the real world, from what felt like months of holidays. Whether you spent last weekend stranded in the Caribbean or pushing slush around your stoop with a shovel: I see you, I appreciate you, and whatever it was, it’s over now.
It’s 2026—if you missed our Honestly predictions episode, including some musings from yours truly, you can check it out here—and there’s countless shibboleths, trends, good movies, great books, and bad TV yet to be dissected, discussed, and debated. If you want to follow along with the culture, subscribe to Second Thought here.
The Finance Guy Is Back on Top
He was a punch line for so long, we began to count him out all together. The finance bro, a vested-up, boring grad of Wharton, Michigan, or even, God forbid, Duke, was the type who drove up rent in once-cool urban neighborhoods and ruined once-off-the-beaten-path restaurants. He worked at Goldman, or Blackstone, as a junior analyst, and while the white-hot rage directed at bankers from the Occupy Wall Street movement had fizzled by the late 2010s, finance guys were still urban bugbears. Late to every trend, obnoxious in every bar, they were the anti-hipsters, and we never let them forget it.
But then, in the past couple years, the waters shifted. There was the meme song in the summer of 2024 that looped the words: “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6′5″, blue eyes.” A raft of banker-coded performance enhancers like nicotine pouches, meal replacement shakes, and high-protein slop bowls best eaten standing up in Midtown Manhattan flooded the market. Trump II brought a renewed focus on cash, and on living the high life. And then there was the rise of Industry, the HBO show about hyper-ambitious, vicious, and promiscuous young bankers working at a London investment bank called Pierpoint & Co.
