Hello, Smarty — It’s Your Balmy Late-August Wag!
The Smart Guy Economy After AI. Plus: New Books From Nicholas Boggs, R.F. Kuang, Grant Harrold, Addie E. Citchens, and More…
Dear Wags,
Industry never captured the buzz of Succession, though both HBO series are about the toxic spells cast by money. Jesse Armstrong’s hit was a jaundiced view from the chalets of plutocrats. In that rendering, the rich are not only like us, they are comic in their despicability. Succession is about those who’ve scrambled to the very tip of the melting iceberg, the loathed Fuck-You-Rich of the oligarchic 2020s.
Industry, created by former investment bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, isn’t about moguls at the top, but the strivers who do the grunt work for them. They’ve bought into a ruthlessly transactional system that reduces human worth to wealth; by training and inclination, they are calculators. There is sex, cocaine, fancy restaurants, yachts, castles, and betrayal, but it’s unglamorous. The world is filtered through the hard gray light of a trading floor. Its people are exhausting and exhausted—trapped in a pitiless workplace that, for all its affluence, looks like hell.
In our lifetime, the jobs in Industry have been at the top of the food chain, though really they’ve acted as a kind of deluxe vacuum, sucking up the best and the brightest. Entry-level positions in financial services are often miserable, but irresistible, drawing as many as 40 percent of Harvard graduates in peak years. At my kids’ elementary school, the most popular job at third-grade career day wasn’t doctor or lawyer, but nebulous, lucrative private equity. That signaled a broader lurch, starting in the 1980s, away from the old goods economy toward one that chases the intangible.
In real life and on TV, the narrative about these jobs is always that they kill your soul. But that’s part of their mystique. Survive the gauntlet and you’ll be one of society’s winners, insulated by money. Yet success is maddeningly relative, and the security we crave—at every level—remains just beyond reach, with yet more millions attached. The lesson isn’t just that money can’t make you happy. It’s that no deal we make will chase away our demons.
Industry won’t clean up at this year’s Emmys. In fact, it hasn’t earned a single nod since its 2020 debut. Maybe that’s because its view of the modern workplace is spectacularly bleak—even in an era when slick critiques of hypercapitalism (White Lotus, Severance) are everywhere. The bankers in Industry aren’t redeemed by satire or a redemptive arc. Faced with a moral choice, they always do the wrong thing. They are multiracial cosmopolitans whose only identity is money—and they live one bad call away from ruin.
This is a commentary on more than finance. Watching Industry seven months into the second Trump administration can feel like a nostalgia exercise—the last days of another Gilded Age. Threaded into the storylines is an awareness that the ladder the characters try to climb is disintegrating beneath them. The old banks are hiring fewer graduates, as consumed with layoffs as they are with staving off collapse. Bandits launch their own funds and stab each other in the back, chasing the next big score. The big addiction here isn’t sex or cocaine but the work itself—and its terminal dependency on risk. “I think this is the closest thing to a meritocracy there is,” says Harper Stern, the rapacious young trader at the heart of the series, who claws her way to portfolio manager on the backs of her colleagues. “And I only ever want to be judged on the strength of my abilities.”
This is a grandiose lie, endlessly exposed. Finance positions itself as consumed only with numbers, but the legions who work them are rarely self-made. The best jobs on Wall Street are still a class entitlement, the end of a gilded funnel most players are born into. The long, unforgiving hours, the theatrical bullying, are a cult of fake toughness for some of the most pampered people on earth. Fi-bros in fleece vests may style themselves killers, but in 2025, the real killers run the game.
A lifetime ago, I worked for a financial media firm in London. The offices were in the City, the historic square mile that has always been the capital’s greed hub. These were the early days of skyscrapers at Canary Wharf, the dawn of London’s heyday as a dirty money laundry for post-Soviet fortunes. My job was to prepare reports on emerging markets newly open to adventurous capitalists. This analysis was uniformly positive—heavy on natural gas and uranium, light on mafia-style corruption. The message was: if you wanted to make a mint in Kazakhstan, just head east with a suitcase of dollars.
The people I worked alongside were a young, multinational group of graduates with precarious jobs. We worked in a pit, surrounded by senior people—a Cambridge man in a rumpled pinstripe suit always flecked with ash, an Argentine socialite who closed deals through charm and connections, and the rosy-cheeked Irish chairman with a halo of silver curls. He was a master of blarney, a charming assassin, and we knew enough to be terrified of him.
After long hours in that stale office, we went out for endless drinks, not the cocaine of Industry. After the pub, we straggled back to bleak houseshares far from the City, and were up before dawn to take the Tube back. Life took on the grinding gray palette. There was camaraderie among the graduates because we suffered together—but also dread, because only a handful of us would ever claw our way into the good life.
The last I heard from one of my colleagues—a hard-charging blonde from Phoenix who once told me, “It’s never dog-eat-dog, it’s dog-kill-dog”—she was trying to make it as an actress in Hollywood. The world we were marginally a part of—the same one depicted in Industry—increasingly looks as precarious as the entertainment business. When I left London for New York, I lost many weekends with young bankers. One, the child of a studio president, a Princeton graduate, lived in the most fabulous apartment I’d ever seen, entirely underwritten by his parents. He was, in every way I could discern, a mediocre person. Yet he not only had a job on Wall Street, an eight-room party house in the sky, weekends in places closed to all but the very rich, but he believed these things proved not that he was lucky, but Smart.
Money has a way of fooling people into thinking they are brilliant. After all, isn’t that what they are given all that coin for? For the past forty years, the culture of Wall Street—and of its cousins in consulting, law, and tech—has trained whole generations to confuse compensation for genius. Now, AI is blowing up the very entry-level jobs that undergird that illusion. “Robots can do what we do,” a depressed young analyst told me recently. “No—they should.”
They will, and they are. The drudgery of analyst work is being vaporized because the spreadsheets once handled by humans make such a persuasive case for it. The golden ladder is disintegrating, and with it, a six-figure hazing ritual for the well-credentialed. The curtain is going down on theatrical meritocracy.
Few Americans will mourn the loss. The analyst class was always resented, and helped spawn a reactionary populism we cope with now. Down and Kay’s creation makes the case for it being as bad for its beneficiaries as any drug—an express ticket to damnation. And then there are the opportunity costs. What if so many of our brightest graduates had not streamed into finance, consulting, and tech, but into laboratories, classrooms, or public service? In the short term, it maximized profits; in the long term, it may have starved us of deeper economic and social health.
The service economy, and the libertarian intellectuals who cheered it on, triggered a rebellion against the Smart Guy Economy, a rejection of the credentialed classes who hollowed out the real in favor of the abstract. That rebellion now focuses its fury on the universities and innovation corridors that produced the techno-elites and billionaires in the first place. No wonder so many prep for an apocalypse.
Wall Street’s old abstractions at least rested on real human output; AI replaces labor itself. Code becomes capital, tokens replace trust, algorithms spin out synthetic creativity. What financial services profited from is now being devoured by a more powerful abstraction—one that no longer skims on top of reality but colonizes it. Against this stands a stubborn but powerful idea: that there is still something indispensable about us.
That, too, may be a delusion. The banker, the poet, and the plumber all share the dream that what we hone in labor cannot be replaced by programming. We pin our hopes on the fragile idea that our work—whatever it may be—is the last outpost of irreplaceable humanity. Marc Andreessen once insisted venture capital will always remain a human trade because it requires handholding entrepreneurs, less number-crunching than therapy. But AI can already synthesize patterns across industries, histories, and personalities; it is adept at approximating therapy. It can already do much of what VCs on Page Mill Road do—without the ego and bias that cloud their judgment. It might never have bet on Theranos.
Industry exposes the fragility of a financial class trapped in a colorless, transactional purgatory. It also has something to say to the rest of us, who are equally implicated in its machinations. If automation strips away work and the myth of our own importance, it may create a little room for truly human creativity to matter again. That may only be another pipe dream from our famously imaginative species—but it’s one worth clinging to.
Yours ever,
Rawlie Thorpe
The City That Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride
“Show, don’t tell” is a tiresome cliché. Often, fiction’s real power is in the telling. McBride (The Lesser Bohemians) is an artisan of language, working her way into its crannies rather than soaring out for the panorama. She plunges deep into the minds of characters fumbling for connection.
This standalone sequel reunites us with Eily, a young drama student from Ireland who, in 1990s London, remains beguiled by Stephen, an older actor with considerable baggage. Stephen is charming but faithless, the father of a daughter, Grace, who happens to be Eily’s age. Things happen—Stephen stars in a West End play, Eily and Grace size each other up over too many drinks—but the real action is interior. Eily reads Stephen obsessively, scanning him for signs of love; he, in turn, is riven with private anxieties. Grace, the fly in the ointment, has her own agenda.
All of this plays out in shaggy 1995 Camden, but the dilemmas are timeless: Can we ever truly know another person? And even if we could, would that knowledge cure our tendency toward self-loathing? McBride doesn’t answer these questions so much as tease them into poignant focus. The result is elegant and deeply humane.
—Molly Bloom
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
Great fictional Southern families—the Compsons, the Pollitts, the Hubbards—are brought down by their corruption. In her debut novel, Citchens adds to that lineage with the Winfreys, who sit atop the Black social pyramid in Dominion, Mississippi. Sabre, the patriarch, is the minister of Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church and also owns the local barber shop and radio station. His wife, Priscilla, plays the perfect consort, and their five sons are the pride of the community—especially the youngest, Manny, a musical prodigy and football star nicknamed Wonderboy.
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