#tnyarchive

“My Misspent Youth”

“I’m twenty-nine years old, and I am completely over my head in debt. I have not made a life for myself; I have purchased a life for myself.” 

“A Student-Debt Revolt Begins”

“Corinthian Colleges’ downfall has come to be seen as a symbol of the ills of for-profit higher education—the false promises of employment, the mounting student debt, the aggressive collection tactics.”

“Killing It”

“A generation has inherited a world without being able to live in it. A young college graduate might now find herself in a position akin to a homeowner with negative equity.”

“Pay Up”

“In the greater Buffalo metropolitan area, more than five thousand people earn a living as debt collectors. That’s more than the number of taxi-drivers, bakers, butchers, steelworkers, roofers, crane operators, hotel clerks, and brick masons combined.” 

“The Scold”

“Mr. Money Mustache is the alias of a forty-one-year-old Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who made or, more to the point, saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty.”

“Take the Money and Run”

Lauren Collins on George Steinmetz’s aerial photography: 

The flying lawn chair is actually a motorized paraglider—a sail, a tank of gas, a propeller, and a seat. Steinmetz is the fuselage. He never flies for fun, but the apparatus has a back-yardish feel: picture a man with a leaf blower on his back, encircled by a metal hula hoop, dangling at altitudes of up to six thousand feet under a tomato-colored beach umbrella. The sail—paragliders call it a “wing,” because it’s cambered, like a bird’s—is connected from its trailing edge to hand controls by two sets of nylon-sheathed brake lines in fluorescent colors. (They look like Silly String.) Steinmetz uses the brake lines, which work the wing like flaps on an airplane, to steer.