The $124,421 Man
On acquiring and paying off a six-figure student debt load:
The amount of money my parents and I were loaned was actually higher than $116,499—$124,141, to be exact—but my parents had been making monthly payments for years, whittling thousands off. In the end, we had decided to take loans out for seven semesters—all but my semester abroad, which my parents paid for out of pocket. (Turns out, it was several thousand dollars cheaper than a semester at Tufts.) Encouraged by low interest rates until senior year’s 6.5 percent, my father decided to pile on the loans, nearly all under his name.
My Lower East Side
A young transplant is drawn to the lively and fast-changing New York neighborhood a great-great-grandfather left behind.
Cringe if you want, but we wouldn’t have been the first to turn a shiva into an open house. We’d all like to believe that our legacies are larger than a rent-controlled apartment, but this is New York, where mortality and mortgages are intrinsically linked. The sad truth is when your lease on life is up, your family members will whisper, possibly over your cold, dead body, about what will happen to that Brooklyn Heights brownstone you purchased in the 1960s for $80,000.
Our Childhood Heroes: A Reading List
Stories about Bill Watterson, Kerri Strug, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mr. Rogers, Wayne Gretzky, and more.
A Sister’s Sleuthing Unravels a Teenage Love Triangle Murder Mystery
A twisted tale of teenage love and cold-blooded murder in Hollywood, Florida.
For detectives, the killing at first glance must have seemed an all-too-common crime: another dead thug, likely felled by the same drug culture that had left him homeless and broke. Yet Savage’s life and death — as told through hundreds of pages of police records, text messages, and interviews with his family and itinerant friends — were far more complex.
Kendrick Lamar, Hip-Hop’s Newest Old-School Star
The young M.C. is on a quest to become the best rapper in the world.
‘Everybody just wants to have fun, be with the scene,” Kendrick Lamar said when we met in his cramped quarters inside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last fall. “Certain people get backstage, people that you would never expect. . . . You ain’t with the media! You ain’t into music! You ain’t into sports! You’re just here.” The rapper, now 27, had just finished his set as the opening act on this stretch of Kanye West’s Yeezus tour, and he was sitting low in an armchair in his trademark black hoodie surrounded by exactly those people.
Treating a Mystery
A disorder triggered by the common strep virus may be causing psychiatric symptoms in children, or it might not exist. Inside the controversial “Pandas” diagnosis:
Candi went into full-tilt research mode. The sensory stuff clicked, but from there she wound up on a site that may just as well have been tailor-made for Reagan. Every symptom matched. On these forums, it was as if every kid was Reagan and every scared and helpless mom was Candi. Some of the symptoms even went beyond Reagan’s, including anorexia, depression, age regression, violent rage.
Love and War
A legendary Special Forces commander was quietly forced to leave the U.S. Army after he admitted to a love affair with a Washington Post war correspondent, who quit her job to secretly live with him for almost a year in one of the most dangerous combat outposts in Afghanistan.
Tyson knew most of the visiting VIPs well from her long stint at the Washington Post, a job she quit to join Gant and write the book, and said she had to keep her presence in Gant’s combat “qalat” secret. News media “embeds” in Afghanistan with Special Operations forces rarely exceed a few days and she was not authorized by any task force to be in the Mangwel operation – much less for nine months.
“I stayed out of the picture,” she said in the ABC News interview with Gant in Seattle. “We didn’t want my presence there to be widely known, but at the same time a lot of people knew about it… I was glad for the opportunity to help the man I had fallen in love with, as well as to write about a potential solution to the incredible suffering I had witnessed over a decade almost.”
Woo Cho Bang Bang
In Brownsville, Brooklyn kids are joining gangs whose territories are based on the housing projects where they grew up. The warring gangs have helped made Brownsville the “murder capital of New York”:
Prosecutors and detectives still don’t know when the battle of Brownsville started or what it was over. Some think it grew out of a perceived slight at a dance-hall party in one of the warring projects, whose turf is separated by about ten blocks. But the authorities did establish a connection to the current group of principals by the summer of 2010, when a series of shootings, allegedly by Hoodstarz members, wounded two associates of the Brownsville Fly Guys (a gang aligned with the Wave Gang). In October, one of them died from the injuries.
Two days later, in what was likely B.F.G. retaliation, the purported Hoodstarz leader, 16-year-old Hakeem (“OCC”) Gravenhise, was ambushed in front of his apartment building with a fatal barrage of gunfire. His mother witnessed the shooting. There have been no arrests in his murder.
Even The Most Progressive University In North America Doesn’t Know How To Handle Sexual Consent
When a tiny liberal arts college in Canada is rocked by sexual assault allegations, none of the students involved feel as if their issues and concerns were fairly addressed:
Helfand said the school educates students on consent during orientation (although multiple students said the “workshop” consisted of a brief PowerPoint on Canadian laws) and recently hired a visiting faculty member to consult on related training and education. He reiterated that Quest allows students to switch classes and residence rooms even if complaints are unsubstantiated.
“It’s simply not true” that Quest students don’t feel listened to, he said.
But the students whose claims were proven false say there’s no more evidence they could’ve provided. Worst of all, they said, was that the school treated them like liars. The police couldn’t press charges when Carrie and Sasha called them, but at least they were sympathetic.
“If I was going to make something up, I would have made it worse,” Carrie said.
“I Thought I Could Swing It”
On the strange life and presidency of Calvin Coolidge:
The Coolidge family never wasted words. John Coolidge simply notified his son that President Harding had died in San Francisco a few hours earlier. Calvin Coolidge calmly got dressed and walked across the street to a general store where he contacted Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes by telephone, drank a Moxie beverage, and left a nickel to pay for it. Coolidge then walked back across the street to his father’s home.
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