Search Results for: Debt

How I Lost $500,000 for Love

Longreads Pick

A writer looks back on her costly mistakes—blowing a generous book advance while pursuing a relationship with a married man:

“I was 27 the year my first novel sold for half a million dollars. During the three years I spent writing the book, I’d gotten by on next to nothing, eating ramen noodles for dinner and living in a rented apartment in Colorado over what may or may not have been a meth lab. I had $10,000 in credit card debt and $30,000 in student loans, and the most I’d ever earned in a single year was $15,000. Half a million dollars, I remember thinking, was more money than I could spend in a lifetime.

“I’d never had money before, and now that I did, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I met with bankers and accountants, strangers in suits who helped me divvy my new money into the kinds of accounts I hadn’t known existed, for purposes I hadn’t ever thought about: a CD for the significant chunk I would owe in taxes; a health savings account (HSA) to cover the deductible on the medical-insurance policy I could finally afford; an IRA to protect a portion of the money for the unimaginable day when I would need it to live on. Afterward, they would shake my hand and congratulate me on my success: I was making such good choices with my money!”

Author: Aryn Kyle
Source: More Magazine
Published: Mar 12, 2013
Length: 7 minutes (1,790 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Isaac Fitzgerald

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Isaac Fitzgerald is managing editor of The Rumpus, co-founder of Pen & Ink, and uses Twitter.

Disclaimer: I know many of the people on this list. One of the wonderful things / occupational hazards of working for a site like The Rumpus is that I’ve come to meet a lot of great writers. These stories stand on their own regardless.

I.O.U., and U., and U. (Chris Colin, The New York Times)

Chris Colin sells a $50 will call ticket to see Miranda July using Craigslist and never gets paid, spurring him to contemplate all the debts he himself owes (after some anger-fueled internet stalking, of course).

Maybe this is catching him at a hard time, I thought. But truth was, Joe seemed to be having a pretty normal time. With his ample tweeting and active Facebooking — well over 1,000 friends! — he allowed for robust stalking. There he was on a sailboat. On a golf course. With some bros. Dancing goofily. Doing his handsome face. Doing some artsy stuff. He looked like someone you’d gone to camp with. Apparently he works for some progressive-sounding start-up, the kind whose Web site speaks of community and so forth.

Eddie Is Gone (Nicole Pasulka, The Believer)

Nicole Pasulka, a former copywriter for a tourism company in Hawaii, examines the messy history of the Aloha State through the riveting life of surf legend Eddie Aikau.

That night Hōkūle‘a rode fifteen-foot swells. The boat began listing from water leakage, and eventually stopped dead in the water. The panicked crew huddled to one side of the craft in an effort to balance out the lilt of the boat with their weight. Around midnight, a rogue wave capsized the canoe, tossing the crew into the water and destroying their radio. The crew clung to the boat. Waiting to be spotted by a plane, they drifted farther from the flight patterns between the islands. Huge swells hammered the vessel. Less-seaworthy members of the crew were seasick and exhausted from exposure. Eddie eventually asked if he could paddle his surfboard nearly twenty miles to the island of Lāna‘i for help. Captain Lyman refused until, seeing no other option for rescue, he gave Eddie permission to go.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave (Mac McClelland, Mother Jones)

Mac McClelland jumps into the product-stacked trenches of a major online retailer’s shipping house to expose the truth behind how those little brown boxes get to your doorstep. 

[The shipping company] has estimated that we pickers speed-walk an average of 12 miles a day on cold concrete, and the twinge in my legs blurs into the heavy soreness in my feet that complements the pinch in my hips when I crouch to the floor—the pickers’ shelving runs from the floor to seven feet high or so—to retrieve an iPad protective case. iPad anti-glare protector. iPad one-hand grip-holder device. Thing that looks like a landline phone handset that plugs into your iPad so you can pretend that rather than talking via iPad you are talking on a phone. And dildos. Really, a staggering number of dildos.

How Men Fight For Their Lives (Saeed Jones, The Rumpus)

Saeed Jones recollects being gay bashed by a “straight” man in Phoenix, Arizona, and delves into what it means to put oneself at risk in the supposed name of art.

Daniel’s shift from sucking me to punching me happened so quickly, I could still feel my erection pressed against his stomach even as his arms came down from above me like lightning bolts. Trapped under a body I suddenly realized was all muscle, all I could do was watch the thunderstorm. It all felt so distant. He wasn’t beating me. He was beating the desire I had brought out in him. And this is one of the reasons why the phrase “gay bashing” feels misplaced. There, on the floor under him, when I looked up at Daniel, I didn’t see a gay basher; I saw a man who thought he was fighting for his life.

And, at the risk of turning this post into a longread itself, let me take one last moment to recommend pretty much any essay written by Roxane Gay and Emily Rapp this year.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work for The Awl and Los Angeles Review of Books was featured on Longreads this year.


In the essay “Freedom Is Overrated,” the theologian and scholar Sancrucensis contrasts the humanism of Jonathan Franzen with that of David Foster Wallace. A transcendentally beautiful and heartbreaking meditation on self and other.

I’ve enjoyed a number of essays from The American Conservative this year, but my favorite may have been Mike Lofgren’s “Revolt Of The Rich”. It’s a blistering reproof of our moneyed classes and their disconnect from the historic aspirations of our country.

The tagline of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, is “Biased and Balanced.” An earlier incarnation of the Dish bore another, equally good: “Of No Party Or Clique.” I consider Sullivan an indispensable companion, not least because his views so often diverge from my own. I can’t choose just one entry from his heady, rapid-fire mix of opinion, reporting, photographs, jokes, poems, ideas. But Sullivan’s great heart, his compassion and intellect, are a salutary test of my own convictions most every day.

The scholar Aaron Bady exposes the fatal weaknesses in the arguments of those promoting “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, in a resoundingly persuasive and passionate essay in Inside Higher Ed. Absolutely crucial reading for anyone remotely interested in the academy.

Mike Konczal, known on Twitter as @rortybomb, led a breathtaking debate on debt relief at the Boston Review that blew my wiglet sky-high. In the lead essay, Konczal makes an ironclad case that a strong social safety net, including debt relief, is crucial to the economic health of the country. Splendid, limpidly clear, beautifully reasoned.

It’s scarcely too much to say that The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson single-handedly rescued my sanity from the maelstrom of this year’s election. I pretty much hop on Twitter and start banging out exclamation points every time she posts, but her recent column on the public confrontation of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by a gay Princeton University student will serve as well as any to demonstrate her unwavering clear-mindedness, her sensitivity, fairness and brilliance.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Film Studies

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from Thomson’s new book about the “story of the movies.” Thomson looks at some of the first novelists to work in film (Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner), as well as the early work of filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola:

“‘Why should I do it?’ Francis Coppola asked his father, Carmine. By chance, they had crossed paths at the Burbank airport. Francis had been at the Paramount building all day. ‘They want me to direct this hunk of trash,’ he told his father. He may have heard through the grapevine that the Mario Puzo novel The Godfather had already been turned down by Arthur Penn, Peter Yates, Costa-Gavras, Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan, Fred Zinnemann, and Franklin Schaffner. But those guys weren’t thirty-one and in debt, like Francis. He told his father he preferred to make art pictures, not lousy anti-Italian mobster stuff. But Dad said, take the money and then do your own things. The money turned out to be $125,000 against 6 percent of the rentals.

“The Puzo novel had been published by Putnam in 1969 on a $5,000 advance. It sold a million copies in hardback and had a paperback advance of $410,000. With the best will in the world, critics admitted it was a piece of trash, but one the public enjoyed. Paramount, in the person of its production chief, Robert Evans, bought the book on a $12,000 option against $85,000. They hired Al Ruddy to produce it, gave him a copy of the book, and asked what sort of movie he could foresee. Ruddy replied, ‘An ice-blue terrifying movie about people you love.’ These are the first words close to sense on the project.”

Published: Oct 1, 2012
Length: 33 minutes (8,353 words)

A man with $90,000 in debt makes some hard decisions about his life—starting with a trip to Kosovo for an IT job: 

Of course, all I understood at the time was JOB INTERVIEW and VIENNA. Prior to my application, I had never heard of the OSCE, and I knew next to nothing about Kosovo. My IT skills were rudimentary and my management experience nonexistent. I was mystified why I got a call. I was so completely unqualified for this job, I might have treated this like a mini-vacation but for one significant fact: the salary. The job paid $85,000 a year, tax-free (due to the glorious Foreign Earned Income Exclusion). This was an incomprehensible amount of money. It would fix everything. The pressure to do well in this interview, just for this one small chance at a dream life and the magical solution to all of my problems, was intense.

I flew to Vienna two weeks later and interviewed the next morning in a small yellow room. It was 10 a.m.—4 a.m. EST. There was a panel, chaired by my would-be boss, a taciturn Austrian man. I was dressed in a garish blue Hugo Boss sport coat that I picked up at Century 21 a week earlier. I was over caffeinated, jet lagged, and clammy. I made nervous self-deprecating jokes, which translated poorly between our cultures. It was a disaster from start to finish. I left the interview thinking, ‘Thanks for the free trip to Vienna.’ I spent the rest of the day squandering my remaining per diem on beer and meat, refusing to think about what might have been. The next morning I flew home.

“Crushing Debt Drove Me to Kosovo — And Then to Iraq.” Anonymous, The Billfold

More from The Billfold

A look at Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital:

Marc Wolpow, a former Bain colleague of Romney’s, told reporters during Mitt’s first Senate run that Romney erred in trying to sell his business as good for everyone. ‘I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator,’ said Wolpow. ‘That was not his or Bain’s or the industry’s primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors.’ When it comes to private equity, American workers – not to mention their families and communities – simply don’t enter into the equation.

Take a typical Bain transaction involving an Indiana-based company called American Pad and Paper. Bain bought Ampad in 1992 for just $5 million, financing the rest of the deal with borrowed cash. Within three years, Ampad was paying $60 million in annual debt payments, plus an additional $7 million in management fees. A year later, Bain led Ampad to go public, cashed out about $50 million in stock for itself and its investors, charged the firm $2 million for arranging the IPO and pocketed another $5 million in “management” fees. Ampad wound up going bankrupt, and hundreds of workers lost their jobs, but Bain and Romney weren’t crying: They’d made more than $100 million on a $5 million investment.

“Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” — Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

More from Taibbi

John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career:

Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild set out to change that dynamic. ‘John came back from Paris and went to the fashion houses here and said, “I don’t want to talk to the manufacturers—I want to talk to the person who makes the dresses,” ’ says de la Renta, who was working for Elizabeth Arden at the time. ‘For all of us, there’s a great debt to be paid to John Fairchild, because he’s the first one to put American designers on the map.’

WWD began publishing personality profiles of the designers, elevating them to celebrity status, writing about their travels, vacation homes, and, in titillating fashion, love lives. As one veteran WWD staffer puts it, ‘Mr. Fairchild always likes to know, “Who’s doing the boom-boom?” ’ The newspaper covered society in cheeky and irreverent fashion. Rummage through the archives of WWD and W at the company’s Third Avenue offices and, even a half-century later, the ‘Eye’ columns are deliciously entertaining, filled with gossip and photographs of ‘the ladies who lunch’ and ‘Jackie O’—phrases coined by Fairchild. He is widely credited with coming up with such catchy phrases as ‘hot pants,’ ‘walkers,’ the ‘social moth’ (for Jerry Zipkin), and ‘the Cat Pack,’ a takeoff on the Rat Pack. Fair­child and his writers went for the jugular, proclaiming that ‘Jackie O is now Tacky O,’ criticizing her taste in clothes and announcing that her jewelry had become vulgar. Fair­child launched the popular trend of running flattering and unflattering photos of socialites with suggestive captions such as: ‘It is hard to believe that the matronly frump in the white wool dress is the same tightly coiled Gloria Vanderbilt of today. Gloria swears that her metamorphosis has nothing to do with surgery but simply weight loss.’

“Fashion’s Most Angry Fella.” — Meryl Gordon, Vanity Fair

Fashion’s Most Angry Fella

Longreads Pick

John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career:

“Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild set out to change that dynamic. ‘John came back from Paris and went to the fashion houses here and said, “I don’t want to talk to the manufacturers—I want to talk to the person who makes the dresses,” ’ says de la Renta, who was working for Elizabeth Arden at the time. ‘For all of us, there’s a great debt to be paid to John Fairchild, because he’s the first one to put American designers on the map.’

“WWD began publishing personality profiles of the designers, elevating them to celebrity status, writing about their travels, vacation homes, and, in titillating fashion, love lives. As one veteran WWD staffer puts it, ‘Mr. Fairchild always likes to know, “Who’s doing the boom-boom?” ’ The newspaper covered society in cheeky and irreverent fashion. Rummage through the archives of WWD and W at the company’s Third Avenue offices and, even a half-century later, the ‘Eye’ columns are deliciously entertaining, filled with gossip and photographs of ‘the ladies who lunch’ and ‘Jackie O’—phrases coined by Fairchild. He is widely credited with coming up with such catchy phrases as ‘hot pants,’ ‘walkers,’ the ‘social moth’ (for Jerry Zipkin), and ‘the Cat Pack,’ a takeoff on the Rat Pack. Fair­child and his writers went for the jugular, proclaiming that ‘Jackie O is now Tacky O,’ criticizing her taste in clothes and announcing that her jewelry had become vulgar. Fair­child launched the popular trend of running flattering and unflattering photos of socialites with suggestive captions such as: ‘It is hard to believe that the matronly frump in the white wool dress is the same tightly coiled Gloria Vanderbilt of today. Gloria swears that her metamorphosis has nothing to do with surgery but simply weight loss.'”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Aug 17, 2012
Length: 26 minutes (6,633 words)

The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Longreads Pick

The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin:

“The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and his incarceration in the debtors’ prison at Marshalsea. Much has been written about this long-secret episode in Dickens’s life, including, most recently, Michael Allen’s heavily documented Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory (2011), a work of some three hundred pages of interest primarily to Dickens scholars, but very likely impenetrable to Dickens readers in its concentration upon historical minutiae only tenuously related to Dickens and his novels. Another recent book, Ruth Richardson’s Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor (2012), gives a more intimately evoked view of Dickens’s childhood and the New Poor Law of 1834 by which workhouses became ‘a sort of prison system to punish (the poor).’

“For the child Dickens, the shock of this change of fortune was all the more in that his seemingly loving parents so readily agreed to the enslavement of their bright young son:

“‘No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.'”

Published: Jul 31, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,891 words)

Why was New York Times CEO Janet Robinson fired? A look inside the political battles and financial troubles that led Arthur ­Sulzberger to let Robinson go (with a $24 million exit package):

Interviews with more than 30 people who are intimately familiar with different aspects of the Times’ business (none but a spokesperson would speak for attribution—this is the paper of record, after all) have made it clear that Gonzalez’s rise and Robinson’s fall, and the ensuing leadership vacuum inside the paper, were symptomatic of larger forces at work. Even as a new pay wall was erected on the Times’ website last spring to charge customers for access, the company’s performance, including an alarming dive in print advertising when other media companies were beginning to recover, was faltering, and Sulzberger was under pressure both financial and familial to throw Robinson overboard. “As the paper’s stock price has declined in recent years, there has been increasing unease among the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, who control the paper through a special class of shares. Three years ago, facing huge debt problems, the company suspended the lucrative stock dividend that once flowed quarterly to the family’s 40-plus members, intensifying the need to solve the intractable advertising problems of the newspaper in the digital age and figure out a way to turn the family’s cash spigot back on. Janet Robinson, the company’s advertising brains, found herself caught between her increasingly remote boss and a frustrated family worried over the future of its 116-year-old fortune.

“A New York Times Whodunit.” — Joe Hagan, New York magazine

More #longreasds from Joe Hagan