Search Results for: Jill Lepore

Spiraling Debt, Mortgages and the Two-Income Family

Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate. “For middle-class families, the most important part of the safety net for generations has been the stay-at-home mother,” Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (2003), a book aimed at a wider audience than Warren’s earlier, academic work. (“Mom, you are boring,” Tyagi told Warren. “Collaborating with my daughter is not for sissies,” Warren says.) It used to be that when a middle-class family was faced with a financial crisis the woman in the house could get a job, to tide things over, which is what happened when Warren’s father had a heart attack and her mother got a job at Sears. This cushion doesn’t exist in the two-income family, which, in its short history—it has its origins, as a middle-class phenomenon, in the nineteen-seventies—has also taken on a great deal more housing debt. The 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act required lenders to count a wife’s income when evaluating borrowers; the deregulation of the mortgage lending industry began in 1980. With two wage earners and low down payments, middle-class families took on bigger mortgages and contributed to an increase in the cost of housing, especially when families with children paid a premium for property in school districts with high test scores. Financial crisis, for a two-income family, usually means having to live, quite suddenly, on one income. In these straits, families with children tend to totter on the edge of ruin. “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,” Warren and Tyagi reported. Between 1981 and 2001, the number of women filing for bankruptcy rose more than six hundred percent.

-Jill Lepore, in The New Yorker, on the books of Elizabeth Warren.

Read the story

Longreads Best of 2012: The New Yorker's David Grann

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.  

I am never sure how to choose the “best” story as there are too many. But here’s a list of some of the most notable and memorable stories I read in 2012. Pamela Colloff’s two-part series, “The Innocent Man,” which appeared in Texas Monthly, was one of the best crime stories—and, indeed, best pieces of journalism in any category—that I read. Many of my favorite longreads are works of history, and, in that category, I would include two notable pieces published in the magazine that I work for, The New Yorker: they are Robert A. Caro’s “The Transition,” a book excerpt that details, through the eyes of Lyndon Johnson, the terrifying day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and Jill Lepore’s “The Lie Factory,” which chronicles the first political consulting firm in the United States, and helps explain everything that is rotten about our politics today.

Finally, I would include a category for the best longreads from the vault—those long ago published pieces that you suddenly discover or rediscover. This year, I read two remarkable pieces in this category. One was James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” which originally appeared in Harper’s, in 1955; it’s the kind of essay that is almost no longer done, and that uses autobiography to tell the story of a nation. The other old piece was David Foster Wallace’s “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” published in 1994, which begins as a predictable takedown review of Austin’s memoir and then becomes a totally unexpected meditation on the nature of athletic greatness and storytelling.


Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

“The Lie Factory.” — Jill Lepore, New Yorker

See more by Lepore

On making a move from the City to the South. Steven Boone and other New Yorkers have headed to Warner Robins, Georgia:

Like so many young black parents, she moved south not just to provide her children with a more secure environment but also to escape the punishing New York rents. In Warner Robins, entire homes in quiet areas rent for less than a single room in Bed Stuy. Townhouses on well-kept complexes, complete with pool and 24-hour gym access, go for as little as $450 a month and rarely higher than $850. In Macon, the college town next door (and geographically the true dead center of Georgia), gorgeous historic homes rent for as low as $400 a month and often no more than $650. (The local rumor is that, as lovely as the homes are, the ghosts in them insure frequent turnaround. Cool.)

This new wave of African-Americans heading south has been called the Second Great Migration or the Reverse Migration, in contrast to last century’s black exodus from a segregated, hostile South to opportunities in the North.

“A Reverse Migration from Post-Crack New York.” — Steven Boone, Capital New York

See also: “The Uprooted.” — Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2010

The Constitution and Its Worshippers

The Constitution and Its Worshippers