When you first graduate from college and enter the workforce, the future seems to hold nothing but promise. If for no other reason than because after four years of scrounging for beer money and living in squalor, you have finally have a steady paycheck — one that affords you...
Anyone who’s ever dabbled in online dating is intimately familiar with being ghosted. Suddenly and without explanation, your romantic interest ceases all contact, never to be heard from again. Sadly, anyone who’s ever conducted a protracted job search has received the same treatment from a potential employer....
Until recently, pop culture portrayed the “revenge bod” as a strictly female phenomenon. As Vanity Fair notes, the term first entered the lexicon in the early 2010s, as a way for glossy celebrity magazines to describe famous women (Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Katie Holmes) who...
When Rick Webb got engaged several years ago, he turned to the best wedding planner he knew: Himself. The long-running stereotype is that men are not just indifferent about the details of their wedding ceremonies; they’re bored by them. Couple that with the idea that women are...
Charles Bukowski wisely once said, “Sundays kill more men than bombs.” Bukowski may have been a violent drunk, an incorrigible womanizer and an unabashed misogynist, but even he was sympathetic to the existential dread that washes over you on a Sunday afternoon. Some people call it the...
Gemma and Robert Hartley had been living frugally for five years when he broke down and decided he couldn’t do it anymore. They’d reduced their overall debt, which include a mortgage, credit card debt and medical bills, from $130,000 to $105,000. And supposing their incomes continued to...
The other day I got a hearty whiff of myself after a workout, only to come to the terrifying realization that I now have the same body odor as my father. I have vivid memories of walking by my dad’s soiled jogging clothes as a kid, and...
In 2001, Cary Carbonaro and her then-husband were on their way to buy a new car when he told her, “I can’t put the car in my name because of my credit.” Carbonaro was confused. The newlyweds were living in New York, and she was under the...
Over the past year, MEL has interviewed 11 people who paid off large amounts of debt. We started the project — which became our personal finance series Into the Black — in May to learn more about the different means by which people make their way out of debt. America is...
This is the latest installment in our series Into the Black, where we hear from people who escaped the burden of unpaid bills and loans through sacrifice and ingenuity. This week we talk to Ryan*, who worked four jobs to pay off his student debt. Ryan, 29,...
Psychologists have long suspected that many of the relationship issues people grapple with in adulthood stem from unhealthy or deficient relationships they had with their parents as children. But a new study from researchers at Oklahoma State University finds that a boy’s bad relationship with his mother...
Work sucks. But work is especially terrible when you’re the office outcast. Office misfits live in “perpetual stress,” says Ryan Vogel, assistant professor of management at Penn State-Erie. Vogel has studied office misfits (his term for people whose personal values don’t coincide with their employer’s) since 2010,...
