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August 24, 2017 Millennials are creating their own definition of financial success . | Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images Facebook knows how you feel about money. The company has been listening in on young people ’s online conversations, as well as analyzing audience data and conducting surveys, in order to learn more about how users between the ages of 21 and 34 think about financial matters. What it discovered is likely to surprise some people, though probably not millennials themselves. “Millennials are misunderstood — famous for their impulse for instant gratification. But when we stop to observe their financial behaviors and listen to them describe their relationship with money in their own words, a new millennial emerges,” according to the report, Millennials and Money: The Unfiltered Journey. ")}; Once you brush aside the stereotype of the lazy and entitled millennial, a picture of a financially responsible generation comes into focus. Millennials want to pay down debt...

Editor’s note: The following has been excerpted from a longer chapter featuring the Arroyo family : Maria Ayala Arroyo (46), Pedro Ayala Hernandez (55) and Guadalupe Ayala Arroyo (21). Read more oral histories like it in Chasing the Harvest by Gabriel Thompson (2017 Verso Press). Read our interview with Thompson here. Farmwork is often a family affair. Parents bring their children to labor alongside them in the fields. Workers learn about a job opening and tell their relatives, the word spreading quickly from uncle to aunt to cousin. If a crew sticks together long enough, it may find that most members are related to each other in one way or another. Such is the case for the crew of the Arroyo- Hernandez family . Maria and Pedro came to the United States in 1994, 10 days after getting married in Mexico. Their plan was to stay for a couple of years, save money, and return to Mexico to open a business. Then they had their first child, Guadalupe, and those plans changed. For more tha...

At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in the formative adolescent years , Messud told me, we learn how to be a person — ‘‘what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love means.’’ We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be ‘‘dire,’’ she said, with violence at the forefront. With ‘‘The Burning Girl,’’ she hoped to write what she calls ‘‘a children’s book for grown-ups,’’ a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational power of emotion — an ‘‘animal thing’’ beyond understanding. It trea...

I arrived in Madrid in December 2012, in time to celebrate the bleakest Christmas the city had seen in a generation. Capital and country were reeling from a series of shocks that had brought Spain to the brink of ruin. Six months earlier, a slow- burning banking crisis had blazed out of control, forcing the government to request billions in rescue aid from its European partners. Spain was in recession and suffering an unemployment crisis that would see the jobless rate peak at 27 per cent a few months after my arrival. Reminders of the nation’s desperation were everywhere. On days when I took my son to kindergarten we would pass a long line of people — not all of them poorly dressed — waiting outside a church- run soup kitchen . Walking to my office in the morning, I would find more and more shops boarded up. Inexplicably, the tiny store that sold and repaired mechanical typewriters held out, defying both the economic downturn and technical obsolescence. Then, one day, I found that ...

One moment you’re sitting on a couch somewhere in Jakarta, listening to the soft hum of the air conditioner. The next, you’re in Saigon, making your way through a street in war- torn 1960s Vietnam . Or perhaps, watching the sun rise and fall through a small window from a prison somewhere in the French-colonized Algeria. Stories have the ability to take us to places that we have never been, to see sights that we have never seen; an access to the foreign and strange and familiar, however brief and fleeting. Ultimately, literature tells us about how people lived. It tells us about what people have cried about, what they have lost. How people wake up in the morning and make their coffee, and how the moon looks before they fall asleep. It tells us about how things fall apart, and how people fall in love. It may even remind us of emotions that we too have felt; whether it be something that we vaguely remember feeling at some time and some place, or something that comes to us with such an i...