Envy Apartment

Purdue University freshman Brandon Wolter waits at a bus stop outside Blackbird Farms Apartments on Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2017. Wolter is one of 240 students who were placed in Blackbird apartments due to overflow in on- campus residential halls . (Photo: Meghan Holden/Journal & Courier) WEST LAFAYETTE , Ind. — Brandon Wolter 's living situation is unlike that of most Purdue University freshmen who choose to live in residential housing. Rather than sleeping in a cramped dorm room, Wolter shares a spacious two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with three other freshmen.  The residence comes with amenities one would expect in a luxury apartment, such as a balcony, a full kitchen with a dishwasher, a washer and dryer, and free parking. There's also a pool and fitness center across the street. The catch? He lives about two miles outside campus and is a 10- minute bus ride  away from the thousands of other freshmen living in the dorms. "The worst part is planning ahead,...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...