Generation Hotness or Notness?

When the imminent blow up of 50% of the world’s hedge funds get us down we like to troll Yahoo Personal Finance for a good re-centering. Some days you just crave the financial wisdom only an ex-pro volleyball player can provide (Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist).

Scrolling down the page and seeing the latest mug in the “EXPERT OPINION” columns, we were like, “No way, Ali Larter writes a Yahoo Personal Finance column!” It makes sense, especially since her son can tap into ATMs and crash markets by touching a Bloomberg terminal.

To our chagrin, the latest Yahoo EXPERT has never appeared in front of Dawson wearing a whipped cream bikini but is rather Anya Kamenetz (but back me up on the fact that her thumbnail-sized head looks like Ali Larter). Anya, or “AK” as the other Crips call her, is a 26-year old Yale alum who started a column called “Generation Debt” at the Village Voice and rode it into a book deal. It also helps in no way whatsoever that everyone the girl knows is an author, like both her parents.

Her columns are detailed affairs about student loans and other cool forms of crippling debt that we could tell you more about if we could get through them. Unlike Penelope’s work, which makes Highlights Magazine seem like a corporate finance textbook, Anya’s columns make corporate finance textbooks seem like issues of Maxim. I guess Yahoo Personal Finance is just balancing out the universe.

Anya now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and cat, although she is listed as “single” on MySpace. If her cat saw that he’d be pissed. You can check out Anya’s personal website here, and find out that she takes great glamour shots (although the verdict is still out, how is she in person?), has written for every publication ever…published, and get her reaction to 9/11.

We all know the real way to differentiate accomplished 20-somethings is by looking at their reactions to 9/11, each more profound than the last. Going down the line, after 9/11 Dana Vachon started reading “Lord of the Rings,” Chelsea Clinton called for everyone except herself to serve her fellow man and Anya Kamenetz realized right away that the attacks were going to be a total career buzz kill. Here’s Anya, quoted in a 2005 version of the Boston Phoenix:

"The whole dot.com thing has passed," says Kamenetz, who graduated from Yale seven months after the 9/11 attacks. "There was a feeling among my peers and I that we had gotten a bum deal, sort of. Politically things were going badly, economically things were going badly."

Stay tuned for more "bum deals" on Yahoo Personal Finance.

Laying Down the Law on Wider College Access [Yahoo Personal Finance]
ANYA KAMENTZ