> Jacobs, in her habitual bright pink lipstick and matching headband, was explaining all this via Skype, from her “little box of a house” in Simi Valley, to Jane Leibrock, 33, who had the more muted look of the fortunate and was sitting in the Oakland headquarters of Even, the start-­up where she works. Leibrock — an alumna of Yale; a onetime Beijing resident and Mandarin speaker; a street-­fashion blogger; a tweeter of first-­world problems (“My personal hell would be having my earbuds pulled out over and over throughout eternity”) — used to study the user experience of privacy settings for Facebook. Now she is a researcher for Even, which proposes, for a fee, to help solve the problem of income volatility.

I'm off topic, but am I the only one to find NY times articles to be abusively long? is it a trend in this type of US publications?

While I find the topic interesting and I would like to know more, the article is just too long, repetitive and boring.