Mark Kaplan graduated university with a solid A- average. He broke his parents’ hearts when he declined to go to law school and instead began an internship at his local newspaper which turned into a full-time position covering the education beat. After seventeen years, the chain that owned Mark’s paper sold it to a corporation and they merged it with an infotainment website. The company began curating “free content” from its other websites and laid off a third of the news staff. Mark currently freelances for his old paper for ten cents a word, supplementing his income by editing self-published memoirs. He calls his mother once a day so she can tell him about the lucrative careers of his former classmates.
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Beth Weller is so introverted that her tenth grade teacher once observed that “the dry erase whiteboard makes more of an impression.” Because of her antipathy towards people, Beth decided to study English literature and become a writer only to discover that this was not so much a profession as a trust fund hobby. She ended up taking a job in business journalism writing about Blockchain Technology. She has two cats.