Creation of a fast food phenomenon.

“J.Crew employees reveal themselves by the nakedness of their ankles. It’s as if the company’s uniform, ambiently dictated by Lyons, is enforced only from the knees down.”

From failure to Pixar, Steve Jobs’ “wilderness years.”

On L.A.’s Homeboy Industries, which offers former felons—including at least one disgraced CEO—the chance to work.

An industry responds to the recession by rebranding the carrot as anything but vegetable.

Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook vs. Amazon.

Inside the lives of students at an elite Beijing high school in the months leading up to gaokao, literally “high test,” the national university admittance exam.

On the development of South Korea’s New Songdo and Cisco’s plans to build smart cities which will “offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities – water, power, traffic, telephony – into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.” The demand for such cities is enormous:

China doesn't need cool, green, smart cities. It needs cities, period -- 500 New Songdos at the very least. One hundred of those will each house a million or more transplanted peasants. In fact, while humanity has been building cities for 9,000 years, that was apparently just a warm-up for the next 40. As of now, we're officially an urban species. More than half of us -- 3.3 billion people -- live in a city. Our numbers are projected to nearly double by 2050, adding roughly a New Songdo a day; the United Nations predicts the vast majority will flood smaller cities in Africa and Asia.

A profile of new Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard, who in another life was a touring musician and hated Ticketmaster just like everyone else.

How YouTube went from ubiquitous to profitable; and where it goes next.

How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.

Its editors still live in different cities, still work different careers, and still treat Boing Boing as a (lucrative) hobby.

A survey on where the industry is headed. Says one agency veteran: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”

The rise and fall of Design Within Reach.

China is securing sub-Saharan Africa’s natural resources at a staggering rate. With the buying spree comes contracts, workers, and of course, politics. (Part 1 of a 6 part series, rest here)