How the Mosley Motel, off U.S. 19 in Florida, became the temporary home to at least 27 families turned away from full shelters.

A pub’s-eye view of Ireland’s recent run of leaders.

A breakdown of the early 80s homeless epidemic.

The absurd scale of McDonald’s’ economics suggests a company more like a commodity trader than a chain of restaurants.

At this volume, and with the impermanence of the sandwich, it only makes sense for McDonald’s to treat the sandwich as a sort of arbitrage strategy: at both ends of the product pipeline, you have a good being traded at such large volume that we might as well forget that one end of the pipeline is hogs and corn and the other end is a sandwich. McDonald’s likely doesn’t think in these terms, and neither should you.

On a pair of Israeli psychologists who between 1971 and 1984 “published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.”

The world’s fastest growing economy isn’t China; it’s the “unheralded alternative economic universe of System D” aka the $10 trillion global black market.

How Warren Buffett’s public image has aided his success.

As a successful investor, he merely moved markets; but as the charismatic, reassuring, quotable prototype of the honest capitalist (a sort of J. P. Morgan with a moral sense), he's capable of influencing elections, galvanizing rock-concert-size crowds, and in general defining how we Americans feel about the system that underlies our wealth.

On the current state of the global economy and the inevitable decline of the U.K. and the U.S.:

A decade-long slowdown would accelerate this shift in global wealth and power and would be a grim thing to live through, but from a world-historical perspective it might not be a game-changer: it might just be the non-scenic route to the place we’re going anyway.

On Bitcoin, the world’s first “decentralized digital currency.”

What it means to be an entrepreneur in Argentina, where economic crashes are a way of life.

A field trip to the video gamey world of the modern trader.

How slot machines snuck into the mall, along with money laundering, bribery, shootouts, and billions in profits.

At times, Mr. Hsieh comes across as an alien who has studied human beings in order to live among them.

A profile of the Zappos CEO.

Immigrant farmers are flocking to the poultry industry – only to become 21st-century sharecroppers for companies like Tyson.

In the late ’80s, Lewis went to Japan to research a hypothetical: what would the economic fallout be if a major quake hit?

On who will bear the burden of the financial crisis facing cities across America. “Will it be articulated in terms of bond defaults or larger kindergarten classes—or no kindergarten classes at all?”

A profile of Jack Dorsey, co-founder (and displaced CEO) of Twitter. Dorsey’s latest venture, a mobile credit card system called Square that only officially launched in February 2011, already processes more than a million transactions per day.

Relative to the total national income, American corporations are making more money than they have since 1947. The connection behind soaring profits and stagnant unemployment.

A primer on income inequality in America.

A newly minted, 34-year-old White House budget director gets a little too candid with a reporter profiling him during Ronald Reagan’s first year in office. Among Stockman’s many admissions: “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.”

On the group of friends who came to rule the bizarre, decreasingly lucrative world of Internet porn.

How a nation went bankrupt. “Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place.”

Obama’s presidency may well be defined by whether or not he can curb unemployment. Step One: find a decent idea.

How the dream of the Euro became a nightmare.