When I arrive at Galco’s Old World Grocery, the last thing I expect owner John Nese to talk about is the future. After all, in its current format, Galco’s has been around Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood since 1955, and in one form or another, the grocery store dates back to when the city was […]

If you’ve found yourself on tech websites, then you’re familiar with those cute videos demonstrating the latest products: young, modern people happily using whatever the company is selling while cheery music plays in background. Nootrobox, a nine-month old startup, has a video on its website that’s intent on showing why its line of “smart drugs” […]

How much good can you possibly do in your life? This issue—how to help the most people who need it—is a seemingly insurmountable problem. But through Amplifier, a movement motivated by Jewish values, this problem has become less troublesome. Amplifier has a solution for people dedicated to turning their empathy into action: it’s called “giving […]

Graphic design is a competitive field because its audience is endless. Graphic design can be found everywhere from fashion to food packaging. It’s a job that, simply put, finds itself wherever anyone needs art to be shown to the public. To get the very basics of this profession, look no further than the United States […]

Andrew Gutterson works in pictures and thinks in sounds. His day job is at Corbis, the massive company that licenses digital images and videos. In his spare time, he’s a beatboxer. Between the two, Gutterson says he’s a pretty happy man. But with beatboxing, Gutterson says he gets to express what images can’t cover: the […]

If you’ve ever wanted to take back an email immediately after hitting the send button, then Criptext is for you. Mayer Mizrachi, the Criptext’s founder, points out how his company is different from other encryption services. When I sent him an email asking him what time he was free to meet for an interview, it […]

When Sophia Loren was born in 1934, in a tiny ward for unwed mothers in the Clinica Santa Margherita in Rome, Benito Mussolini had been in power for around 13 years. A few months prior, Italy had held national elections, with Mussolini’s National Fascist Party winning a less-than-surprising 99.84% of the vote. The state was […]

Ava Gardner wanted to write a book. Published after the death of both writer and subject, Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, a rocky collaboration between journalist Peter Evans and legendary Hollywood starlet Gardner, is a deep look into how a creative enterprise can fail. It’s a book-length post-mortem not only of its two principal subjects […]

The need to create can be overwhelming at times. The drive to invent, to make real life out of dust, to be a rising tide that carries all the ships out of the storm and into a harbor full of other ships all as shiny and teeming with ideas as your own. This is an […]

Jay Schwartz takes a deep breath when I ask if there’s any difference between working on the East and West Coasts. It’s a topic on which Schwartz has intimate knowledge: his advertising, graphic design, and website development firm, IdeaWork, has made moves on both coasts. Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, and New York City are all […]

The rants against the latest technologies and companies are old-hat at this point: that they isolate, they separate neighbor from neighbor, that they’ll all leave us all in Black Mirror–like stupors while taking profits off ads. And for some Silicon Valley companies, this doesn’t actually seem like such a bad end result. Better living through […]

Most descriptions of Radical Honesty often start with a description of the person giving the description. This is because Radical Honesty is a movement based on telling the truth at every moment of the day and doing so aggressively. “Lying is the major source of all human stress”, says its website. “When people engage honestly, […]