In 2008, I was laid off from my job as a contractor and didn't know how I'd pay the bills. Then came my bright idea...

It's August 2011, and Andrew Mason is agitated.

He's at his desk in the middle of Groupon's wide open, call center-style office in Chicago. His headphones are on. His brow is furrowed.

His company had been the darling of the business press for the past two years. Suddenly it's not. 

He can't hang on to a COO. The SEC is asking questions. Industry executives are calling him a ponzi schemer.  Early employees are demanding six-figure pay for 9 to 5 hours. One even filed a lawsuit. Merchant customers are screaming. And Mason and his board, having helped themselves to $900 million of cash that could have gone to the company, are are now being blasted for incompetence and greed.

What a turnabout from a few months earlier, when Groupon was the talk of Wall Street...

A 200-pound man in a kayak has nothing on a 40-ton humpback whale hunting for breakfast, but that's not stopping dozens of sightseers from getting cozy with a pod that has strayed unusually close to shore near Santa Cruz. So far, no one's been hurt, but at least one sailboat was damaged this week when it struck a whale...

Brought to Europe from the New World by Spanish explorers, the lowly potato gave rise to modern industrial agriculture...

Everything was ready. The electrode was in place, threaded between the two hemispheres of a living cat’s brain; the instruments were tuned to pick up the chatter passing from one half to the other. The only thing left was to listen for that electronic whisper, the brain’s own internal code.

The amplifier hissed — the three scientists expectantly leaning closer — and out it came, loud and clear...

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff. If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas...

Looking for a last-minute costume isn't too tough these days. In strip malls across the country, temporary Halloween stores have popped up in vacant retail spaces like an orange-spotted rash. But back when Chuck Martinez was growing up in the 1970s, the idea of a store devoted entirely to Halloween was considered kind of crazy, or at best, a silly business plan...

In a city where demonstrations of every kind are part of the daily syncopation, there has rarely been any with quite the same potential for amplifying the protesters’ cause as the one that has settled in recently on the historic forecourt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, setting off a painful crisis of conscience for the Church of England ...

U.S. Officials and key allies are offering a detailed new defense of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's pivotal role in the approach that led to Moammar Gaddafi's fall -- both within a divided Cabinet and a fragile, assembled-on-the-fly international alliance...

Here are some details about Lynda Barry that didn’t appear in her autobiographical song. She’s a cartoonist whose weekly strip, “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” was a staple of alternative newsweeklies for almost 30 years. (Next month, the publisher Drawn & Quarterly will release “Blabber Blabber Blabber,” the first in a 10-volume retrospective series of her work.) She dips Copenhagen tobacco and fights against wind farms. She e-mails stupid YouTube links to her old buddy Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons.”...