Journal

Mark Zuckerberg, Afghanistan, diversity in tech, and more . . .

The gifts have been gifted. The in-laws are gone. It’s time to relax. We’ve compiled a list of our favorite Fast Company longreads that you may have missed during this long and busy year. So, in this blissful time between merry madness and the start of 2016, read about Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for the future of Facebook, the U.S.’s challenge of getting out of Afghanistan, the state of tech’s gender-diversity push, or—for something lighter—what the condiment aisle says about current American demographics in Hot Sauce, USA.

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When visiting China, Rex Kuo and Charles Ng of Australia-based Orbitkey learned a warmer way of doing business.

When Rex Kuo and Charles Ng began to build their company, Orbitkey, which sells a kind of futuristic key ring, they found themselves taking a lot of meetings with suppliers in China. They found business was done quite differently there than in Australia (where Orbitkey is based).

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Bitcoin has yet to find its “killer app” but the currency’s being traded at higher volumes than ever.

Though headlines about bitcoin this year have focused on the challenges facing the cryptocurrency, it’s still booming with some of the highest mining and transaction rates in its history, according to recent statistics.

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The company best known for shipping you industrial-sized packages of dog food also has grand ambitions for Hollywood.

Not content to claim that his rocket, not Elon Musk’s, was the first to successfully return to Earth after a space launch, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now gunning for another lofty goal: an Academy Award.

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Is Free Basics an altruistic effort to connect the world to opportunities, or a neocolonial race to control and capitalize on new markets?

Today, Mark Zuckerberg published a lengthy opinion article in The Times Of India defending his attempt to connect millions of people to the Internet via a suite of Facebook-approved apps. It’s called Free Basics, and the service lets people with feature phones and other devices access online services without paying data charges.

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The Chrome extension, its creator says, will “make America great again.”

Love your Internet but feel hijacked by all the Donald Trump news? There’s an app for that.

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Songs like “Come Together” and “Let It Be” have a long way to go to catch up with today’s pop hits.

The Beatles may have been “more popular than Jesus,” at least in John Lennon’s eyes, but the songwriter failed to foresee the rise of another widely worshipped deity: Justin Bieber.

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Quantifying holiday cheer: 673,000 Beatles playlists, one box of Stove Top stuffing, and a 20-fold search increase for “return policy.”

Christmas is over and that means it’s time for online businesses to celebrate, or at least crow a little bit.

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Legal experts say this is a serious allegation, if true.

The breakthrough of biotech startup Theranos—making it possible to get a blood test from the prick of a finger rather than a needle injected into a vein—increasingly appears to be too good to be true.

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We sure do love Gummi Bears, and Cards Against Humanity is an urgent purchase.

It wouldn’t be the holiday season without revealing year-end press releases from major corporations, especially retailers. The king of online retail, Amazon, just issued a 3,000-word report of holiday shopping, watching, and listening stats that says a lot about us. Much of the data comes from users of Amazon Prime, the $99-per-year subscription service that provides free and discounted deliveries, plus access to Amazon’s video and music collections. Amazon picked up more than 3 million Prime members in the third week of December alone. (An estimate from June already had Prime at about 40 million subscribers.)

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