Oren Jacob grew up in a family of storytellers. His parents were teachers who were constantly hosting family, friends, colleagues, passersby from around the world — each with their own story to tell. So it’s not surprising he’s built his career around compelling narratives.

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The reasons behind huge income gaps vary widely from city to city, but all these urban centers have one thing in common: the wealth is being concentrated in a tiny number of people.

Is inequality the price you pay for economic success? That's a question you might ask from reading this report looking at the U.S.'s most unequal places. The worst performers--cities like San Francisco and Boston--are the best performers economically-speaking.

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Here's how you could hack together a national transportation network. Hope you brought a good book.

Exactly how hard is it to cross the U.S. without getting in a car or on a plane? For those traveling to and from bigger cities, it’s fairly easy to find transit options, like Amtrak or bus routes. But that’s not really true for the entire country, as this map from Michael Buiting shows.

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For years, corporate campuses like Silicon Valley were known for innovation. Located in suburban corridors that were only accessible by car, these places put little emphasis on creating communities where people work, live and go out.

But now, as the economy emerges from the recession, a shift is occurring where innovation is taking place. Districts of innovation can be found in urban centres as disparate as Montreal, Seoul, Singapore, Medellin, Barcelona, and London. They are popping up in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Cambridge, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

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Is the necktie dead, or at least dying? The answer is yes, of course. Ties are being worn less and less in the workplace, but what's really interesting to me is a specific change in the calculus of the male dress code. I'll get to that in a minute, but first the numbers. Fortune's resident careers expert, Anne Fisher, author of our Ask Annie newsletter, did some digging and found that annual tie sales in the U.S. peaked in 1995 at $1.8 billion, according to the NPD Group. By 2008 that number had tumbled to $677 million. Sales have perked back up to about $850 million a year as we've emerged from the Great Recession -- no doubt some of that volume is from hopefuls picking up a tie at Brooks Brothers before a job interview. In any event, it's hard to see the tie biz ever again hitting the levels of two decades ago. (It should be noted that the increasing number of women in the workplace does nothing for tie sales ... Fortunately, those horrid 1980s women's ties never caught on.)

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HAVEN'T FINISHED A BOOK SINCE COLLEGE? BETWEEN WORK, FAMILY, AND SOCIAL LIVES, TRYING TO FIND TIME TO READ CAN BE MORE EFFORT THAN RELAXING HOBBY. HERE'S HOW TO MAKE MORE TIME FOR YOUR FAVORITE PAGE-TURNERS.

Reading is one of the most pleasurable activities out there. On a scale of human enjoyment I once found in a reference book, where respondents ranked activities from getting their car repaired (4.6) to sex (9.3), reading books scored an 8.3. That’s better than TV. We just assume we don’t have time for this indulgence in our busy lives.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S GETTYSBURG ADDRESS IS MORE THAN A VENERABLE PIECE OF HISTORY--IT'S A MASTER CLASS ON PRESENTING A POISED, POWERFUL SPEECH.

Seven score and 11 years ago, the 16th president of the United States stood in a muddy field and made a two-minute speech that has been celebrated as one of the greatest of all time.

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WHETHER IT'S A BOARD ROOM OR A BANQUET HALL, SPEAKING TO AN AUDIENCE CAN BE INTIMIDATING. BEYOND IMAGINING EVERYONE IN THEIR UNDERWEAR, HOW CAN YOU GET PAST THE STAGE FRIGHT TO TELL A RIVETING STORY?

It happened 18 years ago, but Kevin Allison remembers the moment like it was yesterday. He was up on stage at the Luna Lounge in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, doing a monologue. One paragraph in, his mind went completely blank and he could not for the life of him remember his next line.

Midland and Odessa in West Texas. Pascagoula, a port town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Fargo and Bismarck, the two largest cities in North Dakota. These were among the USA’s 10 fastest-growing metro economies in 2013, as ranked by growth in real gross metropolitan product (GMP), and they have a few things in common.

For one thing, none are huge population magnets. They’re also either at the center of the energy boom or indirectly benefiting from the advances in fracking technology. And they share another common trait, too: along with Columbus, Ind., also in the top 10, most of these metro areas depend on one major, export-oriented industry sector to bring in outside income and drive growth.

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OK, I want you to take a quick test and answer the question with the first thing that comes to mind: What does a “start-up entrepreneur” look like? OK, do you have a picture in your mind?

If you are like most people, I bet your first thought was someone who looks suspiciously like a white male 20-something in a blue hoodie, torn jeans and ironically unhip tennis shoes. And if you stroll through the “typical” tech or health IT startup in Silicon Valley, that is exactly what you see, although there may be a few females sprinkled in.

From relationships to the way we work, the web’s birthday marks an occasion for looking back at the impact the technology has had on every part of modern life.

On March 12th, 1989, British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners Lee published a mildly titled paper called “Information Management: A proposal.” The paper spawned a little thing we know and love called the World Wide Web, which will be 25 years old next month.

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A college degree is no longer a sure fire way to get a job. Ask the many millenials who are on their second or third unpaid internship after graduating from college. Or, better yet, ask the employers who say the top skills they look for in a new applicant is not only what they know, but what they know how to do. Many savvy graduates today will start their own companies while they are still in college.

To be here in the studio.

So may people in tech support you guys.

You feel that teaching kids entrepreneurial skills is the key to keeping them in school.

Peoples of port us into because of the power of entrepreneurship.

We have been really fortunate that our supporters span from early entrepreneurs to new entrepreneurs in silicon valley.

We have found that entrepreneurship is a powerful vehicle to becoming successful.

It forces people to take risks, fall down, and get back up.

As a consultant who helps small businesses grow and as a teacher of entrepreneurship (Kauffman FastTrac facilitator and former adjunct professor at The New School), I get asked all the time if entrepreneurs are born, made or accidental. Ruta Aidis, project director of The Gender Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (Gender-GEDI) and I are discussing whether U.S. high-growth women entrepreneurs are born, made or come apart through happenstance as part of the research she is doing. I’m helping her flesh out her quantitative research in 30 countries with case studies about how U.S. women lead their companies to greatness.

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Apps, software, hardware, social networks, tech and more tech. Tech is so hot right now. Silicon Valley has permeated our lives, even the non techie types have a sense of what this mystical world of where Facebook and Google resides. It’s no surprise that HBO has decided to take a comedic look at this magical land where it seems the web is created.

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While we may not yet have the hover boards, flying cars and self-lacing shoes promised in 80s cult movie Back To The Future, the past 10 years have seen the introduction of an unprecedented number of cool, useful tech products and services that have made the life of the modern PR so much easier. Some among us may remember a time before mobile phones, when we had no way of keeping in touch with important calls after hours. Or even worse, who remembers a time when press releases were printed and hand-delivered (in a personalised manila envelope no less)?

Here’s a quick and fun way to enrich your business knowledge: streaming documentaries on Netflix.

The online movie and TV service has a vast cache of business and tech documentaries that anyone with a subscription can watch instantly. The topics range from profiles of great tech innovators like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk to deep dives into industrial design.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com.au - ‘Freakonomics’ looks at the economics behind some of the world’s quirkiest phenomena. 

Passing judgments of others and ourselves hampers our ability to learn. By asking questions differently, we can learn more and make better decisions.

I recently set off for a business trip to India. When I boarded my flight at New York’s JFK airport, I arrived at my seat and saw that my seat-mate, a man in his 50s or so, was already there. I smiled and said “hello” as I stowed by luggage and settled in, but I got no response. The man didn’t look up or even acknowledge my presence. I immediately jumped to a conclusion. “What an unpleasant guy” I thought to myself.

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TORONTO, Feb. 27, 2014 /CNW/ - A key highlight for 2013 includes $2 billion of new venture capital investment up 31% invested in 2012, while fundraising dropped 24%. These were among the findings of a statistical report released today by CVCA- Canada's Venture Capital & Private Equity Association and research partner Thomson Reuters.

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It pays to have a college diploma -- and preferably more than one. A worker who holds a bachelor's degree will typically earn 77 percent more than a colleague who didn't go beyond high school, says a new U.S. Census Bureau report. And a person with a master's degree will earn 17 percent more than an individual with a B.A. or B.S.

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