On the economics of the booming Somali pirate business, which is up 177 percent over last year.

On 21st-century prospectors:

Shawn Ryan is the king of a new Yukon gold rush, the biggest since the legendary Klondike stampede a century ago. Behind this stampede is the rising price of gold, and behind this price is fear.

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

On the “world’s largest social network that you probably haven’t yet heard of” and its enigmatic founder.

Donald Trump’s loan-reliant financial history.

An oral history of the Playboy Clubs.

How Craigslist dealers do business in New York City.

On Ray Dalio, who built the world’s biggest hedge fund by running it like a cult.

On billionaire financier Lynn Tilton and her quest to become a public figure.

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.

How and why Zappos works.

A site for handcrafts flirts with an IPO.

How Lalit Modi built a billion-dollar cricket empire—only to be exiled from his sport and homeland.

How Minnesota became a hotbed of toy invention.

A profile of 21-year-old Dan Cates, who made $5.5 million playing 145,215 hands in 2010.

A story written about Twitter and one its founders, Evan Williams, when the company’s chief source of revenue was subletting desks in their partially filled office.

An artifact from the era when MySpace was king.

An entrepreneurial primer from the founder of 37Signals. “So here’s a great way to practice making money: Buy and sell the same thing over and over on Craigslist or eBay. Seriously.”

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.

How the Weinstein Brothers barked their way into an empire and then lost it.

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

On the pair of entrepreneurs behind a Wal-Mart of weed in Oakland. The duo is talking IPO. “Everybody I was meeting was a little bit older, more a part of the hippie generation,” says one. “I was like, ‘I bet there’s so much room for innovation and new ideas.’”

On the (disputed) origins of the Huffington Post.

A tech neophyte looks for answers in Silicon Valley, “the last place in America where people are this optimistic.”

Nick Denton is rebooting his entire Gawker empire—and his vision is drawn more from TV than blogs.