“I DIDN’T actually decide to do the whole room at first,” said Shantell Martin, contemplating the freestyle line drawings that cover all four walls and the ceiling of the room she rents in Brooklyn. Initially, she said, she planned to limit herself to part of one wall, a section under a chest-high, black-slate mantel, where there might once have been a fireplace: it was ideal, she decided, because it was self-contained, like a frame. “I thought maybe that would just be enough,” Ms. Martin, 31, said. “But it’s never enough.” A London-born artist whose stream-of-consciousness drawings adorn the walls of private homes and companies like the trend consultancy PSFK, Ms. Martin is also known for live performances in which she makes drawings that are digitally ... Continue reading →

This page will automatically update. To submit your questions to Jared Leto, use the 'Make a comment' box below or tweet your questions to @FastCompany with the hashtag #FCChat.Jared Leto has a posse. In fact, they're so loyal they make him seem like a cult leader. There's the million or so who remember him as the actor in Fight Club, Requiem For A Dream, or even My So Called Life, way back when. A few million more know him as a bona fide rock star, the singer/guitarist in Thirty Seconds To Mars. To us, he's an innovator. Having reinvented himself a few dozen times, he clearly feels the occasional need to destroy something beautiful. And it's his knack for creative destruction that earned him a ... Continue reading →

Joel Saget/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFacebook pulled it off.As investors raced to get shares, the sprawling social network raised $16 billion on Thursday, in an initial public offering that values Facebook at $104 billion.The I.P.O. signals a rapid evolution for the company. In just eight years, Facebook has gone from a scrappy college service founded in a Harvard dormitory to the third-largest public offering in the history of the United States, behind General Motors and Visa.Investors, who are paying $38 a share for the offering, now consider Facebook more stalwart than a start-up. At $104 billion, the social network’s market value is higher than McDonald’s, Citigroup, Amazon.com and all but a handful of other American companies.“Facebook is here to stay,” said Navin Chaddha, a managing ... Continue reading →

braingate2.org Cathy Hutchinson, a quadriplegic study subject, used her thoughts to drink coffee from a bottle. Two people who are virtually paralyzed from the neck down have learned to manipulate a robotic arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach out and grab objects. One of them, a woman, was able to retrieve a bottle containing coffee and drink it from a straw — the first time she’d served herself since her stroke 15 years earlier, scientists reported on Wednesday. “She had a smile on her face that I and the research team will never forget,” said Dr. Leigh R. Hochberg of the Department of Veterans Affairs, an author of a study reporting the achievement. The report, released online by the journal Nature, is ... Continue reading →

One Friday afternoon recently, about 50 fans and friends of the band String Cheese Incident took $20,000 in cash to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles to take a small stand against the system — in this case, Ticketmaster. With money advanced by the band, each person had enough to buy eight tickets at $49.95 apiece for the group’s show in July. Once all tickets were in hand, almost 400 of them, they were carried back to String Cheese headquarters in Colorado and put on sale again through the group’s Web site — for $49.95. “We’re scalping our own tickets at no service charge,” Mike Luba, one of the group’s managers, explained in an interview last week. “It’s ridiculous.” String Cheese Incident, a jam band ... Continue reading →

(Photo: Melissa Hom/New York Magazine) Even comedians�who rarely shut up�had to surrender whenever Patrice O’Neal began to talk. He’s the guy they would call on the long drive home from Magooby’s Joke House who loved to discuss�at length�whether Jay-Z would ever cheat on Beyoncé, or the various options for black reparations, or the best adjectives for different smells of pussy. He was a master at introducing subjects that you never even knew you had an opinion about�like whether you’d be willing to have sex with a girl who had no nose. Even though O’Neal was usually doing 90 percent of the talking, listening had the feel of conversation, in part because he was famously picky about whom he’d talk to, and in part because he ... Continue reading →