An outlet for complaints.

If only Andy Dufresne had been able to look up Shawshank on Yelp. While most people turn to the popular consumer review site Yelp for restaurants and tourism activities, many inmates have taken to the site to offer critiques of their prisons. The reviews not only provide an outlet for inmates to voice complaints but are also seen as helpful for bail bondsmen, attorneys, and family members.

Read it at The Washington Post

Andy Wong/AP

The company may just show us everything wrong with American business.

On Tuesday, Apple, Inc. unleashed the corporate equivalent of shock and awe on the markets: its quarterly earning results. The company sold 39 million iPads, earned $9.5 billion, and saw the amount of cash on its books rise to $145 billion, a figure roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Belarus. More big numbers: Apple announced that by the end of 2015, it would move some $100 billion in cash off its balance sheet, where it is doing nothing, and onto others’ balance sheets.

George Rose/Getty

Urban nostalgists say Americans ought to want to live in dense downtowns—and simply ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary, writes Joel Kotkin.

The “silver lining” in our five-years-and-running Great Recession, we’re told, is that Americans have finally taken heed of their betters and are finally rejecting the empty allure of suburban space and returning to the urban core.“We’ve reached the limits of suburban development,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan declared in 2010. “People are beginning to vote with their feet and come back to the central cities.” Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City and Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Great Inversion—widely praised and accepted by the highest echelons of academia, press, business, and government—have advanced much the same claim, and just last week a report on jobs during the downturn garnered headlines like “City Centers in U.

China Daily/Landov

It may not be the Marshall yet, but the Blackstone Group founder tells Daniel Gross he’s looking for ‘future thought leaders’ for his Schwarzman Scholars program to send to study in China.

The Schwarzman. It doesn’t have quite the same ring as the Rhodes or the Marshall. Yet.Last week Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman announced the creation of the eponymous Schwarzman Scholars program, which will fund scholarships to send bright young Americans to study at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The idea? Take a bunch of members of the future elite in their protean state and give them exposure to what is now the world’s most populous country and what is likely to be the world’s largest economy.

Augusto Casasoli A3/Contrasto, via Redux

Italy just got itself a new prime minster.

By Italian standards, it was positively expeditious. Only two months after the elections, a prime minister was appointed and handed the unenviable task of forming a workable Italian government.At 46, Enrico Letta is one of the youngest leaders in Europe and certainly one of the youngest politicians in the country, where the average age of a lawmaker is 59.But these are not the only characteristics that make Letta stand out against the baroque backdrop of Italian politics.

Mary Turner/Pool/Reuters

May the royal odds be ever in your favor.

On April 29, Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge will toast to two years of nuptial bliss, but the fervor surrounding them since their televised Westminster Abbey wedding has hardly fizzled. As Catherine’s mid-July due date nears, gamblers are stacking their chips on all nuances of royal baby trivia.Gambling on the royal family is a British tradition. Rupert Adams, a public-relations manager at William Hill, one of the U.K.’s largest bookmakers, says his firm has racked up £70,000 in royal-related bets, with £15,000 taken in since the pregnancy announcement.

Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty; Jared Wickerham/Getty

From iPhone cops to left-wing economists in central Mass, The Daily Beast brings you the best in business and economics journalism from the week of April 27.

Undercover Police Stings Target Front Lines Of Stolen iPhone Market Gerry Smith, Huffington Post Seventh and Market Street in San Francisco might be the geographic center of the tech world. It’s also “San Francisco’s primary open-air market for stolen electronics,” and now it’s crawling with cops pretending to fence stolen iPhones.What If We Never Run Out of Oil? Charles Mann, The AtlanticIs the energy source of the future trapped underneath the sea floor? The promise and perils of methane hydratesThrown for a Curve in Rhode Island Matt Bai, The New York TimesAfter Curt Schilling’s ended his baseball career, he became well known for his conservative politics.

Nick Ut/AP

The GDP report profits the broadest barometer of economic performance. But the data are constantly under revision and can often be misused and abused.

Friday’s report on America’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) held a few surprises. But the real story lies behind the data. The economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2013. That was a little less than what most economists had guessed, even though business invested more and consumers spent more than predicted. The key takeaway: Americans were clearly feeling better about their own prospects, since consumer spending accelerated.

Jason Todd/Getty

In the corner office and the boardroom, women are 'leaning in.' But there's one place where they're still wracked with anxiety and shame. A look at the lengths we go to avoid getting caught in the stall.

A woman will go to great lengths to never get caught doing it, especially at work.One 27-year-old at a financial services firm in New York City brings her BlackBerry along while she does it, and sends an email during the experience so that she has an “alibi.” A popular national morning TV show host in her 40s—who, like most others interviewed in this story, asked to remain nameless to avoid embarrassment—said that she walks 10 minutes to another section of her midtown office building to do it, and still then only does it when no one in the hallway sees her en route.

David McNew

After thousands of flight delays this week.

After sequester cuts led to a shortage of 1,500 air-traffic controllers this week and thousands of delayed flights, Congress has agreed to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to move $253 million from other accounts to end furloughs and keep air-traffic-control towers open at smaller airports. "This should prevent the onerous delays that have been occurring and that were only going to get worse as the traveling season reached its peak this summer," said Senator Susan Collins of Maine. The Senate passed the bill on Thursday and the House followed up with its approval on Friday.

Read it at CNN