Marcus Nilsson/Gallery Stock

Inside big pharma’s campaign to hype—and treat—women’s sexual dysfunction.

Pharma's race for a 'pink viagra' finally has a winner, and the promises for it are grand. Osphena, as the recently FDA-approved drug is called, is the newest answer for painful sex. The drug’s creator, pharmaceutical company Shionogi, Inc., is particularly interested in the more than 64 million U.S. women who have hit menopause, half of whom, it claims, could use the drug. In theory, that’s a lot of women who could be having a lot better sex, and soon.

Mark Lennihan/AP

The retail giant might have worked with the Bangladesh factory that collapsed, killing hundreds. So why is its stock suddenly rising? Daniel Gross on Penney’s paradoxical comeback.

Sometimes it seems like the department-store chain JCPenney is simply gathering evidence for a business-school study in crisis management.The company has suffered epic public-relations and image problems. There was the splashy hiring and relatively rapid firing of former Apple retail executive Ron Johnson. Under Johnson, the chain alienated customers by doing away with discounts and sales, only to reinstate them after sales plummeted. The pursuit of Martha Stewart to bring her business to Penney led to messy litigation with rival Macy’s.

Makes $195 million before opening in U.S.

Apparently there isn’t a worldwide economic slowdown for Tony Stark. Disney’s Iron Man 3 got off to a huge start internationally this past week, growing to more than $195 million in the U.K., South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and France, even before it opens in the U.S., China, Canada, and Russia later this week. Over the past few years, many big-budget Hollywood films have started opening abroad before they do in the U.S. as they seek to capitalize on the much more lucrative global market.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

Cut into texting revenues.

Remember when getting unlimited texts was the next big thing for mobile users? Now chat apps like WhatsApp have surpassed text messaging as the most preferred method of mobile communication, taking a huge chunk out of a major cash source for phone companies. Analysts expect messaging on apps to grow to more than 41 billion a year—double the number of texts. They also think Facebook should watch its back, as the messaging apps are seen as a potential threat to Facebook supremacy in social media. 

Read it at The Financial Times

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

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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.

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.

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.