Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty

Japan’s stock market was on an impressive yearlong tear. But starting a few weeks ago, everything went horribly wrong.

The violent vicissitudes of the market have been front and center lately with the head-turning rise and fall of Japan’s Nikkei 225 index.With Japan in decades-long doldrums, recently elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe outlined a bold monetary policy plan that triggered massive cheering from the likes of economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and bets by the well-known investors Daniel Loeb and Stanley Druckenmiller. The new policies included an aggressive expansions of the money supply, a stated intent by Japan’s central bank to boost inflation, a weaker yen, and aggressive stimulus and reform efforts.

Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty

The Supreme Court rules that you can’t hold a patent on natural DNA. What now?

This morning the Supreme Court handed down a big ruling in the biotech world: companies can patent synthetic DNA, but they cannot patent genes that they've identified from natural human chromosomes. This has big implications for how biotech research will fare in the future.  The case centers around Myriad, which has patents on BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes that are linked to a very high risk of breast cancer. This has been in the news a great deal recently because of Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a double mastectomy after testing revealed that she carried the BRCA1 variant.

MySpace has hired the famed indie photographer to direct a commercial celebrating its relaunch. But the campaign has more to do with being a hipster than the actual Internet itself.

Trying to accomplish what’s seemingly impossible, MySpace is gunning for a reboot—one that now boasts Justin Timberlake as minority owner. And as a ploy to lure back the millions of millennials (who in the last 10 years have decamped for Facebook’s less primitive pasture—one that now treads on privacy invasion), MySpace has tapped hipster poster boy and photographer Ryan McGinley to create a campaign celebrating its relaunch, which debuted on Tuesday.

Deputy Cohn wants top job.

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” Goldman Sachs, the investment bank everybody loves to hate, could be facing a tumultuous leadership struggle. The New York Times reports that while longtime second-in-command Gary Cohn wants the top job, CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who has helmed the company for seven years, shows no signs of leaving. Over the past few decades, most Goldman heads have gone on to prominent positions in Washington, D.C. But given Goldman’s unpopularity, Blankfein landing a position like Treasury secretary is unlikely.  

Read it at The New York Times

Drag Asian markets down.

Big declines in Japanese stocks continued, as the Nikkei index fell a stunning 6 percent on the day. What gives? Foreign investors who rushed into the rapidly booming Japanese market have apparently realized that stocks there can set as well as rise. Investors are also beginning to question whether Abenomics (the new economic policy of easy money, cheaper yen, and reform) is actually working to promote growth.

Read it at The Wall Street Journal

Are the big publishing houses using independent presses as a farm league to scout for talent, and giving up gambling on splashy debut novels? James McGirk reports.

When Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station came out in 2011, it won major awards and seemed in every respect like one of those dazzling debut novels that preceded it: Everything Is Illuminated, The Art of Fielding, White Teeth. Except that it was published by little-known Minneapolis art-house company Coffee House Press. How could the big publishing houses have missed it? There have been indications that the Big Six—Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, and Simon & Schuster—were steering away from splashy debuts.

OWN (3); AP

Oprah’s network got off to a weak start. But a new raft of shows highlighting the real lives of black women is giving audiences something new—and something they want.

Just this week OWN, the cable network founded by talk show icon Oprah Winfrey, announced the renewal of three of its top reality shows: Iyanla: Fix My Life, starring Iyanla Vanzant; Life with La Toya, starring La Toya Jackson; and Raising Whitley, starring Kim Whitley, which all feature black women at the center. Erik Logan, president of OWN, credited each show with increasing the network’s ratings overall and propelling the once-struggling cable station to the No.

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The great gaming wars are over and PlayStation 4 is the clear winner, writes Winston Ross. Plus: Sony's John Koller on the company's smart choices.

For gamers, this week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3) in Los Angeles arrived with all the suspense and drama of a presidential election. Up for grabs: the spot as America’s favorite new gaming platform. The contenders: Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4. It’s been eight years since the Xbox 360 came out; seven years since the PS3. Both companies announced there would be updates to the platforms earlier this year, and since then gamers have been anticipating the unveilings, which may have a bigger influence on millennials than the Great Recession did on their ability to buy a videogame console in the first place.

Dimitri Vervitsiotis, via Getty

A judge for the southern district of New York ruled Wednesday that Fox Searchlight violated the law by not paying interns on ‘Black Swan.’ David Freedlander on whether unpaid internships are on their way out.

Is the unpaid internship dead?That’s what corporate CEOs and employment law attorneys were trying to figure out Wednesday after a U.S. district court judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures had violated the law by not paying interns who worked on the film Black Swan.In a lacerating ruling, Judge William H. Pauley III found that had the interns not been hired to do the mostly remedial tasks they were assigned, paid employees would have been.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. The golden age of deficit reduction has arrived. But will Republicans ever admit the truth? Unlikely.

It may not seem like it, but the Golden Age of Deficit Reduction we’ve been writing about is truly upon us.The May monthly treasury statement came out on Wednesday. And while it shows a hefty $139 billion deficit for the month of May, a look inside the data shows why we are entering a brief age of deficit-reduction nirvana.Many analysts believed the huge revenue gains seen in the first few months of 2013 would wilt away as winter turned into spring.