Arturo Rivera Martínez stood over an insanely hot grill Wednesday at his newly minted Michelin-starred establishment—the first Mexican taco stand ever to get a coveted star from the French dining guide—and did exactly the same thing he’s been doing for 20 years: searing meat. Though Michelin representatives came by Wednesday to present him with...

Private equity is often viewed as an industry that favors a particular kind of financial engineering—one that hasn’t always been good for industries where it operates, such as journalism, healthcare, and music. What may not be as well-known is that private equity investors have recently become extremely interested, and heavily invested, in the actual...

A new fixture just appeared in Central Park, and it proves that New York City’s infamous “war on rats” is far from over.  The product joining the front lines is a recycling bin specifically desiged to hold empty pizza boxes—which, apparently, are like the bat signal for the reviled rodents. According to an announcement from the Central Park Conservatory,...

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. John Mulaney’s somewhat-intentionally chaotic pop-up talk show, which ran live for six nights in connection with the Netflix is a Joke Festival, included (and often mocked) many familiar elements of the genre: gaggles of guests, live viewer calls,...

In the vast, ancient world of product design, there’s one 85-year-old classic so iconic that it’s served as a muse for dozens of artists, including Bono, Yoko Ono, Yves Behar, and Damien Hirst. This product has been turned into a car, a robot, and a grill; crushed in a hydraulic press; re-created into a tiny digital image to use instead of the “trash”...

In the age of fickle online trends, font horoscopes, and tiny mics, what room is there to engage with the humble mass-market paperback of yesteryear? A new book, Second Hand, dusts off should-be-classic book covers that have largely been forgotten, and pulls out new design lessons from old tricks. Jesse Reed, the book’s author and cofounder of the design...