
In 2011, when Tim founded Student Reporter as part of his oikos Phd fellowship, he envisioned to build The Economist for young people.
On a sunny Thursday afternoon, I meet Nefertiti Harris at her salon in the Cass Corridor, one of Detroit’s comeback neighborhoods. Harris is a tall, slender, smiling woman with long locs wound neatly around the crown of her head.
Following the Arab Spring, observers in Egypt have noticed that more and more young people are interested in entrepreneurship and self-employment. Tech entrepreneurship especially is gaining increasing institutional support. Some even see it as a means of mitigating the country’s record-setting unemployment that has largely afflicted Egypt’s youth (80 percent of those unemployed are under 30). “Egyptians have been facing drastic sociopolitical and economic changes,” says Dalia Mohamad Abd-Allah, a young entrepreneur from Cairo. “Since young people have played a role in that change, they are getting a sense of ownership of their own destiny.
Journalist McKenzie Funk is an adventurer, as much in his intellectual pursuits as in his taste for sport. He would rather climb a 26,000-foot mountain than hang with the press corps. So it is with his new book, “Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming,” which recounts myriad efforts to cash in on climate change. An absurd display of Canadian militarism first piqued Funk’s interest in the topic. In 2006, he found himself aboard the Canadian frigate HMCS Montréal as it surged toward the Northwest Passage.
Science writer Julian Taub has been freelancing about inventory asset for close to three years now. He has written for prominent publications, believes he has a strong network and understands what it takes to land work. Yet writing for the Web on a contingent basis hasn’t been easy. As Taub points out, he “would be afraid to do it as [his] sole source of income. Just because it’s very precarious: You don’t know what’s going to come up, there’s not many guarantees, and it’s really tough to be one step ahead” on a beat.