Investors See Upside: Lured by continued distress, more realistic values and attractive trailing twelve-month yields, hotel investors doing deals in Europe now stand to benefit most. While most reports show that hotel transaction levels dropped off during 2012, this was driven by outside factors and influences such as lack of financing, lack of product, and economic uncertainty, rather than a lack of desire to participate in steep discounts to valuations from the last cycle peak. Of course,...

Last Friday, Gucci “Guwop” Mane was released from jail. He announced his freedom with the following tweet: Gucci had been incarcerated for smashing a champagne bottle over the head of a fan who asked him for a photograph. “I wanted to get a picture with Gucci Mane,” said the fan, “and Gucci Mane hit me in the head with a bottle. As I looked at him in the shock of why, one of his friends hit me in the side of my face.” He posted $75,000 bond for that charge, but found himself locked up again...

The author with "Sarah," whose name we have changed for her protection. Photo by Samir Amrania I first met Sarah when she asked to take a picture with me after I spoke to her student group about entrepreneurship in Cleveland. Afterwards, I started a conversation with her and the rest of her friends from Baghdad, who were visiting America on a joint US and Iraqi Embassy-sponsored trip to "develop young Iraqi leaders." They showed me pictures they had taken on their iPhones of dead bodies...

The Show Palace offers fully nude entertainment to its 18-and-up clientele from 4 PM to 8 AM every Friday, and I watched the production come together. 2:00 PM In the early-afternoon light, the Show Palace looks pretty innocuous. The Queens strip joint is at rest, hours away from powering up at night. Mike Diaz, the club's manager, meets me there in a slick gray suit and lifts up the metal gate. He's an old-school NYC character—constantly cursing, teasing, and jabbering away, the kind of guy...

If you're one of the few who've been chosen to go to an Ivy League school in America, here's what you're in for. There have been few things in my life that I've wanted as bad as admission into an Ivy League school. Many students, especially children of immigrants (like me), conflate the American dream with going to an Ivy. At 17, I was averaging two all-nighters a week, kept alive on a depraved cocktail of Adderall, Percocet, and coffee. The only light at the end of my tunnel was visions of...