Many young people expect to spend some time couch-surfing when they're just starting out. For Eric Simmons, the couch came courtesy of an unsuspecting AOL. Simmons had been enrolled in an incubator program at the tech firm's Palo Alto campus. And when the program ended, the card that gave him access to the building kept working. That key card unlocked the solution to his housing problem.

People with extremely rare diseases are often scattered across the world, and any one hospital has a hard time locating enough individuals to conduct meaningful research.

But one woman with an extremely rare heart condition managed to do what many hospitals couldn't. Katherine Leon connected with enough people online to interest the Mayo Clinic in a research trial.

In the world of high-dollar politics, the billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch are famous for their lavish funding of conservative politicians and causes. But there's another Koch brother — William — who is passionate about many things, but only recently about politics.

Bill Koch is an avid yachtsman, and he set out to win the 1992 America's Cup. It would take four boats, more than 260 team members and single-minded determination.

David Rosow was the team's business manager and is a longtime friend of Koch's.

Spain's third largest lender, Bankia, is getting a $24 billion lifeline from the Spanish government. The move is a part of Madrid's effort to return some stability to the country's struggling financial sector.

Kanye West has made a name for himself with his music, his award-show antics, and recently his tweets. Including: "Fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on" and "Sometimes I get emotional over fonts." Embroidery entrepreneur Amy Sheridan has decided that Twitter doesn't give these pearls of wisdom their due. For $45, she'll hand-stitch the Kanye tweet of your choice in a simple frame. Just picture, "Working on being a doper person" above the mantel.

NPR's David Greene has the story of a memorial in Kabul, Afghanistan, that pays tribute to American soldiers killed while serving there.

The U.N. Security Council is condemning the Syrian government for the massacre of scores of people, including children, in the town of Houla, a day after images of the mass killings shocked the world.

In this space earlier this month, I wrote about whether President Obama would face a backlash from African-Americans for his endorsement of same-sex marriage. (He hasn't.) I made mention of a random field experiment in which 285 black people in Cook County, Ill., were polled about gay marriage.