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He's the richest man you've never heard of: Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish clothing chain Zara. He's a notorious recluse who is rumored to wear the same plain shirt every day, but his Zara empire has come to define the concept of fast fashion.

And now he's taken Warren Buffett's No. 3 spot on Forbes' billionaires list.

Ortega's rags-to-riches tale mirrors the fast growth of southern Europe in the past 30 years. But the difference in this story is that Zara shows no sign of crashing.

His Beginnings

Ortega built the world's biggest fashion company in a rainy, impoverished corner of northwest Spain — Galicia — where the 76-year-old has lived since he was a kid.

The son of a railway worker, Ortega went to work in a local shirt maker's shop at age 14 to help feed his family. Jose Martinez was Ortega's first colleague. He's 77 now and still works at that same shop called Gala.

Business

In Trendy World Of Fast Fashion, Styles Aren't Made To Last

Following up last month's news about reports that tie hackings of American defense contractors' websites to operations run — or at least encouraged — by the Chinese government, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday told the tale of a Shanghai man who used to blog about his work in a People's Liberation Army hacking unit.

If the stories from this blogger — whose family name is Wang, but who blogged as "Rocy Bird" — are true, the Times writes, the hacking life was "all about low pay, drudgery and social isolation."

According to the Times, its reporters "tracked down Wang and his blog through an email address that was listed on a published 2006 paper about hacking. ... [He] did not return several emails and instant messages requesting comment."

The security firm that reported about hacking last month tells the Times that Rocy Bird's posts from 2006-2009 "provided the most detailed first-person account known to date of life inside the hacking establishment" and that it's likely not much has changed in the four years since.

A few details from the blog, via the Times' report:

— Rocy Bird complained about being told to improve his English skills, and then being criticized for reading too many English-language magazines. "The boss doesn't understand," he wrote.

— At a school reunion, the hacker "felt ashamed to say hello" to old classmates because his pay was much less than theirs.

— His unhappiness showed through right from the start. " 'Fate has made me feel that I am imprisoned,' he wrote in his first entry on Sina.com. 'I want to escape.' "

Related posts:

— "A Chinese Army Outpost That's Tucked Into Modern Shanghai."

— "Who's Been Hacked By China? Better Question Might Be: Who Hasn't?"

A small herd of European bison will soon be released in Germany's most densely populated state, the first time in nearly three centuries that these bison — known as wisents — will roam freely in Western Europe.

The project is the brainchild of Prince Richard of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. He owns more than 30,000 acres, much of it covered in Norwegian spruce and beech trees in North Rhine-Westphalia.

For the 78-year-old logging magnate, the planned April release of the bull, five cows and two calves will fulfill a decade-old dream.

But the aristocrat's neighbors aren't all thrilled about his plan to release wisents, which have been living in an enclosure on his property for three years. They are slightly taller than their American cousins and weigh up to a ton. Questions remain about who will foot the bill if the European bison damage property or injure someone.

"We were skeptical because we weren't given enough information," says Helmut Dreisbach, a cattle farmer and vice chairman of the Farmers' Association of Siegen-Wittgenstein. "How will the animals react? Will they stay in a particular area or will they move onto working farmland?"

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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

An American history textbook used by some schools in Louisiana's voucher system has caused a bit of a stir over passages describing 1960s counterculture. America: Land I Love teaches eighth graders that during the '60s, "Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners... Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship." This is only the latest outcry over textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. Other textbooks claim that "[t]he majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and "[d]inosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."

"I don't think I'm particularly good at research. For better or worse, I write about myself," says Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians, in an interview with Guernica.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is writing a book called A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas, according to The Associated Press. In a statement, Palin says, "This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas." The book is slated to come out in November. There's still no word on the Palin family's fitness book we were promised last year.

In n+1, Rachel Aviv writes about Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who used The Iliad and The Odyssey to trace the origins of human consciousness: "Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness — 'a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can' — as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist."