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Part of a series of stories produced in collaboration with Youth Radio on the changing car culture in America.

You might think there's one place in America you absolutely need a car: Los Angeles. You'd be wrong.

"I have been in L.A. without a car for two years now," says Alyssa Rosenthal, a makeup artist.

Rosenthal's job means lugging a professional makeup kit — think of a small toolbox filled with enough supplies to make a supermodel or a zombie (or a zombie supermodel). Point being: It's heavy, and it's her responsibility to get it to the movie set.

"It's not easy. It's definitely a big challenge, but I make it happen," Rosenthal says. "Public transit really is blowing up in L.A. right now. The trains go a lot of places, and it makes it sometimes easier to get to locations with traffic and everything in L.A."

That "blowing up" Rosenthal refers to is new transit options like the Metro Expo Line, which opened last year. It's already surpassing rider projections.

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Teens Use Twitter To Thumb Rides

In just the past week we've seen a bunch of signs that the housing recovery is gaining steam. Data out Wednesday showed that existing home sales rose to their highest level in nearly four years, while prices were up 14 percent from a year ago.

Retailers Home Depot and Lowe's both reported strong earnings growth and attributed that to the housing rebound.

And most important for the economy, home builders are hiring more workers and building more houses.

At the Cataumet Sawmill in Falmouth, Mass., Tom Adams is watching the power of the housing market comeback firsthand. His mill makes floorboards out of reclaimed wood. Like 100-year-old beams that came out of a shoe factory when it was torn down.

A 4-foot-high spinning saw-blade slices the timbers into boards, which have the rich golden color of old-growth pine.

"You can see after we take the first cut off with the dark wood and everything ... when you get into it ... it's beautiful stuff," says Adams.

Beautiful, but after the housing crash there was a lot less demand. Not many new homes were getting built. But now that's changed.

Nationally, builders are starting construction on 20 percent more homes than a year ago. Adams' says that's good news for his sawmill, where he'd had to reduce his workers' hours.

"They were down to 36 hours at the low point in the economy," says Adams. "This year, they're back up to 45 hours a week. So there's a lot more smiles on faces than there were a few years ago."

This is why housing can play such a powerful role in an economic recovery. As Americans buy more new houses, that's a lot of money getting spent on each house. But also, economists say that money has what's called a big "multiplier." That's because most of the materials and all the labor are domestic. So most of that money flows back into American workers' pockets.

Those workers can then go and spend money. And that helps create a chain reaction of growth in the economy

"I'm building a deck, buyin' motorcycles doing whatever I can to help," says Josh Griffiths, who runs the big 40-inch saw blade in the mill.

Across the mill yard, Vincent Pena says he too is enjoying a bigger paycheck. "It's a good feeling," he says. "Come to work in a better mood and work hard and you're excited you got jobs to do. ... You know, cover everything and still have a little extra to go out on Friday night if you want to."

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There's nothing quite like the sweet, succulent taste of Maine lobster. And fishermen off the state's rocky coastline have been catching more and more of the tasty crustacean over the past five years.

But that surging supply has overwhelmed Maine's limited marketing and processing capabilities and driven down the prices paid to lobstermen.

A year ago, as NPR previously reported, early molting, caused by warmer sea water temperatures, flooded the market with an excess supply of soft shell lobsters. This summer has been a more normal season. But that hasn't translated into a better boat price for lobstermen, who say it's getting harder and harder to break even.

"We're paying four times what we paid for fuel when I started fishing," says Thurman Radford, who has been lobstering for 22 years.

"We're paying 10 times what I paid for bait" back then, he says. "And the price of lobsters is lower today than it's been in the history of the state of Maine."

Patrick Keliher, who runs Maine's Marine Resources Department, has been meeting with struggling lobstermen like Radford all summer. Keliher sums up the problem in six words: "We're catching a lot of lobsters."

Last year's catch: 126 million pounds, up from 70 million pounds in 2008. Keliher says the sharp increase in volume has exposed weaknesses in Maine's lobster industry.

"You look at how commodities are marketed, generically, around the world. ... Maine lobster is not doing that at all," he says. "We spend $350,000 a year marketing lobster. What does that do? Nothing. It does absolutely nothing."

So the state is increasing fees on the industry to pay for a new, $2.4 million-a-year marketing campaign. It's being designed by Jon Stamell, CEO of FutureShift.

Stamell says that Canada, where lobsters have a harder shell, is doing a better job marketing its lobsters. But Maine, he says, can change this dynamic by refocusing its marketing on how its lobsters taste.

"If you go out and you talk to chefs," Stamell says, "they will tell you soft shell lobsters have more flavor."

Maine's soft-shell lobsters, he adds, "are sweeter, brinier," he says. "And the reason for that is there's water inside the shell. The meat is marinating live."

But for Maine's new marketing approach to work, the state will have to find a way to grow another side of the business where Canada has also had an advantage: lobster processing facilities.

John Hathaway is CEO of Shucks Maine Lobster, one of just 14 such facilities in the state. Using a machine that Hathaway calls a "mothershucka," his company can process as much as 30,000 pounds of soft shell lobster a day. The live lobsters are loaded into a narrow tank of water, where high pressure kills the animals in about six seconds, Hathaway says.

But the vast majority of this type of lobster processing takes place not in Maine but in Canada.

"We sell the world's greatest food product in the highest possible volume, at the lowest possible price, to Canadian processors" – tens of millions of pounds a year, Hathaway laments.

More than two dozen large processors in Canada's Atlantic Maritimes then add value to Maine's signature seafood product, before shipping it back to the U.S. with a "Made in Canada" label on the box.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage says he'd like to see every pound of lobster caught in Maine waters carry a "Made in Maine" label within three years.

Citing the billions of people worldwide who can't access the Internet, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the leaders of other technology firms are launching an ambitious project to narrow the digital divide Wednesday. The plan focuses on widening access via mobile phones.

"There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy," Zuckerberg says. "Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making Internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it."

To accomplish that goal, a website for the Internet.org project lists areas for possible gains, from a proposal to make smartphones more affordable to a push to make mobile devices work in more languages.

Other ideas include making apps and processes more efficient, so the data costs of using a smartphone are lower, and giving mobile phone providers and phone makers incentives to make their products more affordable.

Their goal is to increase the number of people who use the Internet, which is estimated to be more than 2.7 billion this year, according to the United Nations.

"By reducing the cost and amount of data required for most apps and enabling new business models, Internet.org is focused on enabling the next 5 billion people to come online," according to a new release.

This summer, Google has been testing its own plan to help provide Internet access in areas where such services are rare. Called Loon, the project calls for floating antenna-equipped balloons high into the atmosphere.

The new project is launching with the support of Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung — all of them companies that could eventually profit from the addition of billions of new customers. As smartphone and digital markets in Europe and elsewhere reach a saturation point, developing nations present the biggest chances for growth.

But a push for profits is not the main factor behind the new initiative, Zuckerberg tells The New York Times.

"We're focused on it more because we think it's something good for the world," he says, "rather than something that is going to be really amazing for our profits."

In terms of Internet access, wide disparities exist between different regions and economic tiers. As the "World in 2013" report from the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union states, it's more expensive to get online in a developing country than in a developed one, in relative terms.

Here are some highlights from the report, published in February by the Swiss organization:

In the developing world, 31 percent of the population is online, compared with 77 percent in the developed world.

Europe is the region with the highest Internet penetration rate in the world (75 percent), followed by the Americas (61 percent).

In Africa, 16 percent of people are using the Internet – only half the penetration rate of Asia and the Pacific.

90 percent of the 1.1 billion households not connected to the Internet are in the developing world.

In developing countries, 16 percent fewer women than men use the Internet.

Another finding of that report was that in developing nations, people often pay far less for mobile broadband than for fixed services.

Before it launched the Internet.org project, Facebook's efforts to widen access to the web have included Facebook Zero, a text-only version of its services that has been a hit in Africa. The company has also worked to spread efficient and affordable computing infrastructure through its Open Compute effort.