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The online magazine Ozy covers people, places and trends on the horizon. Co-founder Carlos Watson joins All Things Considered regularly to tell us about the site's latest feature stories.

This week, Watson talks with guest host Kelly McEvers about a rising star who has made hip-hop serious business, and the advertising tactics that life insurance companies are using to attract young people.

"He's an incredible young Yale graduate named Zack O'Malley Greenburg who writes for Forbes magazine. But instead of writing kind of complicated stories on hedge funds, [he] has spent all of his time covering what he calls the kings of hip-hop. He writes an incredible annual digest of whose been most successful. And whether he writes about Ludacris or Jay-Z, whether he's talking about Beyonce's recent success or what Drake is doing, he's actually turned music — and fun music — into serious business. And it's become one of the most popular portions of the magazine."

Read 'Zack O'Malley Greenburg Is All About The Benjamins' On Ozy.com

U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi has acknowledged that the first day of face-to-face talks between representatives of Syria's government and the opposition coalition failed to yield anything in the way of results.

"We haven't achieved much," Brahimi said following the day's discussions. "But, we are continuing."

"The situation is very difficult and very, very complicated, and we are moving not in steps, but half-steps," he said.

The Associated Press described the talks, which are set to resume on Sunday, as "painstakingly choreographed."

The New York Times reports:

"The opposing teams sat across from each other at a U-shaped table and made eye contact but did not speak, listening as [Brahimi], the international mediator for Syria, spoke about the agenda for the talks, said Obeida Nahas, a member of the opposition delegation."

"The session lasted about 30 minutes, and the delegations left through separate doors to avoid contact, planning to resume in the afternoon to discuss the first order of business: a potential cease-fire in the central Syrian city of Homs to allow aid deliveries to reach areas long blockaded by the government."

"One is on the left and one on right and they face one another and they talk to each other — through me, to one another," he said. "This is what happens in civilized discussions."

Last year, there were more than two dozen shootings on or near college campuses in the United States. This past Tuesday, that number went up, with the fatal shooting of a student at Purdue University. Then yesterday, a fatal shooting at South Carolina State University. It will, of course, tick up again.

On the other side of the world, in Afghanistan, two university colleagues went out for a Friday night meal in Kabul. Before they could finish dinner, they were killed in a suicide bombing followed by a hail of bullets.

We are outraged at the attack, and at the senseless loss of life. We're safer here in America, we tell ourselves, from targeted violence.

And we know that isn't true.

Because increasingly, our halls of higher learning, and the football fields and parking lots and plazas, are targets. Whether at Santa Monica College, where five people were gunned down, or the University of Arkansas or Maryland, all over the country we find ourselves vulnerable to gun violence. But the issue of campus security is a contested topic.

Colorado's legislature is trying to reinstate a ban to make colleges gun-free.

Yet some states, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, have been considering whether to make it easier to bring guns to college. Legislatures in Texas and North Carolina have passed laws that allow students who are licensed gun owners to keep handguns in their cars.

In Florida, a group calling itself Florida Carry is contesting state restrictions against keeping guns on campus.

Florida Carry has been advancing its cause in the courts. It has successfully argued that Florida students have the right to stash guns in their cars. This year, the group is pushing for students to be able to keep guns in their dormitories.

Somehow it's not the college experience I remember. Pizza, beer and bullets. Quite the combination: everyone armed and pulling all-nighters.

In an opinion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the former provost of Idaho State University Gary Olson said, "there is no recorded incident in which a victim, or spectator, of a violent crime on a campus has prevented that crime by brandishing a weapon."

And most surveys show that students and faculties think having guns on campus is a terrible idea.

Perhaps it's not about knowing who the bad guys are, but knowing ourselves, which offers our best protection. Which is, after all, the fundamental mission of higher learning. Those kinds of insights can't really be learned at gunpoint.

One of the dangers of writing a book in this style is that the different little stand-alone sections are inevitably pitted against one another. Some work better than others. A sudden quote from Simone Weil, "Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer," seemed a little bewildering. And a questionnaire about sparrows, a page after the revelation that the couple had lost their baby, made me want to say: let's get back to our characters now.

But there were other times when I was more willing to be taken far afield, such as in a little story about the scientist Carl Sagan's infidelity. Because, in fact, infidelity comes into play in Dept. of Speculation. The husband strays, and the ensuing drama has a held-breath suspense to it.

And the novel is often really funny. Offill refers to the Internet meme of the cat saying, "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" And the payoff comes later, after men are flirting with the wife, who muses to herself, "I CAN HAS BOYFRIEND?"

Offill has successfully met the challenge she seems to have given herself: write only what needs to be written, and nothing more. No excess, no flab. And do it in a series of bulletins, fortune-cookie commentary, mordant observations, lyrical phrasing. And through these often disparate and disconnected means, tell the story of the fragile nature of anyone's domestic life.