LinkedIn for Underdogs | Meet Britain’s Rogue Satirical Street Artist

With Handshake, Garrett Lord aims to give students from every American college access to top jobs.

It’s late at night and Garrett Lord is speeding down a dark highway in middle America. For weeks, the college senior and his two friends, Ben Christensen and Scott Ringwelski, have been clocking the miles in a blue Ford Focus, and coding in McDonald’s parking lots. The three undergrads are meeting with dozens of universities across the country in a bid that will either make or break their new company.

Lucky for Lord, those sleepless road trips have paid off. Today, he is the CEO of Handshake, a college career network that aims to democratize job opportunities for students from every background. The company has grown exponentially in the intervening four years: More than 700 universities and 250,000 companies use Handshake, which has surpassed LinkedIn as the largest network of job-seeking college students in the U.S. That success enabled Lord, 29, who dropped out of college to build Handshake, and his co-founders to move from a rental house in Houghton, Michigan, to slick offices in San Francisco.

But Lord hasn’t lost sight of their mission: With 43 percent of new college graduates underemployed, according to a May report from Burning Glass Technologies, he created Handshake as a way to directly connect students with hundreds of thousands of employers, giving them access to opportunities they may never have had otherwise.

These farmers are successfully taking on powerful opponents, from their own government and foreign royals to companies and corrupt officials.

For nearly a week, Swalehe Nkwale saw unfamiliar surveyors place slabs on parts of Nyamatanga village land 108 miles south of Dar es Salaam. Then one day, he saw a poster on his own farm declaring that he could no longer grow crops there. It was the start of a decade-long battle against British firm African Green Oil (AGO) and the Tanzanian government. They won that fight, but the Nyamatanga villagers didn’t stop once they got their land back in 2016.

They have since mapped their land and registered it with authorities, making it hard for any firm to take it from them in the future. And Nyamatanga isn’t alone.

Villages and communities across agrarian parts of Tanzania are now using legal expertise, political pressure and smart solutions like land mapping to win back plots — and then secure them — from corporations they accuse of using loopholes to grab territory. From their own government and foreign royals to companies and corrupt officials, these villagers are taking on powerful opponents, and in many cases, finding success.

Street artist Foka Wolf is pranking Birmingham with hilarious fake advertising posters — and people are paying attention.

Having taken my fair share of peak-time journeys on the London Underground, I’ve been so close to other commuters that I almost felt we had a relationship. After all, we’d spent 30 minutes together in very close proximity in a heaving, sweaty carriage. So when I saw an ad at Camden Town station it seemed entirely plausible:

Transpost for London: Tube Dating

Press Up Against New People
Taste Their Breath
Feel What’s in Each Others Pockets
Share Sweat

But, of course, it wasn’t a real ad. The piece is the creative work of Foka Wolf (@fokawolf), a street artist from Birmingham, England. The artist plants witty fake ads in public places and around tube stations, pranking local authorities, corporations and members of the public. If Banksy created ads, this is probably what they’d look like.