Poland's video game sales are surging, helping to diversify the economy of the export-driven nation.

It all started with a computer borrowed from a high school.

In the early 1990s, just after the Communist regime collapsed, not many in Poland could afford their own PC. Certainly not the Miechowski brothers, who were born to working-class parents in Lubin, in southwestern Poland. “Grzegorz, my older brother, had some ideas for his first game and wanted to work on them,” Paweł Miechowski, a bearded, focused 40-year-old, tells me. “So he brought the ZX Spectrum from his school.”

Some 30 years later, 11 bit studios, a Warsaw-based game development company founded in 2009 by Grzegorz and his high school friend Adrian Chmielarz, was ranked Poland’s third biggest video game company in 2018, with a revenue of over $21 million, four times more than in 2017. Their flagship video games, This War of Mine and Frostpunk, have together sold more than 6 million copies over the world since they were released in 2014 and 2018, respectively.

Brittney Carter is earning notice with killer freestyles she records simply on an iPhone.

Reciting lyrics over and over in her head, the 28-year-old Chicago native takes her position on the park staircase as rehearsed. Today, her production crew of one is her boyfriend, serving as cameraman and audio technician.

After pulling up the song and positioning the camera, Brittney Carter gives a cue to record and proceeds to get lost in her artistry, delivering potent bars with every bit of her lyrical arsenal on display.

With 11 videos amassing more than 100,000 views and counting, Carter has been able to bypass the middlemen, labels and other relics of the old music industry. By using resources most Americans have in their pockets, she bet on herself and became her own gatekeeper.

Tirupati temple sees tens of thousands of pilgrims daily shave their heads.

There are many legends of how Lord Balaji, one face of the Hindu deity Vishnu, lost a portion of his hair. But while the details vary, they agree on a few things: Lord Balaji was hit on the head, and the hair ceased to grow from that spot. A woman, hoping to help, offered up some of her own flowing hair to cover the god’s bald patch.

This legend is why every day as many as 75,000 devotees visit the Tirupati Balaji temple dedicated to Lord Balaji. Pilgrims travel into the hills of Andhra Pradesh specifically to cut off their hair and offer it up in exchange for blessings. It’s the most visited temple in the world, according to the Guinness World Records book, and it’s also the richest. Every month, temple authorities auction off tons of human hair. In fact, barbers at the salon managed by the temple shave as many as 80 heads per day each.