There's a store in Palo Alto staffed exclusively by robots. The Beam store, which was recently visited by a writer for IEEE Spectrum, sells telepresence robots that let you attend meetings you can't be at. The store's salespeople use the BeamPro — which costs $20,000 — to sell more robots. Beam is also working on a cheaper model that will cost about $2,000. The lack of humans in the store may seem weird, but it makes sense that Beam would use its own products to sell more of them. The entire store is basically a demo for the robots.

In business negotiations, our mistakes sometimes end up affecting not only the current deal, but our best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or BATNA, in deals that lie down the road. That's a lesson that Ann Marie Gardner, the founder and editor of the hip new magazine Modern Farmer, has learned the hard way. After settling in New York's Hudson Valley, Gardner got the idea of starting Modern Farmer in 2010, Alec Wilkinson writes in a New Yorker profile.

When it comes to conflict resolution, surprisingly useful nuggets of advice come from the realm of international conflict. Take the Camp David Accords of 1978, as described minute-by-minute by Lawrence Wright in his new book, Thirteen Days in September. U.S. President Jimmy Carter made history by negotiating a peaceful end to the conflict between Israel and Egypt that endures to this day. He did so doggedly cajoling and threatening two of the Middle East's most bitter enemies, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.