Author: Brian

What Happened to the Activist First Lady?

Brian

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/07/11/betty_ford_is_dead_and_so_is_the_activist_first_lady.html

By Jessica Grose

Betty Ford, who died on Friday at the age of 93, was first lady before I was born, so I knew her only as the namesake of the rehab clinic she co-founded in 1982. When I read the obituaries of Ford published in The Washington Post and the New York Times this weekend, I was surprised to discover that she was, according to the Post, “an activist first lady” who “provided the women’s movement with an impressive ally.” According to the Times:

Mrs. Ford rarely hesitated to make public her views on touchy subjects. She held a White House news conference announcing her support of the Equal Rights Amendment; the mail response ran three to one against her. In 1975, appearing on “60 Minutes,” she said she “wouldn’t be surprised” if her daughter, Susan, had a premarital affair; the mail was four to one against her. Her husband jokingly told her later that the comment had cost him 20 million votes in the 1976 election, she said.

 

Facebook TV?

Brian

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-tv-2011-1

One of the big dreams of the tech set is the idea of internet television. Once your TV is connected to the internet, you’ll be able to get all your internet and TV content in one place. And, like the internet usually does, internet TV will cut out all those meddlesome middlemen like TV networks and cable companies, and life will be grand.

That’s the vision between Google’s ambitious Google TV project, and behind Apple TV.

There’s only one problem though: consumers don’t want it.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-tv-2011-1#ixzz1RortAa9X

 

“A Woman’s Place” by Ken Auletta

Brian

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta

In 2007, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, knew that he needed help. His social-network site was growing fast, but, at the age of twenty-three, he felt ill-equipped to run it. That December, he went to a Christmas party at the home of Dan Rosensweig, a Silicon Valley executive, and as he approached the house he saw someone who had been mentioned as a possible partner, Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s thirty-eight-year-old vice-president for global online sales and operations. Zuckerberg hadn’t called her before (why would someone who managed four thousand employees want to leave for a company that had barely any revenue?), but he went up and introduced himself. “We talked for probably an hour by the door,” Zuckerberg recalls

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta#ixzz1RoqsR5XH