by Lawrence Bush on February 3, 2012
Facebook was launched from a Harvard dormitory room by Mark Zuckerberg, then 19 years old, and three classmates on this date in 2004. By summer they had an investor, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal, and an office in Palo Alto, California. Eight years later the company prepared an Initial Public Offering, was valued at $100 billion, and was on its way to having a billion users worldwide. (Zuckerberg and his colleagues had previously turned down a few buy-out offers by major corporations.”Having media corporations owned by conglomerates is just not an attractive idea to me,” he said.) Facebook has been a major force of communication in political uprisings worldwide and was a key tool in Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2008. The technology has also been an object of fear and loathing among people who criticize it as undermining to privacy and as a source of obsession and fetishization of the self. In December 2010, Zuckerberg joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in signing the “Giving Pledge,” a promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity over the course of their lives.
“The question isn’t, ‘What do we want to know about people?’ It’s, ‘What do people want to tell about themselves?” —Mark Zuckerberg
by Lawrence Bush on February 2, 2012
Ezer Weizman, who headed Israel’s air force from 1958 to 1966 and led its surprise attack against Egypt in the Six Day War, resigned from the Knesset on this date in 1992, warning that the Israeli government under Yitzhak Shamir was leading the country toward war. The nephew of Israel’s founding President Chaim Weizman and former Defense Minister under Menachem Begin, Weizman had moved into the peace camp to serve as an architect of the 1978 Camp David peace accords with Egypt, and had pursued secret contacts with the PLO when such activity was banned. “After serious consideration I have decided to resign my post in the Knesset,” he said, expressing concern “for the fate and image of the State of Israel in the years ahead. I am troubled by the grave feeling that the path we are taking does not lead to peace, but to an impasse behind which is the horror of war.” He returned to government the following year as Israel’s 7th President (a largely symbolic post)and was reelected in 1998, but stepped down in 2000 to avoid prosecution on corruption charges. In 2005, the year of his death, Weizman was voted the 9th greatest Israeli of all time in a national poll.
“Weizman was not the only Israeli military leader to evolve from a fierce, distrustful hawk to an ardent peace advocate. But few made that transition so rapidly and dramatically, and with such public consequence.” —William A. Orme Jr. and Greg Myre, New York Times
by Lawrence Bush on February 1, 2012
The Beatles began their first British tour on this date in 1963 as the opening act for Helen Shapiro. Shapiro had her first hit single in 1961 at age 14, and had been voted Britain’s “Top Female Singer” by the time the Beatles emerged. During the tour, the Beatles had their first hit single (“Love Me Do”) and Lennon and McCartney wrote “Misery” for her, but it was “actually turned down on my behalf before I ever heard it,” Shapiro later reported. “I never got to hear it or give an opinion. It’s a shame, really.” Her pop career quickly declined in her late teen years, though she remained a cabaret, stage and jazz singer for more than 40 years. Over the past two decades her music reflected her turn to Christianity and/or messianic Judaism. For a video of Helen Shapiro lip-synching her hit song, “Look Who It Is,” to John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, click here.
“I got on great with them and John was like a brother to me. Very protective.” —Helen Shapiro
by Lawrence Bush on January 31, 2012
The 350-or-so members of Local 338 of the Bagel Bakers union were locked out by their employers on this date in 1967. The manufacturers were demanding a 40 percent decrease in wages to compensate for competition from newly automated bakeries, which had machines that could produce 300 dozen bagels in the time that two union members could roll 125 dozen by hand. The union had been organized in 1907 by 300 New York bagel bakers, all Jewish, who established standards for bagel production by hand and a system of control over the labor market (spots in the union were reserved for sons of union members). A strike in 1951 led to what the New York Times called a “bagel famine,” with only two of thirty-four bakeries trying to keep up with the area’s demand for 1.2 million bagels per week. Another strike in 1962 led to an 85 percent drop in the bagel supply. By the early 1970s, automation and non-union labor drove the union to merge with the larger, all-purpose bakers’ union.
“It was probably easier to get into medical school than to get an apprenticeship in one of the 36 union bagel shops in New York City and New Jersey.”—“The Schmooze, Bagel History”
