Blog Archive
Exploring the Ascent of Woman
By Allison Vale
Recently The New York Times featured an article, “Aging Gracefully, The French Way,” striking that chord in every American woman who envies that je ne sais qua. I cheekily wrote “How to outlive men gracefully” as the tagline for our August 2nd program on Population Aging as a Feminist Issue, but Ms. Hayutin will be discussing issues far more serious than wrinkles that will affect women all over the globe – especially the French.
The Commonwealth Club's Ascent of Women series, which runs all through August, brings together diverse perspectives on the status of women today, both how far we’ve come and how far we’ve got to go. Asha Hagi’s inspiring stories of courageous Somali women drive home how great we have it here in the land of the free and the importance of promoting women’s issues throughout the world. It seems women have broken glass ceilings in just about every profession, but the playing field is by no means level here. Luckily, women are planners, and by the looks of the impressive line-up of speakers and panelists, it seems women are also dedicated to furthering the success of other women. Female scientists, activists, and businesswomen will all share their experiences, and more importantly, just how women can best utilize our distinctive gifts to close the remaining gendered gaps in society.
But we won’t forget to look back on those who came before us and built the ground upon which we now stand – or pose, in the case of Yves Sant Laurent. Women may outnumber men in America’s universities, but stop by on Monday, August 2nd to learn where women’s education all began.
Look at the complete lineup here.
Recently The New York Times featured an article, “Aging Gracefully, The French Way,” striking that chord in every American woman who envies that je ne sais qua. I cheekily wrote “How to outlive men gracefully” as the tagline for our August 2nd program on Population Aging as a Feminist Issue, but Ms. Hayutin will be discussing issues far more serious than wrinkles that will affect women all over the globe – especially the French.
The Commonwealth Club's Ascent of Women series, which runs all through August, brings together diverse perspectives on the status of women today, both how far we’ve come and how far we’ve got to go. Asha Hagi’s inspiring stories of courageous Somali women drive home how great we have it here in the land of the free and the importance of promoting women’s issues throughout the world. It seems women have broken glass ceilings in just about every profession, but the playing field is by no means level here. Luckily, women are planners, and by the looks of the impressive line-up of speakers and panelists, it seems women are also dedicated to furthering the success of other women. Female scientists, activists, and businesswomen will all share their experiences, and more importantly, just how women can best utilize our distinctive gifts to close the remaining gendered gaps in society.
But we won’t forget to look back on those who came before us and built the ground upon which we now stand – or pose, in the case of Yves Sant Laurent. Women may outnumber men in America’s universities, but stop by on Monday, August 2nd to learn where women’s education all began.
Look at the complete lineup here.
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Paul Saffo: Bay Area Should Flex Its Economic Muscles in the Political Arena
The Bay Area would benefit from thinking more like a city-state and less like a region within a dysfunctional state, futurist Paul Saffo writes in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle.
Noting that the Bay Area's economy would be the 25th largest in the world if it were an independent country (which would put it ahead of Austria, Denmark, and even Taiwan), Saffo writes that local-based pragmatism would result in better economic management than the state currently provides. He argues that "a sudden outbreak of city-state pragmatism might shock Sacramento out of its ideological deadlock and into a serious exploration of how to effect essential but unpopular solutions – from service cuts and tax increases to a rewriting of our state Constitution."
You can read his entire essay here.
The ever-provocative Saffo will be on a high-powered panel at The Commonwealth Club tomorrow night (July 13) that includes Laura Tyson (an economic advisor to President Obama), DBL Investors Managing Partner Nancy Pfund, Robert Klein (governing board chair of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine), former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg – all moderated by KPIX-TV anchor Sydnie Kohara. The event is part of the Chevron California Innovation Series at The Commonwealth Club.
For details and to order tickets, visit The Commonwealth Club's web site.
Noting that the Bay Area's economy would be the 25th largest in the world if it were an independent country (which would put it ahead of Austria, Denmark, and even Taiwan), Saffo writes that local-based pragmatism would result in better economic management than the state currently provides. He argues that "a sudden outbreak of city-state pragmatism might shock Sacramento out of its ideological deadlock and into a serious exploration of how to effect essential but unpopular solutions – from service cuts and tax increases to a rewriting of our state Constitution."
You can read his entire essay here.
The ever-provocative Saffo will be on a high-powered panel at The Commonwealth Club tomorrow night (July 13) that includes Laura Tyson (an economic advisor to President Obama), DBL Investors Managing Partner Nancy Pfund, Robert Klein (governing board chair of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine), former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg – all moderated by KPIX-TV anchor Sydnie Kohara. The event is part of the Chevron California Innovation Series at The Commonwealth Club.
For details and to order tickets, visit The Commonwealth Club's web site.
San Francisco Public Press Hits the Newsstands – And The Club Is There
Print critics have been predicting the burial of print newspapers for many years now; in fact, the chairman of Tribune Company, Sam Zell, said this week that home delivery of newspapers will soon become a thing of the past, with papers being replaced by "PDFs."
One could be forgiven for questioning whether he knows what a PDF is, but it is true that the print news business has undergone traumatic downsizings, bankruptcies, layoffs, rising prices, audience losses, and hemorrhaging advertising revenue, and that it's been a tough haul for many if not most newspaper companies. They might be showing some success at reinventing themselves; a number of these large papers, including San Francisco's own Chronicle, are surprising people by reporting that they're back in the black, even as the larger economy continues to struggle. Still, it's probably a safe bet that papers will continue innovating and experimenting, until they come up with a stable new business model.
But the liveliness of print news is not restricted to these traditional publishers. Now that the old vision of what a paper is – what it must contain, how it must be designed and distributed and priced and consumed – has been blown apart, entrepreneurs are looking at print again with a fresh eye and realizing there are some exciting things that can be done with it. On the entertainment side, for example, last year DC Comics produced a 12-issue weekly broadsheet newspaper called Wednesday Comics filled with full-page color comics. It was only a limited experiment, but it might awaken some daily paper publishers to rethink the restrictions on their own graphic entertainment pages. Make it bigger, more colorful, and worth reading on a large page, and you'll give readers a reason to pay a dollar or more each day for your paper.
And there's more. In June, SFPublicPress.org – a nonprofit online news service – produced a broadsheet newspaper edition. A 28-page color paper with no advertising, the first edition carried a cover price of $2 and owes something to the bigger weekly newspapers of Europe (pick up a copy of Germany's Die Zeit the next time you're at Cafe de la Presse and you'll see what we mean). These papers that are not commuter papers; they're papers that entice you to put your feet up on your desk or stretch out on a couch and read about all kinds of things. News, opinion, entertainment, economics. Even comics.
And if you pick up a copy of this first print edition of San Francisco Public Press, be sure to stop on page 12 and read "Gulf Spill Puts Conservation in Spotlight," an excerpt from a recent timely Commonwealth Club Climate One panel discussion. And let the folks at SFPublicPress.org know what you think about their experiment.
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