Drawing Oxygen
For further evidence that America has become obsessed by the market, consider the cult of CNBC anchor and reporter Maria Bartiromo. Her reports, broadcast live from the floor of the NYSE, can pop or drop a stock in minutes.
"I decipher the news from the noise," she says. Bartiromo is also writing a book on personal finance, but it's not just her market savvy that's turning heads - some have nicknamed her the Money Honey. A recent mating call on a Yahoo! stock board is typical: "Maria is worth 140 a share, not AMZN."
Here Comes the Son
Ted Turner's father got into the billboard business just as highway construction boomed. Ted himself turned to cable TV a few years before the upstart medium flourished. Now, Ted's son R.E. Turner IV. aka Teddy. is hoping the family luck holds with the TV set-top box market. Chair of Jacksonville, Florida-based Compu-Dawn, Turner says the company's recent acquisition of Global PC will allow it to produce an Internet appliance for newbies. That would include his father, whom Turner says has never sent an email. "We're selling a device even my dad could use," he says.
Stock Image
It's a long way from directing Beavis and Butt-head to challenging the role of women in society, but animator Machi Tantillo says she's ready to stretch. The former director of MTV Animation is on board with Oxygen, the women's cable network launching in February and headed by former Nickelodeon exec Geraldine Laybourne. Tantillo will produce X-Chromosome, Oxygen's half-hour prime-time showcase of short animated segments written for, and mostly by, women. The topics, she says, will range from "accessible to humorous" and even "subversive" - her time spent with Beavis may come in handy there. Says Tantillo: "We want to help women release their energy to do great things."
Star Search
As the new head of NASA's Astrobiology Institute - charged with nothing less than unlocking the origin, evolution, and destiny of life in the universe - Baruch S. Blumberg has his work cut out for him. But Blumberg's credentials pack a big bang; the biochemist won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the hepatitis B virus, which led to the development of a vaccine. At the Astrobiology Institute, he'll investigate everything from simple microbes to the atmospheres of distant planets, looking for clues to the basis of life. "We don't know what we're going to find," says Blumberg. "That's the whole point. We could very well discover things we can't imagine now."
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