Salon.com > Loren Fox http://www.salon.com Sun, 19 May 2013 01:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Meg Whitman http://www.salon.com/2001/11/27/whitman_4/ http://www.salon.com/2001/11/27/whitman_4/#comments Tue, 27 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2001/11/27/whitman When Meg Whitman took over as chief executive of eBay some three years ago, she set about her work with her usual mixture of know-how and curiosity. She knew she had to build the eBay brand. But she also listened to the auction site's founders and conferred closely with them. Her style -- collaborative yet decisive, serious but loose -- set the tone for the company.

Sure, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was Time magazine's man of the year, and Tim Koogle was the new-media savant who made Yahoo the top Web portal, but Whitman was the old-fashioned, low-key manager. And the tortoise has beaten the hares. Yahoo has slipped from profitable to unprofitable, and Wall Street wonders if the never-profitable Amazon.com will survive. But eBay is doing fine; Wall Street complains that its stock is too expensive, but the company is worth more than four times as much as Kmart, and Whitman is leading it into its sixth very profitable year in a row.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/11/27/whitman_4/feed/ 0 A conversation with Witold Rybczynski http://www.salon.com/2000/10/12/rybczynski/ http://www.salon.com/2000/10/12/rybczynski/#comments Thu, 12 Oct 2000 19:39:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/conv/2000/10/12/rybczynski Working with your hands is fast becoming a lost art, unless you count the clickety-clack choreography of mouse and keyboard. Among those who understand this is Witold Rybczynski, the author, essayist and expert in architecture, design and urbanism. As recently as the 18th century, he's observed, aristocrats with time on their hands relaxed by working with lathes -- cutting and shaping machines that rotated the piece to be shaped. Nowadays, of course, we have hot tubs and video games.

Rybczynski, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has varied yet inherently related interests that have encompassed books on building a house by hand, the design of cities, the urge to control new technology and "Home," his exposition on the notion of home. His best-known book is 1999's "A Clearing in the Distance," an acclaimed biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, the pioneering landscape architect who created Central Park. Running through all of Rybczynski's books is the nearly alchemical meeting of idea and tangible form.

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