Postcards

NBC Sports boss's big win

"The N.F.L. is more of a guarantee of success than if you got Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie to do an hour drama series for the network. You can't guarantee that it will be a ratings success."

-- Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal (GE) Sports, today in a New York Times story about Sunday Night Football's stellar ratings--one of the few bright spots for the woe-begotten broadcast network.

While MORE

Women lead in this scientific field

"It's all the other fields that are aberrant."

-- American scientist Carol Greider, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, announced today. Her field of research, unlike practically any other, has as many high-achieving women as men. This anomalous corner of biology, telomere research, has to do with the degradation of chromosomes--potentially critical work in understanding human aging and diseases, including cancer. Greider, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins MORE

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg: Unedited

The uncut version of Yahoo (YAHOO) CEO Carol Bartz's first-person "Just Deal With It," which we published on Postcards last Monday, drew lots of traffic. So we're giving you an unedited version of another first-person piece that appeared in Fortune's Most Powerful Women issue (September 28). This one is by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. The most senior woman at Google (GOOG) before she joined Facebook, Sandberg is one of the MORE

Power Point: Progress comes in fits and starts

"Progress comes in fits and starts and we're going to need to grind out this recovery."

--President Obama, responding to today's dismal jobs report that showed much greater losses than expected. The reported net loss of 263,000 jobs for September was up from 201,000 in August, and the unemployment rate of 9.8% hit another 26-year high. "I've made the point that employment is often the last thing to come back after MORE

Starbucks Via: What's the secret?

Hey, Starbucks lovers--and critics too! Have you taken the Starbucks Via Taste Challenge? The drip vs. instant coffee faceoff began this morning in Starbucks (SBUX) stores across North America.

If you want to know the science (it involves micro-grinding) behind Starbucks' new instant, check out this story today by my Fortune tech-writer colleague Michael Copeland. He talked with Andrew Linnemann, Starbucks' director of green coffee quality and operations, whose mission MORE

Power Point: You can't trade money for years

"I would give up all the money I have if I could be 50. You can always make money."

--David Rubenstein, managing director of the Carlyle Group, in the New York Times. One of America's more low-key buyout kings, Rubenstein celebrated his 60th birthday last month, prompting him to reflect that "I could be like the pharaohs and say, 'Bury me with my money.' Or I could start giving it away." MORE

Top women stand up to cancer

Elizabeth Edwards, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina and other cancer survivors convened for a discussion called "Stand Up to Cancer" at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in mid-September. Hollywood producer Laura Ziskin was also on the panel. She's a co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, an entertainment-industry-led initiative that funds cancer research, requires scientists to work together, and is helping to accelerate  progress toward curing the disease MORE