Welcome to the 54th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss – this week from Laura Petrolino, Howie Goldfarb (Blue Star Strategic Marketing), and yours truly.
For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t subscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.
This week, we look at what Saudi women are doing to fight back against the female driving ban, the painful, frustrating struggle for compassionate access to experimental drugs, and privacy.
Laura on No Woman, No Drive. I’ve been quite inspired by the amazing on-going struggle by Saudi women working to demolish the long held female driving ban in the country. The women leading the protest and the movement as a whole are quite extraordinary. Not just because of the magnitude and symbolism of what they are trying to do, but also because it truly shows the power that social media provides for social movements that might never have had a platform to speak from before. This video is fantastic in helping all of us in the rest of the world understand the situation a bit better, and in the process also make the Saudi culture a bit more familiar and touchable. Is this what a modern day social movement looks like? I think so and I think that is a very good thing. What do you think?
I am a big huge proponent of privacy. In terms of people having more control over the content they put out online for social media. While a big fan of Twitter, I know it is public and thus I am not the ‘real me’ on Twitter. In fact most people are not the ‘real’ them on social media. We give a candy coated version of ourselves unless we have an alias then all bets are off. (Check the #TCOT feed on Twitter and you will see). But it is the OTHER stuff off social that is the real us. Where we shop and bank. Our work and finances. And this article is amazing because it proves we all can be hacked. But I am also relieved that some pretty heavy security hackers had to go to such great lengths to hack the author. It wasn’t a few key strokes. And if you see the tactics used you can easily make it harder to get hacked. But even not being the real you on social, we still leave a lot of clues that a savvy person can use to flesh out a lot about you.
Lindsay on Experimental Drugs. No, not *those* kinds of drugs, silly. I’m talking the ones that actually cure you, or at the very least tack a few more glorious years onto your unexpectedly shortened life. Anyone who knows me, knows I’m a massive hypochondriac. Heck, when I came down with Bell’s Palsy, I was 100 percent confident I wasn’t actually stroking out because…I know how to check for a stroke! (Doesn’t everybody?) I’m not sure where my little illness quirks came from. I was a fairly unhealthy child, spending long stretches in hospital, and while my parents urged me to act just like all the other kids, and not let anything hold me back, well, I suppose it had an effect. Anyhow, my point is this. I would walk ten-thousand miles barefoot if I was diagnosed with a life threatening illness (cancer anyone?), and traditional medicine wasn’t helping me. Seriously. Yet currently, Before drugs in the United States can be prescribed by doctors and bought by patients, they must undergo three stages of rigorous clinical trials and approval by the Food and Drug Administration. This article is painful to read, desperate people will to do anything to get compassionate, quick access to drugs not yet cleared by the FDA. And yes, sometimes taking these experimental drugs is a mistake. But surely there’s a better way to get things moving, and provide a glimmer of hope to people willing to take the risks involved.
Now it’s your turn. Is there a book, podcast, article, TV show, blog post, or story we should read?