The Editor's Desk.(Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg; ExxonMobil on global warming)

Byline: Jon Meacham

Stories from the world of technology about the latest man or machine that will forever alter the way we live now (such is the hyperbolic language journalists can fall back on when contemplating a newly minted Silicon Valley gazillionaire or a shiny gadget) are fairly familiar. Internet-driven fads come and go at, well, Internet speed, and businesses that seem indestructible one day can fall apart the next.

It is to Mark Zuckerberg's credit that he hates hype, and understands that building a sustainable business is the work of years, if not decades. At 23, he is the founder of Facebook.com, the social-networking site that is an online home to about 30 million Americans. If you do not know Facebook, then Steven Levy 's cover story this week will take you inside a vast network of "friends"; if you do know it, and know it well, you will find out how Zuckerberg is struggling to preserve the milieu you have come to love (by expanding the site's reach) without losing the coolness at its core.

NEWSWEEK often resembles a family of smart people who sharply disagree with one another. In this issue, Robert J. Samuelson (or "Sam," as he is known to his colleagues) takes exception to last week's cover story on global warming. To him, our story was an "object lesson of how viewing the world as 'good guys vs. bad guys' can lead to a vast oversimplification of a very messy story." He adds: "Global warming has clearly occurred; the hard question is what to do about it."

That is the question, but the point of the cover story stands, for the question of what to do about global warming is made more difficult when influential voices from talk radio to Capitol Hill speak as though global warming is, in Rush Limbaugh's term, a "hoax." (Sam says he does not question the scientific consensus that warming is a serious concern.) Whether we have the will or the technology to prevent the ill effects of ...