Hasta La Gadget!

You’re a working mom and you’re in a book club. Time is precious. And while it’s super fun to get together with girlfriends and drink wine and eat snacks, and have opinions about books you may or may not have had time to read, there are only so many meetings in a row you can get away with not reading the book. (In my experience this is approximately 37 percent of the time, missing no more than two books in a row.)

When it’s your turn to select the book, take the opportunity choose one of these six ideal types of books for working moms to read in book club.

The Make-You-Better Book
Book club is recreation, but all the best working moms know how to multi-task. My book club read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project a few years ago and I guarantee we’ll be reading her new title, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives sooner than later. A great self-help book is a win-win for everyone mom in the room-working or not.

The Escape Book
All books take you somewhere, but some are better than others at immersing you in a world you’d never have the chance to experience. The 19th Wife, A Novel by David Ebershoff and The Other Bolyen Girl by Philippa Gregory are two of my favorites.

The Holy-Crap-How-Do-I-Get-It-All-Done? Book
Working moms are always juggling something, or spinning plates, or balancing on a tightrope. (Trust me, I’ve tried to come up with better metaphors, and when I do I guarantee there’s a book deal in it for me.) So when you’re wondering how others cope, check out Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte and Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood by Rebecca Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple.

The Depressing Thinker Book
What would you do in an impossible situation? Better to play our your choices in the page of a novel. Our book club really enjoyed The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman. We didn’t agree on how we would have handled the situation. And arguing over wine about the decisions of fictional characters is some of the most fun a girl can have.

The Empowerment Book
Sometimes you just have to take on the world. But if you’re a working mom, time’s tight. If you have a fantasy (as I do) of taking a extended nature sabbatical, walk a few miles in Cheryl Strayed’s hiking boots by reading Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. It doesn’t disappoint, but it does spark very good conversations. And don’t forget that other Sheryl- Sandberg. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is required reading for any working mother.

The Comedic Relief Book
I’ve written before about my favorite funny mom books for book clubs. New favorites are I Just Want to Pee Alone and You Have Lipstick on Your Teeth, anthologies by dozens of very funny ladies. But my very favorite new funny book that is the ideal book club read for working moms is, not surprisingly, Faking Balance: Adventures in Work and Life, which will be released in September!

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Zosia Mamet is best known as the neurotic, speed-talking Shoshanna Shapiro on HBO’s “Girls,” as well as for her roles in “Parenthood” and “Mad Men.” But the actress took some time away from the small screen to star alongside Jessica Biel in a new indie drama that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

“Bleeding Heart,” from writer-director Diane Bell, follows May (Biel), a centered yoga instructor who’s been searching for her biological sister. When May finally finds Shiva (Mamet), the two sisters have an immediate connection, despite the fact that they live drastically different lives: Shiva is a sex worker trapped in a violent relationship with boyfriend Cody (Joe Anderson) while May’s romantic life is peaceful and spiritual.

Mamet sat down with The Huffington Post during the festival to discuss playing Shiva, one of her most impressive dramatic roles to date, and filming a disturbing rape scene in the film.

Shiva is really different from any of the characters you’ve played. She’s surrounded by so much darkness. What was the challenge in that for you?
With a character, I always find the biggest challenge is to make them real and keep them grounded. I think the whole superficial qualities that exist in her, like the fact that she’s a prostitute and that she’s abused by her boyfriend, it could be very easy to make her essentially like a soap opera character, someone who’s hiding her sadness. But I thought the most exciting thing about her, and what Diane [Bell] really wrote and tried to bring out, was how dynamic she is. She’s actually a super smart and interesting lady. That was really what I wanted to portray the most.

How did you avoid playing into stereotypes with her?
A lot of it was in the writing, and a lot of it too was playing around with Jessie [Biel] and keeping Shiva quirky. We really found this kind of funny, quite childlike individual. I think all of those aspects combined really made her a little bit lighter.

Did you do any research to understand the life of a sex worker?
Not particularly. I feel like what was written on the surface was enough to play that. It’s very obvious that [Cody’s] very abusive. It’s obvious what [Shiva] does for a living. I felt like what was more important was making her a colorful creature. The fact that she was a sex worker was just sort of circumstantial.

Your character also has a pretty intense rape scene in the film.
Yeah. It was tense. That was a really late night. It was a complicated scene in terms of the shots Diane wanted, figuring out how to get Jessie’s POV right. It was sort of a tedious thing to begin with and we were in this tiny apartment with our entire crew, no air conditioning. Everyone is sweating balls. It was sort of thrown in last minute that [Cody] would try and rape [Shiva] with a gun. So it was intense. But the great thing about moments like that on the set was that everyone was just so professional and couldn’t have been more accommodating and gentle. But yeah, it was heavy. I think Diane really wanted something like that to show the stakes, to show why it’s pretty much life or death for May to get this girl out of there.

Did you do anything to get out of that headspace and relax when you were off set?
At that point, you’re so tired you just want to go home and sleep it off. But I think it’s important especially when you’re shooting nights and you feel distant from the regular world, you just have to try and shake it off. Like yoga and running really helped me.

Did you do yoga with Jessica Biel?
We did yoga a little bit when we were there together. But my best friend lives in L.A. [and] when we weren’t shooting, we’d go hiking or we’d see a stupid movie.

And you also work with Harry Hamlin in this movie.
It was pretty wild. He was only there for a day, and he played [his character] so well that I was totally freaked out by him. He was such a sweet human, but I was like, “You’re so creepy!” But he was great.

It’s funny too since his “Mad Men” character, Jim Cutler, arrived on [the show] right after yours left.
That’s so funny.

Where do you imagine Joyce [Ramsay] is now within the show?
God, I don’t know. I did a little interview for that recently, they were asking a bunch of guest stars. I was like, “I don’t know, I guess she’d probably join the Peace Corps or something.” With Joyce, you just never know. She’d probably be like, doing acid in a foreign country.

And “Girls” Season 4 left off with Shosh planning to move to Japan. What can we expect next season?
Yes. All I can say is more wild and crazy times will be had by all. I think it’s going to be fun.

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Comcast’s decision not to move forward with its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable “is a victory not only for the Justice Department, but also for providers of content and streaming services who work to bring innovative products to consumers across America and around the world,” said Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder in a written statement.

Clearly, the DOJ, FCC, FTC and others who lobbied hard to kill the deal did not trust a combined ComcastNBCUniversalTimeWarnerCable mega-ISP to provide everyone with appropriately balanced access to the Internet.

Wrong Century, Wrong Argument

If you ask politicians and antitrust lawyers about it (and I have), you will hear familiar strains from last century’s “demonification of big business” songbook. I fully understand why people do, and should, mistrust big centralized organizations with massive amounts of power. I fear them. Anyone with a brain should fear them. But the Internet currently relies on them. Which raises the question, “What are you actually afraid of, big or centralized?”

When you logon to Facebook, you are asking Facebook permission to access information about your friends. Facebook grants it to you because it can package information about you and your relationship to your friends and sell that information to advertisers. Facebook isn’t free; you pay with your data. Gmail isn’t free. Yahoo! isn’t free. There are absolutely no free services online – you pay for all of it with cash, data or a combination of both.

But much more importantly, the entire Internet is highly centralized. Data are routed through trusted servers on trusted networks. You trust Google with your Gmail. You trust Facebook with your friends. You trust Yahoo! Finance with your portfolio. You trust your online banker with your money. You trust your credit card and shopping data to Amazon. You trust Verizon when you access its network. To do business online today is to trust central entities with everything about you and your actions. This is about to change.

Bitcoin May Hold the Key to the Future

In his famous paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” inventor Satoshi Nakamoto describes his invention as follows: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” In order to accomplish this, Nakamoto uses a special type of software that creates a public transaction ledger called a “Blockchain.” This solution accomplishes its task without any trusted central authority.

These two component parts, the Bitcoin protocol which empowers transactions between two parties without third-party involvement and Blockchain which publicly records the transactions, have been complete enough to create Bitcoin digital currency – but if you add a few other features, such as an open scripting system, Smart Contracts, AES block ciphers and Open Spectrum, you have a completely new way to think about the Internet, trade, and transactions.

Blockchain Could Be the Foundation of a New Online Economy

Let’s imagine a world where you don’t need the public Internet to live a digital life. What might that look like? First, our smart devices would use open, unlicensed spectrum to communicate with each other. It would start with ephemeral ad hoc peer-to-peer networks that formed for particular purposes when certain devices were in close proximity. For example, a restaurant might distribute its menu to all of the smart devices in patrons’ hands and provide an easy way to order and pay.

The key difference would be that all of the smart phones in the restaurant would be talking to each other without using the public Internet or Comcast’s WiFi or Verizon’s 4G network. Next, an open scripting system would be used to create a purpose-built transaction protocol. Smart Contracts might be used to facilitate the transactions. You order, which tells the contract that you have met the first condition of the contract; the food is delivered inside a specific timeframe and you consume it; payment is then released with a predetermined tip added. To ensure security, the entire transaction is AES encrypted. Payment could be made with Bitcoin or, as you can imagine, any other type of online payment – including your current credit card number.

Importantly, none of this would require a central authority or the release of any personal information at all. Think of how different this type of transaction would be. Your data would belong to you, payments would be made as if you paid in cash, and there would be no record, no targeted advertising after the fact, no network, no central authority – a whole new world.

Big Cable Needed to Be Bigger – Could It Ever Have Been Big Enough?

Every credible source says that the Internet of Things (IoT) will bring us 30 to 50 billion connected devices by 2020. There is no way that all of them are going to be connected to the public Internet. Along with the evolution of IoT will come the evolution of a new paradigm for the Internet that may significantly disintermediate ISPs and Big Cable from our day-to-day lives.

You can read a great deal of science fiction about the impact that Smart Contracts may ultimately have on society, but it is based on truth. If you can do something in the physical world, you can use Blockchain technology to do it at the nexus of the physical and digital worlds or solely in the digital domain. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, creating an alternative to content distribution via trusted central authorities.

The Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal may have been killed because regulators didn’t believe that the resultant mega-ISP could be trusted as a central authority, but we are just a few years away from the emergence of a trustless society where digital citizens, like you and me, would have taken away that danger.

I’m the Managing Director of the Digital Media Group at Landmark|ShellyPalmer, a tech-focused investment banking and advisory firm specializing in M&A, financings, and strategic partnerships. You may also know me as Fox 5 New York’s on-air tech expert. Follow me @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com for more info.

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