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# How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine, My excellent Conversation with Michael, Brain Food: How Steve Jobs Learned to
- URL: https://adjacent.media/weekend/2026-09-06-long-read/
- Published: 2026-09-06T11:04:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-06T11:04:31.000Z
- Description: This week: how Ms. Magazine proved feminism wasn’t a niche market, a career-spanning conversation with the venture capitalist who bet on Google and Yahoo, and what it actually took for Steve Jobs to become a leader worth following.
- Author: Jonathan Greene
- Tags: #long-read, #weekend

This week: how *Ms.* Magazine proved feminism wasn't a niche market, a career-spanning conversation with the venture capitalist who bet on Google and Yahoo, and what it actually took for Steve Jobs to become a leader worth following.

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#### [How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine Transformed the Publishing Industry](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/business/media/gloria-steinem-ms-magazine.html?ref=adjacent.media) (paywall)

A business history dressed as a cultural one — the story of how a group of feminist journalists in 1971 refused to accept the publishing industry's core assumption that women's magazines existed to sell diet plans and home décor alongside the ads. Steinem and her collaborators built *Ms.* as a magazine owned and run by women, funded by subscribers rather than advertisers who wanted editorial control, and the piece traces exactly how radical that structural choice was and what it cost them. There's no hagiography here; the article gets into the fights over money, the compromises with advertisers who did come aboard, and the slow, uneven work of proving a market existed that Madison Avenue had decided didn't. Anyone who thinks the media-independence debates of the last decade are new will find the blueprint here, fifty years early.

*NYT Business · 28 min*

> The feminist icon insisted that women were not a niche audience — and proved it in 1971 with the start of an influential publication owned by the women who ran it.

#### [My excellent Conversation with Michael Moritz](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/my-excellent-conversation-with-michael-moritz.html?ref=adjacent.media)

Michael Moritz has been on the inside of three distinct eras — journalist, biographer of Steve Jobs and Apple, and then the Sequoia partner who backed Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and LinkedIn — and this conversation with Tyler Cowen draws on all three. What makes it worth the full transcript rather than a highlight reel is how Moritz connects his instincts as a writer to his instincts as an investor: pattern recognition, the discipline of watching how founders actually behave under pressure rather than what they say in the pitch. There's a genuine argument here about why venture capital's golden era is unrepeatable, and Moritz doesn't flinch from naming the bets he got wrong alongside the ones that made Sequoia's reputation. It rewards patience in exactly the way a good long-form interview should.

*Marginal Revolution · 30 min*

#### [Brain Food: How Steve Jobs Learned to Lead](https://trendpickw.blogspot.com/2026/09/brain-food-how-steve-jobs-learned-to.html?ref=adjacent.media)

Farnam Street's essay resists the tidy mythology of Jobs-as-natural-genius and instead reconstructs the specific, humiliating failures — the ouster from Apple, the mismanaged early years of NeXT — that forced him to actually learn what leadership required. The piece is less interested in "vision" as a trait and more in the mechanics: how Jobs changed his relationship to feedback, to collaborators, to his own certainty, after being handed unambiguous proof that talent alone hadn't been enough. It sits well alongside the Moritz conversation, since both pieces argue that the people we remember as inevitable successes were, at the time, just people absorbing very expensive lessons.

*Farnam Street · 20 min*