He's an Internet executive, I tell her. He started Facebook. It's the second week of the United Nations' General Assembly. Several hundred reporters crowd into the press holding area. Nearby, on the main plaza, heads of state stroll by. In this place, it seems, Mark Zuckerberg might as well be Mark Smith.¶ She checks her dog-eared schedule, then makes a call, enunciating into the receiver: "ZOO-ker-burg. Mark ZOO-ker-burg." Silence. "Yes, the Facebook guy." More silence, during which it occurs to me the UN is like the opposite of Facebook. If it had motivational posters on the wall, they'd read: Move slow and break nothing. Finally, she hangs up and turns back to me. Zuckerberg is on the program after all, she concedes, speaking just before German chancellor Angela Merkel.

A short time later I slip into the back of a two-story amphitheater where Zuckerberg, dressed in a dark suit and a tie, has come to make the case that the Internet should be considered, like health care or clean water, a basic human right.