Williams opened them. They were blank.

It has taken her 35 years to begin to understand and write about what this meant to her. “Honestly, I buried this story,” she says, the wind whistling through the phone; helicopters overhead in L.A. “I did not save or cherish those journals. I wrote in them unceremoniously. It wasn’t until I turned 54, the age she was when she died, that I realized how terrified I had been of my own blank mind.”

Williams comes from a long line of storytellers—her writing tends to unfold, layer by layer. “When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It’s an act of faith. I just follow my heart.” She talks in a prismatic way that I find perfect for the telephone—a back and forth of recognitions, observations, and phrases. Narrative is difficult by phone—plot cannot be interrupted, conversations are so often one-sided. But with Williams, talking fits the crackle and whistle, the distance of long-distance telephone talk. She never fails to listen for a response, to ask what the person on the other end of the line is thinking.

Williams searched for her mother’s voice in this book about voice. She realized how much mothers traditionally withhold their voices to let their children develop their own. My mother, she writes, was “largely quiet and graceful. A letter. A meal. A walk together. Her touch.”

That was the day that the secretary of State, with bipartisan support from Congress, announced that the U.S.’s tough sanctions on Burma were to be suspended. These varied and complex measures, many of which have been in force since 1990, cannot be eliminated at a stroke, but President Obama did the next best thing, suspending the enforcement of most of them. For the first time in more than 20 years, this impoverished but resource-rich land of more than 50 million people comes within the purview of American business. The opportunities could be staggering.

Justifying the new policy, Clinton said, “This is a moment for us to recognize that the progress which has occurred in the last year towards democratization and national reconciliation is irreversible.”

But earlier in the week, Suu Kyi told a conference in Washington by video link, “You have to remember the democratization process is not irreversible.”

On Thursday, sitting alongside Burmese Foreign Minister U Wunna Maung Lwin in the State Department’s Treaty Room, Clinton said, “Today we say to American business: invest in Burma, and do it responsibly.” She went on, “We are suspending sanctions. We believe that is the appropriate step for us to take today. We will be keeping the relevant laws on the books as an insurance policy, but our goal and our commitment is to move as rapidly as we can to expand business and investment opportunities.”

Her activism began as a Girl Scout and continued through high school, college, and her years as a grammar-school teacher in Stockton. Her Catholic upbringing also played a role in her commitment to social justice, she says. “If you saw someone that needed help, you had an obligation to help them and you didn't wait to be asked,” she says. “If you saw something that you could do to help somebody, you needed to do that.”

The grinding poverty and hunger she saw in her classroom also helped inspire her lifelong crusade. “I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than teaching their hungry children,” she says. First she established a community service program. When her fellow activist Chavez said, “We’ve got to start a union,” she thought he was teasing. “Then he got very serious,” she recalls. ”We were both passionate about farm workers. Seeing these people working so hard in the fields and seeing their children threadbare was so unjust, so very wrong.”

They started the National Farmworkers Association, which morphed into The United Farmworkers Union, the first in America. Chavez headed the all-volunteer group; Huerta became the political strategist and lobbyist, shuttling between Washington and Sacramento, shepherding through stunning amounts of legislation.

Her proudest accomplishments? Spanish-language ballots for voters, public assistance for immigrants, toilets in the fields, drinking water protection from pesticides, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which gave legal residency status to more than 1 million farm workers.

It took a few weeks for her blog post, which was written in Danish, to find an audience outside of Denmark—but once it did, late last week, the blogosphere went into action. Tweets flew. Suddenly Dell, a company that trumpets its diversification efforts, found itself on the wrong side of the females in the tech biz.

On Monday, the company apologized and also defended itself, saying in a statement, “Empowering women and their businesses is something close to our hearts at Dell and is the motivation behind our Women Powering Business initiative and Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network," an annual conference that brings female CEOs and leaders together.

The statement went on to note that, thanks to initiatives that are “designed to accelerate the increasingly powerful role women play in driving economic growth,” the company has won a number of accolades, including being named to the Times list of the Top 50 Employers for Women in the U.K. for the second year in a row.

Why the powers-that-be at Dell invited the Danish provocateur Christensen to speak at the event is anybody’s guess. Christensen, a comic of sorts, is known for his misogynistic comments. BoingBoing called him “a troll known for doing routines about how women don’t belong in the workplace.”

As an example, Mayer noted that while the Advanced Placement calculus exam is taken by 200,000 high-school seniors each year, the Advanced Placement computer-science exam is taken by a mere 14,000. Part of the problem, she said, is that people tend to think too narrowly about who computer scientists are, assuming that they are “pasty, with a pocket protector.” While she confessed that she herself can be rather pale, she insisted that pallor isn’t a requirement, nor is stereotypical tongue-tied geekiness.

“One of the more interesting things they’ve found is that programming aptitude and excellence is more tied to verbal SAT scores than to math SAT scores,” she explained. “Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.”

Clarity of expression is something Mayer prizes so dearly that she uses it as a litmus test when evaluating new ideas. Disruptive technology should solve big problems and have widespread applications, but it should also be easy to understand. “I think about my mom,” she told Brown. “She’s very smart. She’s a little intimidated by technology. So when a new idea comes up, I think, ‘How would I explain it to her?’”

Fittingly, Obama was accompanied onstage by Evan Wolfson, who received a Medal of Distinction for three decades of efforts to legalize gay marriage-an issue that Obama threw his support behind just last week. For Wolfson, it was, he told The Daily Beast after the ceremony, “the honor of a lifetime.”

“The opponents of gay peoples’ freedom to marry and participation in society in general are the same people who stand against women’s equality, women’s empowerment, women’s economic freedom,” Wolfson said. He contrasted the president’s reference to Stonewall and gay rights, which drew a huge surge of applause at Barnard, with reports that Mitt Romney’s commencement address at Virginia’s Liberty University on Sunday attacked same-sex marriage. “It’s not that marriage for gay people is the single most important thing in the country right now, but it does say something about the world view and values of where these two candidates want to take the country,” Wolfson said. “I think the more we end barriers based on gender, the easier it is to create a society that will treat everybody with respect, including gay people.”

The morning wasn’t all so earnest—Obama sprinkled his speech with plenty of moments of levity. When the president noted that he’d graduated from Columbia College in 1983, when students still used Walkmen and Moonwalked like Michael Jackson, a student in the crowd shouted for him to “Do it!” “No,” Obama laughed. “No moonwalking today.” Later, stressing the need for more women to enter male-dominated fields like computer science and engineering, Obama drew cheers when he delivered a message to the students from First Lady Michelle: "You can be stylish and powerful, too."

But the event was not without its share of controversy. Obama's appearance has created quite a scandal on the Morningside Heights campus, with Columbia College students expressing anger over the President's choice to speak at Barnard over his own alma mater. Tempers flared again in April, when it was announced that the School of General Studies' Class Day ceremony, also scheduled for Monday morning, was being moved to Sunday because of the heavy security measures surrounding Obama's visit to campus. Graduates of GS, the university's undergraduate school for adult education, complained that the university had waited too long to notify them of the change, and many family members couldn't adapt to the new graduation date.

I fought the urge to email her adoptive parents when I got the friend request. Instead, I placed a breathless call to my parents in California—“Someday just arrived!”—and shared the milestone announcement on my blog.

I devoured all 793 of her Facebook pictures, and a slow, digital dance began. She “liked” one of my photos. I “liked” one of hers. She posted a video on my Wall. I commented on her status update. We started exchanging 300-word messages in which I learned her likes (meat, makeup, flirting, tidy rooms), her dislikes (rules, televised sports, drugs), and talents (running, tanning, cooking).

We danced faster—toward our first real-life conversation on Dec. 7, 2011.

When she answered the phone, the sound of her voice raced past my eardrums, unlocking doors and attics deep inside me. Something from within expanded, contracted, and sprang open. Within seconds, our stories were tumbling over each other. I learned the names of her best friends and that she prefers life in North Carolina, where she lives now, to Idaho, where she was born. She shared details of her first kiss and asked how much weight I gained during pregnancy. I answered her questions about whether Italy is as beautiful as she’s heard and why in the world I became a vegetarian.

Since it takes big ideas sometimes to reach big goals, my fellow advocates and I at Every Mother Counts decided to do something different this year for Mother’s Day. Last week, we launched the “No Mothers Day” campaign. The big idea behind this was pretty simple. We know that using our voices is powerful, but silence can be powerful too. So that’s the idea behind No Mothers Day. To go silent—to not answer emails, to not answer calls or update social media.

We’re asking mothers to refrain from such communication for one day to remember the thousands of mothers who have been forever silenced unnecessarily due to complications with pregnancy or childbirth. The cornerstone of the campaign, launched last week, is a social-issue film directed by my husband, filmmaker Ed Burns, featuring moms encouraging moms to get involved by “disappearing” this Mother’s Day. The film drives you to our Facebook page, which offers a couple ways you can choose to join the No Mothers Day campaign, but it’s meant to be a personal thing—if none of our options works for you, find your own way to spread the word or honor your sisters in motherhood.

Clinton recalled key people her mother had remembered over the years—people who had helped in small but meaningful ways. There was a teacher who bought two cartons of milk each day, one for herself and one for Rodham, after noticing Rodham was unable to buy her own. Then there was a woman who handed over a shirt when Rodham desperately needed clothes.

With Mother’s Day approaching, Clinton said, she had been thinking of her mother, who died in November at 92, but who helped chisel her daughter’s world view.

“We are living in a world of virtual reality, but nothing substitutes for personal relationships. I learned this lesson from my mother,” she said.

The New York Women’s Foundation funds organizations that empower women to find jobs and to house and educate their families. Benefactors of the organization’s work spoke at the event as well, telling their own stories of triumph. One woman had given birth in prison with her wrists restrained, and benefited from child care and housing provided by aid group Our Children. A teen mom, meanwhile, landed a Fortune 500 company internship that became a job through the mentoring program Year Up.