Facebook's Zuckerbergs to give away estimated $45 billion - charities 'like'

If you hear baby Max Zuckerberg crying, she's got a good reason.

Her parents followed up her birth announcement with one that they were giving away 99 percent of their wealth.

And even after that, daddy Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan are still in the 1 percent. That's rich.

The news came out in a Facebook post by daddy Mark that Priscilla gave birth last week to Max, and that Mark and Priscilla also plan to donate most of their wealth, $45 billion, to a new organization to tackle a broad range of the world's ills.

Zuckerberg said that he and Chan will commit 99 percent of their Facebook stock (symbol: FB, $107.12 per share) to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to pursue their wide-ranging goals.

According to the Washington Post, Wisconsin's Mount Horeb Primary Center elementary school is canceling a reading of I Am Jazz, a book about transgender teen activist Jazz Jennings, following lawsuit threats from parents.

The school had scheduled the reading because one of its students was born male and now identifies as female.

"We refer to this as having a girl brain and a boy body," the school's principal said in a letter to parents. "Together we have come up with a plan to support this student in living as her authentic self."

Authentic self my gender-specific behind, said some Mount Horeb Elementary parents, who got the Liberty Counsel litigation group to write a letter that called the reading a violation of "parental rights."

Referring to Jennings as a "male child 'transgender' activist who has been permitted to undergo harmful gender reassignment drug therapy and hormone blockers," Liberty Counsel stated that the book would teach children about "a psychological and moral disorder" and cause them to "falsely believe that one can choose one's gender."

The American Psychiatric Association says that gender nonconformity is not a mental disorder.

What about being a closed-minded parent?

* Speaking of trans, the Washington Post is also on the case of Mya Taylor, a transgender streetwalker-turned-actress who plays a transgender streetwalker in the film "Tangerine," and is generating Oscar buzz.

Taylor also serves as a sex-worker dictionary.

"A ho is self-employed," she told the Post. "A whore sleeps around with different men. Then you have a slut, and then you have a tramp - a tramp, you know, somebody who's married, but she's sleeping around with different men. I was a ho. There's a difference between being a ho and a prostitute. A prostitute has a pimp."

* Former Smiths frontman and lyricist Morrissey won the annual award for the poorest-quality writing about sex yesterday at a gala ceremony in central London.

The prize was given for Morrissey's first novel, List of the Lost. The judges cited a scene between relay runner Ezra and his girlfriend, Eliza, in which the couple "rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation."

Morrissey is the 23rd winner of the prize awarded by the Literary Review magazine to spotlight "poorly written, perfunctory or redundant" passages of sexual description. Explicitly pornographic works aren't eligible.

Past winners include Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.

* Beginning in January, Jerry Seinfeld will once a month play the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan as part of a residency called "Jerry Seinfeld: The Homestand."

Seinfeld said in a statement that the 2,800-seat Beacon is a place that feels "alive" for him.

Tickets for Seinfeld's first shows go on sale online on Monday and at the Beacon box office on Tuesday.

* The musical "Waitress" hasn't yet opened on Broadway, but it's already made some history.

Lorin Latarro has been hired to choreograph the show, joining a female book writer (Jessie Nelson), composer (Sara Bareilles) and director (Diane Paulus). That's the first time in Broadway history that the four top creative spots in a show have been filled by four women.

"Waitress" will play the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, with previews beginning March 25.

* And so she goes.

Linda Ellerbee, a veteran newswoman who wrote an irreverent best-seller about her time on television and built a second career at Nickelodeon explaining tough stories to youngsters, says that she's signing off the air for good.

Ellerbee, 71, said yesterday that she's retiring from TV after Nickelodeon airs a one-hour retrospective of her work on Dec. 15.

"It's really nice to be one of the few who walks away from television news on their own time and of their own choice and I'm really lucky in that," she said. "That really didn't happen for so many of my contemporaries, didn't happen because of age or cutbacks in news. . . . I go smiling."

- Daily News wire services

contributed to this report.

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