I love the formula which Jeff Bezos uses to define where he’d like to focus his philanthropic efforts: “at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact”. His note arrives as Robert Frank, in the NYT, asks some pointed questions about Bezos’s philanthropy, and the fact that Bezos is by far the richest American…
Charles Duhigg has a piece today which asks why you don’t donate to Syrian refugees, while you do donate to Charity: Water. The headline: “Why Don’t You Donate for Syrian Refugees? Blame Bad Marketing”.
This pair of sentences from the Chronicle of Philanthropy neatly encapsulates everything that’s wrong in the world of foundations and endowments:
In the wake of today’s concert, the amount of money in the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund has risen to more than £10 million, nearly all of which will be used “to support those who have been injured or bereaved” in last month’s bombing at an Ariana Grande gig.
Today in rich people giving their rich-people friends millions of dollars to do rich-people things: New York’s Number One Rich Person, Mike Bloomberg.
I’m perennially fascinated by the way in which different people read the same news story. After reading Eric Newcomer’s Bloomberg piece on Uber pricing, Marshall Steinbaum wrote a short tweetstorm about what it implies for Uber’s incentives, which I suspect is exactly wrong.
The good folks at NewsBusters are very upset that immigration activist José Antonio Vargas and I favor enfranchising non-citizens, at least in local elections. Our position, they say, is not only “outrageous”; it also constitutes “deliberate subversion of the U.S. electoral system.”
Everybody’s writing about this idea that Spotify might go public not through a traditional IPO, but rather through a direct listing. Direct listings are rare beasts, and so in order to understand them, reporters phone up bankers who work in equity capital markets. But the problem is that bankers who work in equity…
“Silicon Valley is sexist” is a depressingly common and uncontroversial statement. “Silicon Valley is innumerate,” on the other hand, seems to be pretty false. Except, it turns out, when innumeracy conveniently supports entrenched sexism.
It’s taken nearly 100 days, but Donald Trump has finally found a tax proposal he can get behind. And as befits his desire to reinvigorate America’s working classes, he’s aiming straight at, um, the amount of income tax paid by law-firm partners and real-estate moguls.
If you’ve ever thought positively about concepts like walkability, density, and street life, then you owe Jane Jacobs a debt of gratitude. The urbanist and activist didn’t just change the way that a whole generation of city-dwellers think about how they live; she also changed facts on the ground: Were it not for her,…
At the beginning of this year, a for-profit company, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, ran a podcast ad campaign. The company wanted its listeners to try its product, and gave them an incentive to try it out: Use a certain hashtag, that would enter them into a contest where one winner would…
The Ford Foundation made headlines this week with a grand announcement: It was going to “unleash the power” of its awesome $12 billion endowment, using a large chunk of the 95% of its assets that it doesn’t spend each year to invest in social transformation.
JPMorgan Chase just released its annual report, showing 2016 profits of $24.7 billion (that’s almost half a billion dollars per week), on total assets of $2.5 trillion–a number so large it’s almost impossible for the human mind to conceive.
Ryan Sutton loves Cosme, a high-end Mexican restaurant in Manhattan, but he doesn’t love its prices, which are not only high but also rising at a rapid pace. “The prices Cosme charges, while always high, have become somewhat startling in their upward trajectory,” he complains, saying that “I can’t think of a single a…
Just what is it that makes today’s president so different, so appealing? (To his supporters, anyway.) Donald Trump might be our first reality-star chief executive, but if you really want to experience the national id he has tapped into, you’d be better off watching Hollywood blockbusters. It’s time to go to the movies.
You get a job in the White House, which means you're going to be a powerful and influential individual. Lots of deep-pocketed individuals are going to want to curry favor with you, but it's hard for them to do that in a way that withstands government ethics rules.
Jason Chaffetz, the Congressman who was memorably described by Stephen Colbert as a "seductive beaver," is rightly receiving a lot of grief for his suggestion that people might be able to afford health insurance if they just demonstrated a bit more personal responsibility when it comes to other expenditures, like, um,…
Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders, edited by the great Carol Loomis, is a yearly masterclass in how to think clearly. It’s also highly educational : It has certainly informed my own thinking on many subjects, and nearly all of the time I end up agreeing with Buffett.
How did Moonlight win the Best Picture Oscar, when La La Land was not only the strong favorite going in to the evening, but also picked up Best Director? The answer has nothing to do with misadventures surrounding envelopes, and everything to do with the arcane subject of voting systems.
