In the wake of the FT’s bombshell report about the Presidents Club annual dinner, WPP’s Martin Sorrell has announced that he’s not going to attend any more. But he’s not happy about it:

In April 2014, the Gates Foundation, as part of its charitable activities, wrote a $51 million check to the government of Japan. And earlier this month, they wrote an even bigger check – for $76 million – to the same recipient.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, author of the definitive financial crisis tick-tock, should know what a firestorm is. But when he says that an anodyne letter from BlackRock’s Larry Fink “is likely to cause a firestorm in the corner offices of companies everywhere,” you have to wonder.

Met Museum president Daniel Weiss gave an interview to Hyperallergic explaining why he’s being forced to implement a compulsory admission fee for out-of-state visitors. Basically, he says, revenues haven’t increased with visitorship:

Every so often, a charitable donation comes along which is so atrocious, on so many levels, that it deserves to be aired out in public as a prime example of what not to do.

Donor-advised funds, or DAFs, are the duck-billed platypus of the philanthropic world: a very weird creature that shouldn’t, by rights, exist. When described, they make very little sense, and it’s easy to get angry about them as a result. But you shouldn’t. Because, weirdly, for all that they are bad things in theory,…

I had a fascinating conversation a couple of days ago with Charlie Bresler, the executive director of The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit which he started with Peter Singer, the godfather of effective altruism. The charity’s purpose is not really to evaluate charities; they mostly outsource that work to GiveWell and …

Ray Madoff’s NYT op-ed, entitled “Congress’s Assault on Charities,” has been garnering praise from luminaries like Ben Soskis and Rob Reich, but I don’t really understand why.

Charity comes from a deeply human place: When we see others in trouble, most of us want to help out if we can. It’s not helping which needs to be learned: all those explanations we give our kids as to why the homeless guy on the corner can’t come stay in our house, or the perverse financial reasons why, if you’re hit…

I’ve been clear for some months now that I consider the Berkshire Museum’s current deaccessioning plan to be a very, very bad idea. But is it illegal?

The fight against inequality is probably going to be the defining fight of the 21st Century. For all that equality is a noble goal, economies around the world seem to have a natural tendency to become more unequal, rather than more egalitarian. That’s why the Ford Foundation, among others, is focused entirely on…

File under “ask and you shall receive”: GiveDirectly is setting up shop in Houston!

All of the most valuable art has left the Berkshire Museum. It’s currently in the possession of Sotheby’s, and there’s a very good chance that none of it will ever return to the Berkshires, let alone the museum.

After Charles Kenny agreed with me that public-health aid should be run through governments rather than non-governmental organizations acting largely independently, I had a simple question for him. If I want to give money to a public-health charity, what’s the best way of making sure that my money is being spent in…

Puerto Rico, today, is in the worst crisis that America has seen in living memory. Millions of Americans on the island are struggling desperately with no electricity, few public services, and severe shortages of food, potable water, medicine, and shelter. It’s a humanitarian disaster, and it’s being woefully…

I spent Tuesday at a fascinating conference* in Silicon Valley, which came complete with roughly the level of inchoate enthusiasm about things like blockchain technology that you might expect. (Note to techno-utopians: No, bitcoin is not obviously helpful in Venezuela right now. Even if everybody in the country had a…

What would you say if I were to tell you that you could make the world a better place by spending an extra $1,500 a year at the grocery store? Perhaps you would say that, for all that you believed in the cause, you really didn’t have $1,500 to spend supporting it. Which is fair enough: That’s a substantial chunk of…