Back in May, Kriston Capps ripped into the Little Free Libraries movement, with some decent arguments on his side. Little Free Libraries are tiny huts where people can leave books, or take them, with no money changing hands. They’re intended, Capps says, to be a “heart-warming civic-minded gesture,” but he makes the case that they’re…
Unfucking the world
Month: July 2017
Saving forests saves lives
Wanna read a new scientific paper about deforestation? Two brand new ones came out on Thursday. Read this one first, from Science, if only because it’s only going to be freely available online for two weeks. It’s a fascinating study which shows that if you pay Ugandan forest owners just to keep their forests in…
The downside of giving money to public-health charities
My Twitter followers are a very smart bunch, in general, and so I expected the wisdom of crowds to win out when I put this question to them on Monday. QUIZ: Between 2004 and 2010, life expectancy in Afghanistan: — Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) July 17, 2017 Boy I was wrong. The true answer, as detailed…
Betraying Norman Rockwell
When museums sell off their treasures, one jargon word is unavoidable: “deaccession”. The thing to look out for is how many other jargon words there are. As ever, more = worse. Enter the Berkshire Museum, explaining why it’s selling off the single most valuable piece in its collection, Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop. The piece has…
People of color aren’t managing foundations’ money. They should be.
Never let it be said that nothing substantive ever comes out of expense-account boondoggles like the Black Corporate Directors Conference. Every so often, a well-placed question can result in positive changes worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Such was the case in 2010, when a conference delegate asked Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen about how…
Rich people giving to rich people: The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly
Rich people often target their philanthropic donations in the direction of other rich people. Warren Buffett gives billions to Bill Gates; Reid Hoffman gives millions to Mark Zuckerberg. When it’s done well (and Buffett has done it well), this can be an extremely effective exercise in allocative efficiency. Giving away very large sums of money…
The Met museum and the curse of growth
Recently-defenestrated Met director Thomas Campbell has given a fascinating interview to The Art Newspaper, where he talks a bit about the art-architecture nexus: We can’t go out into the marketplace to buy works of art that are $50m, $60m or $70m apiece. What we can do, and what the Met has always done, is build…
How art begets architecture, Leonard Lauder edition
Back in 2013, when Leonard Lauder announced the gift of his world-class cubism collection to the Met, the New York Times was clear that this was about as clean and pure as such things ever get. For one thing, Lauder was quoted saying that “this wasn’t a bidding war. I went knocking, and the door…