There’s a disaster in the world, so, sure as night follows day, the Red Cross fundraising machine has groaned back into action, helped by millions of well-meaning individuals on various social media platforms. The pictures of devastation are all over the TV, people want to Do Something, and all too often the first and last…
Unfucking the world
Month: August 2017
The Berkshire Museum’s operating deficits
The Berkshire Museum is still not getting back to me, sadly, but the museum did respond on Facebook to my last post about its financials: The IRS form 990 does not differentiate between operating and non-operating revenues and expense. Such details are key for anyone who is trying to analyze the Museum’s (or any cultural…
The Berkshire Museum’s financials
I just spent a lovely weekend in the Berkshires, which included (of course) a stop at the Berkshire Museum. My trip coincided with the publication of an open letter from the museum’s president, Buzz McGraw, where she says that while she understands the “shock, sadness and anger” which greeted her decision to sell of the…
Are rich people presumptively bad?
Matt Levine makes a very interesting point in his newsletter this morning: One deep theme of this column is that “greed” is overrated as a driver of bad behavior. People who want to make a lot of money are fine, as people go; it’s the people who want power that you should worry about. A…
Let’s add a charitable donation line on restaurant receipts
I'm at a hip restaurant & if the server were to say "one of our specials is we charge you $50 and donate it to @NAACP" I'd get it so fast — Helen Rosner (@hels) August 15, 2017 Most charitable donations are made by middle-class individuals, not by billionaires or charitable foundations. And as we…
Enough already with the charitable deduction
The US government is going to give $51.8 billion to charity this year. Not directly: it doesn’t have an army of technocrats deciding which charities get $1,000 and which get $100 million. Instead, it just has the charitable tax deduction. If you’re in the 39.6% tax bracket, itemize your taxes (as you probably do, if…
Unsolicited advice for the Berkshire Museum
The Berkshire Museum has now hired extra crisis-PR help. So here are a few ideas about what it should do next, on the messaging front. The tl;dr: try engaging your critics a little bit, and being much more honest about the realities you’re facing and the trade-offs you are making. I’d love it, of course,…