Our Billionaire Philanthropists
Bill Gates and George Soros are handing out billions, but there are downsides to foundation giving:
“The new focus on metrics has brought with it a new breed of nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. Foundations such as the Omidyar Network, established in 2004 by eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, provide both investments in for-profit companies and charitable grants.
“This approach is called by various names such as ‘social entrepreneurship,’ ‘venture philanthropy,’ and ‘philanthrocapitalism,’ but it all amounts to rather the same thing: controlling charitable giving in order to produce measurable, ‘sustaining’ and/or profitable results.
“‘Philanthrocapitalism’ is an especially curious coinage, giving rise to a hitherto unarticulated contrast—namely, with the kind of capitalism that is not-philanthro-. “
What to Do?
[Fiction] A man’s romance with a psychic:
“The psychic from the Third Base suckered drunk-me into getting a reading: twenty buckaroos. She had a table set up and was circling the bar in her hoop earrings and a fake mole that was supposed to be gypsy somehow, looking for customers. Real gypsies have a hair coming out of that mole, but hers was bald. Real gypsies don’t have breast implants either, but she had those too.
“I told her, ‘Say something about me first so that I know this is for real. That’s a lot of money. Look into the shithead future real fast.’ That’s how high my expectations were.
“‘You like to drink,’ she said. ‘You can’t dance. You’re looking for women.’
“‘That’s not psychic,’ I said. ‘This is a loser bar.'”
The Last Tower: The Decline and Fall of Public Housing
The demolition of the Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago was supposed to open up new opportunities for low-income families. But the community has disappeared:
“The fifteen-story high-rise was known by its address, 1230 N. Burling. Already stripped of every window, door, appliance, and cabinet, the monolith was like a giant dresser without drawers. The teeth tore off another hunk of the exterior, revealing the words I NEED MONEY painted in green and gold across an inside wall. Chicago was once home to the second-largest stock of public housing in the nation, with nearly 43,000 units and a population in the hundreds of thousands. Since the mid-1990s, though, the city has torn down eighty-two public-housing high-rises citywide, including Cabrini’s twenty-four towers. In 2000, the city named the ongoing purge the Plan for Transformation, a $1.5 billion, ten-year venture that would leave the city with just 15,000 new or renovated public-housing family units, plus an additional 10,000 for senior citizens. Like many other U.S. cities, Chicago wanted to shift from managing public housing to become instead what the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) called ‘a facilitator of housing opportunities.'”
The Bottom
Musician Jim White on Knoxville, and how Cormac McCarthy saved his life:
“In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take on the mechanics of serendipity) it’s sheer coincidence that it ended up in my suitcase as I packed for this tour. Likewise I’m no great bibliophile, certainly not one of those types who might find it exhilarating to locate and use, say, the exact toilet that Jack Kerouac took a shit in while writing On the Road. That said, I’m happy it ended up with me here in Knoxville, as the city itself is practically a character in the novel. Gay and Central Streets, where Walter’s barbershop is, are mentioned frequently, so it’s interesting to be in the physical locale where the action takes place. I’m about halfway through Suttree this time around. I’ve read it front to back many times, usually when events in my life have gone spiraling out of control and that black cloud of depression that’s dogged me off and on for much of my adult years descends.”
The Dream Will Never Die: An Oral History of the Dream Team
Twenty years later, how Michael, Magic and the NBA’s best players sought to regain U.S. dominance in Olympic basketball:
Nathaniel Butler (official NBA photographer): We were sitting on the baseline. Magic is backing a guy down, and the guy on defense is yelling at his bench, “Now! Now!” And on the bench, one guy’s pulling a camera out of his sock and taking a photo of his teammate.
Hubbard: One time they were playing against Venezuela, and the guy who was guarding Magic kept on saying, “I need your shoes! I need your shoes!”During the game. And Magic goes, “Look, I need my shoes!”
Gambling Through The Recession: A True Story Of Horses, Dreams & Sleeper Sofas
An author meets a full-time gambler at the racetracks, who later ends up becoming his roommate:
“The Scholar, the Human Computer, and I were interested in a horse named Keys to Astro. According to The Scholar’s speed figures, Keys to Astro was two or three lengths faster than the rest of the field. A horse that talented is likely to set off a bidding war. Keys to Astro opened at 6-5. The Scholar had an investment rule, which I’d learned to follow as well: Never bet a horse at less that 2-1. The risk isn’t worth the reward. It’s easy to follow when you go to the track every day, as The Scholar and I were doing. You can always wait for tomorrow’s 2-1 horse. But The Human Computer’s work interfered with his gambling; he couldn’t get to the track more than once a week.
“When the track announcer intoned, ‘You have five minutes to wager,’ Keys to Astro was still 6-5. The Human Computer folded his arms.
“‘I refuse,’ he shouted at the speakers.”
Whitey Bulger’s Women
Life as a mob boss’s girlfriend:
“By the early 1990s, Stanley began to crack under the years of control and psychological domination. She and Bulger were arguing constantly, sometimes violently, at home and in public. Once, at a wedding party, Teresa was approached by Bulger’s partner, Flemmi, who said, ‘Teresa, I know you and Jimmy are going through a rough patch, but there’s something you need to understand. That man will never let you go.’
“Stanley felt trapped. She went into a deep depression. She had become financially and emotionally dependent on Bulger; she could see no way out. Then, the ‘other woman’ entered the picture.
“Stanley was home alone one night when she got a call. An unfamiliar female voice said, ‘I think we need to talk.'”
Here We Are Becoming Champs
On boxer Manny Pacquiao and gay marriage:
“It’s here at this church that Manny Pacquiao comes to pray after his fights. He kneels down and gives thanks. In that same way we knelt with a rosary all day when my kuya died of AIDS. All day for seven days, with lots of food, and lots of prayers, on your knees everyday. It’s what we do when someone dies. I heard that a woman had a pin in one of her knees and couldn’t kneel and I pictured a sewing needle stuck there and I silently wished to get pricked by that same needle— because I couldn’t see how what I was doing there in that church was helping any of us out there on the dirt—in the land, on the fields with the farmers, and the trash heaps, and the kids with the little blue-brown faces left by the chapel, or the boys, with their bloodied underpants and soiled shorts, and all the musk from all the work, and the distant gaze from all the glue. How was this rosary tending to this life?”
The Ax Murderer Who Got Away
On June 10, 1912, a family was brutally murdered in a small Iowa town. The murders remain unsolved:
“The Moores were not discovered until several hours later, when a neighbor, worried by the absence of any sign of life in the normally boisterous household, telephoned Joe’s brother, Ross, and asked him to investigate. Ross found a key on his chain that opened the front door, but barely entered the house before he came rushing out again, calling for Villisca’s marshal, Hank Horton. That set in train a sequence of events that destroyed what little hope there may have been of gathering useful evidence from the crime scene. Horton brought along Drs. J. Clark Cooper and Edgar Hough and Wesley Ewing, the minister of the Moore’s Presbyterian congregation. They were followed by the county coroner, L.A. Linquist, a third doctor, F.S. Williams (who became the first to examine the bodies and estimate a time of death). When a shaken Dr Williams emerged, he cautioned members of the growing crowd outside: ‘Don’t go in there, boys; you’ll regret it until the last day of your life.’ Many ignored the advice; as many as 100 curious neighbors and townspeople tramped as they pleased through the house, scattering fingerprints, and in one case even removing fragments of Joe Moore’s skull as a macabre keepsake.”
The World Without You
[Fiction] A couple returns home from Israel:
“It’s six-thirty now and the boys are back in bed; it’s early afternoon Israel time. For the moment, Noelle feels as if she’s in a bubble, lying awake next to Amram while the children are asleep. She presses her ear to the wall to see if her sisters are awake; it’s been a fitful night for them too.
“She rolls over onto her stomach and back again. She wonders what she looks like from up on the ceiling, lying sleepless in her childhood bed. This is where she spent summer after summer. And Christmas vacation and spring break. Amram, who has risen, is in a T-shirt and cutoff jeans, his thighs thick as ham hocks, his prayer fringes sticking out from under his shirt, twisted as always around his belt loops. His yarmulke, blown by the breeze coming through the open window, flips over itself so that it’s barely hanging from a few tendrils of hair; it droops to the side like a single earmuff.”
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