Too much talk of revolution
makes me hungry, and there
is little in the fridge that makes
one believe in a better world:
By forming OpenAI as a nonprofit, the founders–which included Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn–hoped to avoid what happens to nearly all venture-backed companies: the insatiable profit motive soon overwhelms any stated concerns for social good.
It’s easy to look out at the world and despair, to ask what point there is in donating to nonprofits, voting, protesting, calling your elected officials, writing Op-Eds. There is no shortage of anecdotes and pithy quotes to rebut that […]
“Children found ‘butchered’ in Israeli kibbutz…” – CNN
I dream a rocket’s aftermath smells of cracked pepper,
that it sprays not blood and shrapnel but mint leaves,
ice clinking in delicate hand-blown glass; that its
thunder is a hundred-thousand bumblebees come to
pollinate a black-and-white world, devoid of flowers…
Once, when I was getting my masters degree in environmental studies, I met with the then-director of the department to talk about potential career paths upon graduation. I told him that I was interested in figuring out how to enable […]
My freshman year of college at California State University, Northridge, I took a class called General Logic. I remember little of the class, in no small part because two weeks into the semester I fell off my bike at 40 MPH, sustaining […]
One could be forgiven for asking what poetry, with its self-indulgence, its insistence on image and metaphor, can do for the real world of blood and bruises, the harsh dirt with which we bury the newly dead. In his poem In […]
Unfortunately, many of us, especially activists and other change agents, understand far too little about what works and doesn’t, why some protests fizzle out and others lead to transformational change.
In an increasingly privatized world, it’s worth remembering that some of our most cherished and trusted institutions–NPR, PBS, the USPS, libraries, the Social Security Administration, credit unions–are nonprofit, not-for-profit, quasi-governmental, or governmental entities. And this is true even as trust […]
In 2008 I was a graduate student with almost no understanding of the financial system–I couldn’t even explain the difference between an interest rate and an APR!–working to launch what would become Capital Good Fund: a nonprofit lender. One day […]