Grantmakers in the Arts
An interesting post from Venkatesh Rao on his blog Ribbonfarm.com explores the 400+ year history of the corporation. And he declares the “age of the corporation is coming to an end” at the outset. His mental model of the human world is visualized here. Of it he says:
From the Associated Press, as reported on NPR:
The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that 275,000 organizations have lost their tax-exempt status because they failed to file required annual reports for three straight years.
The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has published a new video that promotes and describes the MacArthur Fellows Program (commonly referred to as genius grants). Take a look at this program and hear from some recipients.
Rick Wartzman's latest post for Bloomberg Businessweek, here, is a summary of recent writing on funding nonprofit overhead synthesized with his own outlook on the "charitable challenge." Provocative and opinionated, it is worth a read.
NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman continued his Art Works tour of the US with a visit to the central valley of California. Apparently it's the first ever such visit by an NEA chair. Rocco's host on the visit was Amy Kitchener, who runs the Alliance for California Traditional Arts, while he met with organizations and artists from Fresno, Merced and Modesto.
A pair of Harvard mathematicians have leveraged the power of Google's massive effort to digitize the world's published text to begin a quantitative analysis of culture, a study they've termed Culturomics. In this video, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel—co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google—show how Culturomics can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.