Philanthropy Unmasked

Dr. Jonas Karasu, a Manhattan psychiatrist, in an interview for the New York Times, noted that a wealthy client's inability to accept his own limitations is not without beneficial side effects. "I see this in the way my patients are consumed by the idea of their deaths, or their attempts to counteract death," he said. "All of the philanthropy you see - the buildings named after people for giving $50 million to this museum or to Columbia - is a result of one man after another trying to conquer his mortality."

How Foundations Work

I was reading an article on Andy Warhol in The New York Review of Books. The following caught my attention: "Lawyers paid for by Warhol's own foundation happily arrived in court to denigirate Warhol's work, even claiming at one point that investing in Warhol could be "risky," to lower the value of the estate. Why? Since the foundation was requried by law to give away 5 percent of the estate's value, it wanted that value to be as small as possible, thus reducing the amount it had to contribute to charity."
NYR 2-25-2010, pg. 41