For Thanksgiving, here are 23 things for which I’m grateful in 2023. Some are drawn from the world of philanthropy–so please read on if you are planning to make donations during the holiday season–while others are political or personal. In no particular order.

Philanthropy

Effective altruism: The brand has been tarnished, to say the least, by Sam Bankman-Fried. But the fundamental insights of the EA movement remain sound. These are people who are serious about finding the best ways to do good. If only they had more impact on the rest of philanthropy.

Give Well: Donating to GiveWell helps save lives. The organization does deep research into charities to find those that are most effective. All operate in poor countries, where the needs are greatest and your dollars go further.

Give Directly: A simple, beautiful idea: Give money to the world’s poorest people, and let them decide how to spend it. My favorite charity.

Giving Green: Which are the best nonprofits working to curb climate change? It’s a tough question to answer. The people at Giving Green have found organizations that have a big potential impact but are relatively neglected by donors.

Animal Charity Evaluators: Another meta-charity. This one recommends nonprofits, some quite small, that aim to reduce the suffering of farm animals.

Open Philanthropy: Guided by the principles of effective altruism, Open Philanthropy prioritizes causes based on three criteria: importance, neglectedness and tractability. I’ve found this framework incredibly helpful when I think where to donate, and also when I look for stories to cover as a reporter.

Arnold Ventures: Laura and John Arnold fund research and advocacy in such arenas as criminal justice, higher education and health care. Unlike many big foundations, they’re strictly non-partisan and evidence-based.

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies: Since 1986, Rick Doblin & Co. have been working to make psychedelics safely and legally available for beneficial uses. That world is coming, slowly but surely.

Martha’s Table: I like to give locally and have long been an admirer of (and volunteer for) this Washington DC-based charity, which gave cash transfers to poor residents during the Covid pandemic.

Standing Together: I’m just learning about these Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. They say: “People don’t need to choose whether they are #freepalestine or #standwithIsrael, they need to stand with innocent people on both sides who want to live in peace and safety.”

Politics and media

Joe Biden’s big climate bill: The future of the planet will be shaped by China, which now emits more greenhouse gases than the US and EU combined, but we Americans need to do our part.

Reason magazine: Smart, libertarian takes on the folly of governments everywhere.

The Ezra Klein Show: The podcast has done great work on Israel and Palestine since October 7.

Freddie deBoer: An iconoclast and, easily, the smartest Marxist I know. He writes beautifully, too.

Andrew Sullivan: He’s been right about so many things: gay marriage, torture, Obama, Trump and the excesses of identity politics. What’s more, he’s never dull.

Matthew Yglesias: Pragmatic takes on policy and politics, with a high nerd quotient.

Personal

Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation: My beloved religious community, which keeps me focused on the things that matter.

Montgomery County Road Runners Club: My running community for nearly 30 years. Yikes. We’re growing older together.

The psychedelics community: Open-minded, big-hearted people. My friend Charley Wininger says: “The best thing about the psychedelics community isn’t the psychedelics. It’s the community.”

My friends, and especially my gf: You know who you are.

My band of brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews and boyfriends: This year, 17 of us will gather for Thanksgiving dinner.

My daughters and their families: Sarah, Becca, Amy, Eric, Hudson, Sawyer, Max, Everly and Dori. My time with you brings me immense joy. I am so lucky to have you in my life.

This week, The Chronicle of Philanthropy published two long stories (here and here) about foundations, nonprofits and racial justice. Reporters Alex Daniels, Sono Motoyama and I talked to about 45 people, trying to better understand how foundations and nonprofits responded to the so-called racial reckoning set off by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.

To the degree that a consensus emerged, it was an unsurprising one: We were told by leaders of nonprofits that foundations have made progress, but not enough progress, when it comes to supporting the cause of racial justice. This is entirely predictable because advocates who focus on a specific issue –racial justice, climate change, human rights, disaster relief, failing schools, or homelessness–always say that funders should be doing more.

Another theme that emerged was a bit more surprising: Some of the richest and most influential liberal foundations, including Ford, MacArthur, Hewlett, Packard and Open Society, are increasingly giving up power as well as money. They are giving no-strings-attached, multi-year grants to Black-led organizations that engage in grass-roots organizing to build Black power. It has become conventional wisdom in lefty philanthropy that this is the way to improve the lives of Black Americans. Color me skeptical.

Finally, it became clear that, as with so much else in philanthropy, no one can be sure which strategies and programs to promote racial justice are working and which are not. The practice of evaluation itself is being challenged by insiders in the field, who argue that traditional notions like objectivity and rigor get in the way of racial equity. Color me even more skeptical.

Put simply, vast sums of money are flowing from rich foundations to grass-roots groups to accomplish vaguely-defined goals, with little accountability. The lack of knowledge about what works and what does not should matter more than it does.

The argument for giving unrestricted money to community groups is sometimes summed up by saying that the people closest to a problem are those closest to a solution. It’s almost become a cliche.

Marginalized people deserve to be heard, of course. “Nothing about us without us,” a phrase popularized by the disability-rights community, is an important principle. It means that no policy should be decided without the full participation of those who will be affected. That’s a matter of effectiveness as well as justice.

But trusting community groups alone to solve problems caused by centuries of racism in employment, housing and education makes no sense. Expertise matters. If my computer is on the fritz, I get tech help. When a pipe bursts, I call a plumber. If I were to get cancer, I’d see an oncologist.

Solving social problems, too, requires expertise. Does requiring body cameras curb police abuses? Do gun buybacks curb violence? What’s the effect of rent control on housing affordability? What’s the best way to teach kids to read? How does family structure affect upward mobility?

Scholars have studied such questions for decades. Grant-makers and community activists who want to improve the well-being of Black Americans should, at the very least, become familiar with their work.

Consider, for example, that capitalism, for all its problems, has helped lift billions of people out of poverty, making possible a world that is wealthier, healthier and better educated. The world’s happiest countries — Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, etc — all enjoy market economies, along with progressive taxes and a strong safety net.

Yet foundations run by smart people fund the Movement for Black Lives, which aside from its accountability issues, wants to abolish market economies along with the police and prisons. “We are anti-capitalist,” the movement says. So are Cuba and Venezuela; they’re not faring very well.

Liberal grant-makers are not anti-capitalist but they generously fund nonprofits that advocate for bigger government, higher taxes, a stronger safety net and more regulation. My June 2022 story for the Chronicle, Can Philanthropy Remake Capitalism?, reports on the work of the Ford, Hewlett and Omidyar foundations to develop alternatives to neoliberalism.

Fortunately, institutional philanthropy is not monolithic. Corporate and conservative grant-makers say that unfettered capitalism is not the problem but the solution to the racial wealth and income gaps. They want to make it easier for Black Americans to start businesses and own their own homes.

You can read the rest of this story on Medium

Here we are, with summer coming to a close, and I am more than a little surprised to find that I have devoted most of my working time during 2021 to a single topic--electronic cigarettes. I’ve never been a smoker or a vaper, and paid no attention to e-cigarettes until late last year, when I began reporting a story about Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The more I learned, the more I came to believe that the topic meets the three criteria that I try to apply when deciding what stories to report. (1) Is it important? (2) Is it being covered well by others, i.e., do I have something to contribute? (3) Can my coverage in some way, big or small, make a difference?

(Those of you familiar with Effective Altruism will recognize those criteria as the framework of importance, neglectedness and tractability used by EA-influenced organizations such as the Open Philanthropy Project when deciding where to allocate resources to solve a problem.)

Yesterday, I posted a story with the headline “Vaping can benefit public health.” That’s not my opinion. It’s the conclusion of 15 former presidents of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, who argue in a new paper that a growing body of evidence suggests that vaping, which is safer than smoking, can be an effective way of helping today’s smokers quit. “The potential lifesaving benefits of e-cigarettes for adult smokers deserve attention equal to the risks to youths,” these scientists write. “Millions of middle-aged and older smokers are at high risk of near-future disease and death.”

This is rebuke to, among others, government health authorities in the US and elsewhere, Bloomberg and Tobacco-Free Kids, all of which are pushing to restrict access to vapes. You can read my story here.

Stanton Glantz, one of the world’s best-known tobacco researchers, had everything going for him — a first-class brain, financial support, a tenured professorship and a passion for the task at hand. No scientist, it seemed, was more committed to reducing the death and disease caused by smoking

Glantz led the creation of archive of tobacco-industry documents at the University of California at San Francisco, where he was a professor of medicine. He famously called attention to the risks of second-hand smoke, which helped turn public opinion against smoking. He inspired many.

“He was a hero of mine,” says Michael Siegel, a physician and tobacco control expert who worked with Glantz at UCSF.

Glantz is no longer a hero, not to Siegel and not to other critics who fought alongside him in the battle against smoking. They say that Glantz’s hard-line opposition to all things tobacco has led him to exaggerate the dangers and downplay the benefits of e-cigarettes, which have helped millions of smokers quit.

His bad science has enabled bad policy, which makes it harder for people to switch from deadly combustible cigarettes to vapes, which are safer although by no means entirely safe. Misinformation about vaping promulgated by Glantz and his allies has sure kept many people smoking. That’s tragic.

Undark, a web magazine about science, has just published my 5,000-word story about Glantz. (It was republished today by Mother Jones.) Please read the story, which goes into great detail about Glantz’s work.

In 1976, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, a brilliant and eccentric chemist who concocted hundreds of psychoactive drugs in a home-based laboratory in the hills of Berkeley, California, cooked up a batch of MDMA, the drug that later became known as Ecstasy or Molly. He then tried some, as was his habit.

He loved it. “I feel absolutely clean inside, and there is nothing but pure euphoria,” he wrote in his lab notes afterwards. “I have never felt so great, or believed this to be possible. The cleanliness, clarity, and marvelous feeling of solid inner strength continued throughout the rest of the day and evening. I am overcome by the profundity of the experience.”

This is quite the endorsement, if only because Shulgin took a lot of drugs during his long life.

Thirty five years later, MDMA is having a moment. A clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, run by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPs, produced impressive results, moving the combination of MDMA and therapy closer to FDA approval. The first study of MDMA-assisted therapy for alcohol-use disorder, conducted by researchers at Imperial College in London and the University of Bristol, delivered encouraging, albeit very preliminary, findings. Researchers studying MDMA, as well as experienced users, say that the drug could be an effective way to treat other psychological ailments, while improving the health and happiness of so-called “healthy normals.”

You can read the rest of this story at Medium.

Little-known outside the world of psychedelics and drug policy, Rick Doblin is one of the most effective nonprofit leaders in America. Doblin is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, better known as MAPS, which for 35 years has been trying to develop psychedelic medicines and advocating for the responsible use of psychedelic drugs.

Doblin, in my view, is a brilliant strategist who has done more to change the narrative around psychedelics than anyone, with the possible exception of the writer Michael Pollan. He has built political alliances on the right and left, worked closely with medical researchers and, as best as I can tell, made few enemies along the way. MAPS is on the verge of a major breakthrough by securing FDA approval for the use of MDMA, along with talk therapy, as a prescription medicine to treat PTSD.

I tell the remarkable story of Doblin and MAPS at some length in the new issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The story is ordinarily paywalled but it is available for free until April 1. Here's a link.

Every October, Kingston, N.Y., a city of 23,000 people in the Hudson Valley, attracts throngs of visitors to the O + Festival, a weekend celebration of art, music and wellness.

The O + Festival — it’s pronounced O Positive — is no ordinary civic gathering. It is, improbably, an alternative to America’s profit-driven health care system: The artists and musicians who participate can barter their work for medical or dental care. Help paint a mural, get a cavity filled.

In a story about Kingston headlined The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism, The Guardian last fall called O + Festival an “anti-capitalist, anti-establishment healthcare network” and an “example of a model that could supplant corporate America.” The story explains:

Locals have launched a non-commercial radio station, Radio Kingston WKNY, with widely representative, hyper-local programming that broadcasts via power generators if the grid goes dark. A regional micro-currency called the Hudson Valley Current now exists to, according to co-founder David McCarthy, “create an ecosystem that includes everyone.”

What the story neglects to say is that all these organizations — the O + festival, the radio station, the farm hub, the local currency project and Rise Up — share a powerful patron: The NoVo Foundation, led by Peter Buffet, the youngest son of legendary investor Warren Buffett, and Peter’s wife Jennifer. In 2010, Peter and Jennifer Buffett bought a 19th century farmhouse for $1.2 million in Kingston, a historic city perched on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 100 miles north of Manhattan.

“What started as a weekend getaway,” Buffett says, “became a core piece of what we’re doing at the foundation.”

You can read the rest of this story on Medium.

Philanthropic dollars helped to create today's psychedelic renaissance by funding medical research into the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin and LSD. The research has generated a great deal of excitement.

Now, startup companies want to bring psychedelic medicines to market. That's the topic of a story that I posted today at Medium.

Here's how it begins:

Despite Covid-19, a crashing economy and formidable legal obstacles, a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors are betting that medicines derived from psychedelic drugs can become a real business and heal millions of people. They are joining the researchers, activists, philanthropists and journalists who until now have been driving what’s been called the psychedelic renaissance.

A dozen or more startup companies are developing medicines from psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine and LSD, all of which are illegal in the US, as well as from ketamine, a legal anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties. They hope to treat a surprisingly wide range of mental conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, addiction, even Alzheimer’s disease.

This is excellent news. Developing new drugs is an expensive proposition. Especially in today's tough environment for fundraising, nonprofits are likely to have a hard time bringing in enough donations to stage clinical trials, secure regulatory approval, manufacture and distribute the medicines, persuade doctors to use them and convince insurance companies to pay for them.

Investors, by contrast, may be willing to risk their money with the hope of eventually making a financial return.

You can read the full story here on Medium.

When writing about foundations and nonprofits, I try to keep something in mind: Surprisingly few social programs are effective. When subjected to rigorous evaluation, most fail to produce "meaningful progress in education, poverty reduction, crime prevention and other areas," as Arnold Ventures puts it. This is one reason why my favorite charity remains GiveDirectly, which sends money to those living in extreme poverty, mostly in Africa.

Cash, at the very least, makes people a little less poor.

Few foundations, though, have funded direct cash transfers--until now. So I was heartened to learn last week that some big, influential funders are supporting programs to give away money, with no strings attached, to Americans suffering from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I wrote about this for Medium. Here's how my story begins:

The well-educated folk who lead America’s big foundations have over the years devised no end of theories about how to do what they do. Strategic philanthropy. Collective impact. Venture philanthropy. Big bets. Participatory grantmaking. Trust-based philanthropy.

Now, in response to the economic devastation caused by COVID-19, they are trying something completely different: Giving money, with no strings attached, to those who need it.

Foundations that are supporting direct cash transfers include Blue Meridian Partners (a funding collaborative) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as the foundations of Charles Koch, Pierre Omidyar, Steve Ballmer and Sergey Brin.

You can read the rest of my story here.

This is a remarkable moment for psychedelics. Elite universities, including Johns Hopkins and Imperial College in London, have opened centers to research the medical benefits of such drugs as psilocybin, a hallucinogen found in mushrooms. The nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS) is recruiting people suffering from PTSD to participate in FDA-approved clinical trials using MDMA, better known as molly or ecstasy. CBS News’ 60 Minutes last fall reported on life-changing psychedelic journeys.

So far, the psychedelic renaissance has focused on the potential of these dugs to heal mental illness, and rightly so. A growing body of research suggests that they can alleviate suffering caused by a broad array of ailments: depression, addiction and anxiety, among others.

This story, though, is not about how psychedelics can heal the mind. It’s about how they can heal the world. There is sickness all around us. The threat of climate change. Unconscionable poverty amidst great wealth. Extreme political polarization. These are manifestations of deeper ills: People feel disconnected from one another and from nature.

Serious people — not just hippies, but neuroscientists with PhDs, and their philanthropic supporters — say psychedelics can help address these deeper problems. Drug trips, under controlled conditions, break down the barriers between people and bring users closer to nature.

“These medicines can help us wake up to new levels of caring and concern,” says David Bronner, a philanthropist and the CEO of Dr. Bronner’s, the family-owned maker of natural soaps. “It’s crucial to wake up to the miraculous world we’re part of and understand how we can serve and make it better for all of us.”

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You can read the rest of the story on Medium.