Peter Samuelson

Every recession feels like the end of the world to those hurt by it. Sometimes the best thing a struggling society can do is to remember how it was able to get through a worse crisis. I came across this long-forgotten email (Thank you, Google Desktop!) In September 2001, I...

On a day of tragedy and shared grief, when so many young adults remembered the parent they lost ten years ago and moved us to tears when they said so at Ground Zero, there was one bright, startling ray of hope that emerged from our communal sadness: faced with an...

I spend a lot of time persuading people that selflessness can be selfish. Arguing self-interest in philanthropy may seem like an oxymoron, but in fact it is often the difference between success and failure in fundraising for those of us building non-profit organizations. From my two decades of experience, not...

I constantly bang away trying to persuade people that philanthropists can force new solutions to major challenges in our lives, in our children's lives, and in the direction of our society as a whole. I take great pleasure in discussing philanthropic plans over breakfast with a wide spectrum of business...

What is the meaning of wealth? This is a question I have wrestled with intermittently for the last twenty-five years. At a certain point, if one is lucky, hard work creates what one needs to live comfortably. Continuous observation suggests that leaving vast sums of money to one's kids is...

There's a whole lot of shooting driving this revolution, but not with bullets.

There was a time, and it feels like last week, that the way Joe Public tried to influence the course of anything he cared about in the world around him was to...

It was an interesting day for moral truth. Rare it is that two such glaring and opposite examples occur so close together. An email circulated widely on Wall Street that is breathtaking because not only did the writer clearly think he or she (probably he. I'd be surprised if someone...

I had to do something about the lady living in a refrigerator box near where I sleep in a house with a refrigerator: I got the Sub-Zero. She got the box. The situation seemed to deny the value of my civilization. It bothered me...

The picture above is from today's Obama rally in St. Louis. The eye is first drawn to the sheer number of people. Impressive. But that's not the greatest point to grasp.

If you look in the distance, you can clearly see a...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAHpyFjGdWA&feature=email

Shot over the weekend on a budget of four pizzas by a crew of very, very concerned Americans.

Please forward widely. All copyright is hereby waived.

As we're getting very very close to the wire, I'm writing to remind to register to vote right away if you haven't already, and to further implore you to send this as an e-mail to anyone you know in a swing state,
(as in: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Maine,...

A Message adapted and updated from Mr. John Cleese:

To the Citizens of the United States of America:

In light of the strong possibility you are about to elect an elderly gentleman with a bad temper and a lady who thinks she can run foreign policy because she can see...

It seems perverse to me that anyone at all would want to appoint a clearly inexperienced person one heartbeat away from a 72-year-old President and for at least four years. Can someone explain to me why anyone at all would be so undemanding of their leaders? We may not understand...

The nightmare is that we are trying to elect the leader for the Free World in a nation where two generations of truly lousy K through 12 public education have squandered our youths' potential and delivered a significant part of the electorate that is uncurious, undemanding, has never been anywhere,...

Please support my wife's Campaign for President. Here is why:

Like many of you, I am shocked by McCain's choice for his vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. When she was announced, all I could think about was how ridiculous this choice was. Aside from being kind of cute, I'm not sure...

Two hundred and seventy-eight years ago, the British satirist Jonathan Swift shocked everyone with a modest proposal: In the midst of a famine, Ireland could escape the burden of poor children by .... well, eating them. The author of Gulliver's Travels pointed out that society was unwilling to actually feed...