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      Donate This Holiday Season: Charities That Need Your Help

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      Sebastian KönigThis article also appears in the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning and on Saturdays.I’m excited to announce the return of Times Opinion’s annual giving guide. Over the course of the next two weeks you will find recommendations from our columnists and writers for nonprofits that deserve your attention as 2024 comes to a close. Each year that we have undertaken the guide, I’ve been impressed with our readers’ generosity, and I hope you will consider donating again this holiday season.Today, the columnist Nicholas Kristof kicks things off, suggesting several organizations around the globe that positively affect change. “If you’re feeling dispirited by national or global events,” he writes, “remember the adage that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Nick has been Opinion’s guiding light when it comes to raising money for worthy causes, and this year his list offers many good options.One of my favorite parts of this tradition is offering you some of my own suggestions: I’d be remiss not to start with The New York Times Communities Fund. The campaign, started by the paper more than a century ago, this year supports nine organizations focused on feeding families, offering educational opportunities and much more. You will hear more about their work from me and our editorial board over the next several weeks, but please consider giving to the Communities Fund.I’ve spent the weeks since the election thinking a lot about the future of education in the United States, as the president-elect and his allies have pledged to rethink the federal Department of Education and its mission. One model that I’ve been impressed with is the Cristo Rey Network. Its Catholic high schools across the country give students a curriculum that helps prepare them for college while also placing them at professional jobs once a week during the school year. Students, on average, come from families of four making $38,000 a year or less.What impresses me is that Cristo Rey’s approach offers students multiple pathways coming out of high school, giving them true choice combined with hands-on work experience. I’m most familiar with and have supported the Cristo Rey campus in Milwaukee, which has proved transformational to its community, but you’ll likely find one of the network’s 40 schools nearby if you are interested in supporting its efforts.There are few things that can bring joy like helping those in need. Wishing you all that satisfaction in abundance this year.This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2024, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations. More

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      Excompañeros de JD Vance en Yale recaudan dinero para los residentes haitianos de Springfield

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      Algunos de los donantes dijeron que buscaban reparar el daño que la campaña de Trump, y el propio Vance, habían causado al difundir rumores falsos.Decenas de antiguos compañeros del senador por Ohio JD Vance pasaron el debate vicepresidencial del martes por la noche donando dinero a un fondo para inmigrantes haitianos en Springfield, Ohio, y recaudaron más de 10.000 dólares.En las entrevistas, algunos donantes describieron las contribuciones como un esfuerzo para reparar parte del daño que la campaña Trump-Vance —y el propio Vance— causaron al difundir rumores falsos de que los migrantes estaban robando y comiendo mascotas. Los haitianos que viven en Springfield y la comunidad en general se han enfrentado a una serie de amenazas sobre las afirmaciones desacreditadas.Peter Chen —quien fue miembro de la promoción de Derecho de Yale de 2013 junto con Vance y su esposa, Usha Vance— organizó la campaña en un grupo de debate de clase el martes.Chen, quien creció cerca de Chicago y es hijo de inmigrantes, dijo en una entrevista que se sintió gratificado al ver que más de 50 compañeros de clase, o alrededor de una cuarta parte de la clase, habían donado, publicando notas de solidaridad con la comunidad haitiana de Springfield.“Fue emotivo para mí, personalmente, ver todos los diferentes mensajes y ver todas las formas en que las personas siguen reflejando esos valores”, dijo Chen el miércoles, citando los comentarios de su compañero de clase en el sitio de donación, el Fondo de Unidad de Springfield, que fue establecido por United Way.La mayoría de los comentarios publicados por los compañeros de Vance en la Escuela de Derecho de Yale eran simples declaraciones de bienvenida, pero algunos llamaban específicamente la atención sobre Vance y su esposa.Robert Cobbs, abogado de Washington, donó 100 dólares. Junto con su donación, Cobbs escribió: “En honor de JD Vance y Usha Vance. La Clase de 2013 de YLS está en contra de chivos expiatorios y demagogia sacados directamente de los manuales del fascismo. Con amor y una oración para que JD Vance y Usha Chilukuri Vance encuentren la fuerza moral para revertir el curso de sus vidas”.Entre los donantes también se encontraba Sofia Nelson, una defensora pública en Detroit cuya estrecha amistad con Vance terminó después de que se separaran por sus puntos de vista sobre cuestiones LGBTQ.Las donaciones al fondo por parte de antiguos alumnos de la Escuela de Derecho de Yale comenzaron durante el debate y continuaron el miércoles, con más de 60 donantes que se identificaron como miembros de la promoción de Vance.Lorie Hale, directora de operaciones de United Way de los condados de Clark, Champaign y Madison, dijo en un correo electrónico que su organización se sentía “bendecida” por recibir tal apoyo de personas de todo el país en un momento de “atención sin precedentes”.Stephanie Saul es una reportera que cubre la educación superior, centrándose recientemente en los drásticos cambios en las admisiones a las universidades y el debate en torno a la diversidad, la equidad y la inclusión en la enseñanza superior. Más de Stephanie Saul More

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      in US Politics

      Jimmy Carter becomes the first former US president to turn 100

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      Joe Biden led congratulations on Tuesday to Jimmy Carter on his 100th birthday, a milestone that makes Carter the first former US president to become a centenarian.Carter entered hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia, 19 months ago. His grandson, Jason Carter, has said the former president is eager to cast his ballot for Kamala Harris, a fellow Democrat, in the presidential election.The White House paid tribute with a display of big lettering declaring “Happy Birthday President Carter” and the number 100 outside the north portico. Carter has asked Biden to eulogise him at his state funeral when the time comes.In a statement Biden, 81, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 election campaign, said his predecessor has always been “a moral force for our nation and the world”.He added: “Your hopeful vision of our country, your commitment to a better world, and your unwavering belief in the power of human goodness continues to be a guiding light for all of us.”View image in fullscreenBarack Obama posted a video message on the social media platform X that said: “Happy 100th birthday, President Carter! Thank you for your friendship, your fundamental decency, and your incredible acts of service through the @CarterCenter. Michelle and I are grateful for all you’ve done for this country.”Carter, who has lived longer than any US president in history, served a single term from January 1977 to January 1981 and was beleaguered by high inflation and the Iran hostage crisis. But more recently historians have argued that his record deserves reappraisal and he was ahead of his time in calling for action to tackle the climate crisis.His decades of humanitarian work after leaving office, including the promotion of human rights and alleviating poverty in countries around the world, earned him the Nobel peace prize in 2002.His birthday is being marked by the broadcast of a tribute concert by stars of country, rock and gospel music recorded at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre last month. The concert raised more than $1m towards the international programme of the Carter Center, which he founded with his wife, Rosalynn Carter. The former president plans to tune in to the concert on Georgia Public Broadcasting, according to his grandson Jason Carter.Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were married for 77 years. Rosalynn Carter died in November last year and the former president was last seen in public at his wife’s funeral, where he used a wheelchair and appeared frail. He has been diagnosed with cancer and other health issues, and decided to end medical intervention and enter hospice care in February 2023.Carter is expected to mark his birthday in the same one-storey home that he and Rosalynn built in the early 1960s – before his first election to the Georgia state senate. He taught Sunday school at his hometown Baptist church in Plains until a few years ago.Jason Carter, who is chair of the Carter Center governing board, told the Associated Press: “Not everybody gets 100 years on this earth, and when somebody does, and when they use that time to do so much good for so many people, it’s worth celebrating.“These last few months, 19 months, now that he’s been in hospice, it’s been a chance for our family to reflect and then for the rest of the country and the world to really reflect on him. That’s been a really gratifying time.”Early voting in Georgia begins on 15 October, two weeks into Carter’s 101st year. Jason Carter added: “When we started asking him about his 100th birthday, he said he was excited to vote for Kamala Harris.”The Carters have worked with the non-profit group Habitat for Humanity International since the 1980s, and the ex-president has regularly joined other volunteers to help build homes for people affected by poverty or disasters.This week, to mark Carter’s birthday, scores of Habitat volunteers, including country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, will build 30 homes in St Paul, Minnesota.Jonathan Reckford, Habitat’s chief executive officer, said: “The Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project serves not only as a way to honor the Carters’ legacy, but also as a reminder of what is possible when people from all walks come together to work toward one common goal.” More

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      Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Evolution

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      It was only a little more than a decade ago that Mark Zuckerberg had few qualms about airing his politics.Earnest and optimistic — perhaps naïvely so — he rushed onto the national stage to discuss issues he cared about: immigration, social justice, inequality, democracy in action. He penned columns in national newspapers espousing his views, spun up foundations and philanthropic efforts and hired hundreds of people to put his vast riches to work on his political goals.That was Mark Zuckerberg in his 20s. Mark Zuckerberg in his 40s is a very different Mark Zuckerberg.In conversations over the past few years with friends, colleagues and advisers, Mr. Zuckerberg has expressed cynicism about politics after years of bad experiences in Washington. He and others at the top of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, believed that both parties loathed technology and that trying to continue engaging with political causes would only draw further scrutiny to their company.As recently as June at the Allen and Company conference — the “summer camp for billionaires” in Sun Valley, Idaho — Mr. Zuckerberg complained to multiple people about the blowback to Meta that came from the more politically touchy aspects of his philanthropic efforts. And he regretted hiring employees at his philanthropy who tried to push him further to the left on some causes.In short — he was over it.His preference, according to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, has been to wash his hands of it all.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Final Hours of a Tastemaker’s Trove

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      The society fixture, decorator and philanthropist Mica Ertegun helped define the tastes of an era. Now her great collections are going on the block.On a steamy afternoon last week, a team of movers from Christie’s padded quietly about a townhouse on a side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, yanking strips of packing tape from spools as they began bundling up thousands of artworks and objects for auction. The ripping sound the tape made resembled, in a way, screams of protest.“Can’t we get them to stop?” asked Linda Wachner, an American businesswoman and friend of Mica Ertegun, the woman whose house, until her death in December at 97, this was. “At least for a while.”There was a time in the recent social history of New York City when there would have been no necessity to pose the question “Who is Mica Ertegun?” Readers of the tabloid gossip pages, and almost anyone from a certain social stratum, would have known the name of the woman whose New York Times obituary tidily characterized her as “a doyenne of interior design”; wife of a man, Ahmet Ertegun, whom The New Yorker once called “the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Mogul in the World”; a successful decorator named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 Hall of Fame; a celebrated hostess and designated leader of fashion whose dresses were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.This, of course, was an analogue era. We don’t live there anymore.We inhabit instead a world in which taste is less developed over a lifetime than acquired overnight through Pinterest boards; a time when the megarich buy trophy art as a form of asset class; when the oxymoron known as “quiet luxury” noisily announces itself in the form of branded clothing or else in houses appointed with arrangements of costly if blandly generic objects approved by arbiters at Goop.From the Reagans to Mick Jagger and Jann Wenner, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun knew seemingly everyone.Winnie Au for The New York TimesThousands of objects from the Erteguns’ collections will fall to the hammer in late fall.Winnie Au for The New York TimesOurs is a sphere galaxies away from the one Ms. Ertegun knew, and, to a certain degree, helped conjure into being. And so the opportunity was not to be missed when, for several hours, this reporter and a photographer were given relatively free rein to wander the paired townhouses the Erteguns inhabited for decades (one for the use of Ms. Ertegun’s successful decorating business, MAC II, founded in 1969 with her partner, Chessy Rayner). We were left to prowl among collections that by day’s end would be wrapped, bundled and carted away, never again to be arranged in that particular manner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Art Institute of Chicago Receives $75 Million Gift

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      The donation from Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed will support the museum’s new galleries.The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday announced a gift of $75 million that will support new galleries for its collection of late-19th-century, modern and contemporary art.The new building will bear the names of Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed, the married couple whose donation is the largest individual naming gift in the museum’s history.“This converts what has been an aspiration into a reality,” said James Rondeau, the president and director of the Art Institute.“It is just about access to collections,” he continued. “Only about 16 percent of our modern and contemporary collection is on view.”The museum has yet to announce the total cost of the building project, the square footage or a completion date, Rondeau said. While the addition will increase the Art Institute’s $115 million annual operating budget, Rondeau said the museum had prepared for that by building its endowment by $200 million over the past five years.The new galleries are part of a project that began in 2019 to enhance existing spaces and explore how to make the most of the museum’s campus. The Art Institute is working with the architecture firm Barozzi Veiga.Fleischman, formerly a prominent lawyer in Washington, began collecting in the mid-1980s and has been a trustee of the Art Institute for nearly 15 years. Lougheed received a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, and he has specialized in international education.“Touring the collections on view and in storage I came to believe that more of the museum’s extraordinary collection needed to be available to visitors and presented in world-class architecture,” Fleischman said in a statement, adding that he was excited “for the museum to tell a more complete story of modern and contemporary art.” More

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      A Bargain at the Opera: Philadelphia Offers All Seats for as Low as $11

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      Seeking new audiences, Opera Philadelphia is putting in place a pay-what-you-can model, one of the first of its kind by a major opera company.In Philadelphia, a night at the opera may now be cheaper than going to the movies.Opera Philadelphia, a company with a reputation for innovation and ambition, announced on Tuesday that it was putting in place a pay-what-you-can model for the 2024-25 season, with all tickets for all performances starting at $11. The initiative, which the company calls Pick Your Price, is aimed at attracting new audiences.“People want to go to the opera, but it’s expensive,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, the celebrated American countertenor who became the company’s general director and president in June. “Our goal is to bring opera to more people and bring more people to the opera.”It immediately proved popular. On Tuesday, the day the initiative was announced, Opera Philadelphia said it sold more than 2,200 tickets for the coming season, compared with about 20 the day before. The tickets were originally priced at $26 to $300.High ticket prices have long been a barrier to audiences, and especially to newcomers. In recent years a number of performing arts groups, including Lincoln Center, the Chicago Sinfonietta and Ars Nova, the Off Broadway incubator, have experimented with pay-what-you-can approaches. Other opera companies have experimented with discounts, including rush tickets and deals offered to young people. But Opera Philadelphia’s approach was one of the boldest yet.Its website explains that all tickets start at $11 but that people will be given the option of choosing to pay much more, including the standard price.Like many nonprofit performing arts organizations, Opera Philadelphia gets much more of its revenue from philanthropy than through ticket sales. Radically lowering the prices could encourage more donations, which will no longer risk being seen as subsidizing an expensive art form that is out of reach for many people. And Costanzo said that the new model would allow the company to concentrate more on staging interesting works, and less on worrying about ticket sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      President of Florida A&M Resigns Amid Donation Controversy

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      Larry Robinson took responsibility for accepting a $237 million gift that is now on hold and under investigation.The president of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University is stepping down from the top post two months after he acknowledged that he had mishandled a large donation that a donor had promised to the university but has since been put on hold.During commencement festivities in early May, Florida A&M, a historically Black public university in Tallahassee, announced that a business executive was making a donation worth more than $237 million. Questions soon arose over whether the source of the donation had been properly vetted, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.President Larry Robinson did not give a reason for his resignation in his open letter announcing his resignation or in a news release on July 12. But two months earlier, at a board of trustees meeting on May 15, Mr. Robinson took responsibility for “mishandling” the proposed donation and decided to “cease the engagement agreement” with the donor, according to the meeting’s minutes log.“He apologized to all parties involved and acknowledged the missteps in the University’s approach,” the log said.The gift had been promised by a business executive named Gregory Gerami and a family trust. Mr. Gerami was invited to speak in May at commencement, during which the donation was promoted. Photographs show Mr. Gerami, Mr. Robinson and others posing behind a large, ceremonial check for the amount of $237,750,000.But just four days later, Mr. Robinson told the university’s board that he had “received information suggesting the gift was not as it appeared,” according to minutes from the May 15 meeting. Mr. Robinson and Shawnta Friday-Stroud, who at the time was the school’s vice president, then “contacted the donor to cease the engagement agreement.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More