Do you know how long I’ve been sitting on this particular subject line? At least as long as this newsletter has existed.
Many of you already know this news, but either way I hope you can share in my joy: My book, The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong and How to Fix It, is out TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5th!!! It is the culmination of a decade’s worth of consulting, reading, synthesizing sources ranging from cathedral history to the U.S. tax code to videos of LeBron James, all coming together in what I think is a truly beautiful and hopeful and FUNNY book.
I’ll share press as it comes — excerpts are scheduled for The Daily Beast and Fortune, an interview with Anne Helen Petersen at Culture Study, and podcasts like Factually! with Adam Conover. For now, the best glimpse into the book comes from Public Seminar:
Sherman: So in some ways, you fund the world that you have and the world that you want. Fund things that redistribute power, and fund things that make the experience of being alive better for everybody.
Schiller: That’s a nice way to put it. Philanthropy is for the world you want to have. We should demand more from our government–and we should cherish philanthropy’s separate ability to preserve and protect those things that keep us human and focus our intentions on allowing it to do that.
For those of you in New York, the book launch is Tuesday, December 5 at P&T Knitwear, a bookstore and event space on the Lower East Side. I’ll be in conversation with Corey Robin, a public intellectual of well-deserved renown and my dissertation advisor.
The launch is just the start of my tour — please join me in Portland, OR, LA, Cleveland, Hanover, NH, and/or Washington D.C. I’ll be in conversation with people like Bill Deresiewicz, Helaine Olen, and Tim Schwab, whose book about Bill Gates has gotten a ton of attention of late.
As the book lands, I hope to return to Schill-ing on topics other than, well, my own promotion — and in the meantime, I can’t wait to share the ride with all of you.
Oh how I wish I'd known you were to be in Portland. I live down in southern Oregon, a long drive, but for this I might have gone. If you ever want to speak in Ashland, Oregon at Bloomsbury, let me know. I just ordered the book and am so excited to dig in. Development has been my career for 26 years and yours is the book that I have been waiting for. Looking forward to following along and reading your work. I was just talking with a donor about this very topic and he was like, you are awfully Marxist! Ha!
Julie - my Portland event is January 8, 2024!