details magazine:

When Bobby Jindal was 12, a Southern Baptist friend named Kent gave him a paperback Bible for Christmas. Jindal was disappointed, not least because the Bible was engraved with his name and thus unreturnable. “I was raised in a strong Hindu culture, attended weekly pujas, or ceremonial rites, and read the Vedic scriptures,” Jindal wrote in a 1993 article in America, a Jesuit magazine, one of many religious essays he published in the early nineties. “I considered myself anti-Christian,” he wrote in another piece; elsewhere, he confided that he thought Christians worshipped fish (“in the same way that many Westerners think Hindus worship cows”). The Bible went into a closet, and might have remained there had Jindal not sneaked away with a girl from a high-school dance at a Baton Rouge hotel.

Jindal and the girl, Kathy, slipped off to the rooftop and talked about their futures. She aimed to be a Supreme Court justice, she told him, so that she could stop people from “killing babies.” Her passion astonished Jindal. “While she could not reply to any one of my arguments for abortion,” he later wrote, “I could not help but be amazed by her genuine compassion and innocence. . . . Kathy’s sincere convictions showed me an aspect of Christianity I had never encountered before.”

Thus began Jindal’s conversion to Catholicism, an epic process into which he funneled all his trademark energies, intellectual and otherwise. “I even learned bits of Latin, Greek and Hebrew,” he later wrote. In the same closet to which he had once consigned Kent’s Bible, Jindal now studied its verses by flashlight, away from his parents’ eyes. “I was probably the first teenager who ever told his parents he was going to a party so that he could sneak off to church,” he wrote. “My parents were infuriated by my conversion. [They] blamed themselves for being bad parents, blamed me for being a bad son and blamed evangelists for spreading dissension.”

…

But Jindal’s own writings on the subject—extensive, and largely overlooked—suggest a fierce depth to his adopted religious beliefs. Jindal entered Brown University at the age of 17, as a biology and public-policy major intent on a career in medicine, and it was there in Providence, Rhode Island, that he was baptized. While at Brown, a friend of Jindal’s—whom he called Susan in his 1994 account—confided to him that a lump on her scalp had been found to be cancerous and that she was seeing visions and being plagued by the sulfurous odors traditionally associated with demons. Later, during a University Christian Fellowship prayer meeting on campus, Susan fell to the floor and “started thrashing about,” Jindal wrote, “as if in some kind of seizure.” She was screaming his name, but Jindal stayed back while the other UCF members pinned her down and chanted “Satan, I command you to leave this woman.” One brandished a crucifix. “It appeared as if we were observing a tremendous battle between the Susan we knew and loved and some strange evil force,” he wrote. After a protracted struggle, Susan’s fits subsided. This amateur exorcism, Jindal wrote, seemed to work wonders. When surgeons removed the lump, they “found no traces of cancerous cells.” Susan “claimed she had felt healed after the group prayer,” he wrote. “The physician’s improbable explanation that the biopsy may have removed all the cancerous tissue is no less far-fetched.” Though the cancer was gone, Jindal’s concerns over Susan’s possession weren’t: “With holy water and blessed crucifixes, I have even given her physical protection from the de­mons that have only once reappeared, and then for a mere moment.”

…

As an undergrad at Brown, Jindal interned for Jim McCrery, a Republican congressman from Shreveport, Louisiana. One week into the job, Jindal asked if he could have something substantive to work on. Annoyed, McCrery asked him to formulate a solution to a problem considered intractable by those on Capitol Hill: Medicare. “He just grinned,” McCrery recalls. “I expected never to see him again.” Two weeks later, Jindal plopped a thick manuscript on McCrery’s desk: Medicare, solved (at least to Jindal’s thinking). Jindal’s analysis, McCrery says, “was excellent.” Especially from a 20-year-old.

By 1994, Jindal had been to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and had taken a lucrative job as a consultant in Washington, D.C. But he was already restless. He called McCrery to recommend himself for Louisiana’s secretary of health and hospitals, a cabinet-level position involving oversight of 40 percent of the state budget. “Remember,” McCrery says, “Bobby was like 23 years old. So I asked if he’d consider a deputy position.” Jindal said no. A year later, McCrery got Jindal an audience with Republican governor Mike Foster. “When they told me he was 24, I wasn’t very interested,” Foster says. But in person Jindal won him over and Foster hired him on the spot. “Most people who border on genius,” Foster says, “they’re not too personable. But he’s personable.”

That combustible mixture—high-caliber smarts and higher-caliber ambition—combined with a smooth, polished demeanor, has fueled Jindal’s rocket-ship rise through Louisiana politics. Jindal calls himself a “policy wonk at heart”; ask him about an issue and you’ll hear all 31 points of a 31-point plan. Yet his wonkiness is decidedly (Bill) Clintonesque: suffused with the gleam of personality and devoid of lecture-hall drone. “I want to be the most boring but most effective governor,” he says. “My wife says I have the boring part down.”

…

“That includes David Duke’s old district,” Foster notes, dismissing suggestions that Jindal’s ethnicity is a factor. Jindal rarely plays up his heritage, despite the fact that 40 percent of his campaign contributions for the 2003 election came from Indian-Americans in Louisiana and elsewhere. “He’s kept his distance from the Indian-American community,” Rao says. “Not one mention of maybe the music his parents listened to, or the food that he ate growing up—nothing.”

As a political tactic, this has its benefits. “My grandparents, they’re real old-school, and they didn’t vote for Jindal the first time around because of his ethnicity,” a self-proclaimed racist (“I can’t help it, man, that’s the way I am”) told me in the bar of McCain’s Baton Rouge hotel. But it’s also apparent that many “old-school” white voters have set aside their qualms about sending a brown-skinned man to the governor’s mansion—both the self-described racist and his grandparents cast their ballots for Jindal in 2007. “I’ll tell you,” he said, explaining his vote, “Jindal’s just not your typical African-American.”

…

“If there’s a criticism of Bobby,” says Mike Foster, “it’s that he hasn’t stayed in a job long enough.” Which brings us back to John McCain, and Jindal’s place on the senator’s short list of potential running mates. Pundits suggest Jindal would be an ideal counterbalance to Obama, both because of his youth and because of the fact that he too offers voters the chance to pull the lever for a barrier-breaking candidate. Jindal would also prop up McCain’s conservative bona fides: He’s opposed to abortion even in cases involving incest or rape, supports teaching intelligent design, voted in Congress for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a heterosexual institution, voted to seal the U.S.-Mexico border with a fence, and has been a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq. It’s easy to foresee his becoming, to crib from Robert Penn Warren, “a boy wonder breathing brimstone” on the national stage. So easy, in fact, that it seems more a matter of when than if. “[He’s] the model for Republican victory,” Rush Limbaugh has said, calling Jindal “the next Ronald Reagan.

“full metal mccain” - matt taibi at rolling stone… hilarious article:

Even the briefest of surveys of the supporters gracing McCain’s events underscores the kind of red-meat appeal he’s making. Immediately after his speech in New Orleans, a pair of sweet-looking old ladies put down their McCain signs long enough to fill me in on why they’re here. “I tell you,” says one, “if Michelle Obama really doesn’t like it here in America, I’d be very pleased to raise the money to send her back to Africa.”

The diminutive and smiling old lady’s friend leans over. “That’s going a little too far, dear.”

“Too far?” says the first. “Farrakhan is saying they were brought here against their will, and their bodies are still feeding the sharks at the bottom of the sea! I mean, really!”

“OK, sharks still eating bodies,” I say, writing it all down. “Could I have your name, ma’am?”

“Janice Berg,” says the first old lady. “And lest you think I’m Jewish, the name comes from Norway. Berg is ‘mountain’ in Norwegian. I’m part German, part French myself.”

A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. “He exaggerates too much,” Ron says. “He’s not honest.”

“OK,” I say. “What does he exaggerate about?”

“Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother,” he says.

I ask him how this is an exaggeration.

“Well, he was saying . . .” he begins. “As if that qualifies him to . . .”

Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.

“Look, you either are or you aren’t,” she says.

“And he aren’t,” Ron says, nodding with relief.

…

And when it comes to Obama’s and his wife’s America-hating, well . . . McCain really doesn’t need to say anything about that. All he needs to do to remind audiences of Reverend Wright and Michelle “I’m proud of America for the first time” Obama is to offer a few bons mots in the opposite direction. “I seek the office with the humility of a man who cannot forget that my country saved me,” McCain likes to say. And while he doesn’t believe he was anointed by God to lead the great nation of America, he insists, “I am her servant, first, last and always.”

That’s it — that’s the entire argument. McCain is a canny enough old goat to know that the public’s insatiable appetite for traitorous enemies will do the rest. He’ll wave as many flags and stand in front of as many fucking fighter jets as you like, while the other guy lectures us about why he doesn’t always need to wear a flag pin in his lapel and calls a bomb-throwing Sixties terrorist “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” instead of calling for his immediate beheading.

Cindy Oestriecher, a McCain supporter who turned out for his speech in New Orleans, is stumped when I ask her for an example of Obama’s lack of patriotism. “What was that thing about anti-American?” she asks a friend. “What were they referring to?”

“What thing?” asks the friend.

“People were talking about that thing, that anti-American thing,” Cindy says, frowning.

“You mean about the flag, the thing on the Internet?” the friend replies.

“Yeah, I guess,” says Cindy. “The anti-American thing.” “That bothers you?” I ask.

“Of course it does!”

“But you don’t even know what it is,” I say. “You just know that someone else said he was anti-American. You don’t even know who it was that said it!”

robert reich’s blog:

Conspiracy theories abound, but the soaring price of crude oil (today around $137 a barrel) is related to four more mundane forces:

(1) growing demand from developing nations, especially China and India. This is the main reason for the price rise over the last six years.

(2) the dropping dollar. As it drops, because of our trade imbalance and overall indebtedness to the rest of the world as well as our slowing economy, everything we buy from abroad — including much of the oil we import — costs more; everything we sell to foreigners — including much of the oil we produce — costs less to them. I attribute half of oil’s price rise since January to this.

(3) Global investors (including, perhaps, your own pension fund) are anxious about the American economy, and looking to hedge their bets against future declines. Oil is one of the commodities that looks like a good bet. Hence, there’s speculation in oil futures. This isn’t a nefarious plot. It’s the way the market works. A bit of a speculative bubble is forming, so beware. I attribute a big part of oil’s price rise over the last few weeks to this.

(4) Instability in the Middle East. Israel’s recent bellicose statements about Iran have generated fears about the continuing capacity and willingness of Middle Eastern oil producers to generate oil (about a third of world oil production). OPEC refuses to produce more. Some of oil’s price rise over the last week is attributable to this.

In other words, a perfect storm. Given the US recession and slowing of European economies, I expect oil to fall to around $125 a barrel but then be pushed up by speculators and the falling dollar to around $135 over the next several weeks. Wall Street investment houses are talking about $150 by July but that’s their way of stoking more speculation (in which they have a financial interest).

Bottom line: The days of cheap energy are over, folks. Gas may go down to $3.50 a gallon by this time next year, but you’d be wise to trade in your SUV for an economy car. And you’d be wise to avoid building that new addition to your home and put the money instead into better insulation.

zakaria in newsweek:

“In six months, on Jan. 20, 2009, we will have a new president. But it is not clear that we will chart a new course in the ongoing war in Iraq. Senator McCain has promised a continuation of the Bush strategy—to stay in Iraq with no horizon in sight, with no benchmarks or metrics that would tell us when American troops can come home. In 2006, when levels of violence were horrifyingly high, President Bush and Senator McCain said that things were going so badly that if we left, the consequences would be tragic. Today they say that things are going so well that if we leave, the consequences would be tragic. Whatever the conditions, the answer is the same—keep doing what we’re doing. How does one say ‘Catch-22′ in Arabic?

“I start from a different premise. I believe that the Iraq War was a major strategic blunder. It diverted us from the battle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan—the people who launched the attacks of 9/11 and who remain powerful and active today. We face threats in Iraq, but the two greatest ones, as General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have testified, are Al Qaeda (which is wounded but not dead) and Iran. Both are a direct consequence of the invasion. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before 2003, and Iran’s influence has expanded massively since then.

“And then there are the more tangible costs. The war has resulted in over 4,000 U.S. combat deaths, four times as many grievously wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths. Over 2 million Iraqis have fled the country and 2 million more have been displaced within the country. The price tag in dollars has also been staggering. In the last five years, the United States has spent close to $1 trillion on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. That is enough money to rebuild every school, bridge and road in America, create universal health care and fund several Manhattan Projects in alternative energy. Whatever benefits the invasion of Iraq might produce, it cannot justify these expenditures in lives and treasure.

barack obama, 6/18:

I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let’s talk about 9/11.

The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on 9/11 have not been brought to justice.”

They are Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their sponsors – the Taliban. They were in Afghanistan. And yet George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we’d be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.

Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership – the people who murdered 3000 Americans – have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism

excerpt from fareed zakaria’s new book, the post-american world (nytimes review), which i highly recommend

(also, be sure to check out gps, his new show on cnn…”CNN U.S. chief Jonathan Klein approached Zakaria about a year ago and was told that “the only show I want to do is one that fills in the huge gaping hole in American television, which is 95 percent of the rest of the world,” Zakaria said in an interview with the Associated Press on Monday…”):

The split between Sunnis and Shiites is only one of the divisions within the Islamic world. Within that universe are Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and Arabs, Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners, and, importantly, moderates and radicals. Just as the diversity within the communist world ultimately made it less threatening, so do the many varieties of Islam undermine its ability to coalesce into a single, monolithic foe. Some Western leaders speak of a single worldwide Islamic movement - absurdly lumping together Chechen separatists in Russia, Pakistani-backed militants in India, Shiite warlords in Lebanon, and Sunni jihadists in Egypt. In fact, a shrewd strategist would emphasize that all these groups are distinct, with differing agendas, enemies, and friends. That would rob them of their claim to represent Islam…

A cottage industry of scaremongering has flourished in the West-especially in the United States-since 9/11. Experts extrapolate every trend they don’t like, forgoing any serious study of the data. Many conservative commentators have written about the impending Islamization of Europe (Eurabia, they call it, to make you even more uncomfortable). Except that the best estimates, from U.S. intelligence agencies, indicate that Muslims constitute around 3 percent of Europe’s population now and will rise to between 5 and 8 percent by 2025, after which they will probably plateau. The watchdogs note the musings of every crackpot Imam, search the archives for each reference to the end of days, and record and distribute the late-night TV musings of every nutcase who glorifies martyrdom. They erupt in a fury when a Somali taxi driver somewhere refuses to load a case of liquor into his car, seeing it as the beginning of sharia in the West. But these episodes do not reflect the basic direction of the Muslim world. That world is also modernizing, though more slowly than the rest, and there are those who try to become leaders in rebellion against it. The reactionaries in the world of Islam are more numerious and extreme than those in other cultures-that world does have its dysfunctions. But they remain a tiny minority of the world’s billion-plus Muslims. And neglecting the complicated context in which some of these pseudoreligious statements are made-such as an internal Iranian power struggle among clerics and nonclerics-leads to hair-raising but absurd predictions, like Bernard Lewis’s confident claim that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad planned to mark an auspicious date on the Islamic calendar (August 22, 2006) by ending the world. (Yes, he actually wrote that.)

The ideological watchdogs have spent so much time with the documents of jihad that they have lost sight of actual Muslim societies. Were they to step back, they would see a frustration with the fundamentalists, a desire for modernity (with some dignity and cultural pride for sure), and a search for practical solutions-not a mass quest for immortality through death. When Muslims travel, they flock by the millions to see the razzle-dazzle of Dubai, not the seminaries of Iran. The minority that wants jihad is real, but it operates within societies where such activites are increasingly unpopular and irrelevant.

excerpt from newsweek:

Look around. The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, “they” have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

I. The End of Pax Americana
During the 1980s, when I would visit India—where I grew up—most Indians were fascinated by the United States. Their interest, I have to confess, was not in the important power players in Washington or the great intellectuals in Cambridge.

People would often ask me about … Donald Trump. He was the very symbol of the United States—brassy, rich, and modern. He symbolized the feeling that if you wanted to find the biggest and largest anything, you had to look to America. Today, outside of entertainment figures, there is no comparable interest in American personalities. If you wonder why, read India’s newspapers or watch its television. There are dozens of Indian businessmen who are now wealthier than the Donald. Indians are obsessed by their own vulgar real estate billionaires. And that newfound interest in their own story is being replicated across much of the world.

How much? Well, consider this fact. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a year. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa. Over the last two decades, lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once unthinkable. While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term “emerging markets,” has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world’s next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India, two from China, and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa. This is something much broader than the much-ballyhooed rise of China or even Asia. It is the rise of the rest—the rest of the world

great discussion on education reform from nytimes magazine:

Hess: I think these two camps tend to make the same analytic mistake. Ten or 20 years ago, the dominant givers in education were trying to work through districts. There was the Kellogg Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, all working from the inside. The biggest example was the Annenberg Foundation. In 1993, former Ambassador Walter Annenberg went to the White House and announced a $500 million gift to education. He said, essentially, “We need to drop a bomb on American urban education to shake things up.” Local foundations made matching gifts, so Annenberg’s $500 million was leveraged into more than $1 billion, invested in more than a dozen communities. And generally speaking, it was a substantial disappointment. There was very little change in an ongoing, meaningful way. You know, there’s a reason that Univac wasn’t able just to become I.B.M., and there’s a reason I.B.M. couldn’t just become Microsoft and Microsoft couldn’t just become Google. Organizations bake in the assumptions and the processes that made them successful. The way you hire your people, the way you reward your people, the internal practices you devise — they are all built around a certain set of assumptions and operations. When that larger world changes, it’s tough to retool. So when these reform-minded superintendents come in, like Alan Bersin when he arrived in San Diego or Paul Vallas when he got to Philadelphia or Joel Klein here in New York, they face enormous challenges. A school system is not an agile, nimble organization where if you can just hire the right people and start the right programs, you can turn things around quickly. You’ve got to work your way around outdated staffing processes, inadequate and bulky information-technology systems, abysmal and poorly conceived data-management systems. Alan Bersin was five years into his tenure in San Diego before teachers stopped putting transfer requests into a wooden box.

Tough: O.K., that’s the problem on the fix-the-system side. What is the mistake that the replace-the-system people make?

Hess: Those folks take the wrong lesson from successful programs like Green Dot and Achievement First and KIPP. They say, “Look, let’s just create options, and more good alternatives will emerge.” It’s a little bit like the mistake we made in planning for the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003: if we create a vacuum, good stuff will happen. Well, you know, effective markets aren’t created by vacuums. Markets are ways to channel human energy and ingenuity, but only when they’re transparent, when they’re structured, when you’re building on human social capital, when you’ve got talent and investment capital. If we really want to think about new solutions, it’s not just identifying the right people and the right programs; we need to create an environment where these people and solutions are able to thrive. So for me, if you’re going to do a locale-based strategy — whether it’s L.A. or New York or D.C. — the most important strategy is not putting money into the system and it’s not funding the five best charter operators. It’s attracting aggressive human-resource operations like New Leaders for New Schools or the New Teacher Project. It’s providing the kind of legal and business support that those programs need in order to expand and grow. These are things that philanthropists tend not to invest in because they’re not sexy but that are actually going to determine whether we’re able to make reforms work or not.

Klein: It’s the hardest money to raise. When I go to a lot of businesses looking for donations, they say, “Well, I’ll build a new school library,” or, “I’ll build a gym.” And that’s cool. I mean, we need all the libraries and gyms they can build for us. But it’s not strategic. We’ve got lots of schools with great gyms and libraries that are not doing anything for their kids. I mean, maybe they’re playing basketball. But smart philanthropists will invest in just the kind of things that Rick is talking about. In order to make real change, you have to understand human resources, you have to understand technology and the transparency of data and the ability to actually reward people for things other than showing up. These are fundamental game-changing strategies. And you need money from philanthropists to get that off the ground.

Hess: It’s not sexy money.

Klein: It’s not. But it’s exactly where philanthropy has been very effective in New York. The Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the Tiger Foundation gave us money to totally retool our H.R. system. If I had tried to get that money from the existing budget for that kind of overhaul, it would have been next to impossible. But outside money is much more flexible than government money. So with philanthropic support, we were able to create a pilot program, get it off the ground, tinker with it, prove it worked — and only then expand it with city funds.

III. Inputs vs. Outcomes

Tough: Vanessa, is it hard to get potential philanthropists to think about these more systemic investments? Do they all start off wanting to donate gymnasiums and libraries?

Kirsch: In the past, I think that was true. But we’re seeing a new kind of philanthropist. They don’t want to put their name on a gym; they don’t want to put their name on a building. They want to see change. My company is a venture-philanthropy firm. We work with about 50 wealthy donors, and we bundle their money and invest it strategically in a variety of nonprofits. And when these donors are starting out, I tell each of them that as they turn to philanthropy, it is important for them to keep their business hat on. They should spend their money the way they made their money, which means investing in great people, testing out new ideas, being tough-minded in evaluating what’s working and what isn’t.

Tough: Your approach sounds a little different from what Joel was describing. Instead of creating a single national strategy where all the parts fit together, you’re looking to support lots of different people who have a variety of different ideas.

Kirsch: I think those two approaches can reinforce each other. One of the things that makes America great is its entrepreneurial system. We have entrepreneurs in every corner of the private sector, and we have capital markets to support them. If you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a brilliant idea, there is a whole system in place to help you turn that into a successful enterprise: angel investors, consultants, seed capital, incubators. There are many talented entrepreneurs in the social sector too, but for those social entrepreneurs, there are no organized capital markets or support systems to give them the help they need to be the disruptions and innovators — and, just as important, to get their innovations to scale.

…

Klein: In the last few years, there has been a paradigm shift in the philanthropic community. Increasingly, what matters to donors is outcomes. When Tom was with the Gates Foundation, the first big plan we developed together was a project to take large high schools that weren’t working and break them up into a series of small schools under a single roof. And from our very first meeting, Tom wanted to know about outcomes. He said, O.K., how many more kids will these new schools graduate, compared with the schools they are replacing? And that is a very different approach than you would have seen 10 years ago, when most of the philanthropy that went to education was about inputs.