Latest news with #Gates
Business Insider
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Bill Gates' summer reading list this year is all about memoirs
"Chasing Hope" by Nicholas Kristof Gates said he's been following the work of Nicholas Kristof since 1997, when the veteran journalist published an article about children in poor countries dying from diarrhea. It changed the course of his life and helped him shape the Gates Foundation, Gates wrote in his blog post. "In this terrific memoir, Nick writes about how he stays optimistic about the world despite everything he's seen," Gates wrote. "The world would be better off with more Nick Kristofs." "Chasing Hope" came out in 2024 — after Gates finished writing his own memoir. However, Gates said he felt he had to include it on the list. "Personal History" by Katharine Graham Gates said he met renowned newspaper publisher Katharine Graham in 1991 on the same day he met Warren Buffett. Kay, as Gates affectionately called her, is best known for presiding over her family's paper, The Washington Post, during Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. "I loved hearing Kay talk about her remarkable life: taking over the Post at a time when few women were in leadership positions like that, standing up to President Nixon to protect the paper's reporting on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, negotiating the end to a pressman's strike, and much more," Gates said. "Educated" by Tara Westover Tara Westover's "Educated" debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list after its 2018 release. The tale of her upbringing, which included an unconventional father who banned her family from going to hospitals or attending school, led Gates to leave a 5-star review on Goodreads the same year it came out. Westover taught herself math and self-studied for the ACT despite not setting foot in a classroom until she was 17. Today, she has a Ph.D. in history. "I thought I was pretty good at teaching myself — until I read Tara Westover's memoir 'Educated.' Her ability to learn on her own blows mine right out of the water," Gates said in his review. "Born a Crime" by Trevor Noah Comedian Trevor Noah released "Born a Crime," a memoir about his childhood in South Africa, in 2016. As a biracial boy growing up during apartheid, Noah was the product of an illegal interracial relationship and struggled to fit in. Gates said he related to the feeling of being an outsider. "I also grew up feeling like I didn't quite fit in at times, although Trevor has a much stronger claim to the phrase than I do," he wrote in his blog post. "Surrender" by Bono Gates shouted out the vulnerability in "Surrender" by musician Paul David Hewson, better known as U2 frontman Bono. The full title, "Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story," sums up the 40-chapter autobiography that has each chapter named after a U2 song. According to Gates, Bono opens up about his upbringing with parents who "basically ignored" his passion for singing, which only made him try harder to make it as a musician. "I went into this book knowing almost nothing about his anger at his father, the band's near-breakups, and his discovery that his cousin was actually his half-brother," Gates said.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Inside Bill Gates' meeting with his foundation's staff after his $200 billion bombshell: ‘How do we get people to care?'
Bill Gates had a question for the employees of his charitable foundation, which he recently announced will spend $200 billion to reduce disease and death among the world's poorest. 'How do you get people to care?' the Microsoft founder asked at the Gates Foundation's annual meeting this month. 'We're going to have to up our game quite a bit.' Hundreds of Gates Foundation employees—many flown in from the foundation's country offices in India, China, South Africa, and elsewhere—filled an amphitheater across the street from the world's largest private philanthropy's two-winged headquarters in Seattle. This year's event came at a remarkable moment: Employees had just learned that the operation they work for will no longer exist 20 years from now. On its 25th anniversary, the Gates Foundation announced that after doubling its spending in the next 20 years, it will shutter operations. The $200 billion it will spend is the largest philanthropic commitment in modern history. Walking into the dimly lit auditorium, Gates received a standing ovation from the mezzanine down to the front row. 'We are at an amazing milestone,' said the foundation's cofounder. Gates began by celebrating the progress made in the foundation's first quarter-century, including the reduction by half of childhood deaths, and successes fighting malaria, polio, and other infectious diseases. He teared up as he mentioned the people—his mother, father, fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett, and ex-wife and foundation cofounder Melinda French Gates—who have influenced him the most in his philanthropy. The tone was far from triumphal, however. Even as Gates laid out the foundation's big ambitions—including eradicating polio and malaria, and reducing deaths from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS by 90%—he warned of how far there is to go, bemoaned the sector's fragility, and said the recent drastic cuts to foreign aid from the United States and other top donor countries are already threatening the last two decades' progress. 'It's going to take our very best work to get this reversed, our advocacy to get the resources restored,' Gates told the foundation's staff. And he said, he's looking for 'amazing, low-cost innovation, so we can take what remains and actually get those figures going back in the right direction.' CEO Mark Suzman spoke for many when he expressed rage at the cuts in aid from wealthy countries. Gates and his foundation had made the decision to pursue these ambitious public health goals before the Trump administration's gutting of the United States' main international aid agency, USAID—and several other countries are also cutting their international aid budgets. 'Make no mistake, we are entering a new era, one in which, as you've heard, the world's poorest people can no longer rely on strong, steady support from the world's richest nations,' Suzman said. 'It is okay to be frustrated… We never thought we'd have to fight so hard to justify the importance of our work.' But, he continued: 'This is a fight we are ready for.' Reached after the gathering, one staff member at the foundation said that colleagues' mood has been 'pretty optimistic and enthusiastic' after the $200 billion announcement. 'We are super energized thinking about what legacy building looks like and how we can work ourselves out of a job by building local capacity and empowering our partners to continue the mission,' the staffer wrote to Fortune. Suzman said the foundation's goals have not changed. 'When critical coalitions seem to crumble before our eyes, we cannot just shrink our ambitions,' he said. 'When the very idea of hope for a better future starts to sound naïve or out of date, we must remind people that our optimism does not come easily. It has been hard-earned. It is not based on blind faith, but concrete, measurable results.' Gates asked his employees to reinvigorate their drive to achieve the foundation's core mission, bring new partners along, and invest in the potential of AI to help alleviate poverty and play a key role in drug discovery. 'I really believe, and I hope it's not a naive belief, that we can achieve—despite the headwinds—even more over the next 20 years than we did in the first 25,' he said. This story was originally featured on
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Expedition Unknown' Host Josh Gates Toured OceanGate Titan Sub in 2021 and Found It ‘Non-Functional'
Discovery's new documentary 'Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster' premiered Wednesday night, revealing that 'Expedition Unknown' host Josh Gates actually toured the OceanGate Titan submersible two years before its infamous 2023 implosion — and the adventurer deemed what he found concerning. In 2021, Gates began working on an 'Expedition Unknown' episode with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who tragically died along with four other passengers on a planned deep sea expedition to tour the wreckage of the Titanic. They intended on putting a spotlight on Rush's seemingly game-changing underwater explorations. Things did not go according to plan, however, as Gates' first trip underwater in Rush's sub was mired by enough technical problems that he ultimately decided to scrap the episode altogether. 'We all rely on that Spidey Sense. We all have that little voice that whispers to us. In my job, I've learned I have to really listen to that voice,' Gates explained over footage of himself hesitantly agreeing to being bolted inside the Titan sub with Rush. Noting that the vessel came equipped with no escape hatch of any kind, Gates told the 'Implosion' team that 'Stockton just didn't see — even psychologically — the need for a way out of this sub.' 'We were in the sub for hours with Stockton,' Gates revealed later in his 'Implosion' interview over video footage of his and Rush's aborted dive in 2021. 'The dive was interesting in that nothing really worked right. The sub didn't really do anything it was asked to do.' After describing a number of the errors that the submersible experienced during his time in it, Gates concluded, 'It was non-functional.' He also recalled the conversation he had with Rush in the wake of their failed dive, including one instance when the OceanGate CEO revealed that he had ignored his sub's carbon fiber weaknesses during one of his own deep sea descents. 'Once I saw that that was where he was willing to go to get this operation up and running, a kind of fear set in for me that was so much deeper than anything I experienced while riding in the sub,' the 'Expedition X' host admitted. Gates' very obvious concerns, as well as his decision to pass on his planned OceanGate project, were not enough to stop Rush from spearheading the fateful 2023 Titanic expedition that resulted in the deaths of French deep-sea explorer and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British businessman Hamish Harding, Pakistani-British businessman Shahzada Dawood and the latter's 19-year-old son, Suleman. 'Implosion,' notably, features audio of the very bang that is suspected to be the implosion of the Titan sub. It also features comments from Christine Dawood, the wife of Shahzada and mother of Suleman. 'We all know who the culprit is,' she pointedly notes in the documentary. '[It] does not change anything, does it?' 'Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster' is streaming now on Max. The post 'Expedition Unknown' Host Josh Gates Toured OceanGate Titan Sub in 2021 and Found It 'Non-Functional' | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Inside Bill Gates' annual employee meeting after his $200 billion bombshell: ‘How do we get people to care?'
Bill Gates had a question for the employees of his charitable foundation, which he recently announced will spend $200 billion to reduce disease and death among the world's poorest. 'How do you get people to care?' the Microsoft founder asked at the Gates Foundation's annual meeting this month. 'We're going to have to up our game quite a bit.' Hundreds of Gates Foundation employees—many flown in from the foundation's country offices in India, China, South Africa, and elsewhere—filled an amphitheater across the street from the world's largest private philanthropy's two-winged headquarters in Seattle. This year's event came at a remarkable moment: Employees had just learned that the operation they work for will no longer exist 20 years from now. On its 25th anniversary, the Gates Foundation announced that after doubling its spending in the next 20 years, it will shutter operations. The $200 billion it will spend is the largest philanthropic commitment in modern history. Walking into the dimly lit auditorium, Gates received a standing ovation from the mezzanine down to the front row. 'We are at an amazing milestone,' said the foundation's cofounder. Gates began by celebrating the progress made in the foundation's first quarter-century, including the reduction by half of childhood deaths, and successes fighting malaria, polio, and other infectious diseases. He teared up as he mentioned the people—his mother, father, fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett, and ex-wife and foundation cofounder Melinda French Gates—who have influenced him the most in his philanthropy. The tone was far from triumphal, however. Even as Gates laid out the foundation's big ambitions—including eradicating polio and malaria, and reducing deaths from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS by 90%—he warned of how far there is to go, bemoaned the sector's fragility, and said the recent drastic cuts to foreign aid from the United States and other top donor countries are already threatening the last two decades' progress. 'It's going to take our very best work to get this reversed, our advocacy to get the resources restored,' Gates told the foundation's staff. And he said, he's looking for 'amazing, low-cost innovation, so we can take what remains and actually get those figures going back in the right direction.' CEO Mark Suzman spoke for many when he expressed rage at the cuts in aid from wealthy countries. Gates and his foundation had made the decision to pursue these ambitious public health goals before the Trump administration's gutting of the United States' main international aid agency, USAID—and several other countries are also cutting their international aid budgets. 'Make no mistake, we are entering a new era, one in which, as you've heard, the world's poorest people can no longer rely on strong, steady support from the world's richest nations,' Suzman said. 'It is okay to be frustrated… We never thought we'd have to fight so hard to justify the importance of our work.' But, he continued: 'This is a fight we are ready for.' Reached after the gathering, one staff member at the foundation said that colleagues' mood has been 'pretty optimistic and enthusiastic' after the $200 billion announcement. 'We are super energized thinking about what legacy building looks like and how we can work ourselves out of a job by building local capacity and empowering our partners to continue the mission,' the staffer wrote to Fortune. Suzman said the foundation's goals have not changed. 'When critical coalitions seem to crumble before our eyes, we cannot just shrink our ambitions,' he said. 'When the very idea of hope for a better future starts to sound naïve or out of date, we must remind people that our optimism does not come easily. It has been hard-earned. It is not based on blind faith, but concrete, measurable results.' Gates asked his employees to reinvigorate their drive to achieve the foundation's core mission, bring new partners along, and invest in the potential of AI to help alleviate poverty and play a key role in drug discovery. 'I really believe, and I hope it's not a naive belief, that we can achieve—despite the headwinds—even more over the next 20 years than we did in the first 25,' he said. This story was originally featured on
Chicago Tribune
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Major Theaster Gates retrospective to open at the Smart Museum this fall
You know who's never had a big solo museum show in his own hometown? Strange as this sounds: Theaster Gates, the renowned, longtime Chicago artist, sculptor, community developer, collector, painter and all-around renaissance man. That's why, beginning Sept. 23, the Smart Museum of Art (5550 S. Greenwood Ave.) at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park will open a landmark mid-career retrospective of Gates' far-flung art practices, using most of the museum's space, drawing on his paintings, pottery, films, installations and reclamation projects. 'Theaster Gates: Unto Thee,' set to run through Feb. 22, 2026, will be the first large-scale attempt by a Chicago institution to place a traditional museum framework around a local artist best known for 20 years of non-traditional, not-always-gallery-obvious works. How, after all, can a gallery develop a retrospective of an artist whose acclaim often derives from the transformation of South Side communities? Depending on the critic, Gates, 51, a professor of visual art at the University of Chicago, is a land artist. Or he occupies the social practice niche of the arts world. Or he's an essayist revisiting little-known histories using salvaged materials. Or he's just an ambitious archivist. ArtReview called Gates a 'poster boy for socially engaged art.' England's Tate Liverpool museum described him as no less than 'one of the world's most influential living artists.' Yet he's not often shown in Chicago. He began as a potter and has since created hundreds of installations, paintings and sculptures, but Gates is still best known for remaking a series of bungalows in the Dorchester neighborhood into sort-of living artworks, employing the reclaimed materials from those buildings and making room for local artists. He's bought up the entire stock of a fading record store. He's acted as preservationist for the last remnants of Johnson Publishing (the Chicago home of Ebony and Jet magazines). In 2015, he reopened a 1923 savings and loan as the Stony Island Arts Bank, a combination exhibition space, library, archive and home to the Rebuild Foundation, his group focused on using arts and culture to revitalize disinvested Chicago spaces. In a quiet spot on Stony Island Avenue, beside the bank, is the gazebo in which 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police in 2014. Gates reclaimed that, too. How, in other words, does a museum do justice to that inside gallery walls? The Smart's answer is by mingling Gates' creations with his reclaimed projects, then expanding the exhibition into a number of the places developed by Gates, many of which are only blocks away from the institution. 'A traditional museum show keeps most of its programming inside the museum,' said Smart Director Vanja Malloy. 'But the experience of some of the places Theaster invested in is really only captured by going there.' Programming will sprawl to Stony Island and beyond; the opening reception will happen simultaneously at the Smart and Gates' other spaces. This is not, of course, Gates' first substantial exhibition. Far from it. The Museum of Contemporary Art, in 2013, hosted a large installation by Gates of repurposed pews from Bond Chapel at the University of Chicago. He's had major showings at the Venice Biennale, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and countless international galleries. A 2007 solo show at the Hyde Park Art Center focused on dozens of Gates' clay plates. 'Unto Thee,' though, will showcase new paintings, sculptures and films, beside such reclamation works as Bond's church pews, a chunk of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the personal library of University of Chicago Slavic language professor Robert Bird. Part of Gates' practice has been repurposing artifacts and collections cast off by the university. 'People talk about the art world like it's a monolith,' Gates said, 'and maybe Chicago institutions just had a specific sense of who was important at various moments. Plus, I am from Chicago but my studies were in Iowa, at Harvard, in South Africa. And I didn't go to art school. I was without a (museum) cohort in Chicago. People early in my career would ask what was there to buy? It was a badge of honor I led with ideas, though since those days, I've had a significant practice making objects. It just played out elsewhere. When I came home, I feel more like a nonprofit leader.' Indeed, if there's a theme in Gates' work, it's the stories and echoes heard from objects and materials those objects are made from. The exhibition will feature, for instance, glass slides Gates recovered from the art history department. Of 60,000 slides, only 50 were of African art; those were also marked 'primitive.' For the lobby of the Smart, Gates is creating a new installation using more than 350 African masks he recently acquired. Some are masterful works, but others are tourist trinkets, and when he bought the collection, both disposable and important were mixed together. 'I grew up in a situation where my mom and dad pointed towards happiness whenever they were broke,' he said. 'We would go to Mississippi in the summer and it wasn't a question of do we repair our old barn or get a new one. A new one wasn't an option. See, when obsolescence is not an option, you look more closely at what you have. My parents were hoarders, they just understood there is more life in a thing than most of us attribute. My practice is partly the demonstration of appreciating the things you have.' The retrospective, co-curated by Malloy and curator Galina Mardilovich, is the first exhibition that Malloy, a rising star in the museum scene, developed for the Smart after becoming director in 2022. Next year, she's leading the first Midwest exhibition of the Japanese collective teamLab, known for its immersive, science-based installations. Malloy, whose doctorate in art history considered the ways modern science influenced modern art, imagines 'the next chapter for the Smart going beyond Humanities. How do we partner with physics? Computer science? Chemistry?' She also anticipates a renewed commitment from the Smart, now in its 50th year, to local artists. 'I got to know Theaster when I was approached for this job,' she said. 'Until then I hadn't really appreciated the depth to which Chicago influenced his work or how he influenced the city. I asked him if he ever had a big solo museum show. When he said no, that sounded like a lost opportunity. I'm saying this as an outsider who only moved to the city two and half years ago, but perhaps Chicago didn't appreciate what it had?'
