Inspiring News Articles
Excerpts of Highly Inspiring News Articles in Major Media
Below are one-paragraph excerpts of highly inspiring news articles from the major media. Links are provided to the original inspiring news articles on their media websites. If any link fails, read this webpage. The most inspiring news articles are listed first. You can also explore the news articles listed by order of the date posted. For an abundance of other highly inspiring material, see our Inspiring Resources page. May these inspiring news articles inspire us to find ever more ways to love and support each other and all around us to be the very best we can be.
Five months before Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba's went public in September 2014, cofounders Jack Ma and Joseph Tsai created charitable trusts and seeded them with a combined 50 million in share options. Today those trusts are worth nearly $3.5 billion. It's one sign of a new age of large-scale philanthropy in China. Three decades after economic reforms paved the way for 400 billionaires to emerge ... extremely wealthy Chinese have started giving their money away in large sums ... according to research on China's top 100 philanthropists released Wednesday by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. "It's important to look at the trends in how rich people are giving back to society. We wanted to create healthy competition among donors and shift the national debate from wealth creation to philanthropy," said Peiran Wei, who led the research. Among the 100 philanthropists, the average donation was around $8 million. They gave most often to education. "If you're a businessman in China, it's probably easier for you to make money than to give it away. It's not a free market for philanthropy," Wei said. More than half of the philanthropists gave to charities affiliated with the government. Wei speculates this is ... because these are some of the few entities today that can handle giving at a large scale. However, 19 donors on the list have created private foundations, which Wei says signals a shift toward more professionalized philanthropy.
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The history of science is, like so much else, a human history. But history tends to get simplified; a map becomes a single road leading from point to point. It's not surprising that some scientists who contributed invaluably to the field have been kept out of the dominant narrative because they were women. But in the last days of the 19th century and the early days of the 20th, Henrietta Swan Leavitt - one of the many woman "computers" at the Harvard Observatory - used the measurements of variable stars to determine fixed distances across space. And fifty years later, Katherine Johnson - a black woman working at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia when the state was still deeply segregated - would map John Glenn's space flight, and America's trip to the moon. Women are indelible contributors to the field, and two of this year's best histories - Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, and Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe - are out to prove it. There's deep value to these stories in the here and now. Women fought prejudice (twice over, in the case of Hidden Figures) and did crucial work that shaped our understanding and exploration of the universe. From a glass-plate storage room in the Observatory, Williamina Fleming could look at a far-off star and map it in a sea of numbers; in a segregated Virginia, Katherine Johnson could look at a sea of numbers and map out a path to the Moon. Taken together, these books make a case not just for acknowledging women's contributions to the field, but for the value of science itself.
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