2008 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grants announced. Probably the biggest name is the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross. [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on Sep 23, 2008 - 76 comments

"These are just slush funds for conservative interest groups" --The Compassion Capital Fund ($148 million of our money), and the Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program ($391.7 million of our money)--just 2 of many new programs. ...The distribution of new money to conservative organizations is a small part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year in federal grants to religious and religiously affiliated organizations.--except it's only to organizations who have policies that agree with Bush and the GOP agenda on social issues, and not about need.
posted by amberglow on Mar 22, 2006 - 61 comments

"The Alicia Patterson Foundation Program was established in 1965 ...[it awards] one-year grants...to working journalists to pursue independent projects of significant interest and to write articles based on their investigations for the The APF Reporter."
Almost all of the articles are online, with stories on everything from the death of New Burlington, Ohio (1973), to a 2003 series on cancer in Alaska and a mid-70's series on the Westpoint class of 1969. Lots more at the first link!
posted by OmieWise on Apr 6, 2005 - 3 comments

The Brits appear more concerned about 20-somethings and floundering young people than their American counterparts. They acknowledge that replacing grants with debt has a downside: "Students who fear getting into debt are also more likely to suffer from depression."
posted by sheauga on Aug 10, 2002 - 49 comments

Bill & Melinda Gates' $24 Billion Charity "The Gates Foundation often makes grants only on condition that governments or other nonprofits match them, and requires that recipients meet regular goals for performance—or risk losing their funding. (That hardball approach has met with criticism from some members of the philanthropic community, who argue that holding people to ambitious standards may make sense in Redmond but not in places where millions can’t read.) And experts have calculated that improvements in health care themselves have a huge ripple effect in the poorest countries: if parents believe their children will live longer, they save more and reproduce less. That will help create capital for investment, which will spur more development and so on, in a "positive feedback loop," as the techies like to say in Redmond."
posted by owillis on Jan 31, 2002 - 41 comments

Arrest imperils an internet grant Those who can teach, teach. But sometimes they get drunk instead and lose a nice grant...Not a Bush to be seen here. But still, it is Florida.
posted by Postroad on Apr 11, 2001 - 1 comment

Go Princeton! Student loans will become grants for any who can't afford $134K for 4 years. How relevant attending college is--except for networking and the social milieu I guess--for the post-Internet teen I'm not sure. But anything which makes information and education more available and less tied to income is a fine thing.
posted by aflakete on Feb 21, 2001 - 23 comments

MacArthur Foundation genius grants -- I didn't get one this year, but Ben Katchor did. So did some other astonishing people, such as Patricia J. Williams, of whose column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor" in The Nation I am a particular fan.
posted by elgoose on Jun 14, 2000 - 2 comments