Social Responsibility

Thousands of people who had spent days stranded at the Burning Man festival in a rain-gorged stew of mud and slop began to pack up their camps on Monday and stream away from the sprawling site in remote northwest Nevada.“Exodus operations have officially begun,” organizers wrote in a post on social media.But it was a mucky, uncertain trek. The ancient lake bed where the annual festival is held was beginning to dry and harden on Monday after days of torrential rain, but drivers said they were still encountering foot-deep puddles and stretches of muddy bog along the five-mile route from…

You hear two stories about how private companies raise money to grow. One is that the regulations on them are too restrictive, depriving the nation of innovation and jobs. The other is that the regulations are too loose, harming naïve investors.A new study makes a pretty strong case for the “too loose” story, at least in the case of one class of investors: employees of those private companies. You might not think of employees as investors, but they definitely are if they are paid with stock options, warrants or other forms of equity compensation.Employees can be surprisingly uninformed about the…

Sunset along the Kakhovka Reservoir in central Ukraine, especially in summer, used to be gorgeous: kids played in the shallow water near the shore, men fished and young couples walked under the pine trees as the last traces of sunlight reflected off the water.But after the destruction of a major dam just downriver, that shimmering lake, one of Europe’s biggest, simply disappeared. Now all that remains is a 150-mile-long meadow.For 60-plus years, the Bezhan family ran a fishing business on these shores. They bought boats, nets, freezers and enormous rumbling ice-making machines, and generation after generation made a living off…

Dianne Feinstein makes news these days for the health challenges that seem to keep mounting, but behind her story is another, which few pay attention to. It’s the story of the family and friends who are now caregivers, who juggle the unpredictability of the day-to-day with the inevitability of the long term. No matter how many people have traveled ahead of us on the caregiving journey and have shared their experiences, it always feels like a pilgrim’s path, lonely and strange.When I watched the news clip of Senator Feinstein starting to give prepared comments on an $823 billion military budget,…

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, who briefly became “Joe the Plumber,” the metaphorical American middle-class Everyman, by injecting himself into the 2008 presidential campaign in an impromptu nationally-televised face-off with Barack Obama over taxing small businesses, died on Sunday at his home in Campbellsport, Wis., about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. He was 49.The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Wurzelbacher, said.Mr. Obama, then a United States senator from Illinois, was campaigning on Shrewsbury Street, in a working-class neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, on Sunday, Oct. 12, 2008, when Mr. Wurzelbacher interrupted a football catch with his son in his…

President Biden offered his support and condolences to a Florida community hit hard by Hurricane Idalia after being snubbed by Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor and a potential rival for the presidency.Mr. Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, took an aerial tour of Live Oak, a small town east of Tallahassee; received a briefing from federal and local emergency medical workers; and met with members of the community. In brief remarks, the president vowed that the federal government would support those affected for as long as it takes to recover.“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “The federal government,…

Bill Richardson, who served two terms as governor of New Mexico and 14 years as a congressman, then continued to devote himself to liberating Americans who were being held hostage or who he believed were being wrongfully detained by hostile countries overseas, died on Friday at his summer home in Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 75.His death was announced by the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, which he founded. A cause was not given.Under President Bill Clinton, Mr. Richardson was also ambassador to the United Nations, succeeding Madeleine Albright in early 1997, after having served in the House…

It was all rainbows and unicorns for a while. But like many fun ideas, Big Gay Ice Cream has wound up in debt and in court.With a rollicking rise that leveraged queer identity as a brand strategy, the New York City-based soft-serve chain opened seven shops in the Northeast and landed its products in supermarkets nationwide. The company now is down to just one location.On Friday, a founder and partner, Doug Quint, filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court accusing another partner, Jon Chapski, of mismanaging the company and fraudulently collecting government loans during the pandemic.On Tuesday afternoon,…

As thousands of attendees at the Burning Man festival in a remote stretch of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada were told on Saturday to conserve food, water and fuel after heavy rainfall trapped them in thick mud, the police opened an investigation into the death of a person during the event.The Pershing County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the family of the victim had been notified, but that no further information was available early Sunday because the investigation was continuing.Burning Man, which takes place in Black Rock City and began last Sunday, was interrupted by heavy rains…