Peter Nachtrieb seems like such a nice young playwright, not at all the sort to open a play with the slaughter of a lamb in a Gen-X couple’s living room. Perhaps more discomforting is how funny it is. In Hunter Gatherers, the San Francisco-based Nachtrieb’s play, our cultured selves and the primal ones that roil …

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Sixty million children in India will get added help in basic math, reading and writing from the non-profit organization Pratham, thanks in part to a $9.1 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett and Bill &  Melinda Gates foundations, Pratham leaders announced today. The grant supports Pratham’s Read India initiative, …

Former Mexican president Vicente Fox, who while in office backed a precedent-setting law in support of the public’s right to government information, recently learned the hard way that the offspring of democracy can be unruly. Last month, the Mexican political magazine Emeequis used the very freedom of information law that Fox championed to write stories …

Forget the old public school model of learning history by memorizing facts. The Historical Thinking Matters Web site lets students do what real historians do: read the historical evidence and decide for themselves. Right now the site, a joint project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the School …

“Foundations” is a series of informal question-and-answer sessions with employees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Moy Eng is the director of the Foundation’s Performing Arts Program, which since 1967 has awarded nearly 1,500 grants totaling $135 million to performing arts organizations in the Bay Area. In the past year, the Performing Arts Program …

What does a lonely stretch of wheat fields along the southeastern border of Washington State have to do with the work of the Hewlett Foundation? It’s the home of the Stateline Wind Energy Center, the nation’s largest wind farm and one of more than a dozen sources of clean energy from which the Foundation has …

MENLO PARK, Calif. – From a Boston public broadcaster that wants to open its multimedia educational archive to the world, to a Dutch research group that will fund studies of how reproductive health affects economic development, a total of 144 organizations recently were awarded $100.3 million in grants from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. …

MENLO PARK, Calif. – Julie Fry, a veteran arts director, and Marc Vogl, the founder of a San Francisco sketch comedy group, will join the Performing Arts Program of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as program officers, the program’s director, Moy Eng, announced today. “I am delighted to welcome Julie and Marc to the …

MENLO PARK, Calif. – A group of leading automotive researchers working with the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has concluded that significant increases in fuel-economy standards for vehicles are possible with no loss of safety. The group’s findings were released today in a report entitled “Sipping Fuel and Saving Lives: Increasing Fuel …

“Foundations” is an occasional series of informal question-and-answer sessions with employees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to let them explain their work. Rhea Suh is an Environment Program Officer who works with grantees on environmental issues from the farthest reaches of Alaska, through Western Canada, to the Mexican border. She received a B.A. …