This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.

As mindless diversions from a sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role. But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

• A focus on donor relationships by using Ask, Thank, Report, Repeat
• Adaptability – evolve or dissolve
• Social media crowd funding
• Cash-flow management

Administering the nearly four-million-word federal tax code involves so many arcane legalities, and is so fraught with potential to ignite Washington’s partisan skirmishes or infuriate taxpayers, that much of the I.R.S. is run by lawyers.

But the Exempt Organizations Division — concentrated in Cincinnati with fewer than 200 workers, according to I.R.S. officials — is staffed mostly with accountants, clerks and civil servants. Working for one of only three I.R.S. divisions not charged with collecting tax revenue, specialists in the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati primarily review and process roughly 70,000 applications for exemptions each year, relatively few from groups engaged in election activity.

Inside the agency, the unit was considered particularly unglamorous. “Nobody wants to be a determination agent,” said Jack Reilly, a former lawyer in the Washington office that oversaw exempt organizations. “It’s a job that just about everybody would be anxious to get out of it.”

The investigative-journalism organization ProPublica started a free online service today for searching the federal tax returns of more than 615,000 nonprofits.

ProPublica began building its Nonprofit Explorer tool on its Web site shortly after the Internal Revenue Service announced in April that it was making nonprofit tax returns available in a digital, searchable format.

ProPublica’s database provides nonprofit Form 990 information free back to 2001, including executive compensation, total revenue, and other critical financial data

Then there is the other way around and that can be good too. You can put wealth, and wealth management, and strategies, and competition, and metric and results over love and community and you can see philanthropy as Getting Things Done, as a creature of Pure Reason would and should. That is good too. But for those who have only that, I pray that at least in their family, or house of worship, or in a college reunion, or in a club, that they too participate in the economy of love and gratitude, lest in all that social investing they enter and leave unredeemed from the mind that calculates and dominates with the logic of input and output.

The evolving digital landscape is changing the way brands must communicate with their audiences to establish relevant, timely and actionable dialogues. We must remind ourselves that while brands may operate in channels, customers most certainly do not.

It’s critical to find a way to talk to targets online and offline — responding to their fickle natures with an experience that adapts and changes as often as their minds do. They are on a consumer journey, and you must join them.