we do love a naturesplainer boi
Okay have you guys seen the Guy With Chicago Accent Rescues Coyote Puppy video on Twitter yet (and also this tweet revealing that he is also very tattooed and very hot)???? Yes??
Excellent, ‘cause then the only other thing you have to do today is read about the mysterious man behind it all: he won’t reveal his name, but he did tell the Chicago Tribune about A) what happened to the coyote (fair warning, it’s not Disney material) and B) how he wants his amateur botany YouTube channel (“Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t”) to serve as an unconventional form of science communication, hammed-up accent and all. Because, after all, the only thing we love more than a gentle nature boi is a rethinking-traditional-forms-of-media boi.
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Welcome back to "Seriously?", where Karen K. Ho points to stuff that deserves more consideration in the media.
Jeffrey Epstein's financial ties to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the university's Media Lab went much deeper than previously disclosed, leading to the resignation of one of its top members.
On August 15, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito published a note admitting he met Epstein in 2013, invited him to the Lab and visited several of Epstein's residences. Zuckerman never met Epstein.
Epstein donated money to the Media Lab through some of his foundations and also invested in several of Ito's investment funds focused on tech startup companies outside of MIT.
The Boston Globe reports that public documents show Epstein's foundation and nonprofit gave MIT at least $200,000.
Yesterday, Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Media Lab's Center for Civic Media, published a note explaining his upcoming departure at the end of the school year as a result of learning about Epstein's donations to the Lab as well as Ito's other financial relationships with Epstein.
Zuckerman plans to move his work out of the Media Lab by the end of the academic year so he can take care of his students and staff. "The work my group does focuses on social justice and on the inclusion of marginalized individuals and points of view," he wrote. "It’s hard to do that work with a straight face in a place that violated its own values so clearly in working with Epstein and in disguising that relationship."
Notably, Zuckerman cited the sharing (leak?) of a private note to the most recent recipients of the Lab's Disobedience Prize -- three women honoured for their work fighting sexual harassment and assault in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- with the Boston Globe as the reason for news of his departure becoming public before he wanted it to.
Zuckerman ended his note by saying, "Everyone at the Media Lab is going through a process of figuring out how they should react to the news of Epstein and his engagement with the Lab. I hope that everyone else gets to do it first with their students and teams before doing it in the press."
Other notable news:
G/O Media's loss is Wired.com's gain. Editor extraordinaire Megan Greenwell gave a deeply candid interview to the Daily Beast about her sports-obsessed bosses for what felt like seconds before she was officially scooped up by Conde Nast. The cost of retaining great talent is often deeply underestimated, especially for something like a woman in sports media, but many companies would rather pray for another acquisition than admit to poor HR practices and questionable changes in editorial strategy.
He was serious about Greenland. The extensive coverage of the President's illogical comments musing about buying Greenland (and the bewildered response from the prime minister of Denmark about how the semi-autonomous territory was not for sale) have resulted in a cancelled trip to the Scandinavian country originally scheduled for September 2 and 3. Barack Obama's trip there on September 28 is still a go.
For some, it's never enough. A column in the National Review argues The 1619 Project published by the New York Times is missing key African American figures. It fails to acknowledge that the project is bound by magazine constraints and is not a textbook; the newspaper is continuing to publish more work related to the project in the next few months, including a podcast series with The Daily; or that demand for the issue was so high that additional single copies sold out online in a matter of hours.
The crisis point is now. Smoke from a massive forest fire in Brazil's Amazon rainforest was so bad it blanketed the city of Sao Paolo, causing it to go dark for an hour Monday afternoon. Reuters reports there have been approximately 73,000 fires detected this year. What's alarming is how much of the flames and the extensive damage have been happening over the last six months, and how little international coverage the issue is getting, despite the global implications.
Do better. Summer isn't even over yet, but for many young ambitious journalists the pressure is already back on with the announcement that the Washington Post is accepting applications for its 2020 summer internship. Recently, a report from the Asian American Journalists Association's college program Voices found "two out of three summer interns from seven top newsrooms came from among the most selective colleges in America". If the journalism industry has major issues with trust and diversity, recruiting has to more actively include students and graduates of state schools, HBCUs and non-American educational institutions.
Massive pay inequalities at NPR. Paul Farhi reports that former news director Michael Oreskes received a 25 per cent pay raise, including an $80,000 bonus and a total compensation of $427,809, the year he was fired for sexual harassment allegations. By comparison, union negotiations for pay raises that year yielded a three-year contract with annual increases of 2.5 per cent. Other men at the organization that received significant pay increases in 2017 included Scott Simon's 16 per cent over prior year (to $479,578); Steve Inskeep's 10.5 per cent (to $509,680); and the now-retired Robert Siegel received 5 per cent (to $455,109).
NPR interns are currently paid $530 per week, 15 times less than Oreskes' former salary in 2017 and 18.5 times less than Inskeep's.