In the Media

WBZ News Radio’s Art Cohen reports that a study by MIT researchers finds 70% of market-rate evictions in the City of Boston are in communities of color.

Karilyn Crockett, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, has been named the new Chief of Equity for the City of Boston. “Do we have the will and the courage to dream new dreams for populations long denied what we actually deserve?” says Crockett. “I believe we do.”

Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions and student financial services, discusses the statement by admissions deans aimed at assuaging the anxieties of college applicants during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I believe that the most important thing for students to do right now is to take care of themselves and those around them, and not to overworry about how this will all affect their college application,” says Schmill.

STAT reporter Sharon Begley writes that MIT Press and the University of California at Berkeley are starting a journal that will publish reviews of Covid-19 research. “Preprints have been a tremendous boon for scientific communication, but they come with some dangers,” said Nick Lindsay, director of journals at the MIT Press. “We want to debunk research that’s poor and elevate research that’s good.”

MIT Press and the University of California at Berkeley are launching a new Covid-19 journal that will peer-review popular preprint articles, reports Lindsay McKenzie for Inside Higher Ed. “We want to ensure that clinicians and researchers have trusted information they need to make crucial decisions,” says Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access at MIT Press.

Wall Street Journal reporter David Harrison writes that a study by MIT researchers provides evidence that use of public transportation is associated with a higher Covid-19 death rate. The researchers found “a 10% increase in the share of a county’s residents who use public transit versus those who telecommute raised Covid-19 death rates by 1.21 per 1,000 people when looking at counties around the U.S.”

Reporting for WGBH, Tori Bedford examines a new study by MIT researchers that shows evictions disproportionately impact communities of color. The researchers found that, “tenants living in market-rate apartments in Roxbury, which is 90% people of color, are evicted seven times more than tenants in Allston/Brighton, which is 62% white.”

A new report co-authored by MIT researchers finds that evictions tend to hit Black communities hardest in the City of Boston, reports Zoe Greenberg and Tim Logan for The Boston Globe. “The share of Black renters in a neighborhood is a better predictor of market rate eviction filings than income, rental burden, or other economic factors,” says graduate student David Robinson.

AP reporter Michael Casey writes that a report co-authored by MIT researchers finds people of color are disproportionately affected by evictions in the City of Boston. “The results are very troubling,” says Prof. Justin Steil. “We see white supremacy and anti-blackness functioning in the housing markets as well as other areas of social life.”

NPR’s Scott Simon remembers former MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Simon notes that Hawley’s “Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow projects prophesied so much of the ways in which our world would become digitally connected.”

Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Charles Stewart III underscores the importance of developing strategies that allow Americans to safely vote in-person. “The current trajectory in many states suggests that the demand for in-person voting will hugely outstrip the supply of poll workers and polling places,” writes Stewart. “This imbalance erects barriers to voter participation and needlessly jeopardizes the health of poll workers and voters.”

Quartz reporter Anne Quito spotlights The Future of Work Grand Challenge, a competition aimed at bridging the gap between education and employment. Quito notes that as part of the challenge, MIT Solve is hosting a “six-month competition to crowdsource innovative programs to assist unemployed or underemployed workers to land better careers.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Lee Hotz explores Prof. Markus Buehler’s work transforming the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus into music. In the coronavirus’s spike protein, “the structural complexity translates into musical complexity,” says Buehler. “There are many, many melodies layered into each other. It has a balance of order and disorder.”

A new report co-authored by MIT researchers finds that genomic information from sewer systems combined with cell phone data could be used to help prevent another global pandemic, reports Kim Tunnicliffe for WBZ Radio.

WBUR’s Lisa Mullins spotlights the life and work of former Prof. Michael Hawley, whose “accomplishments seemed too vast for one life.”