Journalism

Writing for The New York Times, Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, reviews “Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life,” a new book by Jason Roberts. “The author of ‘Every Living Thing,’ is not a fan of the founding father of taxonomy, whom he rather hilariously describes as ‘a Swedish doctor with a diploma-mill medical degree and a flair for self-promotion,’” writes Blum. “But the snark is not merely entertainment — the portrait is central to the main thesis of Roberts’s engaging and thought-provoking book, one focused on the theatrical politics and often deeply troubling science that shape our definitions of life on Earth.”

In an article for The Guardian, Angela Saini, an instructor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, details her research studying the origins of the patriarchy. “Anthropologists have documented at least 160 matrilineal societies still in existence today, in which people trace their lineage through the women in their family rather than the men,” explains Saini. “There is an entire ‘matrilineal belt’ that stretches across Africa, and others dotted across Asia and North and South America.”

A team of MIT scholars and journalists are underscoring that artificial intelligence could advance colonialism in a three-part series supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center, reports Ellen McGirt for Fortune. “While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the A.I. industry is repeating this violence [plunder and slavery] today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealth and powerful at the great expense of the poor,” says the team.

A new study co-authored by Prof. Ariel White finds that news outlets can impact the issues Americans talk about, reports Deborah Netburn of the Los Angeles Times. As the authors note in the study, “The decisions made in the nation’s editorial boardrooms have remarkably large effects on the character and composition of the national conversation.”

Writing for The New York Times Magazine, Wil S. Hylton highlights Prof. Ethan Zuckerman’s work examining how information travels around the internet. Zuckerman and his colleagues examined whether the internet, “serves mainly as a distribution network for the articles on major media, or if small blogs and websites can funnel their own stories back into the mainstream press.”

In an article for The Huffington Post, research scientist Matthew Carroll shares his experience working on the Boston Globe team that uncovered decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, as recounted in the film Spotlight. “Our original stories in 2002 were a catalyst for helping many survivors get the help they needed,” says Carroll.

Steve Annear writes for Boston Magazine about FOLD, a platform created by Media Lab researchers Kevin Hu and Alexis Hope designed to add elements that enhance news story narratives. FOLD is designed to keep readers on the same page, eliminating the hassle of needing to visit additional sites for information.