Said and Done | In the Media + Awards | September 2018
 


A section of Said and Done
Full September 2018 edition



MEDIA AND INFORMATION

COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES
How "fake news" was born at the 1968 convention | Heather Hendershot
Today, it’s taken for granted that much of our news coverage is slanted left or right, but in the network era there was still a deeply held belief that news could (and should) be completely neutral. The tumult of the 1960s tore apart that notion.
Commentary at Politico


POLITICAL SCIENCE
Conspiracy theories are more rampant than ever. Can they be stopped?
In 2017, MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky showed that directly refuting the rumors of death panels and euthanasia associated with the Affordable Care Act raised the portion of those who dismissed the claim, from 50% to 57%.
Commentary at The Guardian


READING AND COGNITION
Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound
"When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age."
Article at The Guardian

"As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating....We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop."

— Maryanne Wolf, The Guardian



DEMOCRACY


DEMOCRACTIC REPRESENTATION
Democracy by the numbers | by Alma Steingart PhD '13 (HASTS)
Fundamental fairness in American democracy seems easy, at least as the US Supreme Court interpreted it in 1964: one person, one vote. But this simplicity is misleading. When voters are allocated to districts, the districts can then drastically affect the composition of the legislatures representing them after Election Day.
Commentary at L.A. Review of Books


POLITICAL SCIENCE | VOTING SECURITY
Expert panel calls for sweeping election security measures | Charles Stewart III
MIT political scientist Charles Stewart, one of the study's authors, called that money a "down payment" on what's needed to overhaul the voting landscape, including new public-private partnerships to spur innovation.
Story at the New York TimesReport: Securing the Vote | MIT Election Lab
 

POLITICAL SCIENCE | ELECTION INTEGRITY
Despite hacking fears, a vote for digital ballots | Charles Stewart III
Stewart, a professor in the political science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted existing absentee ballot systems aren't tamper-proof either. For instance, West Virginia and many other states allow military absentees to submit ballots through fax machines, a dated and highly hackable technology. 
Story at The Boston Globe
 

ECONOMICS | ROLE OF DEMOCRACY IN GROWTH ECONOMIES
How tariffs and corruption can ruin a growing economy | Daron Acemoglu
In a 2016 working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Acemoglu and his co-authors write that one feature shared by many high-growth countries — a democratic government — “increases future GDP by encouraging investment, increasing schooling, inducing economic reforms, improving public good provision, and reducing social unrest.”
Story at the Washington Post
 


A ruined hotel in Ivory Coast, Issouf Sanogo, AFP, Getty Images



POLITICAL SCIENCE | ELECTION INTEGRITY
MIT's Stewart and other election experts say Kobach's voter fraud claims are false
Charles Stewart, a professor at MIT pointed out that while there have been isolated instances of voter fraud, there is no evidence to indicate that it is a widespread problem in US elections and that any assertions to the contrary are inaccurate.
Story at CNN
 

ECONOMY |  CENTRALIZATION AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Against states' rights   
MIT's Daron Acemoglu argues that centralised states are so beneficial to regular citizens that elites have an incentive to “strategically opt for a non-centralized state so as not to induce the citizens to organize nationally.” Centralised and powerful states are not a universal positive, of course, and Acemoglu writes elsewhere that they work best with strong civil societies to challenge them.
Story at Financial Times (sub req)
 


PHILOSOPHY
 


Kieran Setiya, MIT Professor of Philosophy; photo by Jon Sachs
 

PHILOSOPHY
And then what? | Review of Midlife by MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya
What happens when we ask a philosopher for advice?
Review at the Times Literary SupplementAbout Midlife
 



SOCIAL INNOVATION
 

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
The origins of America's gun obsession | John Tirman
America's gun culture isn't only a product created by the NRA and gun lobby; the nation's penchant for firearms has its roots deep in colonial attitudes, "nourishing the country's entire history."
Article at WBUR Online


HISTORY | UNIVERSITIES AND SLAVERY
William & Mary seeks ideas for memorial to slaves who helped create school   
Colleges and universities in the south and north have been grappling with their role as slave owners or beneficiaries of the slave trade. In the book Ebony and Ivy, Craig Steven Wilder, a professor of history at MIT, explores how American institutions of higher learning “became rooted in the slave economies of the colonial world.”
Story at The Washington Post  |  MIT & Slavery: an ongoing undergraduate research project


COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES / WRITING
How and why to waste time | Alan Lightman
"I suggest that the psychological destruction caused by our frenzied lifestyles, while subtle and sometimes invisible, may be as catastrophic as the destruction of our physical environment by our heedless pollution and consumption. We need to develop a new habit of mind about our pace of life."
Story at Washington Post


COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES / WRITING
How fiction makes the suffering of immigrants real | Amy Carleton
Though news reports may remind us daily of the institutional indignities faced by members of immigrant communities, a video clip or statistic is not enough to show us the full trajectory of lived experience. But deep reading, or what literary critic Frank Kermode calls "spiritual reading,” can stretch our empathy and understanding in ways that other media cannot.
Commentary at WBUR's Cognoscenti
 


Image via WBUR Cognoscenti



SECURITY STUDIES


This 9/11, end the Afghanistan War | Barry Posen
"War is the extension of policy, aimed at national goals. It is plain that we have no actual strategic policy in Afghanistan — no plausible purpose other than using taxpayer money, the lives of American soldiers and the deaths of Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire to protect U.S. leaders against the possibility of future blame. America's longest war should stop."
Commentary at USA Today
 

US/North Korea Talks have been a disaster since Trump met with Kim Jong Un | Vipin Narang
Narang says it’s a good thing that Pyongyang is dismantling the rocket-launch facility. But it’s a positive step having less to do with North Korea’s missile-launching ability, and more to do with how it will make the Trump administration look. “It gives Trump some cover, and it doesn’t give the president or [National Security Adviser] John Bolton any reason to ramp up the ‘fire and fury’ rhetoric.” he said.
Story at Vox


North Korea's latest angry statement toward the US, explained | Vipin Narang
Vipin Narang, an expert on North Korea's nuclear program at MIT, says North Korea's statement effectively boils down to “we did everything we said we would, now it's your turn to show us the money, literally.” What's more, North Korea would like to see a declaration to end the Korean War — which technically continues to this day — and the dissolution of a UN military command on the Korean peninsula.
Story at Vox


Trump's bet on Kim Jong Un is looking increasingly shaky | Jim Walsh
"This was a nontraditional strategy, but sometimes nontraditional strategies work," said Jim Walsh, an expert in North Korea nuclear diplomacy in MIT's Security Studies Program. Walsh argues that it was always unrealistic to think North Korea would throw itself on the mercy of the U.S. by unilaterally dispensing with its nuclear arsenal.
Story at CNN
 

Pompeo names a special representative | Vipin Narang 
“In general, I view having a Special Representative as better than not having one, and by all accounts Biegun has experience, heft, and so far the confidence of the President and Secretary of State. Those are ingredients for success, and making progress…if not on disarmament, at least arms control,” said Narang, a political scientist at MIT.
Story at Buzzfeed
 



SCIENCE WRITING | CLIMATE AND POVERTY


A leader in the war on poverty opens a new front: pollution | by Kendra Pierre-Louis '16
Superb reporting by our Pierre-Louis '16, climate reporter for The New York Times, making the connection between environmental justice, climate change, and poverty.

Story at The New York Times | Kendra Pierre-Louis '16
 

"Fifty years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. started a movement known as the Poor People’s Campaign, Dr. Barber has been working to revive it. He is best known as the architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement protests in North Carolina that opposed voting-rights restrictions. Now he is making environmental justice and climate change a pillar of a modern-day war on poverty." — Kendra Pierre-Louis, Climate Desk, The New York Times
 



SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY


Loopholes and the 'anti-realism' of the quantum world | David Kaiser
“Physicists have had to grapple with wave-particle duality as an essential, strange feature of quantum theory for a century,” said Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at MIT. Now, Kaiser and his colleagues have built such a source of randomness using photons coming from distant quasars, some from more than halfway across the universe."
Story at Wired


Is your kid friends with Alexa? MIT professor Turkle on what that means for their development   
Author of Reclaiming Conversation, Turkle worries that while people of all ages can get taken in by the illusion of caring machines, kids are particularly vulnerable. Turkle discussed why robots threaten the development of empathy, and what parents can do.
Story at NBC News


There will never be an age of artificial intimacy | Sherry Turkle
Robots may be better than nothing, but they still won’t be enough. "Instead of trying to make robots more pretend-empathic, can't we work on making us more genuinely empathic? That is the more human choice."
Commentary in the New York Times
 



ECONOMICS AND POVERTY ALLEVIATION


LONG TERM GROWTH
Are Trump's policies hurting long-term US growth? | Daron Acemoglue
"A wide range of studies – from the work of the late economist David Landes to more recent research by MIT's Daron Acemoglu and the University of Chicago's James A Robinson – find that institutions and political culture are the single most important determinants of long-term growth. Recovery from the damage Trump is inflicting on institutions and political culture in the US may take years; if so, the economic costs could be considerable."
Story at The Guardian
 

ECONOMICS | ON BREVITY
David Autor and Amy Finkelstein call for more concise papers 
At this year's American Economics Association conference, MIT professor David Autor compared a 94-page working paper about the minimum wage to “being bludgeoned to death with a Nerf bat” and started a Twitter hashtag, #ThePaperIsTooDamnedLong.
Article at the Wall Street Journal


JOBS AND LABOR ECONOMICS
Rise in corporate market power offers clues to feeble wage growth | David Autor
Workers' share of income has declined most in industries where the power is concentrated among just a few major players, says MIT economist David Autor. He and a team of researchers argue that efficient, superstar firms with small numbers of employees have been driving profit and sales growth, thereby reducing labour's share of economic growth.
Story at Financial Times (sub req)
 

IMPACT OF CONCERNTRATION IN INDUSTRIES
Superstar chief executives can self-destruct | John Van Reenen 
MIT economist John Van Reenen analyses the phenomenon of concentration in industries, such as technology and media, and how they have become “winner-takes-all” markets.
Story at Financial Times (sub req)


ECONOMICS | TAXING SUGAR AND FAT?
"Sin" taxes are less efficient than they look | Jonathan Gruber
Gruber points out that taxing foods like sugar and fat is in a different category from taxing tobacco and alcohol, because people need food to live. It presents public-health problems only when people eat too much. 
Article at The Economist
 

INTERNATIONAL GIVING | WHO DECIDES?
Is cash better for the poor than conventional foreign aid? | GiveDirectly
Founded in 2009 by four graduate students in economics at MIT and Harvard, GiveDirectly has big ambitions to reshape international giving.
Story at The New York Times
 



RECENT AWARDS




COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES / WRITING
Marjorie Liu wins the comic industry's top writing award
"Liu took home a Best Writer Eisner Award for her work on the epic fantasy Monstress. The novelist, comic book writer, and attorney expressed shock at being the first woman to win the award in its 30-year history."
Story at Time Magazine


COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES
Sasha Costanza-Chock among winners of Journal of Design and Science essay contest
MIT Media Lab and MIT Press announce winners of the Journal of Design and Science essay competition, including Contanza-Chock, an associate professor of civic media. 
Story at MIT News  |  Essay: Design Justice, AI, and Escape from the Matrix of Domination


LITERATURE, COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES, GAME LAB
Three SHASS professors receive CAST Fay Chandler Faculty Creativity Seed Grants
Stephanie Frampton, Associate Professor of Literature (for ARTificial Intelligence); Mikael Jakobsson, Research Scientist in CMS/W and and Research Coordinator of the MIT Game Lab (for Maria: Voicing Counter Colonialism Through Board Game Creation); and Ken Urban, Senior Lecturer in Theater Arts (for The Immortals)
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Published 18 September 2018