Weekly Roundup March 3, 2023
2 min readMar 3, 2023
Interesting things I read, saw, and more this week. Got hit by a norovirus this week and celebrated my birthday sipping generic Pedialyte — so not that much to report!
Best reads 📚
- Florida Could Start Looking a Lot Like Hungary by Michelle Goldberg. New DeSantis bill in Florida is “almost an apocalyptic bill for higher education,” one that is “orders of magnitude worse than anything we’ve seen, either in the recent or the distant past….This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.”
- The Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians by Taylor Brorby. “According to PEN America, 41 percent of books banned throughout the 2021–22 school year contained L.G.B.T.Q. themes, protagonists or prominent secondary characters.”
- Newsrooms need to do more to protect journalists from online harassment by Naseem Miller. “Interviewees expressed deep frustration that they couldn’t control when they might face punitive measures from their newsroom managers for something they posted.” It really struck me that some described their newsroom’s response as worse than the harassment itself.
Photo 📸
😞
The death of friend and pioneering digital journalist Mandy Jenkins just really rocked me this week. Knowing that it was coming didn’t make it any easier. Rest in peace, Mandy.
Listening to 👂
- Alphabet Boys, a podcast by my friend Trevor Aaronson. Prepare to be enraged by this story of how the FBI used a questionable informant to infiltrate and stoke violence at racial justice protests in Denver in 2020, characterizing activists as “anti-government extremists” and “Black identity extremists.”
Engagement Journalism News
- Lam Thuy Vo has joined our school as an associate professor of data journalism. She is also starting a new job as a reporter at The Markup. Lam has taught in the engagement program and she is beloved by students! 🥳
