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MIT Media Lab director, Joichi Ito, resigns as extent of financial connections to Jeffrey Epstein widens

2019-09-07T16:46:00-04:00

Mr. Ito stepped down less than a day after an article in The New Yorker described the measures officials at the lab took to conceal the relationship with Mr. Epstein, who killed himself in jail last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges. Mr. Ito sent a copy of the resignation email to The New York Times after repeated requests for comment.

“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” Ito wrote in an email to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost Martin A. Schmidt, according to The New York Times.

The New Yorker report, written by investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, can be found here.

MIT Media Lab leadership under scrutiny for financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein

2019-09-05T19:00:00-04:00

MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito has faced pressure to resign after revealing that he took research funding from financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But today Nicholas Negroponte, who cofounded the Media Lab in 1985 and was its director for 20 years, said he had recommended that Ito take Epstein’s money. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeated, more emphatically, “‘Take it.’”

Both Joichi Ito, MIT Media Lab director, and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, have come under scrutiny in recent days as news that a portion of the lab's funding was donated by convicted sex trafficking billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, MIT Technology Review reports.

Epstein, who reportedly donated at least $525,000 to the MIT Media Lab, died by suicide in August while awaiting trail for a series of new sex trafficking-related charges.

Cultural offerings at The Shed dry up as fashion week, artists avoid the venue due to developer's Trump donations

2019-09-05T14:30:00-04:00

Hudson Yards’ nonprofit arts center, The Shed, has been shunned by the fashion elite since developer Stephen Ross’ Trump ties were exposed in early August. Sources say that Michael Kors, Vera Wang and the Academy of Art University were all slated to show their collections at the sleek, $475 million venue but have pulled out. Rag & Bone publicly nixed the space, which opened in April, right after news broke of Ross’ Aug. 9 Trump fundraiser in the Hamptons.

Fern Mallis, the mogul who created New York Fashion Week in the 1990s, told The New York Post that The Shed is “kind of over,” adding, “If you know people showing at The Shed, please tell me because I don’t know who is."

The fallout comes after news broke in August that Stephen Ross, one of the developers behind the Hudson Yards development, was hosting a $250,000-a-seat fundraiser for President Donald Trump. The news was met with boycotts of many Ross-affiliated business enterprises.

Exploiting the complicated politics of transit expansion

2019-08-08T19:29:00-04:00

Proposition 105, a measure backed by a group called Building a Better Phoenix, would halt all future light rail expansions, directing already-earmarked tax dollars toward “other transportation improvements”—mostly road construction. Like a number of efforts to kill urban-rail plans around the U.S., the initiative to stop Phoenix’s transit development has ties to Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group funded by David H. Koch and Charles Koch.

CityLab's Laura Bliss delves into the multi-faceted and contentious back-and-forth effort to build new light rail infrastructure in Phoenix, Arizona, where issues of urban equity, dark political money, and changing transportation needs have rankled residents of all stripes.

U.S. to start tracking secret buyers of luxury real estate

2016-01-18T11:32:00-05:00

"Concerned about illicit money flowing into luxury real estate, the Treasury Department said Wednesday that it would begin identifying and tracking secret buyers of high-end properties." "The initiative is part of a broader federal effort to increase the focus on money laundering in real estate."