Q-MHI Daily Brief ;

Good morning, Q-MHI readers!

What did the Weinstein Company board know and when did they know it?

In the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s firing, there are legitimate questions being raised as to why he was shown the door: Was it because of his hideous behavior, or because he was finally outed for it?

Either way, the message the board is desperately trying to send now, to the world, and to the men and women who still work for the company, is that sexual harassment will not be tolerated, no matter how powerful the abuser might be. But given the endemic nature of the problem (see: Cosby, Ailes, O’Reilly, SoFi, Uber, Amazon, and so on) and its damaging effect on the targets of the abuse and on the workplaces where it occurs, wouldn’t it make more sense for employers to send out a stronger zero-tolerance message from the outset?

After the implosion of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco in 2001, US regulators smelled a systemic sort of rot in the preparation of corporate financials. One response of the US Congress was to require the CEOs and CFOs of public companies to start personally certifying financial statements. What if CEOs and board members were similarly required—or even just volunteered—to certify annually that to their knowledge, no one in senior management had engaged in sexual harassment and that any harassment complaints brought to the company had been dealt with appropriately?

Certifications are no panacea given the lengths to which companies go to insulate executives who sign them. They might, however, make someone think twice before participating in the coverup of an executive’s brutish behavior.

Ultimately, the person responsible for Weinstein’s actions is Weinstein. But if the board knew what was happening—or even just suspected it—and still turned a blind eye to it, then the company is complicit in putting women in harm’s way and inviting the scrutiny it is now under.—Heather Landy ( Q-MHI ).

SPONSOR CONTENT BY LEE KUAN YEW SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY

When it comes to immigration Southeast Asia is nowhere close to a travel ban. Though the US has long been home for a huge number of the world’s huddled masses, Asia has played host to more immigrants than any other area since 2000. Money and youth are two big factors driving migration in the region.

FIVE THINGS ON Q-MHI WE ESPECIALLY LIKED

 Dwayne Johnson‏Verified account @TheRock

Motivating read from @corinnepurtill. A woman trying to balance the craziness of life. Glad I can help a little 

Crushing it with the Rock. Quartz at Work’s Corinne Purtill, a self-described working mother tired of getting her “ass kicked every day by the details of a basic life,” tried the Rock Clock, an iPhone “motivational alarm clock” from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Through her review, Purtill explores the power of motivation, and how the pro wrestler-turned-actor and motivational speaker has tapped into it. (Postscript: She’s even more inspired now that he personally roots for her on Twitter.)

A cruise for gay people in China. This summer, hundreds of members of China’s LGBT community and their parents climbed aboard the Glory Sea for a four-day cruise—and a chance to connect outside the restrictions of an often-discriminatory society. Zheping Huang was there to observe the bonds forged on the ship, along with weddings, workshops, passenger-led musical performances, and emotional conversations. “It was a family trip and a hookup party,” he explains, “a rebellion against stifling social mores—and an attempt to run away from them for a little while.”

Behavioral economics has a plan to fight poverty. Why do easily treatable patients still die in hospitals, and why did dozens of pilots accidentally crash-land their planes in World War 2? Karen Weese looks at work from Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely, Cass Sunstein, and others to understand “cockpit theory”—the idea that the design of our world is at least partly responsible for the results—and examines why pilots aren’t lectured about personal responsibility, but poor are blamed for outcomes largely beyond their level of control.

“Reverse missionaries” are trying to spread the faith in the UK.Brits are an increasingly secular bunch—but as Lily Kuo reports, churches in the UK dominated by people from the African diaspora are now attempting to bring native English folk back to the fold. As one Ethiopian pastor tells Quartz, “Britain brought the gospel to us in the past. Now, by God’s providence we are here when Christianity is very much challenged.”

Watch the deep ocean stretch our limits of perception and communication. The first episodes of Quartz’s “In the Deep” video series, produced by Erik Olsen and Solana Pyne, explore scientists’ efforts to understand the way octopuses, cuttlefish, and dolphins engage with each other—an enterprise akin to trying to communicate with aliens.

FIVE THINGS ELSEWHERE THAT MADE US SMARTER

Silicon Valley wants to disrupt politics. Trump’s election shook liberal Silicon Valley to its core, and tech leaders are reacting by treating politics like a startup. Vauhini Vara in California Sunday Magazine details how the president of startup incubator Y Combinator Sam Altman’s search for impact led him to target state and local elections.

Weaponizing Russian TV. Writing for Coda Story and Foreign Affairs, Amie Ferris-Rotman reports on how popular television has become a tool for the Kremlin to disseminate its political messages. Hit shows like Adaptation (the Russian version of the US show The Americans) and Sleepers (about a James Bond-like figure), Trojan-horse Vladimir Putin’s political messages (like Crimea must stay Russian). One comedy features a Putin impersonator that the president himself has been known to laugh at. The shows, writes Ferris-Rotman, give the impression of being self-critical, but ultimately aim to support the regime.

US prisoners are dying without air conditioning. Despite the rising temperatures of sweltering summers in America, few prisons have installed air conditioners or other basic measures to keep inmates cool. Prisoners complaints aren’t taken seriously and they are fatally overheating as a result, reports Maurice Chammah for the The Marshall Project, the Weather Channel, and Divided Films. They’ll likely continue to do so as hot weather becomes more prevalent due to climate change.

Slower-growing chicken points the way to a healthier world.Restricting antibiotic use for poultry as we do for humans—to care for the sick, not to fatten them up—is the only way to balance the drugs’ utility against the risk of resistance and, as Maryn McKenna shows in The Guardian, the awful taste of the standard American bird.

The predatory corner of the gig economy Startup Crowdtap pays users a few cents to complete small tasks, but it’s more than a job, writes Daniel Carter in The Outline—it’s a training program to model workers into a brand’s perfect consumer.

Q-MHI