• Oprah Winfrey and Hearst Magazines are teaming up for interviews that pair young Black journalists with elders who include civil rights activists, celebrities and others sharing some lessons learned in life. The project, "Lift Every Voice," will be featured on Winfrey's OprahDaily.com website and in magazines like ELLE, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Runner's World and Winfrey's own O Quarterly. Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, Andre De Shields and the activist Claudette Colvin are among the people featured. While some material from earlier Hearst television stories is used, the interviewers are drawn primarily from the ranks of historic Black colleges and universities, with most of the portraits taken by Black photographers just starting in the field. Winfrey said she was inspired by her own memories of knowing poet Maya Angelou when Winfrey was young, and how Angelou stressed the importance of sharing stories from the time she grew up. Beyond celebrities, the young journalists will talk to teachers, doctors, writers, lawyers, homemakers and others about their lives. "All are essential stories that might have otherwise slipped into the white noise of history," Winfrey said in a video introducing the series. Some of the stories debuted Tuesday, and all will be made available online Saturday.
• MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist, announced Tuesday that she has given $2.7 billion to 286 organizations. It's the third round of major philanthropic gifts Scott has made, which together rival the charitable contributions made by the largest foundations. Scott, formerly the wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, wrote in a Medium post that she and her husband, Dan Jewett, made the donations to enable the recipients to continue their work and as a "signal of trust and encouragement" to them and others. She and Jewett worked with a team of researchers and philanthropy advisers "to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change." "In this effort," she said, "we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others." In 2020, Scott made two similar announcements in which she donated a combined $6 billion to covid-19 relief, gender equity, historically Black colleges and universities and other schools. Scott said the 286 organizations chosen for Tuesday's announcement were selected from a rigorous process of research and analysis. They range from universities and refugee resettlement groups to arts and culture organizations that have suffered from a drop in donations as donors focused on more urgent needs brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.