No, and Amherst College doesn’t care. The selective school in Western MA announced that its admissions office will no longer play favorites when considering the applications of children of alumni. In other words, preference for second-generation Mammoths—which account for about 11% of each class—is going extinct.

Other elite colleges that don’t factor in applicants’ family trees include Caltech, MIT, and any school that starts with “University of California.”

But that’s far from the norm: 43% of private, nonprofit universities and 14% of public ones consider legacy status in their admissions decisions, according to a 2019 study. 73% of the most selective schools—ones with a 25%-or-less admission rate like Amherst—do the same.

Pressure to change that is building

This fall, students launched #LeaveYourLegacy campaigns at Harvard and Brown, asking alumni to boycott donations until the schools stop caring about your last name. And just last week, Colorado passed a bill banning preference for applicants with alumni relatives at all public schools in the state.

Critics of legacy admissions argue the practice disproportionately favors white, wealthy applicants and takes admissions spots away from those who are less privileged, but academically more deserving.

• At Johns Hopkins University, which started phasing out legacy preference in 2014 and completely nixed it in 2019, the proportion of accepted students whose parents were alumni more than halved from 2013 to this year, while its share of first-generation students more than doubled.
• In a civil case that accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian American applicants in 2018, an economist hired by the plaintiffs said that Harvard accepted legacy applicants at a rate 5x higher than it did nonlegacy applicants. Over one-third of Harvard’s Class of 2022 had alumni parents.

Proponents of legacy admissions keep their reasoning simple: It’s smart financially, encouraging alumni donations and continued engagement with the school.

Looking ahead...Amherst’s change will go into effect for the 2022–2023 school year.—JW

PayPal is in desperate need of wall art recs. The payment giant is in talks to acquire the wedding-and-soup inspo site Pinterest, according to multiple reports. The deal would likely value Pinterest at $45 billion, and shares jumped roughly 13% yesterday.

Why would it make sense?

• PayPal is on a quest to become an all-in-one “super app” like China’s Alipay, so it’s looking to tack on more services, like product discovery, to its current menu. Plus, it’s got money to play with. Thanks to all those nap dress orders during the pandemic, PayPal’s stock has more than doubled since January 2020.
• For Pinterest, this could be a huge boost for its push into commerce. The company has moved aggressively to get more people to shop on its site with initiatives like a $20 million investment into its “Creator Rewards” program.

Zoom out: If a deal is completed—and it, just like our Friday plans, could fall apart at any time—it would be one of the biggest consumer internet takeovers in years, topping Salesforce’s $27.7 billion purchase of Slack last winter.—MM

With just over a week until one of the most pivotal climate change summits in history begins, governments are still clinging to fossil fuels like a childhood teddy bear.

A new UN-backed climate report found that countries plan to extract more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, calling it “dangerously out of sync” with the targets set out by the Paris Agreement.

Big picture: This year’s energy crunch has highlighted just how dependent the world remains on fossil fuels for power, specifically coal—the largest source of greenhouse gases in the electricity sector.

• Coal prices in China have soared to record highs in recent weeks as the country grapples with an energy shortfall.
• In the US, we’ll burn 22% more coal in 2021 than we did last year, marking the first YoY uptick in US coal generation since 2014, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Bottom line: “The research is clear: global coal, oil, and gas production must start declining immediately and steeply” in order to keep warming to manageable levels, said Ploy Achakulwisut, a lead author of the report.—NF

Stat: Any Nigels reading this? You might be the last of your kind. There were at most two Nigels born in 2020 in England and Wales, according to a new report from the Office for National Statistics. As names like Nigel (and Carol) fade away, an army of Olivias and Olivers is rising: They were the top names given for the fifth year running.

Quote: “We refuse to become the vaccination police for any government.”

Arnie Wensinger, In-N-Out Burger’s chief legal and business officer, pushed back after San Francisco’s department of health temporarily shut down the only In-N-Out location in the city for refusing to check diners’ vaccination status. Restaurants in SF, NYC, and other cities are required to ensure their customers are vaccinated in order to eat indoors.

Read: Inside Wheel of Time, Amazon’s huge gamble on the next Game of Thrones. (GQ)

After a report from The Verge revealed that Facebook will rebrand itself, everyone on the internet speculated about what the new name would be, ranging from “A Mark Zuckerberg Production” to the not-Justin Timberlake-approved “The Facebook.”

• One contender is “Meta,” since, well, it’s short for metaverse and meta.com redirects to a website for a medical research tool developed under the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which the Facebo​​ok CEO co-founded.

Here are the current odds on Facebook’s new name, via SportsBetting.AG:

Virtuel: 4-1
Connect: 5-1
Horizon: 5-1
Ecoverse: 7-1
Metabook: 8-1
Immerse: 8-1
Omniverse: 10-1
…
MetaBeast: 80-1
Zuckers: 100-1

Where are you putting your money? If you have an idea for Facebook’s new name, chime in here.

And of course we made a TikTok about it.—NF

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Three Headlines and a Lie

Three of these news headlines are real and one is faker than a cute pair of Golden Goose’s. Can you guess the odd one out?

1. Apple exploring “AirPods for Pets” to help make training easier for owners
2. Restaurant soap theft at all-time high as diners pinch luxury hand wash from bathrooms
3. Teen girls are developing tics. Doctors say TikTok could be a factor.
4. Paintmakers are running out of the color blue

It was only a matter of time…Morning Brew is officially dropping merch. Merch that is, frankly, hotter than the hottest cup of coffee.

Morning Brew will be dropping a product line on October 25. Sign up for our email list to be the first to shop our products. Plus, join this email list before 10/24 at midnight and get 10% off your first purchase and be entered to win a $50 gift card to shop Morning Brew swag.*

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