You can probably infer that the mercury has dropped fairly low up in Boston, and while staying layered up on my run I listened to talks and books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great conversation between Michael Levin and Ann Lipton breaking down the twisted soap opera/legal drama that is the Warner Brothers Discovery M&A process on the Shareholder Primacy podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypdmfBm3K1s

Next was "The Temperamental Thread: How Genes, Culture, Time, and Luck Make Us Who We Are" by Jerome Kagan. This book would be right at home in 1980 - centering meaningless, socially constructed racial categories, recklessly extrapolating from lab studies to entire societies, etc. To be sure, some of the psychological and developmental insights here are interesting, but you can also find them in other psychology books, and they probably won't make you grit your teeth while trying to ignore the borderline racist study framings here. https://universitypressaudiobooks.com/detail.php/383

Next was "Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play" by Mitch Resnick. Mitch's group (LLK)'s work is arguably MIT's most impactful research of the last quarter century, and I don't issue that praise lightly. This book explains the bulk of that work and some of the design decisions and philosophy that underlies the different systems they have developed, most notably Scratch. I would've liked a lot more of the education research context here, as well as some data on the long term, macro effects of LLK's interventions. While there are some extremely compelling anecdotes here, I couldn't help but want something more to tie it all together https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3134/Lifelong-KindergartenCultivating-Creativity

Last was "Are We Not Foreigners Here?" by Jeffrey Schulze. Schulze combines compelling history of different Indigenous nations that straddle the current US-Mexico border with an exploration of how they navigated and shaped their legal status across both polities. This is particularly important because most histories of both the US and Mexico don't adequately cover these peoples or the challenge of fitting them into legal boxes that assume residence and citizenship in a single state. It is interesting how recently these nations regularly migrated back and forth across this border, and I also appreciated the details on more recent pushes for federal recognition. Highly recommend https://uncpress.org/9781469637112/are-we-not-foreigners-here/