#AcademicRunPlaylist - 11/9/25

I mostly rested up at the onsen today, and while relaxing outside of the baths I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Stevan Harnad on why LLMs don't “understand” at the Université du Québec à Montréal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMG7Uua-EiA

Next was "To Believe in Women" by Lillian Faderman. This book is a fascinating deep dive into a formative period of women's rights (mostly post Civil War to 1920), keeping the focus on the lesbian leaders of these efforts. This individual focus works well here because foregrounding the sexual orientation of the leaders of this movement makes it clear how important it was in creating the space for its ultimate success. It's also fascinating how socially accepted "Boston marriages" were pre women's suffrage, with the US only very recently reacknowledging the normality of those relationships. Faderman does gloss over some of the deeply racist sentiments and statements of these folks, however, and the lack of macro perspective here makes it hard to gauge overall progress. Still, this is a great history on an important topic. Highly recommend https://www.harpercollins.com/products/to-believe-in-women-lillian-faderman

Last was "Growing up Human" by Brenna Hassett. This is a standard introductory, popular science review of why human childhood exists. If you're at all familiar with the topic you probably already know what's in this book, but if not you could do worse than this volume. That being said, Hassett's writing style was extremely grating for me. I'm all for making science accessible and throwing in a joke or two, but joke footnotes multiple times per paragraph? The editor must have been asleep at the wheel. If that's how you like your popular science book though you'll like this one https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/growing-up-human-9781472975751/