#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/29/25

We've had a cold bunch of days here in Boston, and while struggling to stay warm during a lovely hike through the woods I listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "There is Power in a Union" by Philip Dray. The focus here is very much on the people and events that defined white organized labor in American history, and Dray does an impressive job covering those topics from a qualitative analytical perspective. Missing are quantitative data and macro economic data to back up his points, and in the topic of labor more generally slavery, Jim Crow, and Latin American labor is barely mentioned. With those significant oversights in mind however, you'd be hard pressed to find a single volume that so thoroughly covers the rest of the US labor experience https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/42830/there-is-power-in-a-union-by-philip-dray/

Next was "The Origin of Language" by Madeleine Beekman. This book is mostly about the trajectory of human evolution and its biological components with a bit about language and linguistic abilities sprinkled in. If you're at all familiar with this literature there's not going to be anything new here, although many of the sources that Beekman uses are excellent, more focused books that one can jump into after reading this. Unfortunately, she also mixes in a ton of speculation (Neanderthals didn't speak, upright walking evolved so we could hold babies, etc.) and cites extremely questionable sources that nearly caused me to stop reading the book. Protip: the fastest way to get me to put down a book is to seriously consider anything by Gladwell, Harari, or Pinker. The less said about the AI section, the better. If you can ignore that the pointers to other work and introductory explanations are pretty good https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Origin-of-Language/Madeleine-Beekman/9781668066058

Next was "Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America" by Sharon Ann Murphy. This book provides a comprehensive review of the many facets of the roots of the American life insurance industry, detailing underwriting methodologies, operations, and entanglements with slavery. Compared with Murphy's also excellent "Banking on Slavery," this work is a cut above due to its focused nature and the incorporation of quantitative metrics to illustrate the scope of issues described in case studies. For those interested in analytical methods and privacy the sections on underwriting should be especially fascinating, as they reveal the depths of the subjective nature of these metrics as well as the extremely invasive nature of the investigations (arguably necessary to properly estimate risk in these far more fluid times). Highly recommend https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/9816/investing-life

Last was "Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities" by Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen. This book reviews Hamilton and Nielsen's impressive research on the experiences of a variety of actors in the UC system, using that qualitative data as a lens onto the broader implications of the neoliberal turn in state higher education. This book makes a good companion to "The Privileged Poor," and I wish some of the methodology from that book would have been used here to more clearly situate the different actors interviewed for the book, in addition to expanding some of the data collection itself to include surveys and possibly quantitative metrics. That being said, this book makes it abundantly clear how much our current model has failed students, professors, and society more broadly and proposes some thought-provoking interventions (I LOVE the lottery idea). Highly recommend https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo33896239.html