It was a beautiful but chilly run to campus today, and during the journey I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Michela Boldrini on how Amazon's algorithms influence consumer choice and interventions that can change these effects at the Toulouse School of Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_7HqTYyCpE

Next was an amazing talk by Daniel Simons on inattentional blindness at the Psychonomic Society. Simons brilliantly summarizes the state of the research on this phenomenon, then demonstrates experimentally why it's likely that everyone can randomly fall prey to it (even if it's not a guy in a gorilla suit). Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNhDhiNpZzg

Next was an excellent talk by Andrew Shtulman on why adults are actually more imaginative than young children at the Santa Fe Institute. Through a series of clever experiments, Shtulman shows how and why our preconceptions about childhood creativity are wrong, as well as the difficulty of more generally improving imagination. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXRcLSYTomw

Next was the National Bureau of Economic Research symposium on the US medical innovation system. I especially liked the talks by Maya Durvasula (missing markets for innovation) and S. Sean Tu (serial patent litigation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl0AdM5udOo

Last was "Building and Consoling a Nation: The Yiddish Historians in Their Own Words," edited by Mark L. Smith. This is a perfect example of how to deliver an academic reader, providing informative instructions to each selection to set the context, only include material that is still considered to be valid, and make sure the material itself is great. Obviously your mileage on this particular collection will vary based on how interested you are in Eastern European Jewish history, but even if you're only mildly curious this is a fascinating/heartbreaking read.

There is a paucity of academic texts on 1500-1850 Eastern European Jewish history, so I especially liked the sections that dealt with that here. The chapters on the first Yiddish newspaper and on the Jewish guilds were standouts, and if you're interested in these areas more broadly you should absolutely check them out.

The selections that deal with the aftermath of the Holocaust were painful, and even though academically I knew of the connections between these survivors and migrations to Palestine, you viscerally feel that experience and gain a better understanding of why the state of Israel has developed its current ideology. It adds up to a chain of tragedy that we continue to see play out in the news today.

Given that my ancestors all come from this community, and that this volume captures some of the history that was lost in their migration to Canada and the US, this book hit more personally than most. Highly recommend https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798897830725/