#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/22/25

Author

Ben Waber
March 22, 2025

The MIT campus seen from the Boston esplanade on a sunny day, with wispy clouds above. There's a grass lawn with an old WW2 howitzer in front of a paved path followed by a dock with five people sitting on it. A small island with bare trees divides the Charles, with the tall buildings of the MIT campus visible beyond.

It was a great day to be downtown, and while strolling on the esplanade I was also listened to some talks/books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Ivo Tafkov on manager control and employee skill development at Mohamed Elsalkh's research seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT0XSzaJdn4

Next was "The Altruistic Urge" by Stephanie Preston. This book isn't about the myriad kinds of altruism, but rather the urge nearly all mammalian species experience to help others of their species. Preston shows across a wide variety of studies how universal this feeling is, its biological roots, and how to channel this urge to achieve better societal outcomes. The end of the book gets speculative and bogged down in some discredited psychology research, and unfortunately given its publisher I can only recommend getting this book from your library https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/pres20440

Last was "Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography" by Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis. This book does double duty - accounting for the current state of knowledge of the biological effects of testosterone in humans and the heavily biased development of that scientific investigation and its diffusion into the broader public. This leads to a book that is possibly unmatched in this area, with the extremely nuanced and contextual role of testosterone in the body, environmental effects on testosterone, and how the early association of testosterone with strength skewed future research. Highly recommend https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674271081