It was refreshing to see people exercising their First Amendment rights today, and later I was able to catch a glimpse of some of the less politically active but still stunning local water fowl while listening to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the National Bureau of Economic Research economics of race and stratification symposium. I particularly liked the talks by Illenin Kondo (dynamic racial wealth inequality accounting), Marlène Koffi (race, networks, and the diffusion of knowledge), and Lukas Althoff (GI Bill racial inequality effects) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j5VG4eZet8

Next was "Japan's Transwar Political Economy" by Andrew Gordon, who links this period with later Japanese labor developments https://agordon.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum8001/files/agordon/files/gordon_transwar_political_economy_chkv3_proofs.pdf

Last was "Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. As with Godfrey-Smith's "Other Minds," this book provides a compelling journey through the development of cognition, but this time with a wider aperture. By tracing not just the development of cognition-related structures and processes, but indeed all components of life, Godfrey-Smith advances a compelling hypothesis around both the gradual emergence of cognition, but also for the inherently gradient-based nature of that phenomenon. Importantly, this should be read as a hypothesis - many of the conclusions put forward here are still theoretical and require additional follow up work. Godfrey-Smith does, however, wrap everything together in a convincing package, providing a frame of reference for considering new research in this broad area. Highly recommend https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250800268/metazoa/