#AcademicRunPlaylist - 3/30/25

A truly heroic amount of ice accumulated overnight (I had to cut my car doors open), and while carefully navigating the drive home I listened to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Helen Smith on material histories of the book at the University of London School of Advanced Study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXfbF6d78i0

Last was "Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life" by Timothy Jorgensen. While the preface explicitly states that this is not a history of science book, those portions of the book are the most interesting (particularly those sections that take place more than 20 years ago). A close second are the sections on biological electrical systems, which is the author's area of research. Unfortunately this is marred by sections playing executions for laughs, excursions into neuroscience that add little and significantly misrepresent the science, and a final chapter that leads off lauding a certain rich fascist. If you restrict yourself to the early chapters it's decent, but unless it's from the library as it was for me I wouldn't recommend it https://bookwyrm.social/user/bwaber/review/7066232/s/an-interesting-but-deeply-flawed-book#anchor-7066232