It turned into a beautiful day in Boston, and luckily I was able to go out for a nice run and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an amazing talk by Tania Morimoto on soft robots and haptic interfaces for medical care at MIT Robotics. This work is both technically fascinating and a prime example of how to work with practitioners in a field to design technology that is actually useful. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIJPql0fziA

Next was a thought-provoking symposium on building a democratic economy at the LSE with Isabelle Ferreras, Mathew Lawrence, and Neil Warner https://www.youtube.com/live/CDHTJjBgiOI?si=8MKZ-vQLqy3G6WeJ&t=290

Last was “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now" by Annelise Orleck. This book is best viewed as a loosely organized collection of anecdotes and interviews across the global labor rights movement. The first half of the book has almost no organization, essentially rapid-firing different stories with absolutely no macro perspective, while the second half does a good job reviewing developments in low wage workers rights movements in different geographies. Orleck also contradicts her arguments throughout the book (e.g. arguing against price supports for food in one chapter and for them in another), weirdly criticizes Deng Xiaoping as a neoliberal (wut), and overall seems too committed to politics over truth here. I'm not saying politics isn't important, or that it's inappropriate to have a political goal for a book (and she explicitly says she does here), but that you shouldn't jettison truth for those goals. This shows through most clearly in sections on GMOs and on lower income gains globally (which are indisputable). Still, the interviews here are powerful and moving, and should be helpful for generating hypotheses moving forward https://www.beacon.org/We-Are-All-Fast-Food-Workers-Now-P1334.aspx