I’ve had a busy start to the week, kicking off with the fantastic thesis proposal defense of Kayla Evans! In between I was able to go on a nice run and listen to talks and books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great discussion with Jared Mayer on corporate restructuring (and a bit on AI in the space) on the Business Scholarship Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnx_bSMdQ-A

Next was “Private Equity at Work” by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt. This is essentially a collection of anecdotes about the highs and the lows of private equity, with a focus on the lows, with a final section that has some surprisingly good policy recommendations. Most of the book can be summarized: "Here's a case where private equity might have done a bad job. We actually can't prove it did a bad job, and don't have evidence to indicate that this is indicative of private equity overall." It's also less than convincing when their description of the relationship between GPs and LPs is, to put it mildly, extremely naïve and inaccurate. They also weirdly assume that large banks are essentially clueless, which strains credulity, and often argue against themselves (e.g. referring to problems with PE firms hiding results and using documents from a company's IPO to back up those claims). I could go on, and to be fair there are some good points here, particularly when it comes to PE firms that target mid-market acquisitions. In addition, despite these earlier missteps the majority of their policy recommendations at the end of this book are quite good, although I don't think they would alter the industry as much as the authors. Overall, if you're looking for case studies and new policies this book is worth a look https://www.russellsage.org/publications/book/private-equity-work

Last was “Distributed Blackness” by Andre Brock. This is a very critical studies book, with all of the pros and cons that entails. André investigates different Black cybercultures in the early chapters, with the most compelling one diving into Black Twitter (the concept of "weak tie racism" was especially thought-provoking). These sections are insightful but exhibit the verbosity of the field, overcomplicating concepts and reasoning in a way that requires more effort to understand than it should. The final chapter, however, mostly dispenses with this style and also provides an excellent analysis of the state of the academic discourse and future directions for the field. Even if you just breeze through the earlier chapters, the last one is can't miss. Highly recommend https://nyupress.org/9781479829965/distributed-blackness/