It was a lovely day to be in the mountains up in New Hampshire, and while my son biked I went for a long run and listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "The CEO" by Michael Aldous and John Turner. This is a great review of the history of British CEOs, and British industry more generally, since the dawn of the 20th century. The book really gets going in the chapters that deal with post-WWII Britain, with expanded case analyses of illustrative CEOs and companies painting a deep picture of how changing corporate norms, economic conditions, and political context combined with individual backgrounds to shape outcomes. I would've liked more extensive analysis of the span of outcomes, or at least some examples where best practices on CEO selection weren't followed to somewhat explore counterfactuals for different factors that might be related to positive performance. The results in the book are suggestive, although due to the extremely skewed nature of the underlying phenomenon of CEO selection it's very hard to draw many general conclusions about effective CEO hiring and compensation practices beyond the fact that everyone claiming that they can predict CEO performance a priori is fooling themselves. I would've liked some more direct grappling with that, although in the conclusions some of the proposals certainly hint in that direction. Highly recommend https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ceo/5E4A432AD7B3149BB81BEB64A5F65F03

Next was "Asian American Histories of the United States" by Catherine Ceniza Choy. It's a bold move to write a history using the same structure as the movie Memento, and I'm not sure it works here. Certainly if you're already familiar with Asian American history you'll be able to follow the chapters, but otherwise important information is often discussed after a related issue in the future is examined. Beyond that, most of this book acts much more like a chronology, with analysis only included sparingly. There are some interesting and moving cases reviewed here, but it's hard to recommend https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691160/asian-american-histories-of-the-united-states-by-catherine-ceniza-choy/

Last was "AI Ethics" by Mark Coeckelbergh. It's a bad sign when a book on AI ethics cites the ethical opinions of a number of eugenicists as reasonable views, and it doesn't get much better from there. From not defining AI (basically treating it as a form of magic), to spending half of the book on actual sci fi, to only mentioning in passing how values are embedded in performance metrics IN THE FINAL PARAGRAPHS, the only reason to pick up this book would be to give it the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 treatment https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538190/ai-ethics/