The Toms are fiercely competing in Boston, and while giving them a wide berth I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting conversation with Cathy Hwang and Andrew Tuch on the odd practice of PE firms choosing their lenders' counsel on the Business Scholarship Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuUZ-gfpktQ

Next was a great panel at the Economic Policy Institute on correcting excess employer power in the US labor market (and obligatory discussions of AI) with Josh Bivens, Ben Zipperer, and Samantha Sanders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP2wInYoUak

Next was a slate of talks at the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications:

Hungtang Ko - collective mechanical intelligence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87PbvdslLl8

Robert Wood - leveraging the intelligence of materials - highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQuTjIhjWRs

Benjamin de Bivort - Bayesian inference on biophysical models of connectomes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THFj2AzjQb4

Golnar Gharooni Fard - collective architecture of beehives - highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twfgjyCOks4

Elizabeth Tibbetts - social cognition and face recognition abilities of paper wasps - highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlUSVaQ2Gmw

Next was "Working in the Wings," edited by Beth Osborne and Christine Woodworth. This is a nice collection of essays at the unique intersection of US theatre history and labor, mixing some artistic analysis of how theater has portrayed labor issues from the 19th century onwards, as well as the labor of producing theatrical productions itself. I was more interested in the latter, and unfortunately much of the content here is fairly high level and vague - little detail on contract types, career progression, management structure, etc. There are good nuggets scattered throughout the volume, and I particularly liked the chapter on the First Washington Theater by AnnMarie Saunders. After perusing the table of contents you're probably best off going to the specific chapters that pique your interest https://www.siupress.com/9780809334209/working-in-the-wings/

Last was "The Dark Pattern" by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage. This is a decent review of major Western corporate scandals in the last few decades, summarizing media coverage and integrating some psychological research findings from other work to provide context. If you're already familiar with either of those things you're unlikely to find anything new here, as the framework the authors provide is extremely nebulous and not very helpful https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/guido-palazzo-ph-d/the-dark-pattern/9781541705326/