#AcademicRunPlaylist - 8/30/25

It was a lovely Saturday in Boston, and while trekking through one of the local forests I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Shelley Xin Li on the effects of share performance evaluation data with employees at Mohamed Elsalkh's research seminar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfqZ7IcVQCk

Next was "The Skill Code" by Matt Beane. This book is a refreshing look at how skills develop in the workplace, building upon deep ethnographic research across multiple sites to demonstrate how varied experience and coworker interactions drive skill acquisition and long term organizational performance. Matt also shows how a myopic focus on short term or task-specific metrics lead experts and organizations to forsake training novices and ultimately hamper their long term performance ceiling. There is a bit of techno-optimism here that I disagree with, and I'm a lot more bearish on the implications of LLMs, but this doesn't distract from the overall message of the book. Highly recommend https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-skill-code-matt-beane

Last was "A Queer History of the United States" by Michael Bronski. Bronski takes this book in a different direction from many histories of the LGBTQ+ community in the US, focusing mostly on how queerness was represented in literature and only later starting to more systematically examine the role LGBTQ+ people and issues impacted society more broadly. This means there's less coverage of periods such as the Lavender Scare or the AIDS crisis (although there is some of that here), and instead demonstrates how common queer relationships were throughout North American history. I would've liked Bronski to spend a bit more time with the historical record outside of media, but if you go into the book with the mindset that it's going to focus more on cultural change you'll be more than satisfied. Highly recommend https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/216629/a-queer-history-of-the-united-states-by-michael-bronski/