#AcademicRunPlaylist - 10/9/24

It was another nice fall day complete with nice fall mushrooms, as well as some nice talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an excellent talk by Kai Lukoff on co-designing the Thámien Ohlone augmented reality tour at BayCHI https://www.youtube.com/live/P07WIpdqqeM?si=k6woIgUn51uijk6M&t=499

Next was a short conversation with David Atkin on how connecting firms to markets can promote economic development on the VoxDev podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBGH-lE0lJA

Next was a great discussion with Michael Levin and Ann Lipton on the strange phenomenon of one person board of director committees and how activist investors select and work with companies on the Shareholder Primacy podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVy6kwGKfyc

Next was an engaging conversation with Devin Rapp on how workers in stigmatized jobs but are also publicly celebrated (e.g. medical workers during the pandemic) cope, and how making these people into "heroes" can have unintended consequences on Sekou Bermiss's Lit Review podcast https://thelitreview.podbean.com/e/the-lit-review-an-amj-podcast-devin-rapp-s4e2/

Last was "Cobalt Red" by Siddharth Kara. This is one of the most depressing books I've read in a long time, which makes it all the more pressing to internalize the stories here and translate them into action. With extensive field research combined with powerful prose, Kara has penned a damning work on the cobalt mining industry. The exploitative practices, horrendous conditions, and immense suffering spawned from the extraction of an element that fuels global battery production are laid out in devastating detail. It's impossible not to be deeply moved by these stories.

Kara also puts these practices into historical context, reviewing the repression and horror of Belgium's King Leopold's rule and subsequent colonial regimes. The lack of state and corporate accountability in the modern day, which Kara is able to reveal with simple in person trips to different mining areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reaches truly stunning heights. I only wish the book was longer so Kara could have examined that end of the supply chain in more detail. Highly recommend https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250284297/cobaltred