Well it took 39 hours but I finally made it back to Boston! I'm exhausted and a bit under the weather, but at least the long flights gave me lots of time to listen to talks and books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great talk by Ian Watts on how women drove the evolution of symbolic culture at UCL Anthropology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97r9jJUBKU

Next was a fascinating talk by Tina Lüdecke on the diet that made us human at the ASU Institute of Human Origins. Lüdecke uses an ingenious method that uses the geochemistry of fossilized teeth to precisely identify animal diets (including dinosaurs!), here using that approach to study how our ancestors ate and the relationship with brain size. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Jdkh4Pluk

Next was an amazing talk by Janet Vertesi on confronting the political economy of modern AI at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. This is an absolute banger, with Vertesi fully embracing the current hype-fueled framing of AI to argue for a repositioning of how we understand and challenge today's economic and political capture dynamics by the industry (and many academics). Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7juOynisls

Next was "The Reformation" by Diarmaid MacCulloch. This is the one stop shop for all things Reformation, providing both a blow by blow recounting of the period and insightful analysis of the developments that occurred during this time. As the critical bridge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and certainly a major precondition of the latter, understanding how this package of movements grew out of ideal ideological conditions and profoundly shaped the following world is extremely important, and here you'll get a ton of insight on how the excesses of the Church and doomsday theories of the day snowballed by intersecting with other political forces throughout Europe. This book is extremely long (great for very long flights as long as you're not lugging around the physical version), but if you're going to write a single book on a massive topic this is how you do it. Highly recommend https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/292843/the-reformation-by-diarmaid-macculloch/

Last was "The Origins of Inequality and Policies to Contain It" by Joseph Stiglitz. This a thought-provoking but surprisingly shallow brain dump of a book that uses economic models to probe what causes economic inequality. If you're looking for data, though, look elsewhere - this is all about models. I'll be honest, economic models are some of the least convincing research methodologies for me since they are trivially easy to fit when you use data and amount to mathematical camouflage for relatively straightforward hypotheses. But ultimately they are only hypotheses, so tell you almost nothing about the phenomenon you care about. On top of that, the book is poorly edited, most likely because the early chapters are copied from Stiglitz's other writings. This leads to many identical sections in different chapters. Overall, this book is probably useful as a good reference book for theories on inequality, but you probably shouldn't read it all the way through https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-inequality-and-policies-to-contain-it-9780198799597