#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/10/25

It was a great fall day in Boston, and luckily I was able to go out for a good run and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a great discussion with Michael Breakspear and Mac Shine on dynamic systems across different neural scales on the Brain Inspired podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td9zB6Io0M0

Next was an excellent conversation between Ann Lipton and Michael Levin on (what else) Tesla on the Shareholder Primacy Podcast. Ann and Mike dive into the recent mind-boggling cases of Tesla's director compensation and the new proposed pay package for Elon Musk. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsC-FqYWjOI

Next was an important talk by Shannon Gleeson and Xóchitl Bada on how different organizations safeguard the rights of migrant Mexican workers in the US at the Cornell University ILR School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5IQGdaYOzE

Next was "Politics at Work" by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez. This book is an impressive examination of a surprisingly poorly researched issue - efforts by companies to use their employees to bring about political action. While this has deep roots in the US, its modern incarnation - starting with NAM and GE's mobilization of Ronald Reagan for internal events - presaged a new age of technology-enabled, increasingly effective mobilization activities. Hertel-Fernandez looks at this from multiple angles, bringing together controlled experiments, surveys, macro statistics, and media reports to provide a holistic view of how this activity has evolved over recent decades. He paints a somewhat dire but still nuanced view of these efforts, also providing promising policy recommendations for different stakeholders. Highly recommend https://global.oup.com/academic/product/politics-at-work-9780190629892

Last was "Human Physiology: A Very Short Introduction" by Jamie Davies. As the title says, this is an extremely rapid run-through of human physiology, touching briefly on most of the major systems from the micro to the macro. Given its length I think devoting the first section to the ethical and scientific underpinnings of human physiology research is a mistake, although in a longer book this would make an excellent chapter. That being said, this is a quick, accessible entry point into human physiology research. Highly recommend https://global.oup.com/academic/product/human-physiology-9780198869887