#AcademicRunPlaylist - 1/1/26

Before Aoyama Gakuin University's Asahi Kuroda put on a performance for the ages in the 5th leg of the Hakone Ekiden tonight, I ran at a comparatively leisurely pace (but farther at least!) and listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "So Very Small" by Thomas Levenson. Levenson charts the development of the science of microscopy and germ theory from their genesis until the start of the modern pharmaceutical industry. Throughout he demonstrates how powerful a driver curiosity and experimentation were in moving the field forward, but also how it was social forces that ultimately drove the adoption or acceptance of these discoveries - sometimes decades afterwards. It also shows how radically the world has shifted in just the last century around our relative mastery over ailments that were literally the plague of humanity from time immemorial, and how perilous it is for us to forget that. Highly recommend https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672378/so-very-small-by-thomas-levenson/

Last was "The Empire of Tea" by Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane. The Macfarlanes have put together a compelling history of how tea influenced the economic, political, and public health fortunes of the world, seen mostly through the lens of the British. The data arrayed here is persuasive - on the economic side, the volumes of tea that were produced fueled global trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, and this further impacted the political fortunes of China, India, and the UK. The UK's efforts to buy tea with silver and then opium from China are laid out in gruesome detail, as are the appalling conditions and push for tea cultivation in the UK's new Indian holdings. There's not nearly enough information from non-Western sources until the chapter on tea workers, where important and insightful interviews with workers themselves are included. The public health side is less convincing, with the authors arguing that tea was primarily responsible for Japan's city agglomerations due to its health benefits. While boiling water is obviously a good way to get rid of certain pathogens, the evidence here and beyond is circumstantial and correlational, although it definitely merits more research. The idea that the UK was able to go through the industrial revolution in large part because of tea consumption is at the very least an intriguing, unique hypothesis that I would like to see research on. Highly recommend https://www.alanmacfarlane.com/tea/book.html