#AcademicRunPlaylist - 1/5/26

Author

Ben Waber
January 05, 2026

A selfie of me on a bridge over a snow-dusted swamp with a winding brook cutting through it feeding into the partially frozen Charles River on an overcast day. Thick, mostly bare forest lines both banks, and a few bare trees protrude from the dry swampland. I'm a middle-aged white man. I'm wearing a black balaclava covering most of my face, black sunglasses, and a light grey jacket.

It was extremely cold out, but I still got out for a shorter run, avoided frostbite, and listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "The Strange Order of Things" by Antonio Damasio. This book is best viewed as a work of philosophy, and a bad one at that. It could be retitled "Everything is Homeostasis" and you'd get the central thesis, and also probably figure out that in a book nominally about culture the author has probably read zero books by sociologists (or anthropologists, or archaeologists, and so on). The entire book should come with a "citation needed" label, and besides a decent middle third that focuses on neuroscience (the author's actual discipline) the rest is unmoored, with Damasio reasoning from first principles on everything from culture to organisms. Nearly all of the authors quoted here have been dead for at least fifty years and the median is probably closer to 200. You also have to be gravely worried about someone treating Hayek as a scientist, and unsurprisingly eugenics-curious arguments make a big appearance afterwards. You're better off reading almost anything else https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/231780/the-strange-order-of-things-by-antonio-damasio/

Last was "Entrepreneurship in Africa," edited by Moses Ochonu. This book provides an excellent selection of academic essays exploring the diverse and unique classes of entrepreneurship across the African continent over the centuries. Importantly these histories don't privilege the tech startup ideal, but rather conceptualize entrepreneurship itself more broadly to look at traders, boxing promoters, indigenous therapeutics, and more. I especially liked the chapters on Wangara traders (Moses Ochonu), women entrepreneurs in colonial Nigeria (Gloria Chuku), and pito brewing in southern Ghana (Isidore Lobnibe). For those interested in business history, entrepreneurship, or the history of Africa, this is a great book to pick up. Highly recommend https://iupress.org/9780253034380/entrepreneurship-in-africa/