The one conversation was with a brilliant young colleague about the super-abstract and mind-bending Brisker method in Talmud-legal analysis. The other was with a senior colleague about the history and philosophy of science (biology, systems biology, embryology, and the like) that many of the most interesting affect theorists have tapped into as a thinking resource.

As everyone who’s ever been to one knows, the most productive part of an academic conference are the conversations between colleagues in the hotel lobby, bar, and other such corners. Among many such others this year at the AJS annual conference, those were the two that stand out for me; first because of the content, and also because of the curious and serendipitous juxtaposition, the mind-body parallelism.