Marginal Revolution, the economics blog co-written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, published its regular "Friday assorted links" roundup on August 21, 2026. The selection spans evolutionary cosmology, a literary reissue, data markets, a research replication puzzle, the economics of AI agents, and prediction-market calibration.

1. Julian Gough's evolutionary cosmology. A Smithsonian Magazine profile examines Irish writer Julian Gough and the evolutionary cosmology he has developed — the proposition that, just as Earth's organisms arose through evolution, the entire cosmos may have developed through evolution as well. Gough is a novelist and poet also widely known as the author of the "End Poem" in Minecraft, the text players see at the game's ending. A Substack version of the piece is also available.

2. A more portable Bioy Casares on Borges. A new Spanish-language edition of Bioy Casares's book on Borges is coming out, with the edition prepared under the care of editor Daniel Martino. Adolfo Bioy Casares, the Argentine writer best known for "The Invention of Morel," was a lifelong friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges — the two also published collaborative works under the shared pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq — and the volume draws on the diaries he kept across that decades-long friendship. As the post notes, the older edition was, among other things, too heavy to lug around or bring on a trip; the earlier Spanish edition ran to more than a thousand pages.

3. The market for data is the market of the future. The post links to a View from the Wing report that Google bought Spirit Airlines' emails, files, and flight records for $10 million so that its Gemini AI model could learn from the airline's bankruptcy. Spirit Airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November 2024. The sale is one instance of a broader pattern in which AI developers competing for high-quality training data have struck paid deals for content and records, and bankruptcy proceedings can turn a failed company's data into a marketable asset.

4. A replication problem traced to Uzbekistan. A post on statistician Andrew Gelman's blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science — a long-running venue for discussion of replication problems in research — recounts how researchers "couldn't reproduce their findings and realized that it was all driven by weird data from Uzbekistan." If Uzbekistan were excluded, the damages would look similar to earlier work.

5. Capitalizing AI agents. Economist James Broughel discusses capitalizing AI agents in a post on X, with more on the same in a follow-up post on X.

6. How calibrated are Kalshi prediction markets? Kalshi, a U.S. exchange overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that lists event contracts, publishes research on the calibration of its prediction markets — that is, on whether events the markets price at a given probability actually occur at roughly that rate.

Source: Marginal Revolution, "Friday assorted links" (August 21, 2026)