Economics blog Marginal Revolution, run by George Mason University economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, has published its “Thursday assorted links” roundup for August 27, 2026, collecting seven items spanning space infrastructure, animal communication, artificial-intelligence policy, global catastrophic risk, philanthropy, education, and contemporary art.

1. Data centers in space?

The first item highlights an essay by Anton Leicht, “Escape Velocity”, which the blog calls a “good” treatment of the different considerations in the political economy of placing data centers in space. Publicly debated proposals for orbital data centers typically cite abundant solar power and radiative cooling as potential advantages, while launch costs, hardware maintenance, and radiation exposure are recurring objections. The question has drawn renewed attention as AI-driven growth in computing pushes up data center electricity demand and strains the power available to terrestrial facilities.

2. More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff

The second item — “More whales and Dr. Doolittle stuff” — links to a post on X by @begusgasper. The Dr. Dolittle reference invokes the fictional physician who could converse with animals, a familiar framing in coverage of efforts to decode whale vocalizations, a field that includes initiatives such as Project CETI's work on sperm whale communication, which applies machine learning to recordings of the whales' patterned clicks, known as codas.

3. Rohit on the AI hacks. And Peter Wildeford

Third, the blog points to two posts on X about the AI hacks: one by Rohit (@krishnanrohit) and another by Peter Wildeford (@peterwildeford). Wildeford is co-founder of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, a research organization focused on AI policy that was founded in 2023 and publishes work on questions including compute governance.

4. Is Australia the most resilient country to global catastrophic risk?

The fourth item links to a ScienceAlert article, “No place on Earth is safe if all hell breaks loose — but one place is safer than the rest.” The question echoes earlier research, notably a 2021 study in the journal Risk Analysis by New Zealand-based researchers, which ranked island nations on their capacity to maintain civilization after abrupt global shocks such as nuclear war or a super-volcanic eruption; Australia and New Zealand placed at the top of that ranking. The study scored countries on factors including self-sufficiency in food and energy, manufacturing capacity, and geographic isolation.

5. Dolly Parton's philanthropy

Item five links to a New York Times piece on Dolly Parton's philanthropy. Parton's best-known charitable ventures include the Imagination Library, the book-gifting program she founded in 1995, which mails free books to young children and has distributed more than 200 million books, and her 2020 donation of $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which funded early research that contributed to the development of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine.

6. Why has New Zealand education so declined?

The sixth item links to a Deep Dish essay that asks why New Zealand's educational performance has declined and poses “other questions about the country.” New Zealand's scores on the OECD's PISA assessments have fallen markedly since the early 2000s, when the country ranked among the world's top-performing education systems. The essay's title invokes “Mediocristan,” the term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in “The Black Swan” for domains where outcomes cluster tightly around the average.

7. Yayoi Kusama, RIP

The final item marks the death of artist Yayoi Kusama. The Art Newspaper reports that Kusama, the Japanese artist known for her polka-dot motifs, infinity mirror rooms, and pumpkin sculptures, has died at the age of 97. Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Kusama moved to New York in the late 1950s and built a career spanning seven decades that made her one of the world's most widely exhibited contemporary artists. After returning to Japan, she lived from 1977 by her own choice in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, continuing to produce work from a nearby studio.