Marginal Revolution, the economics blog written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, economists at George Mason University, published its regular “Tuesday assorted links” roundup on August 18, 2026. The blog, launched in 2003, has long used such link roundups to surface reading well beyond core economics; this post collects six items spanning medicine, economics, literary criticism, and culture.

1. AI in medicine. The Wall Street Journal reports that AI is helping patients to solve their medical mysteries. The report speaks to a shift that has drawn growing attention since consumer chatbots became widespread: patients using AI tools to research symptoms and bring the findings back to their doctors when illnesses have proven hard to diagnose.

2. Economic history. A post on X by the account lugaricano presents the history of economic thought in one paragraph. The history of economic thought is the field that traces how the discipline evolved from classical political economy through marginalism and Keynesian macroeconomics, and one-paragraph compressions of it are a familiar genre among economics writers online.

3. Literary criticism. Critic Becca Rothfeld reviews Rachel Cusk in The New Yorker (August 24, 2026 issue). Cusk is the British-Canadian novelist best known for her Outline trilogy — Outline, Transit, and Kudos — and Rothfeld is a book critic at The Washington Post.

4. Research output. “Since ChatGPT, the number of new economics papers posted each year has almost doubled,” according to a post on X by the account JohanFourieZA. ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, was released to the public in November 2022. The claim is publicly checkable because economics research circulates openly through working-paper repositories such as SSRN and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working-paper series, and it lands amid a broader debate in academia about how generative AI tools are affecting the volume and pace of research output.

5. Alan Macfarlane and China. An “Alan Macfarlane update” and the “China fact of the day” are shared in a post on X by the account ZhangTaisu. Macfarlane is a British anthropologist and historian, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge whose decades of scholarship and large archive of filmed interviews with fellow academics have made him a recurring point of reference. The “fact of the day” format, frequently featuring China, is a longstanding Marginal Revolution staple.

6. Latin America. An essay asking “Is the next cultural boom coming to Latin America?” was published on Substack. The region, home to more than 600 million people, most of them Spanish- or Portuguese-speakers, has long been a major exporter of literature and music, which gives any question about a “next” boom a substantial existing base to build on.

The original post is available at marginalrevolution.com.