Happy Easter Monday! Before we jump into the last chapter of The Wealth of Nations, I have to confess that Adam Smith’s 900-plus-page masterpiece has taken up a lot of my time these past few months. But that is not the only tome that I have been studying during this time! Among other things, I have also been reading the following mix of classic and contemporary works, including The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Martin Hammond translation; Penguin classics edition) and The Enchiridion of Epictetus (Elizabeth Carter translation, available here), as well as the following:

1. Tyler Cowen, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (Mercatus Center, 2026, available here). Cowen surveys the history of the marginal revolution in economics and explains why thinking “at the margin” is the best thing since sliced bread.
2. Zia Haider Rahman, In the Light of What We Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). I discovered this acclaimed work of fiction by chance on my Twitter feed. Spoiler alert or trigger warning (take your pick): the two main protagonists of this novel are erudite but despicable fellows: one is a two-timer who betrays his best friend; the other is a rapist.
3. Jacob “I Just Make Shit Up” Soll, Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022). I want my money back: the chapter on Adam Smith, for example, contains so many errors of fact and reckless revisionist history that I am pretty sure it was generated — either in part or in its entirety — by an early version of ChatGPT!