prior probability

Available here. (Hat tip: Bruce Sterling.)

Check out this excellent essay by Andy Murdock on the history and aesthetics of airline route maps. By way of example, below are the route maps of two defunct airlines, National Airlines and TWA.

The great Benito Juarez died on this day in 1872. (Hat tip: Alex Tabarrok.)

In addition to reading John Finnis’s classic book on “Natural Law and Natural Rights” and attending Brian Leiter’s lectures on realist jurisprudence, I have been working on the following projects this summer:

1. A Coasean analysis of the fair use doctrine, along with a brief critique of Mill’s theory of harms, which is titled “Of Coase and copyrights: the law and economics of literary fan art,” available on SSRN here.
2. Addendum and revisions to my intellectual autobiography titled “Life, love, and law: confessions of a Cuban-American law professor” to commemorate my 20th year of teaching, research, and service. I have also included a photo gallery and posted this essay on SSRN here.
3. Revisions to my forthcoming paper “So long suckers: bargaining and betrayal in Breaking Bad,” which will be published next month in The Journal of Strategic Contracting and Negotiation. I have posted this paper on SSRN here.

The art pictured below is not a painting. It’s a futuristic, illuminated tunnel below the main buildings of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Photo credit: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

From a recent blog post on my favorite blog, Marginal Revolution:

“Much of my writing time is devoted to laying out points of view which are not my own. I recommend this for most of you.”

Professor Cowen’s approach to writing reminds me of Bryan Caplan’s Ideological Turing Test (ITT), something we have blogged about before. You can read more about Caplan’s ITT here.

https://twitter.com/pwafork/status/1150142459193593856

Although we did not read a single page of Infinite Jest during the month of June, we have now resumed our reading of this massive tome and are up to page 638, or about two-thirds of the way through …

Gary Leff explains why here. The key question, however, is whether such fees should be declared illegal or should be otherwise regulated. That is, what is the optimal level of regulation in this case. (Put another way, what would the late Ronald Coase say?)

We recently learned of the death of the great João Gilberto, one of our favorite musicians of all time. Here is an obituary (NYT). Referring to Mr Gilberto’s masterpiece “Chega de Saudade,” the Times quotes the singer Gal Costa, who was just 12 years old when that iconic song was recorded: “it changed my life, and not only my life but the lives of everyone in my generation.”