prior probability

As a footnote to two of my scholarly papers with Alain Alcouffe–one on “Adam Smith in the City of Light“; the other on “Adam Smith in the Salons of Paris“–I have been meaning to repost this recent entry from another of my favorite blogs, View from the Back:

I just heard this catchy song for the first time in Panama City Beach last week, but according to Google’s A.I. assistant, it was released over three years ago on 29 June 2022!

I am reposting this recent entry from one of my favorite blogs, Remembering Singapore:

Singapore’s Most Recognisable Logos, Then and Now (Part 1)

I am interrupting my beach vacation to share this “infamously difficult” syllabus from 1941. It was for an epic class titled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature” at the University of Michigan, and the professor was none other than the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden! What is so noteworthy about all this is that he assigned 32 literary works, totaling 6,000 pages! More details here. (Hat tip: Alfred Brophy.)

I thought I would post this catchy summer anthem since one of my favorite parts of the Florida Panhandle thus far has been highway “30-A” (State Road 30A), a two-lane scenic stretch of road the runs along the Gulf of Mexico.

I have been on a family vacation these last few days in the Florida Panhandle — we have a great view of the beach, but it is unbearably hot over here — and putting the finishing touches on a book-length manuscript that I have been working on since the autumn of 2020. My hope is to wrap things up by next Friday, 8 August, though the work of a college professor is never really done. In the meantime, rest assured I will have much more to say about this new manuscript soon …

Have the student editors of the prestigious Harvard Law Review (HLR) unfairly boosted Black and Latino authors to the detriment of Asian and white authors? What if we combined Google Scholar, a search engine for academics, with ChatGPT or Google Gemini, the generative A.I. tool/large language model in Google Search, to find out? In the meantime, check out this new and fun paper, “HLR Agonistes“, by my colleague and friend Brian Frye! For further reference, see also this report in the Harvard Crimson; below is Professor Frye’s provocative abstract:

On June 19, 2025, the Washington Free Beacon published a collection of almost 500 confidential memos written by Harvard Law Review editors, evaluating the articles submitted for publication. For the first time, the public has access to inside information about the preferences of the editors of the Harvard Law Review. This article uses ChatGPT to analyze the Free Beacon collection of Harvard Law Review memos and reflects on its findings.

The music of this great jazz legend will live on …