DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog

CROSSPOST: PATRICK WYMAN: The Human Sacrifices of the Shang Dynasty
13,000 names we’ll never know: the sacrificed victims of China’s first dynasty... China’s first literate state didn’t just practice human sacrifice. It…
 • Brad DeLong
READING: The Duc de Saint-Simon on the Battle of Blenheim
322 years ago today, in 1704, a combined Austrian, Dutch, British, Hanoverian, Hessian, Danish, and Prussian army under the joint command of John…
 • Brad DeLong
CROSSPOST: SCOTT AARONSON (2013): Against John Searle's Analogy of an Apparently Chinese-Understanding Room
Scott Aaronson’s complexity rebuttal to Searle's "machines can mimic but cannot understand"; Searle's intuition pump hides the scale of the…
 • Brad DeLong
Nate Silver & Eli McKown Dawson: FLIPR: WEBSITE OF THE DAY
Nate & Eli's subheadline: "Silver Bulletin's prediction for every Senate, House, and gubernatorial election in 2026"; 99.9% wishful thinking-free, which…
 • Brad DeLong
The Family of Man: CHART OF THE DAY
The Zhang-Moorjani-&-al. map of archaic DNA; the knotty question of when, exactly, we became us; & how we appear to be an evolutionary long-shot...
 • Brad DeLong
2026-08-12 0.1% 1-Month 3.4% 12-Month Inflation CPI Release: CHART OF THE DAY
The Consumer Price Index came in in line with expectations: the calm number and the silent Chair: what July’s CPI release says, and what Kevin Warsh…
 • Brad DeLong
OpenAI's Zero-Day Leviathan Breaches Hugging Face's Black-ICE Security Wall: How I Think You Should Think About the Latest "AI Goes Rogue…
No Malice In It, No Mind In It Either: What Really Happened When Zero-Day Leviathan Showed Up at the Hugging Face Cyberparty...
 • Brad DeLong
CROSSPOST: MICHAEL SELLERS: Trump Thinks Iran Is Ready to Deal. Iran Thinks Trump is. Who's Right?
You Cannot Surrender to a Clown Darth Vader Who Cannot Keep from Altering the Deal: Iran, Trump, & the Strait-of-Hormuz State of Affairs...
 • Brad DeLong
The Grave of Karl Polanyi: PICTURE OF THE DAY
On analyzing market, bureaucracy, democracy, ideology, ethnicity, and all the other fictions and systems we East African Plains Apes have imagined into…
 • Brad DeLong
Trump's Lackies Say He Is Powerless to Increase Affordability Because of Things Biden & Powell Did Five Years Ago: CHARTS OF THE DAY
Yes, that is the message that Trump lackey Kevin Hassett—and why did he get to have a career after his monstrously cynical and behemothly stupid and…
 • Brad DeLong
Late Summer for the Internal Combustion-Engine Vehicle Sector: CHART OF THE DAY
But late summer, not yet autumn: internal-combustion engine production is only dying slowly, and its predominance in the global vehicle fleet is dying…
 • Brad DeLong
(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: PETER CONTI-BROWN: Trump Continues His War Against Fed Independence
Piece behind Peter's pay wall; his subheadline: "After a brief reprieve, Trump is back with his pretextual war against Lisa Cook, which is in fact a war…
 • Brad DeLong
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