All articles from Brad DeLong

CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: There Is No U.S. Plan on Iran

Is this the Epstein War, or the Netanyahu War? Dan Drezner thinks it is the Netanyahu War. Dan’s heading: "Maybe, just maybe, the Trump Administration does not know what it is doing in Iran...

CROSSPOST: MICHAEL SELLERS: How the CIA & Israel Pulled Off the Successful Opening Leadership Strike on Iran

This is the best short thing I have read not about the legality, morality, or strategic wisdom of the Trump-Netanyahu war on the Islamic Republic of Iran, but about how the opening strike happened...

Killing Khamenei: Regime-Change Roulette in a Powder-Keg World

But Trump insisted he already destroyed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program! A sudden U.S.–Israeli decapitation campaign against Iran and the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei...

Understanding the State of the Corrupt Supreme Court Today

Legal Realism in CrazyTown facing the chaos-monkey president: Reading the Roberts Court as a Trump‑era power machine as Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett turn Trumpist chaos...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Anchoring Your Thoughts Against the Blizzard of Trumpist Lies Is Very Important for You!

STILL VERY IMPORTANT: Proper mental hygiene is essential if you are to be a useful part of humanity-as-an-anthology-intelligence over the next four years. Start now! Remember: Ukraine has never...

My Cousin Phil Lord, His Co-Director Chris Miller, & the Entire "Project Hail Mary" Movie Team REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY Want You to Go See Their Movie in a Movie Theater

Twelve different video formats, $1.5 million a minute in world-class expert filmmaking craftsmanship, & I got to see where some of that $1.5 million a minute went by watching a small slice of the...

CROSSPOST: JOSH BARRO: Good Things Are Good

Josh Barro’s subhead: "A viral memo, proposing a 2028 market crash because of too much AI-driven productivity growth, makes little sense". This is the best of the “calm down” literature that has...

MAMLMs Still Epic Fail Open‑Book, Closed‑World, Finite‑List, Obvious Ground Truth Tasks

I count this as a failure nine different successive times. There really is a unique, well‑defined answer, and where the machine has every chance to uncover it: the Hedge Knight Ashford Meadow line...

Voyaging on Strange Seas of Thought, Not, However, Alone!: Where I Am Finding MAMLMs Useful This Winter

I do not know how to handle the intellectual crisis tsunami now coming down on me from the creation, development, and societal consequences of MAMLMs—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—other...

CROSSPOST: JOSH MARSHALL: Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision

Josh Marshall & I have the same view of the corrupt & craven John Roberts, & his corrupt & craven right-wing Supreme Court majority...

The Corrupt & Craven Supreme Court Has a Tariff Opinion This AM!

Emergency power, Republican president: Learning Resources v. Trump as a Year of Lawless Tariffs, then a 6-3 clawback—that record does not diminish but underlines the corruption problem of the Rober...

CROSSPOST: MIKE KONCZAL: Three Ways Terminal AI Has Changed How I Work (And Whether It's Coming for My Job)

Mike’s subhead: “How terminal AI compresses setup, robustness checks, and iteration without replacing judgment, and whether Olivia Rodrigo caused the inflation wave.” My intro: Mike Konczal has...

Pre-Class Assignment: Breaking Through: The Coming of Commercial-Imperial Society :: Do before 2026-02-22 23:59 PST :: Econ 196 :: S2026

Lecture Notes: Framing the “Dover Circle”’s post-1500 economic breakthrough as a historical anomaly, the result of a failure to find an equilibrium society-of-domination configuration. It thus...

DRAFT: COURSE: The Enlargement of the Bounds of Human Empire... :: Spring 2027

Time to start thinking about the framework for this...

Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History: Econ 196: Seminar: Special Topics in Economics (Spring 2026)

And we are now launched, with a new preparation for a new course: a Royal Road into the millennia of global economic history, hopefully designed for both humanists and quants who want an...

Query to Self: Is It, This Semester Worth Incorporating in My Classes My Introductory Digression on: "The Liberal Arts, Education, & 'AI'"?

Masters of the Liberal Arts, or servants of the machine? Education as learning how to jack in to the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind. The skills needed by...

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—The SubStack

WELCOME TO BRAD DELONG’S GRASPING REALITY: My attempt to make my readers—and myself—smarter, while keeping all of you out there in SubStackLand interested and entertained...