Recommendations you can check.
Economics professor at UC Berkeley, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, and author of Slouching Towards Utopia; writes the Grasping Reality newsletter.
8 things
The Signal and the NoiseBook Nate Silver
And, in addition, Nate Silver’s earlier book The Signal and the Noise was, I thought, brilliant. I am forever deeply in his debt for his making me better-informed and wiser across a whole bunch of different dimensions.
A long post explaining why he did not like Nate Silver's On the Edge, after praising Silver's earlier work.
2026-07-30·braddelong.substack.com ↗
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000Podcast Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
And I love the podcast of the book’s authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, “Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000”
Notes on a Berkeley roundtable for the book The AI Con, where he praises the authors' podcast but criticises the panel.
2025-10-03·braddelong.substack.com ↗
Freedom from the MarketBook Mike Konczal
Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute has a wonderful new book: Freedom from the Market
A DeLongTODAY briefing he describes as "sort of, a book review" of Konczal's Freedom from the Market.
2021-02-23·braddelong.substack.com ↗
gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_MSoftware Google
The absolute gonzo gemma4:26b-a4b-it-q4_K_M performance-wise. What is going on here that is making it such an extraordinary outlier?
His benchmark notes on running local LLMs on a maxed-out M5 Max MacBook Pro, ending with which model he uses for which task.
2026-06-29·braddelong.substack.com ↗
llama3.2:3bSoftware Meta
Right now: llama3.2:3b appears to be the model for: is this email urgent?qwen3:8b appears to be the model for: summarize this 5000-word article. llama3.3:70b(q8) appears to be the model for: let’s write or debug some computer code.
His benchmark notes on running local LLMs on a maxed-out M5 Max MacBook Pro, ending with which model he uses for which task.
2026-06-29·braddelong.substack.com ↗
Sean IllingOther
Sean Illing is presenting his dissertation's vision of Camus trying to figure out how to deal with the world as painted by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Very interesting. Very much worth reading...
Brad DeLong's own recommendation blurb for the newsletter Sean Illing, on their Substack's recommendations page.
2025-10-15·braddelong.substack.com ↗
The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American FoundingBook William Hogeland
Buy it! Read it!
A short Grasping Reality post about William Hogeland's book, published the week it came out; DeLong says in the same post that he wrote a blurb for it.
2024-05-29·braddelong.substack.com ↗
On the EdgeBook Nate Silver
And yet I did not like Nate Silver’s latest book, On the Edge, much.
A long post explaining why he did not like Nate Silver's On the Edge, after praising Silver's earlier work.
2026-07-30·braddelong.substack.com ↗
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