Vermouth, covfefe, & ‘vermin’: What LLMs potentially have to teach Us About the American Right’s Id from Scott Bessent’s “Straits of Vermouth” to Trump’s “oranges of the investigation”. Our parapraxes are noisy but telling windows into the system prompts running our mental autocompletes:

**Scott Bessent's LLM System Prompt Has a High Weight on the Word "Vermouth": Thing Worth Noting, for 2026-04-16 Thu**

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scott-bessents-llm-system-prompt>

2026-04-16 Thu

Dear Prof. Evans—

Suppose I were to add a "High Patriarchy & The History of Underdevelopment" unit to my courses for next semester...

Which of your things do you think would go best added to this reading list for the week that I am contemplating? Or do you think this approach I am thinking of taking is simply barking up the wrong tree entirely?

@cstross

Is this where I say that the "courgette" did not exist in the Regency Period? That it was selectively bred in Lombardy in the late 1800s?

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/utopia-and-its-enemies-thomas-robert>

Utopia & Its Enemies: Thomas Robert Malthus

In which I digress to answer a question from Matthew Yglesias...

Now if only I can find a place for this in my book ms….

The question is about how original Thomas Robert Malthus’s argument is—that humanity is doomed by fecundity to poverty, with patriarchy, monarchy, and orthodoxy being the only path to build not a good but a not-totally-horrible society:

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-is-e-key-insight-f4b

PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Semi-Weekly; Aspirationally an hour or less.

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