Friday grab-bag

By far the best things I read on the Internet this week were Brad DeLong’s “deleted scenes” from his Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, which apparently will be published next September.  "Stagnation and Poverty Outside the North Atlantic, 10,000 BC-1870," "Where Was China? Why the TwentiethCentury was Not a Chinese Century" and "Lighting the Rocket of Growth andLightening the Toil of Work" – I linked to the first of the three in Thursday's post, all three are well worth reading.

Bonus video of the week: Not a cheesy 1970s music video this time, but the “Sir Archibald Mapsalot” sketch from this week’s The Daily Show. The bit at the end is the nicest jab of the (metaphorical) stiletto I’ve seen in ages: