Wow, I didn't know Graeber posted on HN. May he rest in peace.

I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLong was a bit trolly, but nothing a competent, stable writer shouldn't have been able to handle. This impression is also borne out by my own reading of Graeber's work, and his reprehensible actions as a working academic:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-...

I have the same impressions of Graeber in this back and forth but it doesn't change the fact that Graeber has a point

I mean making a Twitter bot to spam someone "stay away!" every day seems a lot more thin-skinned and vengeful than Graeber's response here. And Graeber points out that most of the "factual errors" pointed out by DeLong do basically nothing to detract from the main theses Graeber makes in his book.

It's clear DeLong has it out for him and the "takedown" is just a collection of "gotchas" on minor details pasted together to try to attack the overall validity of the book