Longtime Atlantic tech, culture and political writer Derek Thompson cuts through all the noise surrounding the big questions and headlines that matter to you in his new podcast Plain English. Watch Derek and guests engage the news with clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday, and if you've got a topic you want discussed, shoot us an email at plainenglish@spotify.com! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson
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The film and TV business has quietly—or, if you work in the industry, not so quietly—been in a depression for the past few years. Original TV work has plummeted. In 2024, Americans bought about 40 percent fewer movie tickets than they did in 2019, the year before the pandemic. The number of people employed in the motion picture industry in L.A. County has also declined by 40 percent. Those are catastrophic figures. Few people have done more to shape my understanding of these developments than Be...
America is rich—richer than ever. Yet Americans are more anxious, lonelier, and less satisfied than people in many poorer nations. The 2025 World Happiness Report ranked the U.S. 24th in life satisfaction, its lowest on record. Maybe, as social scientists say, we’ve traded community for consumption. Today’s guest, Morgan Housel, thinks there’s a deeper reason money hasn’t bought us happiness. America, he says, is world-class at making money, but bad at spending it wisely. In his new book, The Ar...
I’ve had the privilege of talking to many brilliant people about artificial intelligence. And when you ask them to imagine the most beneficial consequences of this technology, they almost always give the same answer: medicine. The dream is dazzling. Superintelligent AI will cure stubborn diseases and disorders—cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s. It will diagnose all our illnesses, design new lifesaving drugs, accelerate clinical trials, and pair with wearables to fight chronic illness and extend...
The past few weeks have marked a low point for free speech principles in America. The head of the FCC openly threatened ABC for the language of a comedian. The president told a reporter that networks that are "against" him should have their licenses revoked. The vice president went on TV and told Americans to turn in their colleagues if they spoke ill of Charlie Kirk. And many have. After Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University, posted that “if you think Charlie Kir...
In the past few weeks, we’ve done several episodes on obesity, GLP-1 drugs, and nutrition science. What we haven’t talked about as much is the politics of food. And today’s guests say: If you really want to understand why Americans are so unhealthy, you have to see that the problem is not just our willpower, and it’s not just our food itself. It’s our food policies. Kevin Hall was a former top nutrition researcher at the NIH who retired after accusing RFK Jr. and the Department of Health and Hum...
This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group of companies have ever spent to do anything. Notably, these companies are not remotely close to earning $400 billion on artificial intelligence. That's why you’re starting to hear some people wonder if the AI build-out is turning into the mother of all economic bubbles. The prospect of an AI bubble should scare us. Roughly half of last quarter's G...
Matt Belloni, the host of the Town podcast and the author of Puck’s 'What I’m Hearing' newsletter, joins the show to talk about Jimmy Kimmel's punishment, what happened behind the scenes at ABC and Disney, Bob Iger's legacy, and what this means at a moment when media companies are bending the knee to the Trump administration, which is clearly using its position to punish free speech despite rising to power by promising to do the opposite. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future ...
To read more of Derek's reporting on GLP-1 drugs, you can subscribe to his Substack here . GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound don't just help with Type 2 diabetes and weight loss. They seem to curb alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco use among addicts. In some studies, they prevent strokes, heart attacks, chronic kidney disease, sleep apnea, and Parkinson's disease. They’re associated with a lower risk of several cancers, including pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma. Arthritic patients on the d...
In the past few years, we have witnessed a frightening spiral of political violence. We’ve seen the killing of Charlie Kirk; the killing of Brian Thompson, the health insurance executive; the assassination of a Minnesota House Speaker and her husband; the shooting of a Minnesota state senator and his wife; several attempted assassinations of Donald Trump; an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s home and husband; a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer; and calls to lynch Vice President M...
America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway. Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, bipolar disorder among American youth grew by a factor of 40, while the number of children diagnosed with ADHD increased by a factor of 7. Rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression have soared, too. Perhaps in previous decades doctors missed millions of cases of illness that we’re now catching. Or perhaps, as the New York Times writer David Wallac...
In the second of our two-episode series on Donald Trump, economics, and power, we talk to Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. Farrell has written extensively on how the United States has in the last few years weaponized its economic power to force other countries to do its bidding, through sanctions or the freezing of bank accounts. Today, we consider the many ways that Trump has weaponized the office of the presidency against American interests and how his authorit...
Today is the first of two interviews this week trying to answer this question: What is Trumponomics? From the 1980s to the 2010s, it was generally assumed that Republicans and Democrats had settled differences in economic policy. Republicans wanted lower taxes and less spending on welfare. Democrats wanted higher taxes and more social spending. Reality didn’t always conform to those differences. George H.W. Bush famously raised some taxes, and Bill Clinton famously reduced some welfare spending....
Host Derek Thompson speaks with Dr. Sandra Weintraub about her groundbreaking research on "super-agers," people over 80 who maintain the memory of someone decades younger. Contrary to expectations of diet or exercise, Dr. Weintraub's study found that the one unifying characteristic among super-agers is their robust social connections. The discussion delves into the biological underpinnings, including specific brain regions, and the broader implications for understanding memory, aging, and public health in an increasingly isolated world.
Today’s pod is about the economic story of the moment. It’s about new technology that supporters claim will transform the U.S. economy, an infrastructure build-out unlike anything in living memory that demands enormous natural resources, fears that corporate giants are overbuilding something that can never return its investment, an uncomfortable closeness between corporations and the state, fears that oligarchs are screwing the public to generate unheard-of levels of private wealth. Just a small...
According to analysis by Financial Times writer John Burn-Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to Americans’ personalities in the last decade. Longitudinal tests indicate that we’ve collectively become less extroverted, less agreeable, and more neurotic. The most significant thing Burn-Murdoch found is that measures of conscientiousness among young Americans appears to be in a kind of free fall. Today, John and I talk about his research. We discuss personality tests, the value of consci...
Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest GDP report. It contained a startling detail. Spending on artificial intelligence added more to the U.S. economy than consumer spending last quarter. This is very quickly becoming an AI economy. I’m interested in how AI will change our jobs. But I’m just as curious about how it will change our minds. We’re already seeing that students in high school and college are using AI to write most of their essays. What do we lose in a world wh...
Subscribe to Derek’s new Substack . In 1991, the median age of first-time homebuyers was 28. Now it’s 38, an all-time high. In 1981, the median age of all homebuyers was 36. Today, it’s 56—another all-time high. This is the hardest time for young people (defined, generously, up to 40!) to buy their first home in modern history. Derek talks about the history of how we got here and then brings on Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen to talk about the state of American housing today and how the national h...
Even before the cancellation of 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,' the business of comedy was changing rapidly. Twenty years ago, comedians aspired to be late-night hosts, or to star in movies, or to have their own sitcoms. But in 2025, late-night shows are going extinct, adult comedies in Hollywood are a thing of the past, and popular sitcoms are so rare these days that Gen Z viewers are still watching 'The Office' and 'Friends.' Instead, many comedians rightly recognize that they can make m...
Sign up for Derek's Substack here . Harvard economist Jason Furman returns to the show to answer two big, burning questions. First, if Trump's economic ideas are as bad as most economists say, why isn't the U.S. economy doing much worse? Second, if Trump fires Jerome Powell, would it be the final blow that finally pushes the economy into a recession? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com . Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jason Furman ...
Couples are having kids much later in their lives. As young people spend more of their 20s and 30s getting established in their careers, and marriage is delayed, and home buying is delayed, the unstoppable force of delay runs up against the immovable object of human anatomy. It is harder for a 40-year-old to get pregnant than for a 20-year-old to do so. The best solution we have for the fertility dilemma of the modern age is in vitro fertilization. IVF is a decades-long practice based on science...
Sign up for the Derek Thompson newsletter . In Game 7 of this year's NBA Finals, Indiana Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in the first quarter while attempting to drive to the basket on an injured calf. It was the third major Achilles injury of the 2025 NBA playoffs. Curiously, Achilles tears are typically an older-dude injury, as they're most common in middle-aged men, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of Biomechanics. So the sudden clustering of this injury amo...
The California housing crisis is a disaster and an emergency. Housing construction per capita has steadily fallen in the last few decades, while home prices, rent, and homeless rates have all soared. By some estimates, the state is three million units short of housing demand—the equivalent of seven San Franciscos. One of the major barriers to building more housing has for decades been provisions in the California Environmental Quality Act. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in the 1970s, the CEQA has ...
Sign up for Derek Thompson's Substack here ! Donald Trump rose to power in the Republican Party as a critic of the neoconservative tradition and was opposed to war in the Middle East. But after weeks of Israel’s aerial attacks of Iran, Trump shocked the world with targeted strikes of several Iranian nuclear facilities, including Natanz and Fordo. Suddenly, it seemed like President Trump was getting the U.S. involved in another Middle East conflict. And then, just as suddenly, he declared a cease...
Before today’s show, a personal announcement. After almost 17 years at The Atlantic, I have just officially moved my writing full time to Substack, the newsletter platform. If you like this show, if you’re a fan of my work, I think you’ll love what I’m trying to build. Sign up here . 'Abundance,' the book I cowrote with Ezra Klein, has received sharp pushback from left-wing commentators. But the response among left-wing politicians has been strikingly different. While Bernie Sanders devotees hav...
Americans are unusually overweight and chronically ill compared to similarly rich countries. This episode presents a grand, unified theory for why that's the case. Our food environment has become significantly more calorie-rich and industrialized in the past few decades, sending our obesity rates soaring, our visceral fat levels rising, and our chronic inflammation surging. The result is an astonishing rise in chronic illness in America. That's the bad news. The good news is that GLP-1 drugs, li...
Americans die younger and faster than the residents of almost every other rich country. Why? There's gun violence, drug overdoses, and car crashes. Young people are much more likely to die from these accidents than those in other countries. Just as importantly, Americans are more likely to die from chronic illness, especially heart disease and metabolic diseases. We eat more and worse food. We're arguably exposed to more environmental toxins. We move around less, too. Kevin Klatt, a research sci...
I'm very concerned about the relationship between smartphone use and America's mental health crisis. But many researchers don't see things my way. They insist that there is little to no empirical data showing that smartphone and social media use drives up anxiety or depression. So what’s the truth about smartphones, social media, and mental health? That’s the question that the NYU researcher Jay Van Bavel set out to answer with his collaborator Valerio Capraro. They took dozens of claims about s...
In November 1932, Germany was a republic. By the spring of 1933, it was a dictatorship. How did it all happen so quickly? Fascination with Adolf Hitler requires no news peg, but I’ve been particularly interested in understanding the story of Hitler's rise, because in the past few months, several prominent podcast hosts—including Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson—have mainstreamed revisionist histories of the Nazi regime and WWII. These new histories often soften Hitler’s antisemitism and treat him as...
The tax and spending bill passed by House Republicans last week is the sort of bill that does so many different things that even budget experts could be forgiven for not realizing just how many different parts of the economy it will change. In the realm of workers' comp, the bill would eliminate taxes on overtime pay and tips. In terms of families, it would create new $1,000 savings accounts for children and give parents an extra $500 per year per child, in the form of an expanded child tax cred...
Last year, Kyle and Nicole Muldoon welcomed their baby KJ into the world. Almost immediately, doctors realized something was wrong. KJ had been born with a genetic mutation that made it impossible to regulate the amount of ammonia in his system. The rare disease had the potential to kill him or cause severe brain damage. But KJ is almost 10 months old today. And he’s doing better than ever. Because this little baby has become a piece of medical history: the first patient of any age to receive a ...
