Plain English with Derek Thompson

Old-igarchy: How the Elderly Conquered American Power

Prior to the 1930s, old age in America often meant poverty. But thanks to Social Security, Medicare, medical advances, and rising asset prices, over the past 90 years, older Americans have become one ...

2026-06-12

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How Modern Fatherhood Is Changing Men’s Brains

Humans are unusual dads. Across the animal kingdom, dads are often absent from child-rearing altogether. But among humans, fatherhood takes many forms, and in the last half century, it has changed dra...

2026-06-09

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What 400,000 Essays Reveal About AI and Creativity

For generations, we've defined creativity by its products: the novel, the painting, the song, the breakthrough idea. We look at the work, and from the work we see the creator as “creative.” But AI is ...

2026-06-05

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The Surprising Truth About America's Friendship Crisis

Modern loneliness is often treated as a simple problem: People are simply spending more time alone. But what if that's not the whole story? Over the last several years, Derek has written about workism...

2026-06-02

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Why the NBA Feels Broken—and Why the League Can’t Fix It

The NBA’s vibes have been unusually awful recently. There has been widespread hand-wringing about the homogenization of modern offenses and the league’s notoriously weak regular-season TV ratings. A t...

2026-05-29

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The Men Who Think Toxic Feminism Destroyed America

Over the past century, attitudes about gender roles have become one of the clearest dividing lines in the country. Many Republicans, both men and women, say men are getting a raw deal in modern Americ...

2026-05-22

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Does Anybody Know How to Solve an American Debt Crisis?

On his 40th birthday, Derek Thompson takes a step back and looks at how his thinking on the national debt has changed. Back when he first covered fiscal policy, concern about government borrowing was ...

2026-05-19

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The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Think

Fertility rates are collapsing around the world. In rich countries and poor ones, in secular societies and religious ones, people are having fewer children than ever before. Some explanations focus on...

2026-05-15

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The Case Against the AI Job Apocalypse

For the past few years, Silicon Valley executives and economists have warned that artificial intelligence could wipe out millions of jobs. Some companies have even blamed AI for layoffs. But what if t...

2026-05-12

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Why American Happiness Just Fell Off a Cliff

America is richer than ever. Unemployment is low. Wages are high. According to traditional metrics, the economy looks strong. So why are Americans feeling so bad? Today, Derek talks with bestselling ...

2026-05-08

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One of the Deadliest Cancers in America May Have Met Its Match

Hard to detect and almost impossible to treat, pancreatic cancer has long been one of medicine’s most ruthless killers. For decades, it’s been the cancer that science couldn’t crack. But that might be...

2026-05-05

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Why Too Much Freedom Is the Enemy of Success

Freedom is one of the few ideas everyone agrees on. Surely more choice and autonomy is a good thing, right? But what if our endless pursuit of freedom is actually making us more anxious, less creative...

2026-05-01

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Why the Iran War Is Tearing MAGA Apart

For nearly a decade, critics have predicted that this would be the moment Trumpism finally fractures - January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, endless internal feuds, even Trump’s online beef with ...

2026-04-28

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The Triple Crisis That’s Breaking Hollywood—and Changing the Future of Movies

Hollywood is in the middle of a triple crisis. You can measure it in tickets, jobs, and ideas. Start with tickets. The best year for the movie business this century was 2002, when Americans and Canad...

2026-04-24

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The Most Powerful and Dangerous AI Model Yet

Two weeks ago, Anthropic announced an AI model so capable and so dangerous that it decided not to release it to the public. The model, codenamed Mythos, could autonomously infiltrate computer systems...

2026-04-21

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The Whole World Is Fighting About Energy

The two biggest stories in the world right now—the war involving Iran and the rise of artificial intelligence—are, at their core, the same story: energy. The Iran conflict has become a war of competin...

2026-04-14

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‘The Job Market for Young People Is Brutal’

Something weird is going on with the elevated unemployment rate for young people today, but no one knows what exactly it is. For the last year, as the unemployment rate for recent college graduates h...

2026-04-10

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America's Religious Revival Is a Mirage

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: The U.S. is experiencing a religious revival, and it’s concentrated among young people, who are flocking back to the fold. The Economist announced that “the West has sto...

2026-04-08

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Is China the Winner of the Iran War?

The 1970s oil crisis changed the world in ways that many people forget today, from the transformation of American politics to the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. The Iran war of 2026 could ...

2026-04-03

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Why We're Addicted to ‘Sh*tty Flow’

One of the themes we’ve circled in the last few weeks is the way that the modern world can hijack our values. This principle was recently articulated by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen in an episode cal...

2026-04-01

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Plain English with Derek Thompson

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