Plain English with Derek Thompson
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. Hear 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! You can also find us on tiktok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_
Episodes
July 30, 2025 • 44 mins
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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 tal...
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July 23, 2025 • 49 mins
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...
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July 17, 2025 • 54 mins
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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 Pl...
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July 16, 2025 • 49 mins
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 vi...
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July 9, 2025 • 56 mins
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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 Jou...
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July 3, 2025 • 61 mins
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 Qua...
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June 25, 2025 • 49 mins
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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 Midd...
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June 23, 2025 • 43 mins
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...
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June 18, 2025 • 40 mins
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 Am...
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June 11, 2025 • 53 mins
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 environme...
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June 4, 2025 • 68 mins
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 hi...
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May 30, 2025 • 64 mins
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...
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May 28, 2025 • 67 mins
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 ...
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May 23, 2025 • 51 mins
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 pi...
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May 20, 2025 • 65 mins
Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one impossibly complex person. Romance psychology is particularly hard because you’re trying to understand what’s going on between two impossibly complex people. Eli Finkel is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Paul Eastwick is a professor at the University of California, Davis. Both are experts on the psychology of attraction, da...
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May 16, 2025 • 70 mins
In every generation, important people predict that the end is near and the apocalypse is coming. In the 1960s, the fear was that population growth would destroy the planet—that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The most famous warning was 'The Population Bomb,' a bestselling book published in 1968 by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed "the battle to feed al...
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May 13, 2025 • 69 mins
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling drugmakers to slash the prices of their medicines. Once again, the president showed an amazing nose for interesting questions. Statistically, the U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population but nearly 50 percent of global pharmaceutical spending. Americans spend three to five times more on new branded drugs than people in Europe.
Why? And what's the matt...
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May 9, 2025 • 62 mins
In music, billion-dollar investments in old catalogues are squeezing out new music. In film, Hollywood has become addicted to the regurgitation of familiar IP. In visual art, critics bemoan the straitjacket of political correctness. On TV, as Derek told Bill Simmons, we're in a Gilded Age of television, where every prestigious show looks absolutely amazing—but that gilded veneer often covers up for dull storytelling.
What do these...
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May 6, 2025 • 45 mins
Last month, the unemployment rate for recent college grads surged to nearly 6 percent. Compared to the overall economy's jobless rate, the unemployment rate for recent grads is higher now than in any month on record, going back at least four decades. Business school grads are struggling, too. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that elite MBA programs saw that their most recent classes had "worse job-placement outcomes last...
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May 2, 2025 • 126 mins
Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on American science. Thousands of workers have been dismissed from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Billions of dollars are being cut from the NIH and NSF. Talented scientists are leaving the field (or leaving the country). Clinical trials and longitudinal studies are ending without explanation. Major research universities are under direct attac...
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