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. 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
Episodes
June 9, 2026 • 64 mins
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 dramatically. College-educated American fathers now spend nearly four times as much time caring for their children as they did in the 1960s.
And according to new research, this new type of fatherhood doesn't just change a man's schedule ...
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June 5, 2026 • 56 mins
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 getting remarkably good at producing creative work. In some cases, experts now prefer AI-generated writing to work created by humans and can't reliably tell the difference between the two. In fact, a major literary prize even recently ...
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June 2, 2026 • 58 mins
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, the rise of a culture that puts work at the center of our lives, and the "antisocial century," in which technology has made it easier than ever to avoid spending time with other people. The result is a world where many of us trade de...
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May 29, 2026 • 57 mins
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 tanking crisis saw about a third of teams purposely try to lose games in a race to secure the top pick in the 2026 draft. A barrage of gambling scandals took out a head coach and several players. And the playoffs have brought relentless...
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May 22, 2026 • 59 mins
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 America. Many Democrats see that claim as completely off base.
So where does that split come from, and why has it become so central to politics?
Journalist Helen Lewis calls this emerging worldview “masculinism,” an ideology that pushes ba...
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May 19, 2026 • 61 mins
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 mostly a conservative position, with many liberals arguing it was overblown.
That’s starting to shift.
The U.S. now spends far more than it brings in, and the gap is still growing. For the first time, interest payments on the debt ha...
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May 15, 2026 • 61 mins
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 economic factors like housing costs, childcare costs, and student debt. Others point to a harder-to-measure, broader sense of uncertainty about the future.
At the same time, economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde thinks we are underest...
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May 12, 2026 • 54 mins
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 the AI job apocalypse isn’t actually happening?
Today, Derek talks to economist Alex Imas about the growing gap between the rhetoric around AI-related job loss and the facts. Despite widespread fears of mass unemployment, surveys show ...
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May 8, 2026 • 60 mins
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 author Morgan Housel and journalist David Wallace-Wells about what Derek calls the “Tragic Twenties”: the strange and sudden collapse in American happiness that began during COVID and never really stopped.
What's behind the country’s ...
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May 5, 2026 • 45 mins
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 starting to change.
Recently, cancer researchers have announced a series of breakthroughs that, taken together, sound almost too good to be true: a drug that targets the “undruggable” gene behind most pancreatic tumors, a personalize...
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May 1, 2026 • 49 mins
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, and holding us back from reaching our full potential?Today, Derek Thompson talks with bestselling author David Epstein about the surprising upside of constraints. After arguing for breadth in 'Range,' Epstein’s new book, 'Inside the ...
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April 28, 2026 • 58 mins
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 Pope Leo. And yet the movement endures. Derek is joined by Ross Douthat to unpack the contradictory coalition Trump has built: Christian conservatives who overlook increasingly pagan behavior, anti-establishment populists who embrace s...
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April 24, 2026 • 70 mins
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 Canadians bought 1.6 billion tickets, or about five per person. Last year, Americans bought half that number. Eighty years ago, the typical American went to the movies twice a month. Now they go about twice a year.
Then there are the jobs....
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April 21, 2026 • 62 mins
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 around the world, exploit security vulnerabilities, conceal its own reasoning, and fabricate false explanations for what it was doing. Anthropic instead shared it with a small consortium of companies to help them find their own cybers...
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April 14, 2026 • 64 mins
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 competing energy blockades, with Iran squeezing American allies and America squeezing Iran. And AI is its own energy arms race, with tech companies scrambling not just for customers but for supply—chips, electricity, and data center capacity. ...
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April 10, 2026 • 67 mins
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 has crept up ominously, one of the questions I’ve reported more deeply than any other is: Is AI replacing young workers’ jobs? To make a long story short: I initially thought yes, then some economists convinced me the answer was no, the...
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April 8, 2026 • 68 mins
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 stopped losing its religion.” The Washington Post declared that “Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men.”
This is shocking news. Since the 1990s, the share of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has been skyrocketing. A rev...
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April 3, 2026 • 52 mins
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 have similarly global consequences, from the rise of China to changes in the future of war to the acceleration of the global renewables transition. Today, Australian investor and writer Alex Turnbull joins the show to discuss the most ...
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March 31, 2026 • 48 mins
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 called "How Metrics Make Us Miserable." Thi told us that he became a philosopher to answer the biggest questions in life but discovered, in grad school, that everybody around him mostly cared about numbers. Journals were ranked by status:...
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March 27, 2026 • 62 mins
Today’s podcast is an interview with one of the cofounders of the AI company Anthropic, Jack Clark. One thing I’m trying to do with the subject of artificial intelligence is offer a balance of perspectives on an issue that tends to receive mostly one-sided coverage. Some people are certain that AI is a bubble; some are certain it is not. Some are certain that AI will destroy millions of jobs; some are certain that it will not. I wa...
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