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
May 14, 2024 • 38 mins
Today—a closer critical look at the relationship between smartphones and mental health. One of the themes we’ve touched on more than any other on this show is that American teenagers—especially girls—appear to be “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. The numbers are undeniable. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that from 2011 to 2021, the shar...
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May 7, 2024 • 59 mins
For decades, flying cars have been a symbol of collective disappointment—of a technologically splendid future that was promised but never delivered. Whose fault is that?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has spent 18 months researching the history, present, and future of flying car technology, joins the show. We talk about why flying cars don't exist—and why they might be much closer to reality than most peop...
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May 3, 2024 • 56 mins
Several years ago, I told some friends that I had an idea for a second book. It would be called ‘Everything Is a Cult.’ I’d noticed that in an age of declining religiosity, capitalism was filling the god-shaped hole left by the demise of organized religion with companies and services and products that were amassing a cult-like following in media, entertainment, and marketing. I never ended up writing the book. But last week, Sean I...
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April 30, 2024 • 42 mins
Today, with Gaza protests spreading across the country and around the world, we dive deep into what’s actually happening on the ground in the war between Israel and Hamas—and how this war might actually end, or lead to a broader conflict.
The status quo in Gaza is horrendous in every conceivable way. Following an attack that killed more than a thousand Israelis on October 7, Israel has retaliated with a bombing campaign more destru...
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April 26, 2024 • 55 mins
In the last week, hundreds of protests across college campuses and American cities have taken place in response to the war in Gaza. Campus life has shut down at Columbia University in NYC. The news is strewn with images of police confrontations on campuses, from Texas to California. Hundreds of demonstrators across the country have been taken into police custody. And many people now anticipate that, without a major course correctio...
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April 23, 2024 • 60 mins
Today’s episode is all about India.You don’t have to believe that demography is pure destiny to appreciate the fact that the future of India is the future of the world. In 2024, today, India is the largest country by population on the planet, having surpassed China two years ago. In 2050, India is still projected to be the largest country in the world. In 2100, when I am 114 years old and this podcast is hosted by my cryo-frozen va...
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April 19, 2024 • 60 mins
Today's show is a critical look at some of the most popular health fads of the moment, with return guests Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg, from the Growth Equation and the ‘FAREWELL’ podcast. We’re talking VO2 max, the benefits of sunlight, so-called morning and nighttime “stacks” (complex multivitamin routines for optimizing your energy and sleep), and Silicon Valley dreams of immortality. Plus, a rant from Derek about the supplem...
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Jason Furman, a professor of economics at Harvard, returns to the show to discuss the biggest economic questions of the moment, including:
- Why have home and auto insurance prices skyrocketed?
- Why did inflation stop falling in 2024?
- How did economic experts get their disinflation forecasts so wrong?
- What sticky-high prices are preventing further disinflation?
- Are interest rates going to be higher for years?
If you have que...
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April 12, 2024 • 50 mins
"This presidential election is not very interesting, but it is important," the political commentator Josh Barro wrote in his newsletter, 'Very Serious.' Americans certainly seem to agree with the first part. Engagement with political news has been in the dumps, and many Americans seem to be tuning out the Biden-Trump II rematch. But the conundrum of this election is that it is both numbingly overfamiliar for many voters and also pr...
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April 9, 2024 • 53 mins
Jay Van Bavel is a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. His lab has published papers on how the internet became a fun-house mirror of extreme political opinions, why the news media has a strong negativity bias, why certain emotions go viral online, why tribalism is inflamed by online activity, and how the internet can make us seem like the worst versions of ourselves. At the same time, Van Bavel emphas...
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April 5, 2024 • 43 mins
The other day, I read a statistic about my hometown of Washington D.C. that knocked my socks off. In D.C. high schools, 60 percent of students were chronically absent in the last school year. That means they missed one day of school every two weeks. Among ninth graders, it’s even worse: One-third of D.C. freshmen were absent for the equivalent of six weeks of school.
The New York Times reported that, nationwide, one quarter of publ...
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April 2, 2024 • 51 mins
What can the science of ancient humans and the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers teach us about how to be healthy today? Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman joins the show to talk about his provocative “mismatch theory,” why humans are dysevolved for the modern world, and why exercise is the ultimate miracle drug.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Daniel Lieberman
Producer: Devon Renaldo
Links:
Exercised, by Dan Lieberman https:/...
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March 26, 2024 • 50 mins
Today, the media vibes around electric vehicles are all bad. But if you lift up and take in the big picture, electric vehicles and hybrids are taking over the market. Gas-powered cars are as much in structural decline right now as the cable bundle in TV.
Today’s guest, Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of the climate media company Heatmap, says that while EV sales are much stronger than the media doom-and-gloom narrativ...
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March 19, 2024 • 33 mins
Derek shares his thoughts on the question of the moment in tech and tech politics.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
Host: Derek Thompson
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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March 12, 2024 • 51 mins
Today, we’re talking about movies, the philosophy of hits in Hollywood, and why we might be at a fascinating inflection point in how the entertainment industry thinks about popularity and prestige.
We start by thinking about the big Oscar win for 'Oppenheimer' in the historical context. For much of the past 10 or 15 years, popularity and prestige have come apart in Hollywood. The biggest movies have almost exclusively been comic bo...
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March 5, 2024 • 29 mins
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2024 was to do more episodes with people who think I'm wrong about something. For example, I've done several episodes about how the U.S. economy is doing much better than most Americans think. Today’s guest says my analysis (and that of many economists and economic commentators) is missing something big. Official inflation measures do a poor job of capturing the effect of higher interest rates. ...
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March 1, 2024 • 35 mins
Today’s episode is about one of the most interesting pieces of research I’ve read in the past year. It's an idea called "need for chaos," and the truth is that I literally cannot stop thinking about it as I follow American culture, politics, and media. Very briefly, it is the observation that many Americans today embrace conspiracy theories and nihilistic burn-it-all-down messages, not because they are partisans of the left or righ...
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February 27, 2024 • 70 mins
Today’s episode is about the extraordinary decline in face-to-face socializing in America—and the real stakes of the country’s hanging-out crisis.
From 2003 to 2022, American adults reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent.
Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist and the director of the ...
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February 23, 2024 • 38 mins
Today’s episode is about arguably the most important economic statistic out there: real (or inflation-adjusted) wage growth. For much of the last few years, many people's real wages have declined. But for the last few quarters, real wages have been growing. In fact, they've grown so much for the poorest workers that several key measures of inequality are falling, and the Black-white wage gap is shrinking. But many Americans still d...
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February 20, 2024 • 40 mins
Life is a series of conversations. Our relationships, friendships, marriages, breakups, makeups, hirings, promotions, and firings are mostly the story of two people talking. And many of these conversations are hard or uncomfortable. Sometimes we spend years refusing to be honest with the people we know the best because we’re afraid of telling them how we feel. What if we all had such confidence in our own powers of communication an...
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