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
September 12, 2025 • 52 mins
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 o...
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September 9, 2025 • 57 mins
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 ...
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September 5, 2025 • 52 mins
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 ...
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September 3, 2025 • 49 mins
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 s...
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August 27, 2025 • 41 mins
Memory is the glue of life. Without it, our focus softens, our experience of the world blurs, and our identities melt away. But as people age, their memory declines. Many billions of dollars have been spent to understand the biological basis of dementia and to devise a cure. In most cases, they have failed spectacularly.
But what if, rather than study the brains of people with advanced memory loss, we instead studied the brains of...
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August 20, 2025 • 55 mins
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 pub...
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August 13, 2025 • 47 mins
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 abou...
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August 6, 2025 • 58 mins
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 us...
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July 30, 2025 • 42 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 • 47 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 • 52 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 • 47 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 • 54 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 • 59 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 • 47 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 • 41 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 • 38 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 • 51 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 • 66 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 • 62 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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