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PODCAST

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_

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All Episodes

41:48

The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/08/27

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 people with the opposite condition: extraordinary memory and brain

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55:49

Plain History: How the Transcontinental Railroads...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/08/20

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 public to generate unheard-of levels of private wealth.Just a small

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47:10

The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/08/13

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 about his research. We discuss personality tests, the value of

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58:13

Will AI Usher In the End of Deep Thinking?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/08/06

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 using AI to write most of their essays. What do we lose in a world

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44:23

The New Geography of Housing in America

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/07/30

Subscribe to Derek’s new Substack.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 talk about the state of American housing today and how the national

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49:22

The Demise of Late-Night TV Is an Omen for American...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/07/23

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.' Instead, many comedians rightly recognize that they can make more

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54:05

If Trump’s Economic Ideas Are So Bad, Why Isn’t the...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/07/17

Sign up for Derek's Substack here.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 PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jason

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49:14

Fertility Needs a Scientific Revolution

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/07/16

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 vitro fertilization. IVF is a decades-long practice based on science,

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56:10

The Mysterious Rise of Major Injuries in Professional...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/07/09

Sign up for the Derek Thompson newsletter.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 Journal of Biomechanics. So the sudden clustering of this injury among

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61:00

How Abundance Won in California

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/07/03

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 Quality Act. Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in the 1970s, the CEQA has

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49:05

What's Next for the Middle East: War, Peace, or...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/06/25

Sign up for Derek Thompson's Substack here!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 Middle East conflict. And then, just as suddenly, he declared a

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43:01

NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani on Abundance,...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/06/23

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 has been strikingly different. While Bernie Sanders devotees have

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40:11

A Grand, Unified Theory of Why Americans Are So...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/06/18

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 America. That's the bad news. The good news is that GLP-1 drugs, like

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53:57

Why Are Americans So Unhealthy? Part I: Is...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/06/11

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 environmental toxins. We move around less, too. Kevin Klatt, a research

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68:38

What Experts Really Think About Smartphones and...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/06/04

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 his collaborator Valerio Capraro. They took dozens of claims about

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64:07

Plain History: How Adolf Hitler Destroyed German...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/30

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 new histories often soften Hitler’s antisemitism and treat him as a

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67:52

Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Is Great for the...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/28

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 $500 per year per child, in the form of an expanded child tax credit

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51:20

The Gene-Editing Breakthrough That Saved a Baby’s Life

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/23

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 piece of medical history: the first patient of any age to receive a

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65:54

The Rules of Attraction and the Psychology of Romance

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/20

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, dating, and romance and hosts of the Love Factually podcast. Today,

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70:54

Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/16

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 all of humanity is over" and “hundreds of millions of people would

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333 results

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