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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

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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69:21

Why Do Americans Pay So Much for Drugs?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/13

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 matter with fixing this problem by just telling pharmaceutical companies

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62:18

Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/09

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 trends all have in common? The slow decline of modern media. This

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45:56

The Job Market for Young Grads Is Flashing Red

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/06

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 year than any other in recent memory."What’s going on? Today’s

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126:21

Megapod: The Crisis in American Science

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/05/02

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 attack, with billions more dollars being withheld for political

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70:45

Is This the Chinese Century?

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/04/29

In the last few weeks, for the first time in my life, I’ve seriously thought about the 21st century not being another American century.A recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs by Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell put things as starkly as I’ve ever seen. Some people are still stuck in a mode of thinking about China as being a place that just makes things of little value and significance. But Made in China means something different now. Technologically, China dominates everything from electric

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69:37

What Americans Get Wrong About ADHD

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/04/25

In 1937, a Rhode Island psychiatrist named Charles Bradley ran an experiment on 30 child patients who had complained of headaches. He gave them an amphetamine, that is a stimulant, called Benzedrine, which was popular at the time among jazz musicians and college students. The experiment failed, in one sense. The headaches persisted. But he noted that half of the children responded in what he called spectacular fashion, as teachers said these children seemed instantly transformed by the drug. Rather

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66:16

An Astrophysicist Explains the "Strongest Evidence...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/04/22

Last week, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Cambridge announced that they had discovered the “strongest indication” ever of extraterrestrial life. The source did not come from Mars or Venus or any nearby moon. It came from K2-18b, a massive planet some 120 light-years from Earth.If this finding checks out, it is, without question, one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. But many scientists think that ... well, it might not check out at all. Today’s guest

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35:09

A Toy Manufacturer Explains How Trump’s Tariffs Could...

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/04/17

In the past three weeks, we've spoken to economists about the tariffs. We’ve spoken to a historian about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the 100-year legacy of American protectionism. We've spoken to supply chain expert Jason Miller from Michigan State about why China is set up to win the upcoming trade war. But the voice we haven’t heard is the voice of business. People who run companies are screaming at whoever will listen that the White House agenda will decimate business and plunge their

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45:29

Why America Will Lose Its Trade War With China

Plain English with Derek Thompson ·

2025/04/16

The U.S. is in the opening innings of a full-blown trade war with China. What does that actually mean? What do we sell to China? What does China sell to us? How is each country dependent on the other for the supply of electronics, food, machines, and goods? Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State and an expert on global supply chains, tells Derek that in the trade war between the U.S. and China, one of these two countries seems better positioned to weather a protracted trade dispute—and it’s not

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344 results

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