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 [email protected]! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson

PodSkip has analyzed 1 episode of Plain English with Derek Thompson, averaging 4.0 ads per episode (7% of runtime).

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What We Get Wrong About Loneliness
Jun 02, 2026
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…
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Why the NBA Feels Broken—and Why the League Can’t Fix It
May 29, 2026
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…
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The Men Who Think Toxic Feminism Destroyed America
May 22, 2026
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…
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Does Anybody Know How to Solve an American Debt Crisis?
May 19, 2026
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…
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The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Think
May 15, 2026
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…
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The Case Against the AI Job Apocalypse
May 12, 2026
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…
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Why American Happiness Just Fell Off a Cliff
May 08, 2026
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…
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One of the Deadliest Cancers in America May Have Met Its Match
May 05, 2026
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…
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Why Too Much Freedom Is the Enemy of Success
May 01, 2026
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…
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Why the Iran War Is Tearing MAGA Apart
Apr 28, 2026
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…
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The Triple Crisis That’s Breaking Hollywood—and Changing the Future of Movies
Apr 24, 2026
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…
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The Most Powerful and Dangerous AI Model Yet
Apr 21, 2026
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…
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The Whole World Is Fighting About Energy
Apr 14, 2026
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…
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‘The Job Market for Young People Is Brutal’
Apr 10, 2026
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…
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America's Religious Revival Is a Mirage
Apr 08, 2026
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…
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Is China the Winner of the Iran War?
Apr 03, 2026
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…
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Why We're Addicted to ‘Sh*tty Flow’
Mar 31, 2026
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…
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Anthropic Thinks AI Might Destroy the Economy. It's Building It Anyway.
Mar 27, 2026
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…
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America's Tax System Is Broken
Mar 24, 2026
If you're a typical worker with a salary, you have almost no control over how much tax you owe. But if you own a company worth billions of dollars, the income tax is, in the words of my guest today…
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The Casino-ification of America
Mar 20, 2026
In 2017, Americans legally bet about $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to $160 billion. Gambling hasn’t just taken over sports. It’s invaded culture, politics, and even international…
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"Yes, AI Is a Bubble. There Is No Question."
Mar 17, 2026
The AI buildout continues to break records, as the hyperscalers pour hundreds of billions of dollars into chips and data centers, even as investors punish their stock prices. But the revenue side of…
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The Pill That Works Even When You Know It's Fake
Mar 13, 2026
Why do placebo effects work, even when patients know that they're taking a sugar pill? How do "nocebo" effects work, and why do some people hold onto beliefs that they suspect might bring them pain…
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The Economic Crisis of the Iran War Goes Far Beyond Oil
Mar 10, 2026
The Strait of Hormuz is the tiny bottleneck that could destabilize the global economy. As a critical passageway for crude oil, natural gas, and critical inputs for fertilizer, computer chips, and…
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"American Democracy as We Know It Might Not Survive This Technology"
Mar 09, 2026
What happens when the two biggest stories in the world—the Trump White House and the development of advanced artificial intelligence—collide? Well, nothing good, apparently. When contract…
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Trump Is Doubling Down on Iran. How Should Democrats Respond?
Mar 06, 2026
Donald Trump’s polling has continued to edge down week after week. And yet approval of the Democratic Party is still stuck near its all-time low, according to Gallup and other surveys. One…
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The Four Ways That the Iran War Could End
Mar 03, 2026
Dramatic regime change. Moderate regime evolution. A calamitous regional conflict. Or … no change at all. Today we consider how the Iran conflict might evolve following the killing of Supreme Leader…
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How Metrics Make Us Miserable
Feb 27, 2026
The modern world swims in numbers: work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social media metrics. Sometimes the quantification of life can make things better. But very often, I think they force…
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The Future of GLP-1 Drugs and AI Medicine, With Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks
Feb 24, 2026
The GLP-1 drug revolution has taken the medicine world by storm. I’ve done several episodes on the science of GLP-1s. But we’ve never done an episode like this before, where we talk to one of the…
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The Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs. Now What?
Feb 21, 2026
Donald Trump suffered a huge blow Friday when the Supreme Court struck down the centerpiece of his economic policy: his vast system of tariffs. So, what happens now? Harvard’s Jason Furman explains…
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The Media Theory That Explains “99% of Everything”
Feb 17, 2026
In the mid-20th century, a group of media and communications scholars proposed that the shift from spoken to written language—from orality to literacy—transformed our politics, our media, our social…
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