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 plainenglish@spotify.com! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson
411 episodes transcribedA year and a half after 'Abundance,' Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s book about why America has become so bad at building things, the time has come fo...
Americans spend more time alone than ever, as parties, nights out with friends, and dinner gatherings become less common. Cellphones, social media, TV...
AI apocalypse, recession fears, sky-high mortgage rates, and now, the plague? Last week, a researcher at a plague institute in Siberia died after deve...
Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis are three of the most important figures in AI superintelligence, but each of them have very different ide...
Last year, Republicans were the heavy favorites to hold the Senate in the following years midterms. Now, however, prediction markets and political for...
What makes a hit a hit? Why do some bands make it while others fade into obscurity? Chuck Klosterman’s new book imagines an alternate history of 20th...
With new breakthroughs in math and biology alongside reports of AI agents escaping and hacking systems, suffice it to say AI has had an interesting fe...
Education outcomes have been getting worse across much of the world, with reading and math scores falling to historic lows. The U.S. has seen some of...
Expert economists keep making predictions about America’s financial future, and those predictions keep being … wrong. Over the past few years, we’ve h...
Trust in American higher education is near a historic low. Tuition has soared, and the payoff for a college degree is now in question as graduates fac...
In the late 19th century, a railroad boom fueled by easy money, speculative investment, and new technology helped kick off one of the worst financial...
So many people seem to hate AI, and it’s not just because it might displace millions of jobs, destroy the world, or deepen distrust in big corporation...
For much of the 21st century, the U.S. economy was built around cheap money. Today, though, interest rates are rising, and borrowing is getting much m...
Higher Education’s Age of "Insufferable Hypocrisy" It would be an understatement to say that higher education is in crisis, as it faces attacks fro...
Today, Derek talks with cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos about a recent wave of alarming AI cyberattacks. For decades, one of the biggest fears about...
It seems a universal fact that AI has become an indispensable part of the American economy. At the same time, opposing AI has also become one of the m...
Two extraordinary trends are happening in the United States simultaneously. One is that alcohol consumption is declining precipitously. The share of A...
There’s no doubt that reading is in decline. But what is that decline doing to the way we think? Derek talks with The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch about...
Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' has brought one of history's oldest stories back into the spotlight. It’s also sparked a fresh debate about what it...
Christopher Nolan's 'The Odyssey' is finally here, but how exactly has a 3,000-year-old story endured long enough to become the foundation of Western...
