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
369 episodes transcribedToday’s guest is Ethan Mollick. Ethan is a professor of management at Wharton, where he specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation. He is the auth...
By some measures, the Democratic Party has never been so unpopular as a political brand. While this fact obviously reflects some difficult realities f...
Two weeks ago, in one of our most popular podcasts of the year, the investor and author Paul Kedrosky explained why he thinks AI is a bubble. In the l...
In the second episode of our two-part miniseries on the future of entertainment, Derek goes from Hollywood to NYC to understand why Broadway musicals...
The film and TV business has quietly—or, if you work in the industry, not so quietly—been in a depression for the past few years. Original TV work has...
America is rich—richer than ever. Yet Americans are more anxious, lonelier, and less satisfied than people in many poorer nations. The 2025 World Happ...
I’ve had the privilege of talking to many brilliant people about artificial intelligence. And when you ask them to imagine the most beneficial consequ...
The past few weeks have marked a low point for free speech principles in America. The head of the FCC openly threatened ABC for the language of a come...
In the past few weeks, we’ve done several episodes on obesity, GLP-1 drugs, and nutrition science. What we haven’t talked about as much is the politic...
This year, American tech companies will spend $300 billion to $400 billion on artificial intelligence, which is in nominal dollars more than any group...
Matt Belloni, the host of the Town podcast and the author of Puck’s 'What I’m Hearing' newsletter, joins the show to talk about Jimmy Kimmel's punishm...
To read more of Derek's reporting on GLP-1 drugs, you can subscribe to his Substack here. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound don't just help with...
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 Thom...
America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway. Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-20...
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 Hop...
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 as...
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 m...
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 infrastruct...
According to analysis by Financial Times writer John Burn-Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to Americans’ personalities in the last decade...
Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest GDP report. It contained a startling detail. Spending on artificial intelligence added...
