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 transcribedSubscribe 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...
Even before the cancellation of 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,' the business of comedy was changing rapidly. Twenty years ago, comedians aspired...
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 economi...
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...
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...
The California housing crisis is a disaster and an emergency. Housing construction per capita has steadily fallen in the last few decades, while home...
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 o...
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, th...
Americans are unusually overweight and chronically ill compared to similarly rich countries. This episode presents a grand, unified theory for why tha...
Americans die younger and faster than the residents of almost every other rich country. Why? There's gun violence, drug overdoses, and car crashes. Yo...
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. The...
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 Hitl...
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...
Last year, Kyle and Nicole Muldoon welcomed their baby KJ into the world. Almost immediately, doctors realized something was wrong. KJ had been born w...
Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one impossibly complex person. Romance psychology is particularly...
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 wou...
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling drugmakers to slash the prices of their medicines. Once again, the president showe...
In music, billion-dollar investments in old catalogues are squeezing out new music. In film, Hollywood has become addicted to the regurgitation of fam...
Last month, the unemployment rate for recent college grads surged to nearly 6 percent. Compared to the overall economy's jobless rate, the unemploymen...
Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on American science. Thousands of workers have been dismissed from the National Institutes of Health...
