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 transcribedIn 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 essa...
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 amp...
Last week, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Cambridge announced that they had discovered the “strongest indication” ever of extraterre...
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...
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...
The 1920s and the 2020s share a special kinship. One hundred years ago, the U.S. was grappling with a mix of growth, technological splendor, and gener...
Donald Trump's tariff plan has set global markets on fire. What are they for? What are they trying to accomplish? Fresh off his black-out-rage sessio...
Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global...
Corruption. Class wars. Technological splendor. The dawn of a new age of business and government. Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Gilded Age in America—...
Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to acce...
Generation Z, which was born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, has a unique economic, political, and cultural identity. In the 2024 election...
Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. C...
Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright f...
Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scor...
If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck. The labor market is stuck. The low unemploymen...
Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and end...
For the past month, chaos and confusion have gripped Washington and the federal government. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or...
This is a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time. It's about the decline of religion in America, the value of faith, the case for belief, an...
Why is it so hard to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? A simple answer is that the brain and its disorders are complicated. But as today’s guest, Charles P...
Fans of green energy like me face some inconvenient truths about the global energy picture. First, coal sounds like a dirty technology that the rich w...
