Derek Thompson
Staff writer at The Atlantic. Host of Plain English podcast. Books.
- I went to an acting camp between junior and senior year. We did a talk back with Richard Kind after a show in Chicago. "Ppl tell you 'Be an actor only if you can't do anything else,'" he said. "They're wrong." Dramatic pause. "Never be an actor. Even if you can't do anything else for shit: don't."
- By targeting academics, embracing nostalgia economics, purging society of opposition ideology, rationing toys, and demolishing our global reputation at the moment we need scale, Trump has responded to the threat of China by mimicking the ghost of its Maoist past. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
- New pod: Something very strange is happening to the labor market for college graduates. Their unemployment is rising much faster than the overall economy—in a way that's unprecedented in the last 40 yrs. Why? Harvard's David Deming and I talk thru the evidence. open.spotify.com/episode/3Feh...
- This is actual US policy right now
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- Reposted by Derek ThompsonEnjoyed talking to @dkthomp.bsky.social about the crisis in American science. Glad to have him on our side in talking about how to protect American science in the future. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...
- The unemployment rate for recent grads is worse now relative to the overall economy than any time on record. Three flavors of explanation: Short-term: It's Trump. Medium-term: It's the flagging college premium. Long-term: Is Gen-AI substituting for new hires? www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...
- New pod: IS THIS THE CHINESE CENTURY? That's the question I asked China experts Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell on today's show. "The Chinese cannot believe what we are doing," they said: The Trump admin is like a CCP fantasy of accelerated American self-destruction. open.spotify.com/episode/3YB8...
- New pod: What's behind the extreme rise in ADHD diagnoses in the last decade? Paul Tough joins the show, to plot a middle path between "ADHD was invented by Big Pharma to sell kids pills" vs. "There's absolutely no downside to the boom in stimulant prescriptions" open.spotify.com/episode/6Gga...
- When you consider that Tesla was a world leader in its category until a top exec made a series of unforced and eccentric errors, which tarnished its image and demolished growth, all while a Chinese industrial giant threatened to leave it in the dust ... you really get what drew Musk to this admin
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- New pod: I talked to the visionary astrophysicist @saraseager.bsky.social about: - the recent announcement that we found alien life on a faraway ocean planet - why many scientists blasted the finding - the new science of detecting life on exoplanets via spectroscopy open.spotify.com/episode/1KZn...
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- New pod: "A lot of companies are definitely going to go under, that's for sure" I talked to Molson Hart, a manufacturing CEO, about how the tariffs are affecting his business. He told me America could be sleepwalking into a small business apocalypse. open.spotify.com/episode/2EP3...
- If China defeated the US in war and forced us to sign a treaty that would ensure a century of Chinese dominion in science and tech, they'd be smart to force the U.S. to: - slash scientific grants in half - reduce foreign students - gut our manufacturing base Instead, we're doing it all by choice.
- New pod: 'I hate to say it, but the biggest winner out of all of this? It's China' Jason Miller, a supply-chain expert at Michigan State, explains why the US is terribly positioned to win a protracted trade war against China, as it alienates its own trading allies open.spotify.com/episode/6a18...
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- New Plain History: The most infamous policy failure of the last century: a bone-headed effort to protect a declining industry leads to a tariff that accelerates an economic crisis in the '20s. I'm talking, of course, about farming, the 1920s, and Smoot- Hawley. open.spotify.com/episode/4Sm5...
- It's really bad. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...
- There's no logical or moral or strategic defense for what we're doing right now. It's an idiotic plan being implemented with a level of incompetence that has no possible explanation.
- It's darkly humorous that AI doomers worry about an advanced technology falling into the wrong hands, which allow China to wreck our economy, throw markets into turmoil, interrupt manufacturing progress, disrupt our scientific infrastructure, and create global panic and confusion.
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- Reposted by Derek Thompson“The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.” - @dkthomp.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
- Trumpists want to argue for a future-world that doesn't yet exist, in which the tariffs create a perfect equilibrium for US growth. But the tariff plan announced yesterday does exist. We can read it. It does not make sense and is not defensible on its own terms. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
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- Reposted by Derek Thompson👀 Looks like a sighting of an Abundance-pilled policy approach in the Canadian political wild. @dkthomp.bsky.social @ezraklein.bsky.social www.cbc.ca/news/politic...
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- Three years ago, I wrote my "abundance agenda" essay. Today, my book ABUNDANCE, co-written with Ezra Klein, comes out. Here's my best summary of our view of abundance vs. Donald Trump's regime of scarcity. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
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- Reposted by Derek ThompsonEstimates by @charlesjkenny.bsky.social @justsand.bsky.social: US foreign aid likely prevents 2.3 to 5.6 million deaths annually, largely in Africa. And that a complete disruption would result in over 4000 lives lost per day.
- New pod: The science of cancer vaccines Pancreatic is one of the deadliest cancers. In February, a NY lab found 75% of responders to its personalized cancer vaccine remained cancer-free at 3 years—a minor miracle. How? Today, the head of the cancer lab explains. open.spotify.com/episode/1I7C...
- I'll be talking about ABUNDANCE this month in newly added events in Chapel Hill, Atlanta, and Seattle. I'd love to see you there! Chapel Hill: flyleafbooks.com/event/thomps... Atlanta: acappellabooks.com/pages/events... Seattle: townhallseattle.org/event/derek-...
- One way to think about this administration is: Trump's last full year in office was a global pandemic with no known cure that filled hospitals with dying patients and shut down the entire in-person economy. And firms think the current business environment has *more* uncertainty.
- Trump's interpersonal psychology sort of haphazardly recreating late-19th century US political economy. Trump doesn't like or understand trade. (He thinks when we import stuff, we lose money.) So, we get tariffs *plus* special dispensation for companies that make attractive appeals to him.
- The hard thing about riding the tiger of anti-establishment anger is that eventually you win and become the establishment. And, meanwhile, the tiger's still a tiger.
- New pod: I wrote a piano song with artificial intelligence and talked to the film-TV-and-podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips about how generative AI is threatening artists and transforming the work of music composition open.spotify.com/episode/3ylJ...
- TRUMP, RUBIO SET TO ANNOUNCE ANNEXATION OF 665,384 SQUARE MILES OF OIL-RICH WILDERNESS NORTH OF BRITISH COLUMBIA - BLOOMBERG
- one of the difficult things about evaluating the long-term *consequence* of any trump policy is that his authoritarian tendencies generate such backlash. he's already stimulating a liberal comeback in Canada and a boom in German defense stocks, despite endorsing their anti-defense-spending AfD
- New pod: The End of Reading Student reading scores are plummeting. Elite-college students say they can't read full books. Leisure reading has declined >30% for adults. And, as @weisenthal.bsky.social says, it's happening as US culture swings back to "orality." open.spotify.com/episode/0tFL...
- Atlanta Fed forecasts Q1 GDP declining 1.5% (ht @conorsen.bsky.social) Would the worst quarter in the last decade (outside of 2020 spring). Notably, expected contribution of net exports fell from -0.41 percentage points to -3.7. Weird, since US trade policy has been very normal recently.
- Unbelievable news. Pancreatic is one of the deadliest cancers. New paper shows personalized mRNA vaccines can induce durable T cells that attack pancreatic cancer, with 75% of patients cancer free at three years—far, far better than standard of care. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Two million views of a tweet a) accusing the NYT of "putting the lives of DOGE employees at risk" (... by naming the people running the government) b) accusing the NYT of "hiding the names" of its reporters from the public (... when they are listed, all 15 of them, right there on the page)
- Have thought about this a lot recently.
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