Plain English with Derek Thompson

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis are three of the most important figures in AI superintelligence, but each of them have very different ideas about what this technology should become and what it could mean...

Last year, Republicans were the heavy favorites to hold the Senate in the following years midterms. Now, however, prediction markets and political forecasters see a very different race. Today, Nate Silver joins Derek to...

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 century music and uses it to explore why some things become popular...

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 few weeks. How worried should we be about it all? Derek talks with...

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 the steepest declines in decades. But, why does Mississippi look so...

Expert economists keep making predictions about America’s financial future, and those predictions keep being … wrong. Over the past few years, we’ve heard warnings about a recession, inflation, tariffs, wars, deficits...

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 face a weird and challenging job market. Simultaneously, AI is...

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 crises in American history. Sound kind of familiar? In today’s...

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 corporations and government. The reason might actually be simpler than we think...

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 more expensive. At the same time, the federal government is running...

Higher Education’s Age of "Insufferable Hypocrisy" It would be an understatement to say that higher education is in crisis, as it faces attacks from both the current presidential administration as well as issues of its...

Today, Derek talks with cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos about a recent wave of alarming AI cyberattacks. For decades, one of the biggest fears about AI has been that the machines will start doing things we didn’t ask...

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 most influential causes in American politics. Nowhere is that tension...

Two extraordinary trends are happening in the United States simultaneously. One is that alcohol consumption is declining precipitously. The share of Americans who drink has hit a record low since Gallup started tracking...

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 why Americans are reading fewer books than ever and struggling more...