Plain English with Derek Thompson

Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global coalitions ripped apart. What sort of a world are Trump and the White House trying to build? If you stand back from the brush strokes, and take in the full mural, it is possible to see something like a grand economic strategy. One way his chief economic advisers have put it is that we’re using America’s power in the 2020s as leverage to rebalance the global economy in a way that helps U.S. companies grow faster. There are several questions to ask about this stated economic strategy. One is whether or not it’s working. When tariffs designed to buoy the auto manufacturing economy lead instead to hundreds of layoffs among steelworkers getting walloped by trade wars—as they did this past week—it's hard to be confident that Trump's gambit is paying off. A very different question to ask is whether Trump’s economic strategy is _economic—_or, strictly speaking, strategic—at all. Much of our geopolitical agenda today seems to be a simple extrapolation of Donald Trump’s personality. His proclivity for audacious promises. His tactic of using leverage to squeeze counterparties. His preference for mano a mano deal-making over coalitional bargains. Today’s guests are Rogé Karma, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard. We talk about the new world order Trump seems to be accelerating us toward. But we also talk about Trump himself, an unusual leader whose governance style often seems to have more to do with personal leverage than with policy. By evaluating the White House along both of these fronts, perhaps we can begin to see around the corner and understand what kind of a world, and what kind of a global economy, Donald Trump is pulling into view. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Rogé Karma and Jason Furman Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Corruption. Class wars. Technological splendor. The dawn of a new age of business and government. Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Gilded Age in America—roughly the 1870s through the early 1900s—was one of the most fascinating and misunderstood eras in our history. It seems like every week, news organizations claim that the U.S. is in a new Gilded Age. But what does that mean? What was the Gilded Age? Today’s guest is Richard White, award-winning historian and author of ‘The Republic for Which It Stands,’ a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. We talk about how corruption and monopoly and power worked during that period. We talk about Rockefeller and Carnegie and Morgan, and how these giants typified the era with their business genius and their thin sense of morality. We talk about how the monopolies of this era used the government, and the government used these monopolies. And we talk about how the movements that emerged from the Gilded Age invented the modern world. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Richard White Producer: Devon Baroldi P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 accept a period of economic hardship. They say America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. They say America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, so we have to accept less trade. They say America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. America needs the opposite of this scarcity mindset to grow and thrive. We need an abundance agenda. But what does that mean? The answer to that question is in my new book, which I cowrote with the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. He is also today’s guest. We talk about ‘Abundance’ the book, and why it exists. And we talk about abundance the idea, and why it matters. (You can buy the book here!) If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ezra Klein Producer: Devon Baroldi P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, Gen Z shifted strongly to the right. They are less likely than any previous generation to expect they’ll achieve the American Dream. Most of Gen Z graduated into a pandemic economy or entered high school during the school shutdown years.They have record-high rates of anxiety. They use their phone ... a lot. Defined by the forces of scarcity, phone-driven media, and global crisis, they are different. And their differences will drive the future of U.S. economics, politics, and culture. Today’s guest Kyla Scanlon is 27 years old, making her an older Gen Z representative. As a financial commentator on TikTok, Instagram, and Substack, she’s coined several terms—like the vibecession—that have made their way into the New York Times and federal economic reports. For a long time, I wanted to have a conversation about young people that doesn’t make me subject to a bunch of Reddit memes of Steve Buscemi holding the skateboard asking, “how do you do, fellow kids?” I wanted to get somebody smart, who was a member of Gen Z, and who also had conducted their own surveys of Gen Z. I’m very honored to have Kyla tell me about how young people today think and what they want. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kyla Scanlon Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. Today's episode is about the hardest lock of them all: pancreatic cancer. Cancer’s power lives in its camouflage. The immune system is often compared to a military search and destroy operation, with our T cells serving as the expert snipers, hunting down antigens and taking them out. But cancer kills so many of us because it looks so much like us. Pancreatic cancer is so deadly in part because it's expert at hiding itself from the immune system. Now, here’s the good news. This might be the brightest moment for progress in pancreatic cancer research in decades—and possibly ever. In the past few years, scientists have developed new drugs that target the key gene mutation responsible for out of control cell growth. Recently, a team of scientists at Oregon Health and Science University claimed to have developed a blood test that is 85 percent accurate at early-stage detection of pancreatic cancer, which is absolutely critical given how advanced the cancer is by the time it’s typically caught. And last month, a research center at Memorial Sloan Kettering published a truly extraordinary paper. Using mRNA technology similar to the COVID vaccines, a team of scientists designed a personalized therapy to buff up the immune systems of people with pancreatic cancer. Patients who responded to the treatment saw results that boggle the mind: 75 percent were cancer-free three years after their initial treatment. Not just alive, which would be its own minor miracle. But cancer-free. The mRNA vaccine, administered within a regimen of standard drugs, stood up to the deadliest cancer of them all and won. Today’s guest is the head of that research center, the surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran. The concept of a personalized cancer vaccine is still unproven at scale. But if it works, the potential is enormous. But again: Cancer does not exist, as a singular disease. Cancer is a category of rare diseases, many of which are exquisitely specific to the molecular mosaic of the patient. Cancers are personal. Perhaps in a few years, our cures for cancers will be equally personalized. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Vinod Balachandran Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Cancer Vaccine paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08508-4 P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: The Abundance Book Tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition; why he's worried AI might eventually do much of his current job; the morass of AI copyright law; and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain whirring about the nature of creativity—how great new ideas, like songs, come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and inspiration in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And that is not just a memorable quote. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers, to put it lightly. Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs—such as "Whole Lotta Love"—were such obvious lifts that, after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history also fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment. Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries. What happens to music when that partner is a machine: Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a sad way, will super-intelligence make the future of music more average than ever? Links: WNYC: "How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music" "In February's Cruel Light (Goodbye Luka)" Full AI song "L.A. Luka (I Wanna Puke-uh)" Full AI song P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/abundance-tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with everything happening in the world, would I want to talk about reading? The business podcaster Joe Weisenthal has recently turned me on to the ideas of Walter Ong and his book 'Orality and Literacy.' According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It is a specific means of structuring society's way of thinking. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition, mnemonics, and stories. Writing and reading, by contrast, fix words in place. One person can write, and another person, decades later, can read precisely what was written. This word fixing also allows literate culture to develop more abstract and analytical thinking. Writers and readers are, after all, outsourcing a piece of their memory to a page. Today, we seem to be completely reengineering the logic engine of society. The decline of reading in America is not the whole of this phenomenon. But I think that it’s an important part of it. Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Baroldi Links "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books" "Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 unemployment rate disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The hiring rate has declined consistently since 2022, and it's now closer to its lowest level of the 21st century than the highest. We’re in this weird moment where it feels like everybody’s working but nobody’s hiring. Second, the housing market is stuck. Interest rates are high, tariffs are looming, and home builder confidence is flagging. The median age of first-time homebuyers just hit a record high of 38 this year. Finally, people are stuck. Americans don't move anymore. Sixty years ago, one in five Americans moved every year. Now it’s one in 13. According to today’s guest, Yoni Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, the decline of migration in the U.S. is perhaps the most important social fact of modern American life. Yoni is the author of the latest cover story for The Atlantic, "How Progressives Froze the American Dream," which is adapted from his book with the fitting title 'Stuck.' Yoni was our guest for our first sold-out live show in Washington, D.C., at Union Stage in February. Today, we talk about the history of housing in America, policy and zoning laws, and why Yoni thinks homeowners in liberal cities have strangled the American dream. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Yoni Appelbaum Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and ended slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Depression, remade government, and won World War II. But if we define "success" as the ability to articulate your goals and achieve every single one of them, perhaps only one president in American history was ever perfectly successful. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected by a whisker-thin margin, confided to his friend George Bancroft the four goals of his four years in the White House. Acquire Oregon from Great Britain. Acquire California from Mexico. Reduce the tariff. Establish an independent treasury. Four years later, he'd done all this and more. As the historian Daniel Patrick Howe wrote, "Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.” And that’s why Polk is the subject of today’s show. I don’t think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement. There are two great biographies about Polk that I’ve read that have been published in the last 20 years. I’m very pleased that today, we have both authors on the show. Walter Borneman is the author of 'Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America.' And Robert Merry is the author of 'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent_._' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Walter Borneman and Robert Merry Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the past month, chaos and confusion have gripped Washington and the federal government. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have served as an iron fist of the Trump administration—ransacking government agencies, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as they can get away with. Much of this work is plainly illegal. Every 12 hours, it seems, another federal judge rules that the Trump administration has exceeded its executive authority. Efficiency is a worthy goal, and some of the programs that Musk and his team cut may turn out to be wasteful. Still, the way Musk has gone about his work—destroying life-saving programs at USAID, mistakenly offering buyouts to nuclear assembly engineers and essential doctors with Veterans Affairs, slashing funds for important studies and data collection programs across government—suggests that his bureaucratic blitzkrieg isn't just illegal; it's careless and harmful. The U.S. deserves a theory of government more sophisticated than "F-ck around and find out." So, what would an effective DOGE look like? Today’s guests are Michael Geruso, an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Tim Layton, a professor of health care policy at UVA. We explain why any sensible waste and fraud search-and-destroy effort should start with health care spending. Then we get very nerdy about waste and fraud in health care. Most importantly, we talk about trade-offs. It’s a myth that there is some pot of $10 billion just lying around, doing nothing, gathering dust. Every dollar of federal government spending goes to a person in a place doing a thing. And that means that every dollar we cut will have a recipient on the other end who is losing a dollar. Taking government efficiency seriously requires thinking about both sides of this equation: What do we get when we spend this dollar, and what do we lose when we take that dollar away? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Michael Geruso and Tim Layton Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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, and the rational reasons to believe in God. My guest is the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. He is a Catholic conservative. From an identity checkbox standpoint, we are very different people. But Ross is one of my favorite writers from any point of the ideological spectrum. His new book is 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' and it begins with an extremely compelling description of Ross reading the feedback he’s getting at the Times, watching that feedback evolve from “You stupid idiot, how could you possibly believe in a magical man in the sky?” to “I think I’m missing something in my life, a religion-sized hole at the center of my community or myself. Can you help me find it?” We talk about his religious journey and mine, the history of religion in America, the popular misconception that science automatically rolled back religiosity, the rational, scientific case for the existence of God, why I find that case emotionally lacking, and the case for even secular people to believe in God. And, finally, I invite Ross to give me his single best case that Christianity is true. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ross Douthat Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Piller, writes, there’s another, more sinister factor at play. His new book, 'Doctored,' traces an incredible, true story of fraud, arrogance, and tragedy in the quest to cure Alzheimer’s. In the last few years, some of the most famous and revered neuroscientists in America have been accused of doctoring images in research related to Alzheimer’s and neuroscience—even as they raised tens of millions of dollars in funding based on this doctored science and set up clinical trials for thousands of patients based on these manipulated results. At the same time, a silent conspiracy of groupthink starved this field of research of fresh ideas, with catastrophic consequences. Piller explains how he broke the story of what might be this century's biggest scandal in American medical science. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles Piller Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 world is moving on from. But nearly 9 billion tons of coal were burned last year—an all-time high. Second, "peak oil" is a prediction that many analysts have thrown around in the past few years, but oil production is also near its all-time high. Third, we might not even be at peak wood: Global wood fuel production was higher in 2024 than in 1980. At the same time, I think the renewable energy revolution is proving to be its own unstoppable phenomenon. Solar and battery installations are still exploding upward, and whereas some skeptics worried that the earth wouldn’t be able to provide the essential elements and metals to build out a green energy system, those doubts seem, for the moment, overwrought. Lithium, which is one of the most important metals for battery production, has seen its resources double since 2018. So what we have is not a pretty picture but a messy one. A green energy boom matched with an enormous demand for fossil fuels, as billions of people around the world drive and eat and demand the middle-class lifestyle that is their right. Today’s guest is Nat Bullard, an independent energy analyst and the author of a new extraordinary report on the state of energy and decarbonization. We talk about everything: coal, oil, wood, and natural gas; the history of nuclear vs. solar in America; the solar and battery revolution of the 21st century; the political barriers to its growth; the rise of BYD in China; the flatlining of Tesla's growth; and the future of energy technology. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nat Bullard Producer: Devon Baroldi Nat's report: https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wealth isn’t just about financial security, according to today’s guest, Sahil Bloom. It’s about time wealth (the freedom to control our own schedules), social wealth (deep relationships with family and friends), mental wealth (the space to think clearly about the most important questions in life), and physical wealth (health and vitality). Bloom’s new book, 'The 5 Types of Wealth,' is uncommonly wise and deep on the questions I care about most. Why is it so hard to make friends late in life? How can we build a life that combines freedom and control with duty and responsibility? What does it really mean to control our time? What’s the best career advice? I think Bloom is uncommonly good at a job that too many people try and very few people master: serving as a clearinghouse for truly excellent advice about being alive and being decent to other people. It’s a lesson we really need to hear these days. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Sahil Bloom Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the past few years, we've learned that GLP-1 drugs don’t just help with diabetes or increase people’s feelings of fullness to help them lose weight. They have broad effects on substance abuse and behavior. They even seem to help with otherwise incurable illnesses, like Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. This month, a team of scientists studying 2 million patients in the Veterans Affairs medical system found that GLP-1s were associated with “a reduced risk of substance use and psychotic disorders, seizures, neurocognitive disorders (including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia), coagulation disorders (clotting), cardiometabolic disorders (like strokes and heart attacks), infectious illnesses and several respiratory conditions.” Today’s guest is a coauthor on the paper, Ziyad Al-Aly. He is a physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis. We talk about his new paper, the steps he took to make sure his findings were trustworthy, why GLP-1 drugs might work so well, what they’re teaching us about the brain and body, how they’re scrambling our sense of where volition begins and where free will ends, and what scientists should do next with the revelation that these drugs have effects that go far beyond obesity and diabetes. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ziyad Al-Aly Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Al-Aly et al. on the effectiveness and risks of GLP-1 drugs [link] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, tech talk with an old friend of the pod, Kevin Roose of The New York Times, who is also host of the 'Hard Fork' podcast. This is a show about everything. And it’s going to remain a show about everything because I’m a little bit interested in everything. But one cost of that purposeful lack of narrow focus is that sometimes you fail to communicate the gravity of the important things that are happening in the world. And at the moment, I think some of the most important stories in the world are in tech—and more specifically, in the relationship between government and technology. A relationship that is closer now than it’s been in many decades. We begin with TikTok—the most popular source of news for Gen Z in America and the most downloaded mobile app in the world in 2024. Last year a bipartisan bill signed by Joe Biden demanded that the parent company of TikTok, which is the Chinese firm ByteDance, sell its American business or else face a ban. Well, today, TikTok is legally banned in America, and also in broad use, because Donald Trump—the man who called for banning the app in 2020—saved it in 2025 by essentially declaring that he won’t uphold the law. We then spend most of this episode talking about the crescendo of predictions from Silicon Valley that the AI frontier is nearing a breakthrough. In the past few weeks, members of OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier labs have claimed that they are less than three years away from building AI agents that are, to borrow their language, better than humans at everything. I ask Kevin how widespread these predictions are, whether we should believe them, what it would mean if they’re right, why they might wrong, what’s the biggest bottleneck still standing in their way, and why it’s so hard for the news media to report responsibly on a story like this, where we’re asked to take seriously the economy-shifting potential of a technology that we can’t actually report on because it doesn’t actually exist. And then, because I’m also completely bewildered by the bonfires of corruption that are erupting in crypto-land, we close on crypto. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kevin Roose Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is the first episode of a little experiment we’re trying this year, a podcast within a podcast on history that we’re calling, simply enough, 'Plain History.' There are, I am well aware, a great number of history podcasts out there. But one thing I want to do with this show is to pay special attention to how the past worked. In this episode, for example, we're using the assassination of an American president to consider the practice of medicine in the 19th century. Our subject today is the bestseller 'Destiny of the Republic' by the historian Candice Millard, on the incredible life and absurd and tragic death of President James Garfield. In the summer of 1876, the United States celebrated its 100th birthday at the U.S. Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Of the millions of people who walked through the grounds, one was Garfield, who attended the centennial with his wife and six children. In four years' time, he would be elected president at a shocking and chaotic Republican convention. But at the time, he was a 44-year-old congressman known in Washington for being a rags-to-riches genius. Garfield was a perfect match for the centennial grounds, which were themselves a gaudy showcase of genius. In Machinery Hall, visitors could pay for a machine to embroider their suspenders with their initials. They could gaze at one of the world’s first internal combustion engines, a technology that would in the next 50 years remake the world by powering a million cars, tractors, and tanks. They could see the first Remington typewriter and Edison telegraph system. In the Main Exhibition Building, a little-known teacher for the deaf caused a riot with his science experiment. In one room, the teacher held up a little metal piece to his mouth and read Hamlet’s soliloquy into a transmitter. In a separate room, the emperor of Brazil, sitting with an iron box receiver pressed against his ear, heard each word—to be or not to be—reverberating against his eardrum. The teacher’s name was Alexander Graham Bell, and the instrument in question had three months earlier received a patent as the world’s first working telephone. A few yards away, a scientist named Joseph Lister was having much less success trying to explain his theories of antisepsis to a crowd of skeptical American doctors. He claimed that the same tiny organisms that Pasteur said turned grape juice into wine also turned our wounds into infestations. Lister encouraged doctors to sterilize wounds and to treat their surgical instruments with carbolic acid. But American doctors laughed off these suggestions. Dr. Samuel Gross, the president of the Medical Congress and the most famous surgeon in America, said, “Little if any faith is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister.” American surgeons instead believed in “open-air treatment,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Here are three characters of a story: James Garfield, Alexander Graham Bell, and Lister’s theory of antisepsis. They were united at the 1876 centennial. They would be reunited again in five years, under much more gruesome circumstances, brought together by a medical horror show that would end with a dead president. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Candice Millard Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode has been a long time coming. For years, more scientists and health influencers have claimed that even moderate drinking does serious damage to one's health. As someone who likes being healthy and also loves a glass of wine (or scotch), Derek really wanted to understand this issue more deeply. This week, he published a long article in The Atlantic about his research on the health effects of moderate drinking—meaning one or two drinks a night. In today's episode, he breaks down his research process and conclusions, sharing audio from his interview with Canadian health researcher Tim Stockwell, who is one of the most prominent skeptics of the supposed benefits of moderate drinking. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Tim Stockwell Producer: Devon Baroldi Links Derek's original article in The Atlantic (free gift link!): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/moderate-drinking-warning-labels-cancer/681322/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsD7vJ9S6Vd2LMCE-zROPKQs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share "The Battle Over What to Tell Americans About Drinking" in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/health/alcohol-dietary-guidelines.html "Alcohol and Cancer Risk 2025" The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/oash-alcohol-cancer-risk.pdf A meta-analysis in The Lancet on alcohol use and burden for 195 countries and territories https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(18)31310-2/fulltext Vinay Prasad on alcohol and the meta-analysis https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/what-is-the-truth-about-alcohol-consumption Emily Oster on alcohol and health https://parentdata.org/alcohol-and-health/ Tim Stockwell, et al, meta-analysis on alcohol, 2023 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2802963 "Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28735-5 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With so many confusing narratives unfolding around a fire that is still raging out of control, I wanted to talk to somebody I knew and trusted to get stories like this right. Robinson Meyer is the founder and editor of Heatmap News and a former staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate news and related disasters. We talk about why this Los Angeles fire is so unusual, how it differs from most recent forest fires in California, the role of climate change, and what Los Angeles and other places can do to protect people from the inevitability of future disasters. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Robinson Meyer Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Could More Controlled Burns Have Helped? 5 Startups Working on LA Fires What Started The Fires? Why LA’s Fires Are Exceptionally Hard to Fight Does climate change make the Santa Ana winds worse? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My new feature for The Atlantic magazine is called "The Anti-Social Century." It's a long article that revolves around a simple point: Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. This surging solitude is changing our personalities, our politics, our culture, and our relationships. On this episode, University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley joins the show to talk about why aloneness matters. We talk about his research on relationships and solitude, on why we need people in our lives, and why sometimes we disregard or misunderstand that need, and why "social fitness" is so critical to a good life. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Nick Epley Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices