Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
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Sign up for my new newsletter! (Link below) Also: Co-author of Abundance, host of Plain English, and contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Washington, D.C.
Joined May 2009
Some personal news. Today, I’m leaving The Atlantic after almost 17 years and moving my writing to Substack. It would be convenient, for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement, to have a dramatic exit story: a fight, a grievance, a shouting match with an
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1. Raise tariff 2. Collect bribes 3. Reduce tariff It's really that simple. The challenge with describing the economic strategy of the Trump admin is that it's not an "economic" "strategy," it's a "create pain -> collect payoff" mafia formula run over and over again, and admin
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Can’t beat them? Connect your broker to trade like them.
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Bingeing TikTok reels may be hazardous to your well-being. 71 studies, >98k people: The more short-form videos teens and adults watched, the more they struggled with attention, self-control, and stress and anxiety. Read a book. Watch a movie. Long live longform.
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I've got a bit of a magnum opus for you on how the NFL is changing into almost a completely different sport. And why we're getting so many weird, high-scoring games. The number of 55+ yard field goals has increased by 3x since just 2022, for instance.
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According to @NateSilver538's NFL analysis, in the last 20 years - the share of drives ending in punts, interceptions, and fumbles has declined by 20 percent - the share of drives ending in touchdowns or field goals has increased by 30 percent
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OWS for Epstein-Barr Virus now
Epstein-Barr Virus, which is a trigger in certain B cell cancers, and has been previously implicated in multiple sclerosis, is now believed to be a causative factor in Lupus, raising the chance that we could reduce disease incidence through a vaccine. https://t.co/WgxSXs2xO5
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Correct. Also, listen to Derek on this week's episode of @semafor 's Mixed Signals podcast....
The top of Maslow’s hierarchy is just going on podcasts
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Delightful Mixed Signals with @DKThomp about whether everything is, in fact, becoming television
podcasts.apple.com
Podcast Episode · Mixed Signals from Semafor Media · 11/14/2025 · 51m
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New newsletter: ARE YOUNG PEOPLE SCREWED? The economic vibe-meme of the moment is that today's young people have it uniquely bad, between the rotten housing market, plummeting hires, and rising unemployment. Today, a highly visual FAQ guide to the question. The case for yes:
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Gen Z is engaging in so much creative collective action. Here's a story about the spread of phone-free parties. Catherine Goetze was motivated by @DKThomp' s article in @TheAtlantic on how Americans need to party more: https://t.co/G4VQN6RcvK
dailynews.com
Catherine Goetze was worried about social isolation and party culture dying out so she threw a no-phone party in Silver Lake. 700 people showed up.
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Univ of Michigan athletics generated $266 million in revenue last year and the program still lost $15 million, and that's before $20+ million/yr of payments to student-athletes that begins this year. The economic model of college sports is so very broken.
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The trailer is here. Season 2 of Owning Manhattan premieres December 5 on Netflix. Bigger listings. Higher stakes. Real estate doesn’t get more real than this. Let’s go. 🎥 Watch the trailer:
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most parsimonious explanation for a global turn to the right is not material (zoomers are not particularly poor or without opportunity) but rather obviously that the internet is a great native accelerant for populism
This is average, not median age, but the New York Fed finds that first-time homebuyers were *younger* in 2024 than in the 2000s. Haven't gotten older on average in nearly 20 years. h/t @MosesSternstein
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Peter Thiel (one of capitalism's biggest winners) has said that capitalism isn't working for young people. Mamdani's recent win underscores that point. The rise of the groyper is primarily economic too. So many things point to something in the system either breaking or being
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It seems like a natural extension of Sunstein’s “group polarization” theory that, without the intervention of strong moderators, most sub-Reddits gravitate over time toward conflict and negativity, which is why so many fan pages evolve into anti-fan pages
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We are facing a crisis of disconnection and this is directly linked to polarization. New research finds that people living in communities with denser social networks consistently reported less partisan animosity and a greater sense of national unity--even with strangers.
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Day one of the Cardano Summit 2025 was a great success. Thank you to @F_Gregaard, CEO of the @Cardano_CF, for the kind words and recognition. We keep building, stronger, together.
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“Did the destabilizing mid-career transition from BlackBerry to iPhone doom Boomers to a life of shitty texting accuracy?” is a hilariously plausible thesis
@DKThomp I wonder to what extent this matches the timing of what mobile device they were using at the time: palm pilot, blackberry, early iphones.
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When people — I think maybe Boomers especially — surpass a certain level of fame, fortune, or power, the typo frequency in their emails goes to the moon. There is, in other words, a kind of horseshoe theory of grammar: middle schoolers and the most powerful men in the world
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