Substack author. Plain English podcast host. Abundance co-author. Contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Washington, D.C.
Joined May 2009
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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 editor that ended with me hurling a bunch of leather-backed Thoreau volumes across the open-plan office. That is not the case here.
I love The Atlantic, and I'll remain a contributing writer there. But after almost two decades at one publication, I wanted to write for myself. The things I've published that I'm most proud of—whether it was the original abundance agenda essay, or my piece on workism—emerged from a very personal expression of frustration, or confusion, or curiosity. I want to know what my thinking and writing is like if I lean into a more independent and personal writing life.
That's brought me to Substack, which is already home to an astonishing share of my overall reading. I'm excited to join their community and excited to build my own. The name of the newsletter should be easy to remember: Derek Thompson.
The newsletter will have three main pillars
1. Abundance
2. The frontier of science and technology—GLP1s, AI, biotech, energy breakthroughs—covered in a way that’s both curious and skeptical
3. The anti-social century & the social crises of anxiety and aloneness
Thanks to The Atlantic for 16.8 incredible years and thanks to everybody who follows me across the river.
- dt
Kalshi’s over/under on “columns after the midterms that declare American politics to be ‘Post-Trump’” currently screaming toward 10,000.5
Axios: Senate Republicans fear Mississippi is in play
Senate Republicans are weighing three last-ditch spending moves that would have been unimaginable six months ago: a cash infusion for Mississippi and even more money for South Carolina and Kansas.
"The wall has broken. The enemy is inside the fort," one national Republican political operative told Axios. "We are now fighting hand to hand."
axios.com/2026/10/21/mississ…
I suppose it’s a testament to Fielder and Oppenheim that every review of You Can See Everything claims to see a different lesson or moral in the movie…
It’s about the post-truth era, or it’s maybe even about Trump or Musk, it’s about the limits of the documentary, it’s about the nature of lying, its about the psychology of psychopathy, it’s about Silicon Valley’s hype economy, it’s about … autism.
I don’t think it was principally about any of those things!
I think what makes the movie both incredibly powerful and also frustrating to people who know the Holmes story really well is that it’s a film mostly “about” the impossible ambiguity of truly getting to the bottom of another person*—and that lesson is largely true and it’s profoundly performed in the movie—but this particular movie is about a very particular person who lied so blatantly in so many ways that an alternative and more prosecutorial documentary wouldn’t have struggled much to prove who she is: a convincing liar who’s lying (convincingly at times) about having been a convincing liar. And so while Fielder’s artifice is both incredibly entertaining and often ingenious I get the critique that it’s also an unnecessary maneuver to get to the bottom of *this particular person* whose record of lying is so blatant and whose psychopathy is so richly documented in the public record.
*I mean, right? That’s clearly the point? Seems important that the movie begins with the husband saying “nobody knows who she is” and ends with Amanda saying she can’t be sure who Elizabeth is or how Nathan feels about her, and the last frame is a paragraph of text about how no one—not the NYT, not Fielder, not Holmes—can be absolutely sure if Elizabeth actually told the Times that Amanda was “playing a character I created” bc nobody has a perfect record of the most important quote in the film ever actually being said. The movie is designed to build toward the conclusion that there is no definitive conclusion.
My take on wealth taxes is they won't work well at the local or state level, because you're targeting the people with the greatest means and motivation to just pick up and move somewhere, and they won't work well at the national level, because they'd almost certainly require a constitutional amendment, just as federal income taxes did (the 16th Amendment), so in both cases you're creating a levy that is basically designed to disappear.
California's Billionaire Tax Act would collect roughly $30 billion. Accounting for lost income taxes from departures, the mean Net Present Value is negative $39 billion, from Benjamin Jaros and Joshua Rauh nber.org/papers/w35899
Lot of people furious at this tweet but the amount of energy required to pass a national wealth tax that the Supreme Court will just overturn in 6 months is much much much better spent repealing the Trump tax cuts, creating a higher minimum effective tax rate for the wealthy, doing cap gains, or trying payroll tax ceiling increases.
We have like infinity legal and proven ways to actually raise revenue for welfare and deficit reduction, I don’t understand the enthusiasm for rejecting these in favor of something we know won’t work
Derek Thompson retweeted
Fascinating podcast. Try to make sure my AI listening diet is not just doomer-stuff, and there was something nice listening to two guys geeking out over the technology.
Not sure I'm fully convinced about the societial implications, but lots of food for thought.
New pod: 'YOU'RE NOT AGI-PILLED ENOUGH'
I asked @emollick to tell me what I'm getting wrong about AI. We also talked about:
- why so many experts keep underrating the rate of progress for model capabilities
- why so many experts keep *overrating* how rapidly powerful AI will change the macroeconomy
- why the answer to the previous question starts with "O-rings and garbage cans"
- the sociology of AI swarms
- the paradoxes of AI use (or: 'every technological augmentation is also an amputation,' per McLuhan)
- the end of prompting (or: what happens if personal AI agents get so good at anticipating our needs that humans, once the prompter, become the prompted)
- 2027 predictions and ... his excellent new book CO-EXISTENCE
youtube.com/watch?v=zthE5Oa8…
Whether AI is crowding out the physical world economy, or just the physical economy's bright shiny interest-rate-insensitive diamond in the rough, or somewhere in between, the situation is that "homes for chips" spending is on fire and "homes for people" spending is putrid
Derek Thompson retweeted
What do Larry Kudlow, Janet Yellen, Steve Mnuchin, @econJaredB & me have in common? We all believe the permitting reform bill is essential for America to build, grow, tackle climate change and maintain our technological lead.
Probably the broadest letter I've ever signed.
Derek Thompson retweeted
This was a great conversation!
New pod: 'YOU'RE NOT AGI-PILLED ENOUGH'
I asked @emollick to tell me what I'm getting wrong about AI. We also talked about:
- why so many experts keep underrating the rate of progress for model capabilities
- why so many experts keep *overrating* how rapidly powerful AI will change the macroeconomy
- why the answer to the previous question starts with "O-rings and garbage cans"
- the sociology of AI swarms
- the paradoxes of AI use (or: 'every technological augmentation is also an amputation,' per McLuhan)
- the end of prompting (or: what happens if personal AI agents get so good at anticipating our needs that humans, once the prompter, become the prompted)
- 2027 predictions and ... his excellent new book CO-EXISTENCE
youtube.com/watch?v=zthE5Oa8…
Derek Thompson retweeted
What else distinguishes the 1% from everyone else?
Having a stay at home spouse...
New pod: 'YOU'RE NOT AGI-PILLED ENOUGH'
I asked @emollick to tell me what I'm getting wrong about AI. We also talked about:
- why so many experts keep underrating the rate of progress for model capabilities
- why so many experts keep *overrating* how rapidly powerful AI will change the macroeconomy
- why the answer to the previous question starts with "O-rings and garbage cans"
- the sociology of AI swarms
- the paradoxes of AI use (or: 'every technological augmentation is also an amputation,' per McLuhan)
- the end of prompting (or: what happens if personal AI agents get so good at anticipating our needs that humans, once the prompter, become the prompted)
- 2027 predictions and ... his excellent new book CO-EXISTENCE
youtube.com/watch?v=zthE5Oa8…
This is basically the David Foster Wallace essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” boiled down to a 45 second post game interview.
I’m sure DFW would have appreciated (despised) it.
gwern.net/doc/psychology/wil…
The strongest case against the argument that AI is crowding out the physical-world economy is that, actually, it's more about Trump policy than AI
@tylercowen: "I think a more plausible story is that two things are happening at once: tariffs, uncertainty, and other forces including the fading of Biden-era CHIPS and IRA subsidies have weakened investment outside AI-tech" ... not to mention, higher interest rates from tariffs, wars, deficits, inflation
Tariffs, mad-man policy, fading subsidies, war, energy inflation contributing to higher inflation rates ... that's all administration policy. (And, btw, so is exempting computer imports from tariffs)
Great, great data.
I also a hunch that having 3 kids was becoming a new status symbol for the 1% in the 2020s. Not quite.
It's more that 3-kid families among every other non-rich percentile has declined by double-digit percentage points while the 1% held steady.
So having 3 kids went from being fairly common across the board to a luxury good that, increasingly, only the 1% can afford.
