Derek Thompson

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

No but seriously … what’s going on

New pod: THE NETFLIX CRISIS ISN'T WHAT IT SEEMS I talked about the entertainment story of the moment with @MattBelloni Take 1: Netflix is having a bad, bad year. The stock is down nearly 50 percent. The company has laid off more than a 1,000 people this year, including its chief content officer and its head of film. Take 2: Wait. Actually, Netflix is objectively having its best year ever. It has decidedly won the streaming wars, it has a lower churn rate and higher LTV than any streaming competitor, global subscribers are growing, and its operating margin is higher than ever. Take 3: Netflix won the last war. That is, it perfected a 20th century business model of making traditional video entertainment (docs, reality shows, TV series, film) and serving millions of at-home customers. But the final boss of video entertainment is not 20th-century TV but 21st-century TV—YouTube, TikTok, and infinite video scrolls, which are not only commanding more and more of our daily attention but also do so with significantly lower upfront production or licensing costs. As attention fractures, it becomes harder to create monocultural moments—what once went by the name "hits." I, personally, think Netflix makes too much slop. But one household's slop is another household's 8pm downtime. The problem isn't quite that Netflix forgot how to make hits but rather than it's a hit-making enterprise in a world where monocultural moments are getting structurally harder to make with every passing decade. youtube.com/watch?v=a0qabBgo…

The rise of Google AI Mode (plus agents) will be a big economic shift for the web—but it's also a huge psychological shift in our relationship to other people on the web. Right now, AI summaries of queries do not send our attention outward to links but rather answer our questions directly by summarizing the material they can consume faster than the user. This will change the economics of the internet because the machine has gone from hunting and gathering (ranking and displaying links to which they send traffic) to serving final meals (summarizing the results). We're seeing AI Mode affect Alphabet earnings, Reddit revenues, and search traffic for publishers. That's already a big story. But I'm also watching now information consumers are being moved up the hierarchy of search: - Bottom rung: Find links in response to search - Next rung up: Generic summary of links (AI) - Next: Encourage me to talk to the AI about the results rather than click any of the below links, so that the AI summary isn't generic but rather tailored to the user who did the search (personalized advanced AI) - Next: Anticipate the next search/prompt and give me the information or product I need before I know I need it (Muse, Instinct, advanced agents) With each rung, the human-to-human interaction of the web (eg, me reading an article by a person) is being intermediated and then finally replaced by a machine that anticipates what I wanted from that human-to-human interaction and serves it up to me, possibly even before I knew that I wanted it.

Sneaky big winner of the 2026 midterms could be Obama. Won a whole news cycle with a joke. Made Republicans look like fools acting like Cheesecake Factory foyers are as sacred as an American flag. Ossoff is crushing with a Millennial Obama act, El Sayed has mended bridges, and here’s Talarico updating the 2004 DNC speech vibes for 2026.

I mean look, AI is hard. I’ve been wrong about many aspects of it and most of the smartest people I follow have been wrong about *something.* But Ed has been claiming peak AI for more than two years. This is almost literally like covering the Intel IPO in 1971 by bringing on somebody who claimed that Moore’s Law (written in 1965) had peaked in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. It’s not illegal to do this, but your source is confidently commenting on a phenomenon his previous commentary considered impossible.

“They mobilized a whole of government response to my joke. Not to inflation. To a joke.”

it's important to reject the belief that mass behavior can be understood. it cannot. for example, liberty mutual ran "Limu Emu and Doug" commercials for 7 years bc analyses presumably showed that there exists a significant number of people who bought LiMu insurance *on the basis of that ad campaign.* and that's not something that anybody will ever be able to explain

There's a leftist/academic thing to constantly emphasize both the moral brutality of capitalist growth in the US and the surprising growth under brutal communism in China. I think it's good to see the full picture of reality, but the emphasis is …. notable. Leftists/academics are never tweeting about how “did you know America’s economic growth was surprisingly robust when child labor was legal?”