America in the Age of Diagnosis
America is sicker than ever. That’s what the data says, anyway. Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses have soared. Between the 1990s and the mid-2000s, bipolar disorder among American youth grew by...
9 Sep 202557min
Trumponomics Explained, Part 2: The Enshittification of American Power
In the second of our two-episode series on Donald Trump, economics, and power, we talk to Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. Farrell has written extensively on how the U...
5 Sep 202552min
What Is Trumponomics? Part 1: How Donald Trump Is Breaking American Capitalism
Today is the first of two interviews this week trying to answer this question: What is Trumponomics? From the 1980s to the 2010s, it was generally assumed that Republicans and Democrats had settled d...
3 Sep 202549min
The Healthiest "Super-Agers" Have One Thing in Common, According to a 25-Year Study
Memory is the glue of life. Without it, our focus softens, our experience of the world blurs, and our identities melt away. But as people age, their memory declines. Many billions of dollars have been...
27 Aug 202541min
Plain History: How the Transcontinental Railroads Built the Modern World
Today’s pod is about the economic story of the moment. It’s about new technology that supporters claim will transform the U.S. economy, an infrastructure build-out unlike anything in living memory tha...
20 Aug 202555min
The Modern World Is Changing America’s Personality For the Worse
According to analysis by Financial Times writer John Burn-Murdoch, something extraordinary has happened to Americans’ personalities in the last decade. Longitudinal tests indicate that we’ve collectiv...
13 Aug 202547min
Will AI Usher In the End of Deep Thinking?
Last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest GDP report. It contained a startling detail. Spending on artificial intelligence added more to the U.S. economy than consumer spending l...
6 Aug 202558min
The New Geography of Housing in America
Subscribe to Derek’s new Substack. In 1991, the median age of first-time homebuyers was 28. Now it’s 38, an all-time high. In 1981, the median age of all homebuyers was 36. Today, it’s 56—another all...
30 Jul 202542min
