Derek Thompson

We seem to be moving from a period of demand scarcity (not enough customers) to supply scarcity (not enough compute)

Or: If you're so smart, why aren't you happier?

Why young men aren't really going back to church, why liberals are sadder than conservatives, and how "Substack-ification" is transforming the future of Christianity, media, and politics

The screens got cheap. The shared experiences got expensive.

Many people believe that the nexus of smartphones, Internet, and social media is to blame for every modern catastrophe. Here's 5,000 words on who's right and who's wrong.

An interview with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark on the specter of AI-fueled mass unemployment, the future of agents, and how to raise children in an age of super-intelligence

I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.

The evidence that artificial intelligence is a big fat bubble has, confusingly, gotten much stronger and much weaker at the exact same time.

When a metric becomes a meme, it gains in popularity what it loses in precision.

Nir Eyal on the power of belief, the atheist's case for prayer, and the origins of self-confidence

This isn't just about the price of oil. It's about everything oil becomes—fertilizer, AI chips, plastic—and the cost of snapping the achilles heel of the global shipping economy

If Donald Trump doesn't end the war by April, "oil prices could get into Scary Land," one expert told me.

A personal reflection on fatherhood

The quantified life has become a modern religion. But many of us are measuring life the wrong way.

A wide-ranging interview with Dave Ricks, the CEO of Eli Lilly, which makes the GLP-1 drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound and recently became the first trillion-dollar pharma company in history

The fact that a piece of AI science fiction rocked the stock market this week is a clear indication that absolutely no one knows how the next few years will go.

Or: How did America's mid-century communications theorists get it all so right?

What are the strongest cases for it and against it?

It's great to be a dad. But it's great to be back, too.

On the science of hope and hopelessness