Derek Thompson

The great AI cost panic of 2026 is upon us

Donald Trump did not invent political corruption. But he may be accelerating something more dangerous: the collapse of universal moral standards into a culture of endless special exceptions.

Everybody knows about the decline in birthrates. Fewer people understand why—or just how significantly it could transform society in the next few decades.

Every week, I save dozens of screenshots of charts, essay passages, science and economics papers, and tweets.

The most lethal cancer is invisible to the human eye until it's too late to treat. In today's Q&A, a Mayo Clinic doctor says AI can see what the best radiologists cannot.

Is artificial intelligence normal?

What the mysterious history of "multiple discovery" in science tells us about the nature of creativity

Compared to their parents, Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids. The new American dad is more present and more exhausted—but also, more satisfied with life.

Or: How the 2020s broke our brains

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