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

Pretty neat

Why do the best leaders fail at the most important job? What do Marcus Aurelius, Bob Iger, Bill Belichick, and William Shawn have in common? Succession failure. via @DKThomp open.substack.com/pub/derekt…

The Trump admin continues to treat AI like a screwdriver that is also enriched uranium: That is, apparently advanced AI is such a normal technology that it’s crazy to limit chip exports to China but also such an abnormal technology that we can’t let British employees of NYC banks access it

NEWS: US Justice Dept OKs $111B Paramount/Warner Bros Discovery deal, saying "the transaction is not likely to to result in harm to competition or American consumer" would unite Paramount , HBO, Paramount Pix, Warner Bros, CBS & CNN State AGs may sue to block Text to follow:

More people need to realize that 80-year-old Senators just PRETEND to run America. In actuality, they're full-time fundraisers. America is actually run by 30-year-old staffers who mainline X, TikTok, and Bluesky all day.

New pod: OLD-IGARCHY I talked to @samuelmoyn about his new book GERONTOCRACY IN AMERICA and whether it is extremely and unforgivably ageist to be alarmed about several facts about the state of America, including but not limited to: 1. Boomers have so dominated American politics that we've had more presidents born in the summer of 1946 (three: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump) than born in all years after 1946 (one: Barack Obama, 1961). 2. In the S&P 500, chief executives are ten-times more likely to be over 70 years old than under 40. 3. Since 2000, households headed by adults older than 65 improved their median net worth by 42 percent, while older workers have increased their wages relative to younger workers by about 60% in that period 4. Today more than 50% of all federal spending -- through social security, medicare, and parts of medicaid -- is for the elderly, about 7x more than federal spending on Americans under 18 5. In many cases, NIMBY is frequently GNIMBY with a silent G for gerontocratic, given how frequently the loudest opposition to new housing comes from elderly homeowners blocking development that would make it easier to younger people to move youtube.com/watch?v=l8Gvc9IA…

humans remain undefeated

I don't know what Piketty, Stiglitz, and co. are smoking. Global poverty rates have never been lower. Progress on basic global health and wellbeing measures has been amazing over the past few decades. "End of the road"?!? Come again!?! theguardian.com/commentisfre…

America is becoming so illiterate that the AI trained on our output is no longer talking English good

Thompson's Theorem

New newsletter: WHY DO HISTORY'S GREATEST LEADERS FAIL AT THEIR MOST IMPORTANT JOB? I spent a long time with this one and had so much fun with it. Whole thing started with a question that nagged at me after I spent a night reading the biographical introduction of Marcus Aurelius in a copy of his Meditations that I was gifted. The philosopher-king of the Roman Empire— who we still remember thousands of years later as one of the wisest leaders in history—handed the car keys to a nincompoop son, Commodus, who Edward Gibbons once called a "monstrous, worthless boy" whose reign accelerated the demise of the empire. As I thought about the irony of history's wisest emperor ending his career with a catastrophic succession plan, it occurred to me that many of the most famous leaders fall into a similar Aurelius Trap. The greatest football coach in NFL history, Bill Belichick, also practiced nepotism and his successor in New England Jerod Mayo was a complete failure. The greatest entertainment CEO in the 21st century, Bob Iger, so dramatically bungled his own succession that he had to come back to the company to rescue it. “The major job of leaders is to develop other leaders,” the management expert Noel Tichy once wrote. But corporate and political history is full of towering figures who gave way to fools and incompetents. Why? With some help from @AdamMGrant and other researchers, today's post offers a grand theory of why the strongest leaders often fail to secure their legacy—and why this moment in American history, with aging Boomer leaders throughout politics and business—is a particularly good time to think about a cure for the Aurelius Trap. derekthompson.org/p/why-do-t…

Really enjoyed this @DKThomp episode on fatherhood. Why it is surprisingly different based on cultural context, and how it shapes our brains for the better. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

tired: introspection (reflect on your relationships) wired: whooptrospection (download your wearables data, cross reference with face time for everybody in your life, give the whole thing to Claude Code, make a biometric matrix of interpersonal calmness, export to Excel, reverse rank by heart rate, “Siri ask whoever’s at the top of column C to come over for beers to watch game 4”

What a nightmare this piece is, about a young guy who gets ambushed by internet vigilantes who falsely accuse him of being a child predator on a ginormous livestream. This kind of stuff really makes me pity the Gen Z dating scene. Getting to know strangers is hard enough without recording devices turning the world into a panopticon, and every night into a potential viral humiliation, and meanwhile there's a tiny part of you worried the person you're messaging is working with an online celebrity to publicly shame you. nytimes.com/2026/06/10/techn…

Extremely insightful listen. Highly recommend.

Another great ep from @DKThomp Would love a follow up ep maybe focused on fatherhood over the past decades. There’s so many “father advice” accounts all over YouTube and instagram. What happened? A lot of Millenial kids (now adults) are seeking out that simple father advice they were never taught as children. It’s not to put blame on Baby Boomer dads, just more of an explanation on how it got that way. Why were they more hands off? Was it simply the increase of divorce rates? I know a friend in their 40s who recently sat down with his dad and asked how he was able to create such a nest egg of wealth from his investments. “How do you do this? Why didn’t you ever show me?” And his dad simply replied “Well you never asked…” That’s just so heartbreaking. On one hand you can say well the son wasn’t ready and now he is, and on the other hand you can argue if the Dad had simply showed him the importance of investing early on then his sons life could have been dramatically different today.

"We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities." Extremely good essay by @a_m_mastroianni about how Americans used to negatively judge musical artists for "selling out" but now we accept that practically every musical artist is doing promo, or owning their own makeup line. But at the same time, Adam points out, attitudes toward the rich have gone in the opposite direction. In the 1990s and early 2010s, a majority of Americans said it was good that America had a class of rich people. Now Americans are about twice as likely to say billionaires are bad than good for society. Adam calls this "the great switcheroo." Americans used to think wealth was good but also that it was bad for artists to sell out; now we think it's fine for artists to sell out but more of us hate billionaires. The coinciding phenomena of (1) rising wealth inequality and (2) the attention economy has created a scenario where Americans are more skeptical of corporate wealth but more fond of celebrity/influencer wealth, in part bc we seem to see ourselves as impossibly cut off from the former but potentially in line to get some of the latter. experimental-history.com/p/s…

I loved getting to talk to the brilliant @DKThomp (also a new second-time dad!) about fatherhood and how it has evolved in recent decades.