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Plain English with Derek Thompson

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Plain English with Derek Thompson
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  • The Gene-Editing Breakthrough That Saved a Baby’s Life
    Last year, Kyle and Nicole Muldoon welcomed their baby KJ into the world. Almost immediately, doctors realized something was wrong. KJ had been born with a genetic mutation that made it impossible to regulate the amount of ammonia in his system. The rare disease had the potential to kill him or cause severe brain damage. But KJ is almost 10 months old today. And he’s doing better than ever. Because this little baby has become a piece of medical history: the first patient of any age to receive a personalized gene-editing treatment. It's truly remarkable. In the hundreds of years of modern science, no human being had ever received a medicine designed specifically to correct their genetic mutation. A medicine built for one. That is, until KJ Muldoon. Today, we have a very special guest: Dr. Kiran Musunuru, the gene-editing researcher at the University of Pennsylvania at the center of this breakthrough. We talk about the full story of saving baby KJ, what this breakthrough means for science, and what we need to learn or change to make personalized genetic medicine possible at a larger scale. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dr. Kiran Musunuru Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • The Rules of Attraction and the Psychology of Romance
    Psychology is hard, even when you’re just trying to understand what’s going on with one impossibly complex person. Romance psychology is particularly hard because you’re trying to understand what’s going on between two impossibly complex people. Eli Finkel is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Paul Eastwick is a professor at the University of California, Davis. Both are experts on the psychology of attraction, dating, and romance and hosts of the Love Factually podcast. Today, Derek asks: Does anybody actually have "a type"? Are we any good at predicting the sort of people we’ll fall in love with? Has online dating caused people to over-filter for attraction, even though initial attraction doesn't determine long-term compatibility? How do modern, affluent folks' incredibly high expectations of marriage affect satisfaction in long-term relationships? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse
    In every generation, important people predict that the end is near and the apocalypse is coming. In the 1960s, the fear was that population growth would destroy the planet—that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The most famous warning was 'The Population Bomb,' a bestselling book published in 1968 by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and “hundreds of millions of people would starve to death” in the 1970s. But then the 1970s came and went. And global famine deaths didn’t rise. They declined by 90 percent. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the 1990s. And again in the 2000s. The apocalypse that everybody said was coming never came. And the reason is, basically, we invented super wheat. In the 1950s and 1960s, a plant pathologist named Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico on fungus-resistant wheat on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, managed to create a breed of wheat that was super abundant, efficient, and disease-resistant. His work kickstarted what’s known as the Green Revolution, a movement whose discoveries are responsible for keeping roughly half the planet alive. In 2007, when Borlaug was 93, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had “arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.” Today’s guest is Charles C. Mann, a journalist and author. We talk about the long history of the Green Revolution. Who was Norman Borlaug? What did he actually do? How did he do it? What does his accomplishment teach us about science, invention, and progress? We’re at a moment today when American science is being cut to the bone while foreign aid is being slashed. I sometimes hear the question: What is foreign aid really worth to us? I think it’s important to remember that Norman Borlaug was a foundation-funded scientist who didn’t do his most important work in air-conditioned labs at Harvard or Johns Hopkins. His breakthroughs came in lean-to shacks in Mexico, where he worked to improve harvests. Without Borlaug’s accomplishments, the world would look very different: Famines might trigger migration that destabilizes countries and transforms global politics. The world we have today, where countries like China and India can easily feed their huge populations, is a gift to global stability, to humanity, to America. It grew from the seed of a foreign agricultural support program. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles C. Mann Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • Why Do Americans Pay So Much for Drugs?
    On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order telling drugmakers to slash the prices of their medicines. Once again, the president showed an amazing nose for interesting questions. Statistically, the U.S. accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population but nearly 50 percent of global pharmaceutical spending. Americans spend three to five times more on new branded drugs than people in Europe. Why? And what's the matter with fixing this problem by just telling pharmaceutical companies that their prices are too damn high? Today’s guest is Jason Abaluck, a health economist at Yale University. We talk about why Americans pay so much for new drugs but, ironically, pay so little for old drugs. We unpack trade-offs between low prices and innovation. And finally, we consider several ways we can have our cake and eat it too: more miracle drugs and more affordability. Because, after all, what is this whole conversation about besides the obvious: How do we design a world in which imperfect people working at imperfect companies nonetheless collaborate to build therapies that save and extend our lives with products we can actually afford? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jason Abaluck Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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  • Is Pop Culture Worse Than Ever?
    In music, billion-dollar investments in old catalogues are squeezing out new music. In film, Hollywood has become addicted to the regurgitation of familiar IP. In visual art, critics bemoan the straitjacket of political correctness. On TV, as Derek told Bill Simmons, we're in a Gilded Age of television, where every prestigious show looks absolutely amazing—but that gilded veneer often covers up for dull storytelling. What do these trends all have in common? The slow decline of modern media. This month, The Atlantic's Spencer Kornhaber published a blockbuster essay, "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" Today, he joins Derek to answer that question. They discuss the four horsemen of the pop culture apocalypse—stagnation, cynicism, isolation, and brain rot—and the case that, maybe, things aren't quite as bad as they seem. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Spencer Kornhaber Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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About Plain English with Derek Thompson

Longtime Atlantic tech, culture and political writer Derek Thompson cuts through all the noise surrounding the big questions and headlines that matter to you in his new podcast Plain English. Hear Derek and guests engage the news with clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday, and if you've got a topic you want discussed, shoot us an email at [email protected]! You can also find us on tiktok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_
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