Plain English with Derek Thompson

• Can a Vaccine Cure the World’s Deadliest Cancer?

  Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. Today's episode is about the hardest lock of them all: pancreatic cancer. Cancer’s power lives in its camouflage. The immune system is often compared to a military search and destroy operation, with our T cells serving as the expert snipers, hunting down antigens and taking them out. But cancer kills so many of us because it looks so much like us. Pancreatic cancer is so deadly in part because it's expert at hiding itself from the immune system. Now, here’s the good news. This might be the brightest moment for progress in  pancreatic cancer research in decades—and possibly ever. In the past few years, scientists have developed new drugs that target the key gene mutation responsible for out of control cell growth. Recently, a team of scientists at Oregon Health and Science University claimed to have developed a blood test that is 85 percent accurate at early-stage detection of pancreatic cancer, which is absolutely critical given how advanced the cancer is by the time it’s typically caught. And last month, a research center at Memorial Sloan Kettering published a truly extraordinary paper. Using mRNA technology similar to the COVID vaccines, a team of scientists designed a personalized therapy to buff up the immune systems of people with pancreatic cancer. Patients who responded to the treatment saw results that boggle the mind: 75 percent were cancer-free three years after their initial treatment. Not just alive, which would be its own minor miracle. But cancer-free. The mRNA vaccine, administered within a regimen of standard drugs, stood up to the deadliest cancer of them all and won. Today’s guest is the head of that research center, the surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran. The concept of a personalized cancer vaccine is still unproven at scale. But if it works, the potential is enormous. But again: Cancer does not exist, as a singular disease. Cancer is a category of rare diseases, many of which are exquisitely specific to the molecular mosaic of the patient. Cancers are personal. Perhaps in a few years, our cures for cancers will be equally personalized. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Vinod Balachandran Producer: Devon Baroldi Links:  Cancer Vaccine paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08508-4 P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: The Abundance Book Tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  49:43
• How AI Could Change the Future of Music

  Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition; why he's worried AI might eventually do much of his current job; the morass of AI copyright law; and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain whirring about the nature of creativity—how great new ideas, like songs, come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and inspiration in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And that is not just a memorable quote. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers, to put it lightly. Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs—such as "Whole Lotta Love"—were such obvious lifts that, after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history also fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment. Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries. What happens to music when that partner is a machine: Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a sad way, will super-intelligence make the future of music more average than ever? Links: WNYC: "How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music"  "In February's Cruel Light (Goodbye Luka)" Full AI song "L.A. Luka (I Wanna Puke-uh)" Full AI song  P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/abundance-tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  59:41
• The End of Reading

  Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube. Why, with everything happening in the world, would I want to talk about reading? The business podcaster Joe Weisenthal has recently turned me on to the ideas of Walter Ong and his book 'Orality and Literacy.' According to Ong, literacy is not just a skill. It is a specific means of structuring society's way of thinking. In oral cultures, Ong says, knowledge is preserved through repetition, mnemonics, and stories. Writing and reading, by contrast, fix words in place. One person can write, and another person, decades later, can read precisely what was written. This word fixing also allows literate culture to develop more abstract and analytical thinking. Writers and readers are, after all, outsourcing a piece of their memory to a page. Today, we seem to be completely reengineering the logic engine of society. The decline of reading in America is not the whole of this phenomenon. But I think that it’s an important part of it. Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Rose Horowitch and Nat Malkus Producer: Devon Baroldi Links "The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books" "Testing Theories of Why: Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Achievement Trends"  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 'How Progressives Froze the American Dream' (Live)

  If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck. The labor market is stuck. The low unemployment rate disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The hiring rate has declined consistently since 2022, and it's now closer to its lowest level of the 21st century than the highest. We’re in this weird moment where it feels like everybody’s working but nobody’s hiring. Second, the housing market is stuck. Interest rates are high, tariffs are looming, and home builder confidence is flagging. The median age of first-time homebuyers just hit a record high of 38 this year. Finally, people are stuck. Americans don't move anymore. Sixty years ago, one in five Americans moved every year. Now it’s one in 13. According to today’s guest, Yoni Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, the decline of migration in the U.S. is perhaps the most important social fact of modern American life. Yoni is the author of the latest cover story for The Atlantic, "How Progressives Froze the American Dream," which is adapted from his book with the fitting title 'Stuck.' Yoni was our guest for our first sold-out live show in Washington, D.C., at Union Stage in February. Today, we talk about the history of housing in America, policy and zoning laws, and why Yoni thinks homeowners in liberal cities have strangled the American dream. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Yoni Appelbaum Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  56:39
• Plain History: The Astonishingly Successful Presidency of James K. Polk

  Who is the most successful president in American history? George Washington secured American independence. Abraham Lincoln preserved the union and ended slavery. Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Depression, remade government, and won World War II. But if we define "success" as the ability to articulate your goals and achieve every single one of them, perhaps only one president in American history was ever perfectly successful. In 1845, James K. Polk, newly elected by a whisker-thin margin, confided to his friend George Bancroft the four goals of his four years in the White House. Acquire Oregon from Great Britain. Acquire California from Mexico. Reduce the tariff. Establish an independent treasury. Four years later, he'd done all this and more. As the historian Daniel Patrick Howe wrote, "Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the United States has ever had.” And that’s why Polk is the subject of today’s show. I don’t think another president in American history has so large a gap between his modern reputation and his actual achievement. There are two great biographies about Polk that I’ve read that have been published in the last 20 years. I’m very pleased that today, we have both authors on the show. Walter Borneman is the author of 'Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America.' And Robert Merry is the author of 'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent_._' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Walter Borneman and Robert Merry Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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