Skip to main content
Derek Thompson on Muck Rack

Derek Thompson

Washington, D.C.
As seen in: Derek Thompson, Plain English with Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, Medium, MSN, MSN Ireland, MSN Money Canada, The New York Times, Bloomberg CityLab, Business Insider, Yahoo Canada, Aol, Daily Express and
Sign up for my new newsletter! (Link below) Also: Co-author of Abundance, host of Plain English, and contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work. Claim your profile

Get in touch with Derek

Contact Derek, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.

Learn more about Muck Rack

Actions

Share this page

Is this you?

As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile

Articles

The Iran War Is Ending. Everybody Lost.

|
By Derek Thompson
| Substack
Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash Welcome back to the Derek Thompson Substack birthday week! One year after my newsletter was launched, I’m offering a ONE-TIME-ONLY DISCOUNT of 35% for paid subscriptions. If you’ve enjoyed this Substack, this is the perfect time to become a member of our paid community. Paid subscribers get to read everything I write (about half of my posts are paywalled now), and they can leave comments on articles, which I always read and frequently respond to.
Open in Who Shared Issue with article?

The Great Depopulation

|
By Derek Thompson
| The Atlantic Verified
Why has the number of births declined everywhere, all at once? Some blame technology, particularly smartphones and social media. Others blame a kind of 21st-century weltschmerz—a sadness about the state of the world and our uncertain future in it. A long essay in The New York Times by Anna Louie Sussman, titled “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All,” argues that today’s generation is too anxious about the future to make the irreversible commitment of having a child.
Open in Who Shared View Duplicates (4) Issue with article?

If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad? Original

|
By Derek Thompson
| derekthompson.org
“The United States was a reasonably happy country for a long time,” the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 paper. “It is not happy now.” Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman documented “a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population” after COVID that “mainly persists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in national sentiment.
Open in Who Shared View Duplicates (2) Issue with article?
See all 2,555 licensed articles (2,706 Total)