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Derek Thompson Profile picture
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Nov 4 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's obvious to me, and it's obvious to a lot of other people: Twitter is appreciably worse now than it was two weeks ago.
I'm surprised how quickly things got worse on here. Maybe it's Musk becoming a Uber main character. Maybe it's code changes I can't see. Maybe it's internal chaos that will be resolved soon. Memories are short, history is long, and anything could still happen. But it's worse.
What's worse
- I'm seeing way more junk ads
- there's been an appreciable increase in weirdo replies from, eg, crypto bots
- #Jews and Kyrie Irving defenses have taken over my trending box
- timeline feels weirdly rejiggered to elevate weak-tie follows
If you disagree, that's fine! And interesting! I'm not trying to get people to do anything. I'm not planning on leaving. Just keeping a little ongoing diary of how the Musk regime is going in my corner of the world.
Twitter contains multitudes

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More from @DKThomp

Derek Thompson Profile picture
Oct 5
OK, fine I'll bite.

No reasonable person thinks that Barry Bonds' 73 isn't the record for home runs hit in a year.

The interesting question is whether our attempt to tell the story of baseball benefits from using other words to separate Judge's accomplishment.
Imagine if the Hall of Fame opened a Steroids-Era Wing. It'd be better than the status quo, btw, which pretends Bonds etc don't exist.

A Steroids Wing would honor MLB achievements, while physically separating them.

What you can do with real estate you can also do with words.
So, if you ask me, Barry Bonds holds a record: most home runs hit in a single year." That's his record! It's beyond dispute.

I'd also say being the only player outside the '98-'01 steroids era to hit 62 HRs is absolutely an achievement that ppl can give a special name to.
Read 4 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
Oct 4
I'm enjoying House of the Dragon, but there's an interesting degree of defensiveness around criticisms of the pacing. It's genuinely and objectively strange to be executing an intimate family drama series that drops in on each main character for about 20 minutes every ~decade.
The show is doing a good job executing at an incredibly high degree of difficulty for storytelling and character development. But I keep toggling between "this is well done, given the challenge" and "oh right, the showrunners *gave themselves* this weird decade-hopping challenge"
Maybe another way to say it is: HOTD is doing a pretty good job making an entire season of TV that feels like a prologue, but the prologueyness of it can sometimes feel a bit blatant in a way that makes me want to hold back a bit of emotional investment in these characters
Read 4 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
Oct 4
On today's pod, I gave a few reasons why I'm afraid the Fed is going too fast and too hard with rate increases and triggering too many bad side effects in the global economy.

open.spotify.com/episode/4DnOt3…

In short: The Fed is navigating a tough terrain with an out-of-date dashboard.
We know the Fed's preferred rent inflation lags the best high-frequency data by ~6 months.

The best high-f data says inflation for new units turned down this summer.

Summer + 6 months = very, very soon.

Official rent inflation will come down. Period.

I'm always looking out for stories that are like: What is something important that will seem obvious soon, but ISN'T widely acknowledged as obvious right now?

Right now, I think it's the Fed choosing to use an old dashboard to navigate the terrain of future shelter inflation.
Read 5 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
Sep 9
I wrote about career advice.

Recently, I've been struck by how much online career advice is overly personal (do these 3 things I did) or political (all hard work is a capitalist con).

So I wrote down 5 ideas that've made the biggest impression on me.

theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
1) "Don't take the job you want to *tell* people you do. Take the job you want to do."

@JamesFallows told me this circa 2013. I've never forgotten it. It's the chestnut I've repeated to more people than any other piece of work advice I've ever received.
2) On a similar theme of "work is mostly about time":

Life is roughly 4,000 weeks long. Your career is 80,000 hours, or, sequentially, roughly 500 total lived weeks; or one-eighth of life. That's too big a thing to not take seriously and too small to take too seriously.
Read 6 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
Sep 8
I called America a "rich death trap" this week.

This, while perfectly defensible on the merits, is also pretty gloomy. So I also want to point to 3 ways life expectancy is likely to be much better for Americans in the coming years and decades.

theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
1) Life expectancy is an important but weird statistic. It imagines that people live exclusively inside one year (say, 2021).

But the 2022 pandemic wasn't nearly as fatal. That means life expectancy is almost certainly going to shoot up next year.
2) Smoking is one of the most well-established killers among all health behaviors. And Americans, rich and poor, smoke much less than they used to.

There will certainly be a big "no-smoking dividend" for US life expectancy in the coming decades.

schwandt.sesp.northwestern.edu/papers/Mort_In…
Read 4 tweets
Derek Thompson Profile picture
Sep 7
America Is a Rich Death Trap

theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…

I wrote about a demographic mystery: Why Americans of every age, at every income level, are more likely than residents of similarly rich countries to die—from guns, drugs, cars, Omicron, and even our own bodies
In the 1980s, the U.S. had pretty similar life expectancy to most rich European countries.

Since then, we've fallen way behind.

The reasons are diverse: We have more guns, more car accidents, more overdoses, and less health care access. Image
In this piece, I talk about two pieces of an Abundance Agenda that could raise life expectancy—which might be the most important statistic in the world.

1. Housing
2. Primary care

theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
Read 7 tweets

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