Plain English with Derek Thompson

In 1937, a Rhode Island psychiatrist named Charles Bradley ran an experiment on 30 child patients who had complained of headaches. He gave them an amphetamine, that is a stimulant, called Benzedrine, which was popular at the time among jazz musicians and college students. The experiment failed, in one sense. The headaches persisted. But he noted that half of the children responded in what he called spectacular fashion, as teachers said these children seemed instantly transformed by the drug. Rather than being bored by their homework, they were interested in it. Rather than being hyperactive, they became more placid and easygoing. Rather than complaining to parents about chores, they would make comments like: I start to make my bed, and before I know it, it is done. Bradley published the results in The American Journal of Insanity, and it marks perhaps the origins of our treatment model for ADHD.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, has always been hard to define. Its harder still in an age when everybody feels like modern entertainment and the omnipresence of our screens make it hard for anybody to concentrate and sit still. But clearly, some people struggle with concentration and stillness more than others. ADHD has many classic symptoms, but it is typically marked by patterns of inattentivenessfrequently losing items, failing to follow multistep instructionsor by hyperactivity: say, fidgeting, or, for some children, being literally incapable of sitting in one place for more than half a second. In a way, Ive always disliked the phrase "attention-deficit disorder," because ADHD is not about a deficit of ordinary attention but a surplus of feral attentionan overflowing of raw, uncontrollable noticing.

Last week, the journalist Paul Tough published a long, 9,000-word essay in The New York Times Magazine about ADHD called "Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong?" Tough asked hard questions about why diagnoses are soaring. Is this evidence of an epidemic? Or is it evidence of overdiagnosis? Paul is todays guest. We talk about his blockbuster essay, what its loudest critics said about it, what its loudest advocates said about it, and why they both might be wrong.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Paul Tough Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last week, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Cambridge announced that they had discovered the strongest indication ever of extraterrestrial life. The source did not come from Mars or Venus or any nearby moon. It came from K2-18b, a massive planet some 120 light-years from Earth.

If this finding checks out, it is, without question, one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. But many scientists think that ... well, it might not check out at all.

Todays guest is Sara Seager, a celebrated astrophysicist at MIT. Seager is a pioneer in the study of exoplanets and their atmospheres. She has done as much as practically anybody to develop the science of interpreting light from faraway stars to make inferences about planets. In todays show, Seager and I slowly worked our way up to last weeks announcement by building a foundation of the basic science at play. What are exoplanets? How do we know that theyre there? How do we have any idea about the chemicals present on that planet if we cant send probes to test their air? What does the K2-18b finding really tell us? And what larger philosophical questions about life and aliens are raised by this new science of exoplanet atmospheres?

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Sara Seager Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the past three weeks, we've spoken to economists about the tariffs. We’ve spoken to a historian about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the 100-year legacy of American protectionism. We've spoken to supply chain expert Jason Miller from Michigan State about why China is set up to win the upcoming trade war. But the voice we haven’t heard is the voice of business. People who run companies are screaming at whoever will listen that the White House agenda will decimate business and plunge their industries into a recession.

Today’s guest is Molson Hart. He’s run a manufacturing business in the U.S. for the last 15 years. His company, Viahart, manufactures consumer products in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam and sells them both in stores and online—mostly in the U.S. His biggest vertical is toys, including Brain Flakes, which are molded plastic disks that kids and adults can snap together to build things.

This is not a bleeding-heart lefty. Quite the opposite: This is a guy who is rooting for the Trump agenda to succeed. This is a guy who told me in our interview he wants to believe that the Trump team has its heart in the right place when it comes to bringing back manufacturing in the long run. And yet he has called these tariffs not just a bad idea … but the worst economic policy in American history.

I spoke to him this week, and he was just incredibly compelling and thoughtful about the toy industry, why it’s so difficult to bring back American manufacturing quickly, and how these tariffs could do incredible damage to America’s small businesses. So we’ve decided to rush out this interview a little sooner than we intended, in part because it’s great and in part because this news story is moving so quickly, it’s hard to know what reality will even look like next week.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Molson Hart Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. is in the opening innings of a full-blown trade war with China. What does that actually mean? What do we sell to China? What does China sell to us? How is each country dependent on the other for the supply of electronics, food, machines, and goods? Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State and an expert on global supply chains, tells Derek that in the trade war between the U.S. and China, one of these two countries seems better positioned to weather a protracted trade dispute—and it’s not the U.S.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jason Miller Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 1920s and the 2020s share a special kinship. One hundred years ago, the U.S. was grappling with a mix of growth, technological splendor, and generational anxiety—a familiar cocktail (albeit, from an era where cocktails were illegal). The era’s young people felt uniquely besieged by global forces. “My whole generation is restless," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise. “A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

America was changing. And change always implies a kind of loss. We were moving toward cars and cities and manufacturing. And that meant we were moving away from horses and farmland and agriculture. And so, in 1930, just months into the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover signed a new piece of legislation to restore farmers to their previous glory. It was a great big tariff—the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Rather than save the economy, it deepened the depression.

Today, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff is one of the most infamous failures in the history of American politics. To suggest that it holds lessons for this moment in history is to state the obvious. Our guest is Douglas Irwin, an economist and historian at Dartmouth University and an expert on the economic debates of the Great Depression. We talk about the economic motivations of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the congressional debates that shaped it, the president who signed it, and the legacy it left. We talk about the economic instinct to preserve the past—an instinct that has never gone away in American history—and the profound irony, that some efforts to return America to its former glory can have the unintended effect of robbing America of a richer future.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Douglas Irwin Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices