What Does Derek Thompson Write About?

Derek Thompson says his beat covers three subjects he calls the three A's: abundance, artificial intelligence, and the antisocial century.

When he was at the Atlantic, visitors asked what his beat was and what he did there. He used a canned line. Some beats are like contiguous land masses you can identify on a map. Australia is Australia, an island, and the country is the island. His beat is a little more like Malaysia or Indonesia. You cannot look at an ordinary topographical map and see exactly where Malaysia ends and begins. You need to see where people are drawing the lines. He feels the same way about his beat. It is an archipelago of ideas, and he decides where to draw the line based on what he thinks is interesting.

For brevity, he is interested in abundance, artificial intelligence, and the phenomenon he calls the antisocial century. He describes the antisocial century as a grab bag category for why life is the way it is, with a particular emphasis on the decline of socializing, the rise in alone time, and how people spend alone leisure time, which is overwhelmingly looking at short form video.