Derek Thompson
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Channels with Peter Kafka · Netflix in Turmoil + Derek Thompson on AI & The Antisocial Century
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What Pays the Most on Substack?
Derek Thompson says facts about artificial intelligence pay the most on Substack: Benjamins, against dollars for other facts and dimes for analysis.
Peter Kafka says Thompson left The Atlantic a little more than a year ago, in the summer of 2025, and reads the paid list as somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 subscribers. Derek Thompson says that range is right. Peter Kafka says Thompson has written that the Substack at least equals his Atlantic pay so far. A salary stays flat across the year. The Substack line is one Derek Thompson wants to push up. When 12 months pass after a big article, 10 to 20 percent of subscribers drop, and a falling number makes him feel more harried and chase the ne
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Why Is Everything Becoming Television?
Derek Thompson says everything is becoming television because three separate industry moves turned out to be one story.
Spotify, through The Ringer, told him the podcast he hosts should be video, because everything is going to video, so he should think of the show as television. A Facebook brief in an antitrust lawsuit said Facebook cannot be a social-media monopoly: most people on Instagram are not connecting with friends and spend almost all their time watching other people's footage. Derek Thompson took that to mean that Instagram, according to Instagram, is television. OpenAI was trying to launch Sora, which did not amount to much, and he decided that even the organization trying to bui
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Why Did Americans Stop Having Dinner Parties?
Derek Thompson says Americans stopped hosting dinner parties in large part because women entered the workforce and men did not take over planning the family social calendar.
In the 1950s heyday of the dinner party and the cocktail party, one of two parents tended not to work. Labor force participation among adult women was something like 20 or 30 percent. Now it is like 60 percent. A spouse at home had time to plan gatherings, which is why so many sitcom plots turn on a boss coming to dinner. Derek Thompson says some of that hosting came from wanting to impress a husband's boss, and some from the isolation of stay-at-home parenthood. He supports women entering the workforce. What disappeare
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Why Are Data Centers Crowding Out Housing?
Derek Thompson says data centers are crowding out housing: in the last year, data center construction is up by more than 60%, while construction of housing, hospitals, offices, and manufacturing facilities is down.
He does not treat a data center as a house. A data center is an igloo for chips, a very cold house for chips, and a house is a house for people. He is passionate about removing barriers to housing where people want to live, and less passionate about clearing the way for every AI company to put a data center wherever it wants. Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard, published the graph behind the 60% figure. Derek Thompson says data centers are eating the economy and crowding out o
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Why Is the Netflix Stock Down?
Peter Kafka says the Netflix stock is down 40% over the last year because Wall Street is not buying the pitch to watch revenue per subscriber instead of subscriber growth.
Netflix has been telling investors not to worry so much about subscriber numbers and to look at how much each subscriber pays, including through ads sold to some of them, so the company can make more money from each subscriber even when the count is barely growing. Rishi Rajagopalan asks whether the drop is just the failed Warner deal, and notes that Netflix is still profitable and revenue is still growing. Peter Kafka says the market told Netflix not to spend $80 billion to buy Warner Brothers and HBO, and that wanting t
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Who Is Replacing Bella Bajaria at Netflix?
Peter Kafka says Peter Rice is replacing Bella Bajaria as Netflix's content chief.
Rishi Rajagopalan says Netflix laid off about 1,000 people in the past week. The exits include Bella Bajaria, the chief content officer, Doug Belgrad, the VP of film, and, on Monday morning, film chief Dan Lin. Peter Kafka calls that a big erasing of the people in charge of content. Rishi Rajagopalan says Peter Rice comes from Disney and Fox and has an indie film background, and asks what that background means for the Netflix slate. Peter Kafka says Rice will then hire other people to do film.
Peter Kafka says Bella Bajaria described her plan, in a New Yorker profile, as a gourmet cheeseburger: approachable
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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
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Why Is Competing With YouTube Hard for Netflix?
Peter Kafka says competing with YouTube and TikTok is a hard business model for Netflix because people can really watch only one thing at a time.
Netflix has spent the last year or so trying to act a bit more like YouTube by bringing over some podcasters, and Peter Kafka says that push has not moved the needle. He says it may be that streaming has topped out, and he does not know that anyone has a good answer for Netflix or the other traditional streamers.
He says a TikTok-style scroll feed will show up on Netflix TV within the next year, then asks why anyone would care. The issue is not vertical video or infinite scrolling. The issue is whether Netflix can offer something people want to s