Plain English with Derek Thompson

Cancer is not a singular disease but a category of hundreds, even thousands, of rare diseases with different molecular signatures and genetic roots. Cancer scientists are looking for a thousand perfect keys to pick a thousand stubborn locks. This episode is about the hardest lock of them all: pancreatic cancer.

Last month, a research center at Memorial Sloan Kettering published a truly extraordinary paper. Using mRNA technology similar to the COVID vaccines, a team of scientists designed a personalized therapy to buff up the immune systems of people with pancreatic cancer. Patients who responded to the treatment saw results that boggle the mind: 75 percent were cancer-free three years after their initial treatment. Not just alive, which would be its own minor miracle. But cancer-free. The mRNA vaccine, administered within a regimen of standard drugs, stood up to the deadliest cancer of them all and won. Our guest is the head of that research center, the surgical oncologist Vinod Balachandran.

If you had to describe the U.S. economy at the moment, I think you could do worse than the word stuck. The labor market is stuck. The low unemployment rate disguises how surprisingly hard it is to find a job today. The housing market is stuck. Interest rates are high, tariffs are looming, and home builder confidence is flagging. The median age of first-time homebuyers just hit a record high of 38 this year.

Finally, people are stuck. Americans don’t move anymore. Sixty years ago, one in five Americans moved every year. Now it’s one in 13. According to today’s guest, Yoni Appelbaum, the deputy executive editor of The Atlantic, the decline of migration in the U.S. is perhaps the most important social fact of modern American life. Yoni was our guest for our first sold-out live show in Washington, D.C. We talked about the history of housing in America, policy and zoning laws, and why Yoni thinks homeowners in liberal cities have strangled the American dream.

Something alarming is happening with reading in America. Leisure reading by some accounts has declined by about 50 percent this century. Literacy scores are declining for fourth and eighth graders at alarming rates. And even college students today are complaining to teachers that they can’t read entire books. The book itself, that ancient piece of technology for storing ideas passed down across decades, is fading in curricula across the country, replaced by film and TV and YouTube.

Today we have two conversations—one with a journalist and one with an academic. First, Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch shares her reporting on the decline of reading at elite college campuses. And second, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute tells us about the alarming decline in literacy across our entire student population and even among adults.