Derek Thompson Substack

A new weeklyish feature on awesome and interesting stuff at the frontier of science, technology, and beyond

The internet loves bad news. Researchers have shown that negative headlines attract more clicks, and antagonistic emotions, such as outrage, stimulate more viral sharing. So, one easy way to grow an independent media company or newsletter would be for me to focus relentlessly on all the most terrible things happening in the world.

I really don’t want to do that. The news cycle is a mess, and the world is full of crisis. But while the news media typically excels at pulling our attention toward developments that are sudden and negative, the press often fails to educate audiences about changes in the world that are slow or positive, even as the latter stories sometimes matter more in the long run.

That’s the thinking behind the Sunday Morning Post, a weeklyish rundown of the most interesting or wondrous stuff I’m seeing in science, technology, economics, and beyond. The goal of this feature is to utterly and completely fail every test of the 24-hour news cycle. I want to share findings and discoveries and stories that will be as critically relevant to our lives in 10 years as they are in 10 hours.