Derek Thompson (Writer)
Derek Thompson (Writer)
Derek Thompson is an American journalist, writer, and author based in New York, New York. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic, news analyst for NPR's "Here and Now" and author of Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction, a book on the science of popularity in pop culture. [4] [2] [3]
Education
Thompson graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he triple majored in Journalism, Political Science and legal studies. [3][7]
Career
Apart from his prolific career at The Atlantic, Thompson has also written for publications such as Slate Magazine, Businessweek, and The Daily Beast. Thompson has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including CBS News Radio, the BBC, and CNBC. [3]
Derek Thompson is the host of a podcast called "Crazy/Genius" where he dicusses technology, science and culture. He is also the author of a a popular book called Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction which has been translated into a dozen languages. He also had his own Ted Talk called "The four-letter code to selling anything". [6] [21]
As a staff writer at The Atlantic, Thompson has written a couple cover stories. The first one was called "A World Without Work", and it primarily focused on the looming threat of automation in the workforce. The second, "Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity", was an in-depth profile of Alphabet's research and development division, X.
A blog called astepinthewritedirection compiled a short and incomplete list of some of their favorite Derek Thompson articles:
Awards
Thompson has won several awards including the 2016 Best in Business award for Columns and Commentary from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. His book won him an American Marketing Association’s Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award for the best marketing book of 2018 and his podcast was nominated for an iHeartMedia Best Podcast Award.
Personal Life
Derek Thompson was born in McLean, Virginia to Robert Thompson and Petra Kahn. Before going to university, Thompson acted in several theatrical productions at the Folger Shakespeare Theater and the Shakespeare Theater. [9]
Thompson wrote an essay in 2007 that he considers one of his favorites that compares the Middle East at the time to a party scene: [8]
"I was a politics and international affairs writer at Northwestern. In my senior year, I left the newspaper and started writing for a new website called North by Northwestern. My editor pushed me to be interesting and weird. This was in late 2007, and the Middle East was in chaos (unfortunately, this is a timeless clause). I wanted to find a weird metaphor to explain the region. So I picked The Keg, a famously terrible dive bar in Evanston, and built an extended metaphor about the Middle East as the bar — with Iraq as a young coed with a weak “constitution,” Saudi Arabia as the bouncer, Iran as the BMOC quietly ruining Iraq’s night, and so on. It was ludicrous, glib, occasionally smart, and loaded with way too much figurative language. In other words, at 21, I was way too proud of it."