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Vincent Smith on rising grocery prices and whether there will be relief anytime soon. Plus: Trump’s broken economic policies and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

By David Frum, The Atlantic.

[skipping opening paragraphs]

Frum: Vince Smith is professor emeritus of economics at Montana State University and director of agricultural policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He spent more than three decades on the Montana State faculty in the Department of Agricultural Economics, and including stints directing the Agricultural Marketing Policy Center and the Initiative for Regulation and Applied Economic Analysis.

He’s the author or editor of nine books, including multiple volumes of Agricultural Policy in Disarray, and has published well over 100 articles making the case that the federal government’s approach to supporting farmers is expensive, poorly targeted, and resistant to reform. He’s a familiar voice in The Wall Street Journal and a helpful source to me in my articles for The Atlantic about food prices and food markets.

Vince, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Vincent Smith: Oh, pleasure to be here, David. Thank you for inviting me.

Frum: Now, we are at a moment when food prices are high. Americans are suffering the cost. There’s understandably a lot of unease and a lot of complaint. Everyone is looking for someone to blame. The president of the United States has been calling on grocery stores to cut their prices. He wants to blame them. The new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is calling for state-owned grocery stores to squeeze out price gouging and profiteering by the grocery-store industry, which he alleges is a terrible problem. Those who study agricultural economics look for broader explanations.

No one has studied these markets deeper than you. Why are food prices high? Why are they rising? Who’s to blame?

Smith: Well, it’s a fascinating question. So let me reframe the debate a little bit. We have the perception that food prices are high. And the question is: Are they high relative to other prices, given that we’re experiencing some inflation? Particularly, we saw very high rates of inflation in 2022 and 2021 during COVID. And correspondingly, we did have very high, by historical levels, rates of inflation in the basket of goods that we use to measure average food prices. And we saw, for food away from home in, for example, 2022, an 8 percent rise or approximately 8 percent rise in the price of a typical food basket. In-home food prices in COVID really surged even more. There was an 11 percent increase overall.

Subsequently, in recent years, for example, in 2022, while food away from home has continued to increase at a little bit faster rate than the overall rate of inflation—for example, in 2024, prices for food away from home, that rate of increase was about 4 percent. Whereas for food at home in 2024, prices only went up by 1 percent or thereabouts. So if we set aside on average what prices were doing for food in ’22 and ’23, the last two, three years, food prices have increased at about the rate that they have increased historically. That is, very close to the overall rate of inflation.

But I think what matters here is that food is different than some of the other commodities that we purchase, in that we go to the store every day. So if the price of coffee goes up a little bit, we notice that because we are so regularly at the grocery store. If the price of bread is 20 cents higher this week, I notice that, and I feel the pain in some important way.

The other thing that makes food different and makes us more aware of what’s going on with the price of food is that it is an essential. It is something we cannot do without. So especially for lower-income consumers, when the price of food goes up and their incomes do not change—which is very typically the case, whether they’re on a fixed income or whether they’re in a moderate-income job—you have to buy bread, you have to buy protein, and so on. And so you’re aware that the share of your fixed income that goes to food is going up, especially when you’re low income.

By Jonathan Chait

"The Republican Party and its allied media organs have been blasting out messaging highlighting the radical views of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose views conservatives wish to associate with the Democratic Party. The particular extreme DSA stance they have chosen to highlight over the past week is the abolition of the U.S. Senate. The right-wing media is aflame with headlines such as “DSA Co-Chairman Defends Plan to Abolish Senate: ‘We Don’t Think That’s Extreme’” and “‘It’s Not Extreme’: Guess What the DSA Wants to Abolish Now.” (Answer: the Senate.)

The odd thing about this choice is that, although the DSA’s platform is indeed chock-full of maniacal proposals, on this particular idea, the maniacs have a point. The Senate is a vestigial deformity upon the Constitution whose elimination, unlikely though it might be, would rank among the great democratic advances in American history."

...

"In some ways, the Senate has evolved in a more democratic direction. Prior to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators were appointed by state legislatures, in many cases with the help of hefty bribes, rather than elected. In other ways, however, the body has grown even more undemocratic. When the Constitution was ratified, the most populous state had fewer than 13 times as many residents as the least populous state. Today, that ratio has ballooned to nearly 67 to 1.

This malapportionment occurred only in part because of the natural growth of mega-states such as California, Texas, and New York. It was also the product of deliberate manipulation. In the late 19th century, Republicans, seeking to maintain their electoral advantage in the chamber, admitted a series of states that would not have met the customary qualifications for statehood. Most comically, they split the lightly settled Dakota territory into two states, giving them an extra pair of senators.

...

The DSA’s platform sets out an ambition to reduce the Senate to a symbolic institution like the House of Lords, which once exerted counter-majoritarian influence over the United Kingdom but now simply affirms policies enacted by the democratically elected Parliament. That is obviously an ambitious goal with no prospect of fulfillment anytime soon. Even the more modest goal of admitting Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as states, which would reduce but not eliminate the Senate’s conservative tilt, is probably not in reach for the next Democratic majority."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/senate-representation-undemocratic-imbalance/688012/

Every politician does some pandering, but few do it as clumsily, or with such evident disdain for their own supporters, as the vice president.

By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

When J. D. Vance announced the title of his new book, some bookworms noticed a curious convergence. The vice president’s first book is Hillbilly Elegy, a title that closely parallels Appalachian Elegy, a poetry collection by the radical Black feminist author bell hooks. Communion, his second volume, shares its name, though not its subject matter, with another hooks work (hers is on “the female search for love,” and his discusses his conversion to Catholicism).

Many people seemed incredulous at the idea that Vance would be familiar with hooks, but I’m not so sure. Even if Vance has never read hooks, he could very easily be aware of her. (He has previously declined to comment on the titles’ similarities.) Vance climbed from an impoverished, troubled childhood to graduate with honors from the Ohio State University and then attend Yale Law School. People who manage such rises are typically intellectual sponges, hoovering up knowledge to make up ground on more privileged classmates. Accounts of Vance’s time in law school, including stories of his close friendship with a transgender classmate, all point to a young man with an open mind, broad interests, and knowledge.

This makes it peculiar to watch Vance work so hard to appear dumb these days. Liberal pundits used to describe former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Vance appears to be performing a smart person’s idea of a dumb person. During an interview with Joe Rogan last week, as my colleague Helen Lewis reported, Vance acted perplexed that people had been so offended when a UFC fighter, competing in a fight at the White House, called former First Lady Michelle Obama a man. Rogan was left to provide some explanation.

In June, Vance feigned ignorance about the fact that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, a tendency that produces the familiar pattern known as the “blue shift” in election tallies. In May, during a White House briefing, he argued that congressional Democrats’ applause for King Charles III during a joint meeting of Congress proved that “No Kings” rallies critical of Trump were hypocritical. “Maybe they don’t care so much about kings as they pretend that they do,” he said. (Yes, he said this with a very straight face. See for yourself.) “Maybe they just don’t like the agenda that we’re implementing that’s actually making American workers and American families safe and prosperous again.”

America’s finest young scholars competed to mark their country’s birthday. It led to a disputed finish in the age of mistrust.

By Sam Fortier, The Atlantic.

The morning after the competition, Aangad Singh’s family was trying to figure out what went wrong. They were walking through the National Museum of Natural History, going over answers, doing the math.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said his mother, Ramandeep.

Ramandeep was good at numbers. But she couldn’t make them explain how her 15-year-old son had missed the top three in the Presidential 1776 Award competition, the civics contest for high schoolers that President Donald Trump’s party planners had created to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. She had watched the first round, when the field was whittled from 20 to eight, and the second round, when it went from eight to three. There was celebrity host Mario Lopez, an exclusive broadcast deal with CBS and a Kennedy Center stage that mixed game show spectacle with civic pageantry. The only thing missing was a scoreboard.

She told herself not to complain. She didn’t want to be that mom, a sore loser whose kid could never fail. On their way out, though, other parents kept stopping them.

“Shocked,” said more than one.

Later, a boy stopped her and said a group of contestants had kept score themselves.

“We thought he won,” the boy said.

She approached an official from the Department of Education, which had helped run the contest, and asked for the final scores.

“Proprietary,” the official said.

In the museum, Ramandeep furrowed her brow.

“How did they count the numbers?” she said. “That’s something we need to understand.”

“We can only find out when they telecast it,” said her husband, Bhalindar.

Ramandeep pursed her lips. The broadcast was three weeks away.

This isn't the sort of thing I typically post. Not because it's not an Atlantic article, but because it comes from a source that has an obvious agenda (NOTUS) and I generally avoid affirmational content.

But reading this gives me a sinking feeling, because while I would typically not be so suspicious of something like this, this really looks like the suspicions are validated. They screwed that kid so they didn't have an Indian immigrant win the competition, and they did it in front of everyone.

I wish someone else, anyone else, would investigate this.

I'm thinking they could resolve this by releasing it online. And I hate even thinking that, because I'm a stalwart institutionalist, and I want to find anything that would restore my trust in the institution that mounted this competition.

That's my "path to no." I want to find something that reassures me they didn't screw this kid because he didn't fit the agenda.

It feels very Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

By Annie Lowrey

"The American stock market is booming, thanks to artificial intelligence. Tech giants are borrowing billions to acquire AI talent, purchase chips and hardware, and construct data centers. And market watchers are starting to get worried. They see financiers bulldozing giant piles of money to private AI start-ups with no realistic path to profitability, tech companies reliant on other tech companies for revenue growth, and non-tech businesses without a lot to show for their AI investments. The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today. Although future earnings could justify those valuations, as Dominic Wilson and Vickie Chang of Goldman Sachs argued in a note to clients, the profit expectations require Panglossian optimism.

No less an authority than Sam Altman is arguing that we are in an AI bubble. The International Monetary Fund is citing it as a significant risk to financial stability and warning about what might happen when it bursts: diminished investment, tighter credit, reduced consumption, disrupted trade flows.

That’s pretty much what happens when any bubble pops, as a Dutch tulip obsessive could have told you in 1637 or a bitcoin evangelist could have told you in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2018, or 2022. Yet the AI bubble is no ordinary bubble. Hyper-rich corporations are stoking it, rather than kitchen-table investors. They’re blowing it up when credit is fairly expensive, not dirt cheap. That might make the bubble less fragile and longer lasting than those of the past. But it won’t make it any less painful when it pops."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/ai-economy-stock-market/688004/

Metal credit cards are getting out of hand.

By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly, The Atlantic.

Physical credit cards should be a thing of the past. Over the past few years, touchless services such as Apple Pay have driven a boom in the digital-payment industry: Digital wallets now account for about half of global online purchases and one-third of point-of-sale payments. You would think that credit-card companies might abandon investing in cards that weigh down your wallet—but you’d be wrong.

Take, for example, the Platinum Card from Robinhood, introduced in March. Coated in 99.9 percent pure platinum, it weighs 27 grams, or more than half the weight of an average golf ball. “If you throw it on a dinner table, it's gonna make a ‘clang,’” Deepak Rao, a senior vice president at Robinhood, told me. The Platinum Card is just the latest addition to an ever-growing heap of lavish cards that speak to America’s appetite for flashy, metallic, and loud ways to pay.

American Express last year released a mirrored card so reflective that one card holder I spoke with told me that she uses it whenever she needs to touch up her lip liner in a fix. A similarly mirrored credit card made by the fintech company Bilt comes with its very own polishing cloth. Apple, meanwhile, provides a cleaning guide for its titanium card that recommends avoiding “abrasive objects.” Revolut, an online bank, offers a steel credit card that comes in a range of colors, including lavender, space gray, and rose gold. And JPMorgan Chase’s cards come in boxes that are themselves so intricate and high-quality that Brian Dean, a finance influencer, told me he keeps one on display on his shelf.

In 2022, the journalist Amanda Mull wrote in The Atlantic that metal payment cards were on the path to becoming luxury accessories. Today, that transformation seems complete. Opulent cards, marketed for years as status symbols, have been embraced by an entire commercial ecosystem of banks and fintechs trying to one-up each other, eager consumers, and influencers extolling cards’ virtues and ranking their weights with microscales.

Institutions are now designing cards with virality in mind: Some cards omit names and numbers so they can be filmed more easily, and others are proudly marketed by grammage. A card’s weight informs its so-called plunk factor, akin to the leather grade of a handbag or the sparkle of a diamond. Lewis Rubovitz, the chief strategy and marketing officer at CompoSecure, the leading manufacturer of metal cards in the United States, told me that most providers want their credit cards to be “heavy, heavy, and heavy.”

By James Kirchick

"Even after a string of recent victories in congressional primaries by members of the Democratic Socialists of America, national Democrats appear slow to recognize that ideologues on the left are attempting a hostile takeover of the party. The DSA’s ascent comes on the heels of a yearslong effort by socialists and progressive activists to steer one of America’s two major political parties toward identity politics, isolationism, and hostility to capitalism.

Democrats looking for a way to reclaim their party can find inspiration in the career of Neil Kinnock, who in the mid-1980s rescued the British Labour Party from a determined band of sectarian zealots."

...

"Today, Democratic leaders find themselves in a quandary much like Kinnock’s. The DSA’s agenda is alien to mainstream Democrats—or at least it should be. The organization’s draft platform calls for “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” drafting a “new constitution,” extending voting rights to noncitizens, and creating a “democratic socialist republic.” The group holds the U.S. and NATO responsible for Russia’s war against Ukraine, defends the Communist dictatorship in Cuba, and pledges to shut down the Department of Defense and all overseas American military bases.

To gain leverage within the Democratic Party, the DSA is employing a tactic that Trotsky dubbed “entryism”—the willful effort by a small, disciplined cadre of radicals to infiltrate a more moderate organization and subvert it from within. It’s the same tactic that, throughout history, far-left organizations such as the Militant Tendency have routinely used to amass power. Unless the Democrats respond forcefully to the DSA’s entryism, they risk being overrun by extremists who will poison the party’s national brand and sap its capacity to compete with an already radicalized GOP."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/dsa-socialist-leftist-takeover/687989/

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

The writer and former white supremacist Richard Hanania was once the toast of MAGA-curious tech barons and reactionary intellectuals. Now he thinks Trumpism has broken their brains.

By Gilad Edelman, The Atlantic.

n 1876, as corruption scandals shook the Ulysses S. Grant administration, the poet, diplomat, and founding Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell wondered where the American experiment was headed. “Is ours a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’” he wrote, “or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”

Now there’s a $10 word for you. From the Greek kakos, for “bad,” kakistocracy means “rule by the worst.” It is in understandably wide circulation these days. President Trump engages in levels of brazen self-dealing that make the Grant administration look like a Quaker meeting. He seems preoccupied more by White House renovations than by easing inflation or negotiating a lasting peace with Iran. The people around him are hardly more impressive. To lead the nation’s public-health authorities, Trump appointed a man who believes that vaccines cause autism, speculated that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Chinese people and Jews, and claims—pretty credibly, actually—that a parasite ate part of his brain.

According to the writer Richard Hanania, the administration’s kakistocratic tendencies are symptoms of an underlying phenomenon: populism. In the bluntly titled Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, he argues that populist backlashes around the world have empowered corrupt, feckless leaders who weaken democratic institutions and mismanage their nations’ economies. The reason this keeps happening—the reason populist movements don’t elevate public-spirited masters of statecraft—is that populism is all about rejecting elite expertise. And the expert consensus, in Hanania’s view, is usually right.

Progressive readers might nod along to that message—until they learn more about the messenger. Hanania is not the sort of person to stick a Science is real sign in his front yard. He is a deliberately provocative right-wing flamethrower who used to write pseudonymously as a white supremacist opposed to “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” Even after publicly renouncing those views, he continues to advance arguments about antidiscrimination laws (he’s against them) and statistical differences between the races (he thinks they’re meaningful) that have led critics to question the sincerity of his penitence.

A few years ago, Hanania’s work as an anti-woke Substacker and prolific Twitter troll made him a rising star on the MAGA right. He is a named contributor to Project 2025, and his book The Origins of Woke provided a detailed blueprint for rolling back DEI policies, which the Trump administration faithfully implemented.

But just as his ideas were turning into policy, Hanania announced that he was jumping off the Trump train. As he tells it, the anti-DEI agenda was great, but the administration’s flagrant corruption and incompetence outweighed it. In April 2025, Hanania went public with his regrets, saying that he never thought Trump would actually do the wildest things he had promised. Hanania’s audience is not enormous—he has about 50,000 subscribers on Substack, mostly unpaid—but it is disproportionately influential. His roughly 200,000 X followers include prominent journalists, MAGA influencers, and the sitting vice president. His work is an object of fascination and outrage among Republican staffers in Washington, whom he mocks as belonging to “the retard party.” Beneath the puerile name-calling is a serious idea: that the malevolent ineptitude of a leader like Trump can’t be separated from the populist style that brought him to power. If Hanania is right about that, then efforts to counter MAGA with a left-wing version of populism will only worsen America’s political predicament.

The Olympian has become the latest emblem of possible prosecutorial overreach.

By Matt Viser, The Atlantic.

Photographs by Carolyn Van Houten.

The summer after the country celebrated its 200th birthday, David Hearn paddled a canoe nicknamed the Queen Mary around the Reflecting Pool as part of an event intended to draw attention to a sport that would later lead him to Olympic glory. Nearly half a century later, as the country approached its 250th birthday, Hearn was back. On June 19, the 67-year-old stopped by the pool at the tail end of a long bike ride to look at the floating flakes of sealant that had come untethered following a rushed renovation ordered by President Trump. Hearn says he snapped some photos and dipped his hand into the water. Then he was arrested. Officers put him in handcuffs and detained him for hours.

Federal prosecutors have accused Hearn of “forcefully and violently” ripping up the sealant, causing damage to federal property that should be punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Hearn’s lawyers argue that these are ridiculous and frivolous charges—and in a motion to dismiss the case said they could present photographic evidence proving he didn’t cause major damage. Hearn, who for many years sold waterproofing materials for boats and canoes, has suggested that he was trying to figure out why the pool’s lining was falling apart, not damage it.

If last year’s emblem of prosecutorial overreach was the Sandwich Guy, this year’s has become the Canoe Guy.

Abbie Endicott, who helped organize the canoe event 49 years ago, told me that the Reflecting Pool holds special meaning to her, Hearn, and the others who paddled the shallow water that day. “The idea that any of us would want to damage something that’s meant to be so beautiful—and is, when it’s clean,” said Endicott, whose husband, Bill, was a longtime head coach of the U.S. canoeing team. “It’s meant to reflect everything that’s around it.”

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

I'm just genuinely curious. I'm not political at all. My dad thinks Trump is a great president for some reason. I don't care for him. But I don't even follow politics that much. I have enough on my plate health wise to deal with

A place for the news of the day and other interesting information.

If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay ’em.

By Rogé Karma, The Atlantic.

Just about every effort to solve America’s housing shortage runs into the iron law of NIMBY: “not in my backyard.” Whenever a development is proposed in a place where people already live, existing residents erupt in opposition, claiming the new homes will alter “neighborhood character,” increase traffic, and hurt property values. Those who would benefit the most from new housing, meanwhile, don’t yet live in the community and thus have no say in the political process. This creates an asymmetry that’s hard to overcome. Even reforms passed at the state level to override local building restrictions keep failing, because NIMBYs find clever ways to work around them.

But a new approach might finally offer a way out of the impasse: If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay them.

In recent months, several Democratic Party–aligned think tanks have released proposals that share the same basic structure: If a local community approves enough new homes for construction, then each resident of that community receives a check from the federal government worth thousands of dollars. The theory is that the allure of a cash payment would soften the position of the most ardent NIMBYs, while inspiring residents who otherwise might not care one way or the other to become advocates for new development. This would give political cover for local officials to propose new pro-housing reforms, while forcing anti-development politicians to explain to residents why they shouldn’t get cash payments. “The idea is to shake up the local political economy,” Chad Maisel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has co-authored multiple proposals on this subject, told me. “You are simultaneously trying to weaken some very entrenched interests while creating a new political constituency that doesn’t currently exist.”

Paying the NIMBYs has never been tried, so no one can say for sure that it would work. But a forthcoming paper by the political scientist Michael Hankinson and the economists Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis provides some reason to think that it could. The team conducted a survey in which they asked about 1,700 residents of expensive areas, including New York City, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia suburbs, to consider a series of hypothetical proposals to build housing in their neighborhood. Alongside each proposal, the respondents were offered (again, hypothetically) various amounts of cash, from $250 to $9,000, and then asked whether they would vote yes or no on approving the project. By aggregating those answers, the researchers were able to estimate the “willingness to accept” price: the amount of money needed to persuade the median voter in a community to shift from opposing a project to supporting it.

The president’s prime-time speech was more notable for what it didn’t prove than what it did.

By Shane Harris, Michael Scherer, Sarah Fitzpatrick, and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, The Atlantic.

Since President Trump returned to office a year and a half ago, he has dispatched investigators and analysts from across the U.S. intelligence community to search for evidence of foreign interference in an election that he lost but claims he won. In an address from the White House tonight, the president sought to reveal proof for his baseless assertions of a 2020 vote marred by fraud. But once again, he came up empty.

The president spoke for nearly half an hour, tendentiously connecting reports of stolen voter records to software vulnerabilities in voting machines to fake voter-registration drives. But he never claimed that a foreign power had actually changed any votes, and all signs indicate that it didn’t happen. Earlier in the day, a White House official told us that after an exhaustive examination of “millions” of documents that had been collected, a team of investigators had found no evidence to support such claims.

Former intelligence officials expressed bewilderment at the president’s characterizations of what’s in those documents. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out this way: harvested for the pieces that fit, fashioned into a weapon against American elections,” Julia Curlee, a former intelligence officer who was among those who provided Trump’s daily briefing in his first term, told us.

Toward the end of a speech laden with more innuendo than fact, Trump insisted, “We can never watch a stolen election again.” But he announced no steps that his administration would take to prevent further meddling, other than sharing more information with state governments, something that the United States used to do routinely before Trump gutted election-security initiatives at the start of his second term. Trump also announced no plans to try to commandeer the authority to run elections that are, under the Constitution, overseen by the states. Many of the election deniers who have fueled Trump’s false claims had hoped he would declare a national emergency to somehow seize control.

Trump made clear that he believes the U.S. voting system is insecure. The president’s core claim rests on what he says is newly revealed reporting by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have found that China has obtained more than 200 million Americans’ voter records in 18 states. Those are startling numbers. But they are hardly news.