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Denying reality is one of the most persistent, successful strategies in Donald Trumps playbook. It helped him inject ambiguity into an electoral defeat in 2020, dismiss his surging unpopularity more broadly, and contend he never said things he actually said on live television. Some aspects of reality, however, are simply undeniable, such as the amount of money in ones bank account and how far it will go at the supermarket. Nevertheless, since Democratic politicians like Zohran Mamdani won big on November 4 with a message of affordability, Trump has been falsely insisting America has seldom been more affordable than it is right now. Its a messaging strategy that may prove an even bigger miscalculation than Trumps galactically fuzzy tariff math. The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden, Trump said on November 7 during a summit with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The president has also insisted recently that every price is down, gas is nearly $2, and energy and inflation are both way down. It should go without saying, of course, that none of this is true. And even some of the presidents historically reality-challenged supporters are taking notice. High prices are getting harder to hide Grocery prices are up, with record costs for beef and coffee. Gas prices are hovering around $3, having not come close to $2 since March 2020. Electricity bills are up 11%, and inflation in October 2025 was at 3%up from 2.6% a year prior. Also, while Trump keeps touting Walmarts reduced price on its Thanksgiving dinner this year, he refuses to acknowledge the sale is due to the company including less food in this years meal and a higher proportion of products from its Great Value private brand compared to name brands. (When an NBC reporter asked Trump about this discrepancy, he dismissed her question as fake news.) As the high-spending holiday season approaches, and as people prepare to watch their health insurance premiums rise, its only going to get harder for Trump to maintain his sunny economic forecast without his supporters noticing the thunderstorms just outside their own financial window. It might temporarily help Trumps case that due to the government shutdown the U.S. will have to wait a while to get fresh economic data. Still, plenty of other economic indicators abound. The labor market appears to be weakening amid slow job growth and massive layoffs. Consumer sentiment has slumped to its lowest levels since mid-2022around the time inflation hit a 40-year high under Biden. The share of first-time homebuyers has fallen to a record low of 21% this year. Even Trumps Treasury secretary, billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, conceded There are sectors of the economy that are in recession, which may or may not have earned him a private tongue-lashing for the ages. And one economic indicator that should especially concern the president is the uncharacteristically adversarial interview he faced on Fox News this week. A new angle from Ingraham Laura Ingraham is typically one of Trumps staunchest defenders on the network, where there is steep competition for the title. On November 10, though, she pushed back against the presidents claim that the economy is as strong as its ever been, asking why people are anxious about it if thats the case. Elsewhere, she questioned the wisdom of his recent move to raise the 30-year mortgage to a 50-year one, and threw shade at the constellation of chintzy gold nonsense now festooning the Oval Office, asking whether it came from Home Depot. Before getting too carried away with the significance of this interview, it should be noted that Ingraham went right back to vehemently defending Trump hours later. Not all Trump supporters will likely have their concerns as easily assuaged, though. It would be one thing if Trump simply deflected blame for high costs in 2025. He could trot out any flavor of low-effort spin pinning high electricity bills and persistent inflation on those dastardly Democrats, whose unfair and possibly illegal shutdown wrecked an otherwise perfect economy. But doing so would mean acknowledging that his vast and sundry collection of campaign promises about bringing down prices have gone largely unfulfilled. Faced with the prospect of accountability, he is instead once again denying reality. As of November 11, for instance, the White House was boasting about positive economic data cherry-picked from the inaugural DoorDash State of Local Commerce Report, citing its four-item Breakfast Basics Index with the mic-drop confidence of total vindication. People of all political stripes will occasionally swallow lies from their leaders like bitter pills, but sticker shock tends to be spin-proof. Although the economic outlook was indeed rosy for Biden in 2024, the former president had a hard time conveying as much to people hit hard by inflation. The reality in grocery stores looked a lot different than what some economic forecasters were reading in the tea leaves, giving plenty of single-issue voters a case of cognitive dissonance. But if Biden faced a vibecession, Trump could be fomenting a real one. The gulf has widened between what the administration is saying and what people are experiencingand Trumps cratering approval ratings suggest that those feelings are bipartisan. Whenever Trump finally switches gears from denying reality to casting blame, some of his cash-strapped supporters wont buy it. Believing the president might be something they literally cant afford to do.
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E-Commerce
Your pennies are now collector’s items. The last penny was minted Wednesday at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, spelling the end of America’s longest-running coin design. More than Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe or Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it’s sculptor and medalist Victor David Brenner’s profile of Abraham Lincoln on the humble penny that’s actually believed to be the most-reproduced piece of art in the history of the world: the U.S. Mint estimates some 300 billion pennies remain in circulation. And even though no new pennies will be minted, the coin will remain legal tendergood news for those inclined to give a penny, take a penny at their local gas station. The penny’s rise to government-issued pop art status begins in 1793 when the Mint’s first one-cent coin went into circulation. That first copper coin showed an image of a long-haired woman representing liberty, a design element that was mandated by law. The Coinage Act of 1792 required coins have an “impression emblematic of liberty,” though it was later changed, paving the way for Lincoln to be featured. [Photo: National Museum of American History] The design of the reverse side of the first one-cent coins in 1793 showed a chain of 15 links representing the 15 states in the Union at the time, but the links were swapped out for a wreath in later coins because the chains were misinterpreted for symbolizing slavery, according to the Mint. The Mint says early coins from before 1909 showed personifications of liberty in the form of a woman rather than showing U.S. presidents in part because some lawmakers thought putting the head of state on a coin was too similar to the U.K. where the monarch is pictured on currency. [Photo: Lost Dutchman Rare Coins/Wiki Commons] In 1909, then-President Teddy Roosevelt marked the occasion of Lincoln’s 100th birthday by putting his likeness on the penny. Roosevelt selected the rendering by Brenner, a Jewish, Lithuanian immigrant who was then considered one of the best relief artists in the country, and who had designed a bas-relief of Lincoln based on a photo by Mathew Brady. It was the first time a President’s likeness appeared on a U.S. coin. Since Lincoln took over, the reverse or “tails” side of the penny has rotated through different designs, including an image of the Lincoln Memorial by Frank Gasparro from 1959 to 2008. After that, the Mint introduced four designs representing Lincoln’s life in 2009 for his 200th birthday, like a log cabin, followed by the Union Shield to symbolize Lincoln preserving the Union in 2010. [Photo: US Mint] The Mint says the cost of producing a single penny has risen from 1.42 cents in 2015 to 3.69 cents in 2025, and President Donald Trump said in February he asked the Treasury Department to stop producing new pennies. With the billions of pennies still in circulation, it will be some time before Brenner’s famed Lincoln portrait will completely be history. Even if you melted down every penny on Earth, you couldn’t get rid of it, because in 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover took one to Mars.
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E-Commerce
How do you explain the laws of physics to a toddler? A new children’s book, titled Simple Machines Made Simple, wants to demystify mechanical engineering for kids as young as a year old. It recently beat its Kickstarter goal by 700%raising more than seven times its target. It will be available to ship early next year. But Simple Machines Made Simple isn’t your typical picture book. Instead of drawings, the book features working models that kids can interact with, like spinning a wheel, sliding a knob up an inclined plane, and pushing a wedge into a block that splits into two. The kids may not graduate with a physics degree, but they might come away with a curiosity for the world around them. “Maybe they can’t explain it, but it starts to build intuition for how things work,” says Chase Roberts, a computer engineer who created the book. [Photo: courtesy Chase Roberts] Roberts, who spent the better part of a decade making phone apps, moved away from technology in 2021 to more tangible objects that can teach kids basic and useful skills. His first book, Computer Engineering for Babies (2021), used buttons and LEDs to explain to kids how computers think by teaching them basic logic gates like NOT, AND, OR, and XOR. The sequel, Computer Engineering for Big Babies (2023), swapped buttons for rocker switches and introduced more LEDs to challenge slightly older readers. Roberts was planning a third sequel when he caught one of his three young children catapulting cereal off a spoon one morning. The idea for a book about mechanical engineering was born. [Photo: courtesy Chase Roberts] Book vs. machine Sooner or later, our children will find out they can learn how something works by simply prompting ChatGPT or asking Gemini. What, then, is the point of teaching them how pulleys or wedges or even computers work? For Roberts, it’s about instilling fundamental skills from a young age. “We still learn to add and multiply even though we have calculators,” he says. “My kids in elementary school are learning how to multiply and divide on paper because weve decided it’s still important.” [Image: courtesy Chase Roberts] To help both kids and parents look for “simple machines” in their everyday lives, Roberts has included examples for each machine in the book. Wheels appear in scooters, roller skates, and pizza slicers. Escalators and ramps are nothing but inclined planes. Shovels, knives, and axes act as wedges. [Image: courtesy Chase Roberts] “Being able to play with these machines, all together in one place, we’re giving it a name and drawing attention to how magical they are,” he says. “It’s pretty amazing that we figured out these ways to leverage the world. Theres this [lever] you can’t turn, but if we add a huge rod to it, it’s not that hard.” Making engineering fun Roberts’s books appear to have struck a chord. “I get emails from people all the time saying ‘This is my daughter’s favorite book, he says, even though his actual target audience is less the kids but the adults who buy the books for them. [Image: courtesy Chase Roberts] More often than not, his target audience is made up of engineers. In fact, Computer Engineering for Babies went viral after Roberts posted about the book on Reddit, specifically the Arduino subreddit, where people discuss everything related to the popular microcontroller that Roberts used in his first book. “I thought, Those are my people. If anybody’s going to appreciate it, it’s these guys.” According to Roberts, his books tend to resonate with engineers not only because they speak the same language but also because they manage to repackage complex systems into something fun that engineers can finally share with their kids. As it turns out, the best way to teach kids how things work is to play with them.
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E-Commerce
Data is an omnipresent facet of modern existence, yet the current discourse around it is often too technical, academic, and inaccessible to the average person. Speak Data, the book I’ve just published with my coauthor Phillip Cox, emerges from more than 15 years of living and working with data, both as designers and as human beings.Instead of a textbook or how-to manual for designers, we imagined a more accessible exploration of the human side of data, enlivened by the perspectives of experts and practitioners from many disciplinesfrom medicine and science to art, culture, and advocacy. In an era when we are all talking about AI, the climate crisis, surveillance and privacy, and how technology shapes our choices, we wanted to reframe data not as something cold or distant, but as something deeply personal: a tool we (as human beings) can wield to understand ourselves and the world better. The book explores what we call Data Humanism, an approach that brings context, nuance, narrative, and imperfection back to the center of how we collect, design, and communicate data. In this excerpt, organizational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant reflects on how we interpret and communicate data, especially in moments of uncertainty, and why stories and emotions are just as essential to understanding information as statistics themselves. Adam Grant is the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Yet that impressive title barely covers the full breadth of his activities. Adam is an academic researcher, an award-winning teacher, a best-selling author, a podcaster, and a public intellectual. Hes interested in big human topics like motivation, generosity, rethinking, and potential. Hes also the author of six books, including the best-selling Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Dont Know. In this conversation, Adam talks about learning lessons from the pandemic; datum versus data; and how abstract numbers can lead to very real human outcomes. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] As a psychologist studying organizational behavior, data is a tool that you use every day. What do you think people get wrong about data the most? People often have a very hard time accepting data that challenge their intuition or experience. I always want to tell them that if the evidence disagrees with your experience, you shouldnt immediately say the data are wrong. It might be that youre an outlier, that your experience is not representative, and the data are actually revealing a trend that you simply dont fit. A lot of my work relates to how people interpret social science research, because thats where I confront the general public. One thing I see a lot is people reading a study and then figuring, well, that study was done with a sample of only a few thousand people in this industry or that country, and dismissing the results because of that. This is basic confirmation bias and desirability bias. You shouldnt trust your personal opinion over rigorous evidence gathered across many people. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] In an article you wrote for The Guardian, you describe arguing with a friend on the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. You wrote, I had fallen victim to what psychologists call binary bias. Its when we take a complex spectrum and oversimplify it into two categories. If we want to have better arguments, we need to look for the shades of grey. This is more or less what youre talking about. With all that in mind, what is the utility of data? The analogy I use is medicine. Today we have evidence-based medicine, but once upon a time, medical professionals tried to solve problems via bloodletting and lobotomies. Thanks to randomized controlled trials and careful longitudinal studies, we now have much safer and more reliable treatments. With evidence-based medicine, people are living longer and are healthier. So now look at how we interpret data from medicine. If you were to summarize all the randomized controlled trials of the average effect of ibuprofen on pain reduction and express the findings in the form of a correlation from -1 to +1, most people would think the correlation would be 0.7 or 0.8. After all, we have a lot of Advil in the world. But in actuality, an analysis showed that the average correlation was 0.14. Thats shockingly low to a lot of people, but the fact that its a small effect doesnt mean its insignificant. Thats the first lesson: Patterns in data do not have to be large to be consequential. You play that effect out over millions and millions of people, and a lot of people will benefit. And that benefit will be widely distributed. Secondly, the treatment doesnt have the same effect on everyone. There are contingencies. So instead of asking whether Advil is effective, we want to ask: For whom is it effective? When is it effective? This question of when and for whom allows us to look at the data and say: This is real, but only under certain circumstances. Now we need to know how widespread those circumstances are. This is real for some people. What are the commonalities of those people? The last lesson from medicine is that whats effective evolves over time. The problems were trying to treat can change. We need to update our evidence and ask: What are the best available data on any given question or for solving a given problem? Is there a reason why what was true 10, 20, 30 years ago may not apply today? I would still rather base my opinions on strong evidence thats old than no evidence at all, but we need to keep an eye on how things evolve as our contexts change. Exactly. Whats the context? What are the nuances? Data is a snapshot in time. Tomorrow, or in a month, things might be different. Espcially when we see data represented in a very definite and defined way, we assume it has absolute power to always represent a situation. This became a problem during the pandemic, of course. I think the biggest pandemic takeaway regarding the role of data is that experts and public officials did a remarkably terrible job communicating about uncertainty and contingency. I should have known it was going to happen. Chapter 8 in my book Think Again, which I wrote before the pandemic, was about how you dont lose trust when you say, More research needs to be done, or Here are the initial conclusions, but there are conditions under which they may not hold, or Here is what our initial trials suggest. Once weve done more trials, well update our conclusions. And let people know what that process looks like and how the scientific research is not only done, but accumulated. This is probably the most useful thing Ive said to a friend of mine who is very skeptical about vaccines after three-plus years of debate. He would say to me, One study says this and one study says the opposite! My response is that you shouldnt weigh both sides equally. You should weigh strong evidence more heavily than weak evidence. We need to be much more nuanced in how we communicate. We need to clarify where theres uncertainty. We need to highlight where there are contingencies. We need to be as open about what we dont know as about what we do know. One of the things we saw during COVID-19 is that source credibility dominates message credibility. People will believe a weak argument from someone they trust much more readily than a strong argument from someone they dont trust. One of the ways you become a trusted source is by very clearly admitting your uncertainty, showing intellectual humility, and expressing doubt where appropriate. I hope we dont have to keep relearning that lesson over and over again. Whats your personal definition of data? Data are information gathered through systematic and rigorous observation. We love that you say data are. To us as well, data is plural. A datum, or a data point, is one piece of information. Data are the collections of those observations. [Photo: courtesy Pentagram] To change the subject slightly, youve spoken in the past about the relative power of data versus stories to influence people and change minds. This is also something we think a lot about in our work. When do you think a really powerful statistic is appropriate, versus when a human story is going to be more effective? And when can they be combined? Its a false dichotomy to say they cant be combined. My point of view on the responsible use of stories is that we should start with the data and then find stories that illuminate the data. Stories are often more effective at evoking emotion. They allow us to distance ourselves from our own perspectives a bit. In addition to immersing ourselves in the narrative, they immerse us in a character. We get transported into stories, and we tend to experience them more than we evaluate them. Sometimes that can make people less rigorous in scrutinizing data, and that becomes a problem when the stories arent guided by data. The more surprising data are, the more likely they are to capture attention. If you have data that challenge peoples intuition, youre much more likely to pique their curiosity. But you have to be careful, because, as the sociologist Murray Davis wrote in his classic paper Thats Interesting!, people are intrigued when you challenge their weakly held intuitions, whereas they get defensive when you question their strongly held intuitions. So theres nuance there. From a visual perspective, we try to anchor stories in more aggregated data, but then disaggregate them by pulling out a couple of data points that can explain the context. By doing this in a narrative way, it can become more accessible, like a plot of a book. Thats really fascinating. Another way to tell a story about data is to start with what people would expect, then lead them to overturning their assumptions. People often find that journey revealing and enlightening, and it can become an emotional arc. Yet another thing Ive learned is to present a surprising result and then ask people how they would explain it. It opens their minds quite a bit: they generate reasons they find persuasive, and thus become active participants in the dialogue. Instead of preaching your view or prosecuting theirs, you engage them in the process of thinking like a scientist and generating hypotheses. I quite enjoy that.
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E-Commerce
Jack Schlossberg announced he’s running for Congress. And instead of using his last name in his campaign logo, the 32-year-oldborn John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossbergis using the nickname he shares with his famous grandfather, John F. Kennedy. Schlossberg’s “Jack for New York” logo underlines the “New” in the city’s name in red as if to emphasize a new generation. A red 12 appears in small print at the top right of New York to indicate he’s running to represent Manhattan’s 12th District in the U.S. House. Schlossberg tagged designer and Only NY cofounder Micah Belamarich in a social media post showing the logo. Belamarich did not respond to a request for comment. It’s standard operating procedure for candidates to use their last names in political logos, though there are notable exceptions (hi, Bernie!). One study of 2020 campaign logos found female candidates are more likely to use their first names in their logos than male candidates, as their first names communicate their gender to voters in a simple way. For Schlossberg, his first name connects him to the Kennedy family legacy without saying “Kennedy.” “Let’s Back Jack” was a slogan used in support of Kennedy in 1960. In 2026, it will be a rallying call for Schlossberg in what could be a competitive primary to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler in one of the most Democratic districts in the country. Already, two New York state assemblymen, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, are running for the seat. [Photos: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston] The campaign has found other ways to give a nod to the candidate’s storied political heritage without explicitly referencing the Kennedy name. Schlossberg’s logo and branding use typography that evokes mid-20th-century signage (check the “Our Man Jack” sign in the background of one shot in this Instagram gallery) alongside a contemporary take on the classic red, white, and blue color palette. A “12 for 12” list on the campaign website lists off not policy proposals, but rather 12 “promises to the people of New York’s 12th District” that sound like qualifications for a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, including service, strength, accountability, and optimism. Overall, it’s a brand that’s nostalgic but still feels contemporary, and combined with Schlossberg’s name recognition and vociferous social media posting, it’s one that could find success in a city that just elected another well-branded and social media-fluent candidate as mayor. “This is the best part of the greatest city on earth,” Schlossberg said about the district in his announcement video on TikTok, calling New York “the financial and media capital of the world.” He added: “This district should have a representative who can harness the creativity, energy, and drive of this district and translate that into political power in Washington.” Though JFK’s presidential campaign happened 65 years ago, it continues to inspire political branding and advertising, even across party lines. A super PAC ran a 2024 Super Bowl ad for Schlossberg’s cousin, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that ripped off one of the 1960 Kennedy campaign ads. And today, there’s campaign merch available for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley that mimics the style of JFK’s, with the candidates’ portraits on a background of horizontal red, white, and blue stripes. Images of Schlossberg on his campaign website pay homage to his famous family. One shot of Schlossberg backlit against a wall that’s decorated with U.S. and New York flags recalls a photo of a 29-year-old Kennedy running for Congress, while photos of Schlossberg in a suit on a bike emulate his uncle, George magazine founder John F. Kennedy Jr. By evoking the Kennedy dynasty through image, typography, and nickname, Schlossberg is tapping into his family legacy without using the famous family surname. “Jack” says enough.
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