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When people say they work 40 hours a week, are they really working 40 hours—or are they spending a lot of that time waiting on colleagues to respond to emails, chatting with coworkers, and wasting away in meetings? Hell, even when you're alone at your desk, are you locked in on that spreadsheet or graphics project for eight straight hours, or might you be sipping a drink or texting your spouse every once in a while? There are simply some hours that aren’t true work hours, even if they occur during the work day. Times like these are known as idle time or downtime—but there’s a difference between the two, and understanding that can actually help you work smarter and be more productive. The difference between idle time and downtimeThese terms don’t just refer to the time experienced by people in the workplace; they also refer to—and come from—the tools we use to get our jobs done. The terms come from the tech world. Essentially, idle time is any time when an asset is waiting to run or isn’t scheduled to run, and downtime is when the asset can’t run, due to an outage or planned maintenance. For example, idle time happens when you’re waiting for your computer to boot up; downtime happens when the computer just won’t turn on. Outside of tech, idle time happens as you wait for a coworker to formulate a response to a question you asked, but downtime happens when they just don't respond and you're waiting in limbo, unable to work without their answer. So, for people, idle time is nonproductive time that occurs when there’s a lack of demand or an unforeseen work stoppage. When you have all the tools you need available to you, but no reason to use them, you’re in idle time. If you’re working on a pitch deck, for instance, and need approval from a higher-up before you move forward on it, you’re idle while you wait for that approval, even though you could open the program to work on it. The reason you don't do that isn't that you don't have the tools; it's that you don't want to waste time doing it wrong. Downtime isn’t necessarily bad. Throughout the day, you need to take breaks from working. In fact, taking regular breaks makes you more productive, but that's more if you intend to take them, instead of having them foisted on you by someone or something else's failure to provide the tools you need. You can run into idle time that is caused by what corporate psychologists call “the dead-time effect,” which is when you’re overworked and stop being productive. In the productivity world, this is known as Illich's Law: The more you work without a break, the less productive you eventually get as the quality of your work declines. It’s better to pre-plan downtime than let idle time occur because of burnout. The trick to making idle and downtime work for you and your company is scheduling. Scheduling around idle and downtimeDowntime can also occur when too many people are away from the office, say, on vacations or out sick. In that case, unlike idle time, a job can’t just be done whenever everything is ready, as the key tools—in this case, the people—are completely offline. To avoid losses from idle time and downtime, you need a solid scheduling plan. First, you should personally schedule around idle time. For instance, if you work in an environment that depends on the delivery of certain assets or products, pad time into your schedule to account for how long that might take. If it should take one day, leave padding for two, and fill up any idle slots with work you can accomplish without the shipment, if any. Use time boxing and time blocking, or the complete filling of your calendar, for this, and set two deadlines: the ideal date the shipment (or whatever you need) will be there, and a flexible time that you could still make work. For scheduling around downtime, make sure that you update your company-wide calendar whenever you’re going to be out and check for others’ outages when you’re making your personal schedule. Others’ downtime could lead to yours if you don’t account for the things you’ll need from them and get those before they’re gone. View the full article

President Donald The President signed a government funding bill Wednesday night, ending a record 43-day shutdown that caused financial stress for federal workers who went without paychecks, stranded scores of travelers at airports and generated long lines at some food banks. The shutdown magnified partisan divisions in Washington as The President took unprecedented unilateral actions — including canceling projects and trying to fire federal workers — to pressure Democrats into relenting on their demands. The Republican president blamed the situation on Democrats and suggested voters shouldn’t reward the party during next year’s midterm elections. “So I just want to tell the American people, you should not forget this,” The President said. “When we come up to midterms and other things, don’t forget what they’ve done to our country.” The signing ceremony came just hours after the House passed the measure on a mostly party-line vote of 222-209. The Senate had already passed the measure Monday. Democrats wanted to extend an enhanced tax credit expiring at the end of the year that lowers the cost of health coverage obtained through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. They refused to go along with a short-term spending bill that did not include that priority. But Republicans said that was a separate policy fight to be held at another time. “We told you 43 days ago from bitter experience that government shutdowns don’t work,” said Rep. Tom Cole, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. “They never achieve the objective that you announce. And guess what? You haven’t achieved that objective yet, and you’re not going to.” A bitter end after a long stalemate The frustration and pressures generated by the shutdown was reflected when lawmakers debated the spending measure on the House floor. Republicans said Democrats sought to use the pain generated by the shutdown to prevail in a policy dispute. “They knew it would cause pain and they did it anyway,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. Democrats said Republicans raced to pass tax breaks earlier this year that they say mostly will benefit the wealthy. But the bill before the House Wednesday “leaves families twisting in the wind with zero guarantee there will ever, ever be a vote to extend tax credits to help everyday people pay for their health care,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would not give up on the subsidy extension even if the vote did not go their way. “This fight is not over,” Jeffries said. “We’re just getting started.” The House had not been in legislative session since Sept. 19, when it passed a short-term measure to keep the government open when the new budget year began in October. Johnson sent lawmakers home after that vote and put the onus on the Senate to act, saying House Republicans had done their job. What’s in the bill to end the shutdown The legislation is the result of a deal reached by eight senators who broke ranks with the Democrats after reaching the conclusion that Republicans would not bend on using a government funding to bill to extend the health care tax credits. The compromise funds three annual spending bills and extends the rest of government funding through Jan. 30. Republicans promised to hold a vote by mid-December to extend the health care subsidies, but there is no guarantee of success. The bill includes a reversal of the firing of federal workers by the The President administration since the shutdown began. It also protects federal workers against further layoffs through January and guarantees they are paid once the shutdown is over. The bill for the Agriculture Department means people who rely on key food assistance programs will see those benefits funded without threat of interruption through the rest of the budget year. The package includes $203.5 million to boost security for lawmakers and an additional $28 million for the security of Supreme Court justices. Democrats also decried language in the bill that would give senators the opportunity to sue when a federal agency or employee searches their electronic records without notifying them, allowing for up to $500,000 in potential damages for each violation. The language seems aimed at helping Republican senators pursue damages if their phone records were analyzed by the FBI as part of an investigation into The President’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. The provisions drew criticism from Republicans as well. Johnson said he was “very angry about it.” “That was dropped in at the last minute, and I did not appreciate that, nor did most of the House members,” Johnson said, promising a vote on the matter as early as next week. The biggest point of contention, though, was the fate of the expiring enhanced tax credit that makes health insurance more affordable through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. “It’s a subsidy on top of a subsidy. Our friends added it during COVID,” Cole said. “COVID is over. They set a date certain that the subsidies would run out. They chose the date.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the enhanced tax credit was designed to give more people access to health care and no Republican voted for it. “All they have done is try to eliminate access to health care in our country. The country is catching on to them,” Pelosi said. Without the enhanced tax credit, premiums on average will more than double for millions of Americans. More than 2 million people would lose health insurance coverage altogether next year, the Congressional Budget Office projected. Health care debate ahead It’s unclear whether the parties will find any common ground on health care before the December vote in the Senate. Johnson has said he will not commit to bringing it up in his chamber. Some Republicans have said they are open to extending the COVID-19 pandemic-era tax credits as premiums will soar for millions of people, but they also want new limits on who can receive the subsidies. Some argue that the tax dollars for the plans should be routed through individuals rather than go directly to insurance companies. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Monday that she was supportive of extending the tax credits with changes, such as new income caps. Some Democrats have signaled they could be open to that idea. House Democrats expressed great skepticism that the Senate effort would lead to a breakthrough. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said Republicans have wanted to repeal the health overhaul for the past 15 years. “That’s where they’re trying to go,” she said. Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report. Follow the AP’s coverage of the federal government shutdown at https://apnews.com/hub/government-shutdown. —Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti and Matt Brown, Associated Press View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The PowerBoy 2-in-1 Retro Gaming Console and Fast-Charging Power Bank mixes the old with the new, and it's currently on sale for $79.99 at StackSocial. At first glance, it appears to be a simple handheld game console from the early 2000s, complete with a 3-inch IPS display and a familiar D-pad layout. But hidden inside that nostalgic shell is a 5000mAh magnetic power bank capable of 22.5W fast charging. You can play 1,500 preloaded games, covering everything from side-scrollers to puzzle titles, or use it to recharge your phone during a long commute. Performance-wise, the PowerBoy runs on a 900MHz ARM9 CPU with 64MB of RAM, which is modest but more than enough for retro titles. Games load instantly, controls are responsive, and the 320x320 full-color screen gives old sprites a surprisingly crisp look. If you enjoy tinkering, there’s room for more, as its TF card slot lets you expand storage and add your own ROMs, although you’ll need to supply your own card. Beyond gaming, it doubles as a mini media player that can handle MP4 videos, MP3s, photos, and even eBooks. The 5000mAh battery isn’t just for the console itself; it can charge your phone, earbuds, or smartwatch multiple times through its built-in multi-device cables, which are compatible with USB, Apple, Android, and Huawei devices. You can even charge three gadgets simultaneously, making it a surprisingly practical companion for travel or workdays. The design is compact and lightweight, measuring approximately 6.3 inches in width and weighing under a pound, making it easy to carry. It’s not designed for modern gaming or heavy use, but that’s not its intended purpose. It’s for filling quiet moments, revisiting old favorites, or keeping your phone alive when the battery warning hits. The 12-hour playtime gives it plenty of staying power, and since it doesn’t rely on wifi, it’s a solid offline entertainment option. If you want something simple, nostalgic, and functional all in one, the PowerBoy makes a solid case for pocketing a little retro fun with real-world usefulness. Our Best Editor-Vetted Tech Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Wireless Earbuds — $84.99 (List Price $129.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $319.35 (List Price $349.00) Shark AV2501AE AI XL Hepa- Safe Self-Emptying Base Robot Vacuum — $294.99 (List Price $649.99) Apple Watch Series 10 — $309.99 (List Price $429.00) Google Pixel 9 128GB Unlocked 6.9" OLED Smartphone (Obsidian) — $544.98 (List Price $799.00) Amazon Fire HD 10 (2023) — $69.99 (List Price $139.99) Sony WH-1000XM5 — $328.00 (List Price $399.99) Blink Outdoor 4 1080p Wireless Security Camera (5-Pack) — $159.99 (List Price $399.99) Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Plus 1080p Security Camera (White) — $99.99 (List Price $179.99) Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Plus — $24.99 (List Price $49.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

The outgoing head of the Secret Intelligence Service on the rise of China, why Putin is not interested in talks — and how screen spies aren’t always far from the truthView the full article

SMART goals are a helpful way to turn your ideas and to-dos into actionable plans for the near and far future, but they're not always the best approach. If you work on a larger team or need to track highly ambitious, long-term goals, for example, SMART might not be the best method to turn to. Other goal-tracking methods, like FAST and PACT, may be a better fit. You'll need to start by familiarizing yourself with these alternate methods, but once you do, you'll see that they are more tailored to specific needs and might just be your best bet. When should you use SMART goals?SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—that's what the acronym spells out. When you make them, you make sure your goal sticks to all five of those requirements, usually writing it out in a sentence like this: “By the end of the month, I will have aced three practice quizzes to prepare for my chemistry test.” It’s specific because it says what you’re going to do and why, measurable because you’re setting an amount of quizzes and expected grade on each, achievable because it can reasonably be done, relevant because it has to do with a pressing need, and time-bound because it’s related to a forthcoming deadline. Because they're so customizable, SMART goals are used by students, workers, and anyone who needs to break down their to-do list into manageable action items, but they can be limiting for the same reasons they work so well on an individual level. For example, they can be too specific to be broadly applicable, so if you have to do the same sort of task at work every month, you’ll redo the SMART goal every time instead of creating a process to follow. They’re also not ideal for collaboration because while you can share a SMART goal with others, it doesn’t leave much room to be concise and authoritative about who needs to do what to reach the goal. When FAST goals make senseThe first helpful SMART goal alternative is the FAST goal, which is especially useful if you’re in a position to lead or delegate, but is generally good for teams overall. FAST stands for the following: Frequent discussions Ambitious scope Specific measurements Transparent When using SMART goals, you analyze your desired end result through the lens of how achievable it is and when you’ll have it done. With a FAST goal, you’re looking less at the elements that define the final product and more at how you will collaborate to get there. FAST goals enable teams to adapt and evolve as the project goes on because they require frequent discussions and transparency about what the ambitious goal is and how its success will be defined. Still, you need to have a plan in place to follow the FAST goal, since it is a little vague. What are "frequent" discussions, for instance? You need to hammer that out with the team and set a goal dictating what frequent means and how you'll conduct those meetings. Say your team at work has to build a report for the end of the quarter. You already know when it’s due, so you don’t need to incorporate timeliness, like you would with a SMART goal. Instead, consider the task through the FAST lens, setting up regular times to meet and discuss it and creating clear communication channels so everyone can stay on the same page. The success of the project might be measured by manager feedback, client response, the enhancement of processes, or increases in sales; you need to define early on what “success” will look like, but staying communicative and transparent will help—and will enable you to make the end goal ambitious. Here, I'd recommend incorporating a single source of truth, or SSOT. That's essentially a folder everyone has access to that includes every resource anyone might need. For the hypothetical project of the end-of-quarter report, your SSOT might include monthly reports, a template for the bigger report, contact information for clients whose data will appear on the report, and so on. The first document in the SSOT should be one outlining the FAST goal by setting requirements for the frequent discussions, detailing the scope, defining the specific measurements of success, and, by its nature, being transparent. When to use PACT goalsPACT goals, like FAST goals, focus more on the process of achieving a desired result than the measurements of the result itself. Here’s what PACT stands for: Purposeful Actionable Continuous Trackable Like a SMART goal, PACT works well if you’re tackling something on your own, but it is more process-driven. Let’s say your goal is to get in shape. With a SMART goal, you might have to define it like, “By the first day of summer, I will have worked out for five hours per week, lost 20 pounds, and increased my muscle mass by 5%.” It’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound, but once you write that down, you’re on your own fighting your way to the finish line. A PACT goal might look more like, “To get in better shape and improve my health, I will work out five times a week and monitor my weight loss and muscle gain using my smart scale.” Instead of being time-bound, this approach takes the process itself into consideration—but also incorporates purposefulness, reminding you why you’re doing what you’re doing. You still take actions and track metrics, but the goal is rooted in purpose and relies on continuity, not a defined end result. Keeping the purpose front and center is important, as it helps you stay motivated and reminds you of what you’re really working toward. If you’re building a report at work, you can get caught up in the absolutism of knowing this is your assigned task and you have to do it, which can lead to losing sight of why you're actually toiling. If you bear in mind that you’re building the report so your company can bring in more clients or enhance internal operations, you remember that this could lead to more business, accolades, or even a raise for you. Tracking your progress is also key to staying motivated and moving toward an end goal, even if it isn’t as rigidly defined as a SMART goal might be. Again, you'll need a document that outlines all this. Think of it like a mission statement and stick it in the SSOT. Here, it might be like, "Our team will compile the report by each dedicating one hour of time to it a day for the next month, inputting our work hours and achievements into the attached spreadsheet, and meeting every Friday to discuss progress." View the full article

TfL says changes needed to ensure scheme remains effective at managing trafficView the full article

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 tender—good 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. 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. 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. 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 The President 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. View the full article

Denying reality is one of the most persistent, successful strategies in Donald The President’s 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 one’s 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, The President has been falsely insisting America has seldom been more affordable than it is right now. It’s a messaging strategy that may prove an even bigger miscalculation than The President’s 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 The President than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden,” The President 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 president’s 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 The President keeps touting Walmart’s reduced price on its Thanksgiving dinner this year, he refuses to acknowledge the sale is due to the company including less food in this year’s meal and a higher proportion of products from its Great Value private brand compared to name brands. (When an NBC reporter asked The President 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, it’s only going to get harder for The President to maintain his sunny economic forecast without his supporters noticing the thunderstorms just outside their own financial window. It might temporarily help The President’s 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-2022—around 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 The President’s 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 The President’s staunchest defenders on the network, where there is steep competition for the title. On November 10, though, she pushed back against the president’s claim that the economy is “as strong as it’s ever been,” asking why people are anxious about it if that’s 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 The President hours later. Not all The President supporters will likely have their concerns as easily assuaged, though. It would be one thing if The President 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, The President could be fomenting a real one. The gulf has widened between what the administration is saying and what people are experiencing—and The President’s cratering approval ratings suggest that those feelings are bipartisan. Whenever The President finally switches gears from denying reality to casting blame, some of his cash-strapped supporters won’t buy it. Believing the president might be something they literally can’t afford to do. View the full article

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. 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. 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 we’ve decided it’s still important.” 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. “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. There’s 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. 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. View the full article

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 disciplines—from 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. He’s interested in big human topics like motivation, generosity, rethinking, and potential. He’s also the author of six books, including the best-selling Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t 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. 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 shouldn’t immediately say the data are wrong. It might be that you’re an outlier, that your experience is not representative, and the data are actually revealing a trend that you simply don’t fit. A lot of my work relates to how people interpret social science research, because that’s 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 shouldn’t trust your personal opinion over rigorous evidence gathered across many people. 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. It’s 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 you’re 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. That’s shockingly low to a lot of people, but the fact that it’s a small effect doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. That’s 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 doesn’t 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 what’s effective evolves over time. The problems we’re 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 that’s old than no evidence at all, but we need to keep an eye on how things evolve as our contexts change. Exactly. What’s the context? What are the nuances? Data is a snapshot in time. Tomorrow, or in a month, things might be different. Especially 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 don’t 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 we’ve done more trials, we’ll 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 I’ve 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 shouldn’t 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 there’s uncertainty. We need to highlight where there are contingencies. We need to be as open about what we don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t have to keep relearning that lesson over and over again. What’s 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. To change the subject slightly, you’ve 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? It’s a false dichotomy to say they can’t 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 aren’t guided by data. The more surprising data are, the more likely they are to capture attention. If you have data that challenge people’s intuition, you’re much more likely to pique their curiosity. But you have to be careful, because, as the sociologist Murray Davis wrote in his classic paper “That’s Interesting!,” people are intrigued when you challenge their weakly held intuitions, whereas they get defensive when you question their strongly held intuitions. So there’s 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. That’s 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 I’ve 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. View the full article

Motivation comes and go, but consistency is what will get you the results. That’s a principle I’ve tried to live by for as long as I can remember. For the most part, it has served me pretty well. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that being consistent while being unmotivated can be energy draining. And when mental and physical energy is lacking, it can be difficult to be consistent. Earlier this year, I found myself in a bit of a motivation rut. I’d had a very busy six months of work. As a freelancer, this is something that I’m definitely grateful for and don’t take for granted. When things started to slow down for a little bit, I figured that I would finally have the headspace to get started on some side projects and goals that had been brewing in my head. Yet despite being excited about them all, I struggled to find the energy (and motivation) to take consistent action. Identifying the source After a little bit of introspection, I suspected that two things were getting in my way. First, my emotional attachment to the goals gave me too many excuses not to start. I wanted my side projects to succeed, so I could find all sorts of reasons as to why it just wasn’t quite the right time to start. And this led to the second point: I struggled to break down the goals into smaller steps, because I couldn’t stop ruminating on what might happen if the first step didn’t work out. The solution was simple. I needed to be less emotionally invested in the outcome, and take those small steps consistently. But what’s simple isn’t always easy. After years of writing and editing about productivity, I’ve learned that sometimes you need to take the long way to get somewhere. In the past, I experienced many flow-on benefits from taking on a challenging and scary physical goal. So I committed to training for my first boxing fight. Establishing a routine and confidence The fight I signed for required me to commit to a 12-week training camp, where I trained alongside other fighters of similar level (which in my case, is extremely novice as I’d only started boxing seriously for about six months prior). For the first four weeks, I didn’t have the energy to do anything else beyond training and my freelance work. It took a little bit of time to get my body and mind to adapt to the physical load, dial in my nutrition, and understand how to recover. All so I can do it all over again the next day. But halfway through the training camp, my mind and body started to adapt. I noticed that I started to have more mental energy to work towards the side projects I’d been putting off. First, I was able to break down my goals into tiny, little, doable steps. Once I did that, I could finally start to take small actions. I also stopped overthinking about what would happen. The flow-on effects of setting a low-stakes goal I was familiar with the concept of habit-stacking, a term that means stacking new behaviors to existing habits. For example, say you have a habit of eating dinner at 6 p.m. You can “stack” going for a walk after your meal if you wanted to add some more physical activity to your day. But I wondered whether there was a similar rationale when it comes to goal-stacking. I was especially curious about the impact that setting a low-stakes goal can have on working towards a higher stakes one. Dr. Gina Cleo, habit researcher and author of The Habit Revolution, said that there is. “When we take on a low-stakes goal, like training for a boxing match or learning a new skill just for fun, it can reignite our sense of agency,” she says. “We experience progress, mastery, and momentum in one domain, which spills over into others.” “This happens because success triggers a release of dopamine, the brain’s motivation and reward chemical. Once that circuit is active, it improves focus, confidence, and willingness to take on challenges elsewhere. So a seemingly small or playful goal can become a catalyst for renewed energy and drive in the areas that feel ‘heavier’ or higher-pressure,” she goes on to say. The power of taking small actions The idea of mastery in boxing feels a long, long way away. But as a novice fighter, I’m acutely aware of every incremental and tiny progress. I’m still a few weeks away from my fight, but stacking a series of small improvements week by week has triggered a sense of momentum. I could then leverage that to take action in other parts of my life, like starting my side projects. Dr. Cleo explains, “Progress creates what psychologists call a ‘success loop.’ As you start ticking off small wins, your brain registers that you’re capable, and that confidence fuels motivation for other goals.” It was a powerful reminder that sometimes, all it takes is a series of small actions to trigger bigger ones. This is a practice that Leo Shen, engineering graduate turned elite amateur boxer (and my boxing coach), implements in his own life. For him, the foundational goal is finding small ways to control your environment. That might mean putting your running shoes and socks by your bed so that it’s easier to go for a run. Or it could look like eating a nutritious breakfast that nourishes you so you’ll continue to do the same for lunch and dinner. He says, “You create the environment where you’re more likely to be disciplined, and then everything falls into place. Once you control the environment, then it becomes a habit. You have to stack the dominoes before you can push them over.” Building a strong foundation Pursuing a challenging physical goal has forced me to do exactly that—control my environment so that I can train and recover to the best of my ability. In turn, those healthy practices have given me the mental and physical energy to make small progress on my professional goals. I know that regardless of what happens on fight night, I’ve built a foundation and a routine that I can rely on. And as a result, I’ll have the energy (and motivation) to take consistent action towards something that once felt too overwhelming to start. View the full article

Delegation is supposed to get easier the higher you rise. In reality, it becomes challenging in a different way, Common delegation advice is helpful for first-time managers, who typically have trouble letting go. But for senior leaders, effective delegation looks different. It’s not about handing off tasks. It’s about leading through a paradox. They need to stay close enough to align and coach, but they also need to step back enough to empower and grow others. At this level, for many, the risk isn’t micromanagement, but over-detachment. When you’re too removed, you miss chances to align strategy, spot risks, or coach your leaders. Delegation is about managing a polarity These risks don’t happen by chance. They’re likely to happen when we don’t see what delegation really is: a polarity to manage. It’s a continuous balancing act of two interdependent poles, involvement and autonomy. Both are valuable. And there are downsides to doing too much of both. That is the essence of polarity management, which Barry Johnson first described in his 1992 book, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. Yet it remains more relevant than ever for leaders today. Polarities are paradoxes and tensions you can’t solve, but only manage, over time. Think speed and quality; short-term and long-term; stability and change. Two poles of a polarity are interdependent, so you cannot choose one as a “solution” and neglect the other, just like involvement and autonomy. To get the benefits of one, you need to attend to the other. Senior leaders live in this paradox every day, but few think about delegation as the polarity it actually is. It’s not about choosing between involvement and autonomy, control or letting go, but about continuously managing the tension between the two. The trap of the pendulum effect Most leaders have a natural preference. Some stay deeply involved, others pride themselves on giving their people wide latitude. Both preferences work—until they don’t. When there’s too much autonomy, it can lead to organizational misalignment, missed risks, and late-stage pivots. But when there’s too much involvement, that creates decision bottlenecks at the top, and team members can feel micromanaged and disempowered. The actual trap is the pendulum effect—leaders swinging from one pole to the other. If too much autonomy leads to drift, they jump back in and get more involved, potentially exerting too much control. When that frustrates and disempowers their team members, they swing back to being hands-off. And the cycle repeats. Breaking the cycle requires a different mindset. Leaders need to see delegation as a polarity to balance. That means recognizing the pattern, anticipating the shifts, and proactively balancing the upsides of both poles before the downsides start to emerge. The art of high-impact delegation at senior levels, therefore, lies in cycling between involvement and autonomy. You need to be able to switch between the two depending on the stakes and context of the work, and trust in the relationships and capabilities of your team members. There is no perfect and stable point of balance. It’s a continuous practice of adjustment. How to show up differently A tech company I’ve worked with trained all its senior leaders to look at delegation through a polarity lens, while emphasizing that involvement was an integral part of their culture. Leaders mapped out their tendencies, learned to recognize early warning signs of leaning too much into one pole, and experimented with new ways of showing up. A few big shifts stood out: Where they showed up changed They realized involvement wasn’t about hovering everywhere. It was about leaning in with more focus and attention when the stakes were highest. This means critical work like high-stakes or unusually complex projects, when they need to coach, support, or provide people with stretch opportunities. This was also crucial during strategic moments when they needed perspective to align across the organization. How they showed up changed Instead of inserting themselves or taking over, leaders leaned on dialogue. They were: Asking big-picture questions about context, impact, or purpose, like “Why are we doing this?” or “Who else will be impacted?” Helping teams zoom out to see risks, interdependencies, and strategic connections. Clarifying expectations and roles upfront, and using check-ins for alignment, problem-solving, and coaching—not just updates. The result? Leaders weren’t doing more of the work themselves, as many had feared. They were actually influencing the work, bringing perspective, context, and coaching in ways that elevated their teams. Through modeling deeper thinking and strategizing, their teams started internalizing those behaviors and applied them independently, even when the leader wasn’t present. And once leaders got comfortable with polarity thinking, they started applying it elsewhere—candor and care, stability and change, results, and relationships. They stopped asking which side was “right” and started asking how to get the best of both. That development shift—from either/or choices to both/and leadership—is what unlocks deeper effectiveness, not just in delegation but in leading in complexity. Leading with the paradox So how can you put this into practice? You can start by doing the following: Reflect on your patterns. Notice when you overdo autonomy or involvement. Watch for the early warning signs: drift, misalignment, bottlenecks, and disengagement. Ask yourself the following questions: How do you intentionally cycle between the two poles, depending on context and capability? How do you ensure your involvement adds value without disempowering? How do you ensure autonomy doesn’t become detachment? Align expectations upfront. Be clear on outcomes, roles, responsibilities, and decision boundaries. You should also discuss and align around your work styles and preferences for updating and keeping each other informed. Continuously calibrate. Contexts shift. Projects evolve. People grow. Ask yourself: “What requires my attention right now? Where will involvement matter most? Where can I step back to create space?” Trust your intuition and check in with your teams. This cycle of reflection, alignment, and calibration allows you to balance both poles of the delegation paradox over time without getting stuck in either. Delegation at senior levels isn’t about handing off tasks and hoping for the best. Treating delegation as a polarity–rather than a skill to master—helps leaders embrace it as an ongoing practice. Leaders who do this well don’t ask, “Am I delegating enough?” They ask, “Am I balancing involvement and autonomy in a way that serves the whole organization, my teams, and the individuals I lead?” View the full article

College across the country may soon start seeing a much older demographic roaming their campuses. According to a report from the higher education publication Best Colleges, at least 84 public or nonprofit colleges have announced they would merge or close over the past five years. Almost half of those are outright closures, as small colleges struggle to keep up with rising costs amid falling enrollment. In many instances, the shuttering of a college means the mothballing of its campus. But while some campuses are being left idle with no future plans, a growing number are finding new life in the form of senior living facilities. That doesn’t mean just moving seniors into old dorm buildings. Some adaptation projects are showing that college campuses have room and opportunity for building reuse and building redesign to accommodate the special needs of senior residents. “College sites are absolutely prime because they have a slightly larger scale, they have infrastructure running to them, and they have open space that can be utilized,” says Sargent C. Gardiner, partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, who has worked on multiple college campus adaptation projects. One of the firm’s most recent projects is the Newbury of Brookline, a luxury senior living community in Massachusetts built from and around the former buildings of Newbury College, which shuttered in 2019. Located just outside Boston, the campus centered around a historic mansion and had been used by the college since the early 1980s. Now, that historic mansion has been joined by a newly constructed six-story building that holds 159 units of independent, assisted, and memory care living facilities for seniors. Amenities include an indoor saltwater pool, a fitness center, art rooms, and a rooftop bar. Operated by Kisco Senior Living, the Newbury of Brookline has monthly rents that start at $10,000. This project is part of a trend in higher education, particularly at smaller colleges, which are turning to real estate development as a way of buttressing their bottom line, or, in the case of closed colleges, finding entirely new lives. In dozens of projects across the country, colleges are turning over parts of their campuses for redevelopment as housing, and often senior housing. Old buildings, new use On the campus of the State University of New York’s Purchase College, a new senior living facility recently opened that includes 174 independent living apartments, 46 villas, 36 assisted-living residences, and 32 memory care suites. In Denver, the closed Johnson & Wales University is now home to 154 units of affordable housing. More are likely on the way. Wells College in Aurora, New York, closed in June and one of the proposals for the property includes housing. Meanwhile, senior housing is also on the table for the campus of the College of Saint Rose, in Albany, New York, which closed in 2024. On the campus of the former Newbury College, Gardiner says the project was carefully designed to fit into the campus and mesh with the existing facilities. It was also important to blend the architecture with the surrounding community, which has many historic buildings and classical building styles. “There are a lot of people embedded in the neighborhood that really care about the neighborhood, and really care about the architectural character. They don’t want to see it ruined,” Gardiner says. “It was very clear from the very beginning that they needed somebody that could talk the talk of regional architectural languages.” Robert A.M. Stern Architects, one of the foremost classical architecture firms in the U.S., has deep experience designing new buildings that fit their context. But while the central building of the former college campus is a historic mansion, the site itself has been a college for decades. That gave the architects the leeway to design a building with the look and feel of the historic structures in the area, but at a more institutional scale. Uniquely, the building is much taller than its neighbors. “The central portion of it rises to six stories, which is unheard of in many senior living areas, especially in a suburban neighborhood,” says Gardiner. “But going up was the key to this project.” It was able to accommodate a significant amount of units while preserving open space and a stand of old growth trees. “That allowed the project to just nestle in and sort of feel like it was always here,” Gardiner says. The height also opened up another unique amenity for the project, creating room for a rooftop deck attached to the building’s bar, where residents can go for an evening drink and take in views of downtown Boston in the distance. All of this—along with its tony location—is why there’s such a relatively high price point for residences at the Newbury of Brookline. It’s part of the appeal and the business logic of turning a former college into this new sort of campus. But the concept won’t work just anywhere, Gardiner says. A big campus far removed from urban amenities or, importantly, good healthcare, may not pencil out as well as a campus that’s better connected or even in a city center. “The green acre sites may get gobbled up by some other use,” he says. “It’s these in-between, irregular sites where you can sort of squeeze the caulking in.” As more colleges in these areas struggle to survive, this kind of rebirth may be just what their campuses, and older adults, need. View the full article

From the outside looking in, the life of a content creator is enviable. Shopping, jet-setting, star-studded events, all documented for their audience of thousands. But new research tells a different story. A study by Creators 4 Mental Health, conducted in partnership with Lupiani Insights & Strategies and sponsored by Opus, BeReal, Social Currant, Statusphere, and the nonprofit AAKOMA Project, spoke to more than 500 full- and part-time creators across North America about their work, mental health, and well-being. One in ten creators reported having suicidal thoughts tied to their work. That rate is nearly double the national average of 5.5%, according to the National Institutes of Health. Only 8% of creators described their mental health as excellent. For those who have been in the industry for more than five years, that number drops to 4%. The report found that 65% experience anxiety or depression related to their work, and 62% feel burned out. Rather than getting better over time, this only gets worse. Those who have worked five years or more report the highest rates of burnout, stress, and financial instability. Content creation is a numbers game. Yet those who check analytics obsessively also have significantly worse emotional well-being scores. Of those surveyed, 65% said they obsess over content performance, and 58% said their self-worth declines when content underperforms. Likes, views, and engagement directly correlate to how much money content creators can make, either through creator funds or negotiating brand deals. However, nearly 69% of creators said their income is unpredictable or inconsistent, a factor that also strongly correlates with poor mental health outcomes such as anxiety and depression. Far from the cushy work life some would imagine, burnout impacts creators almost as much as the wider U.S. population. The difference is that creators often face these challenges without access to any kind of specialized mental healthcare or workplace benefits. “Creators are the new workforce of the digital age, doing the work of entire teams without support and protections,” says Shira Lazar, Emmy-nominated creator and founder of Creators 4 Mental Health. “This study is a wake-up call for platforms, brands, and policymakers to treat creator mental health as a workforce issue, not a personal problem.” As much as creators’ complaints about the industry are often met with calls to quit or “get a real job,” content creation as a career path isn’t going anywhere. In fact, the creator economy is growing rapidly, expected to nearly double in value to $480 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs. Instead, change has to start with the platforms and brands that rely on content creators’ labor. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they want income stability tools built into social media platforms; 59% said they want transparent pay rates from brands. “These results are a clear call to action for brands, platforms, nonprofits, and creators themselves,” says Lazar. “Creators are suffering as a result of their work, and something has got to give.” View the full article

Jack Schlossberg announced he’s running for Congress. And instead of using his last name in his campaign logo, the 32-year-old—born John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg—is 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. 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. View the full article

Fed Gov. Stephan Miran has spent his short tenure at the central bank arguing that disinflation in housing and immigration reforms will tamp down inflation in the near term. But other economists say the timing, degree and context of those effects is very much in question. View the full article

Party will find it easier to push for leadership challenge now it is in power compared with oppositionView the full article

A practical way to get back in control of your inbox Email was designed to help us communicate. For many people managers and people professionals, it now creates more pressure than clarity. Messages arrive faster than they can be processed, and inboxes become crowded with tasks, questions, updates and CCs. The result is a workday shaped around reacting, rather than making progress. To help teams reset their habits, Productivity Ninja Lee and Head of Learning Success Deane ran a live Ninja Skills Booster on how to bring your inbox back under control in a simple, sustainable way. You can now watch the recording on demand here. Why email becomes overwhelming Most inboxes grow because people are trying to keep up, not because they’re disorganised. Throughout the day, we scan, reopen, save for later and carry half-finished thoughts in our heads. As this builds, the inbox becomes a mix of tasks, reminders and unresolved decisions. The impact is familiar: • difficulty spotting what matters • pressure to be constantly available • hesitation about deleting anything • a sense of being behind, even when you’re working hard This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a workload and habit problem, and it can be fixed. One change to try today When a new message arrives, ask: Does this need my action, someone else’s action, or no action at all? This one question reduces re-reading, frees up mental space and stops the inbox from becoming a running to-do list. If your team needs practical support to reduce email overload and work with more clarity, our Getting Your Inbox to Zero workshop gives them the habits, structure and confidence to stay on top of email long term. The post Why email still gets in the way of good work appeared first on Think Productive UK. View the full article

Discovering that a colleague with the same job title is earning more than you is never fun, though it is quite common. According to a global survey of 1,850 workers by résumé building platform Kickresume, 56% have discovered that someone with the same job at their company is earning more than them, and another 24% have their suspicions. “People are much less willing to discuss their salaries than we thought they would be—there’s still quite a stigma around it,” says Kickresume’s head of content Martin Poduska, who helped conduct the study. “The weirdest thing is that we didn’t identify a good reason for it.” Poduska explains that compensation is far from a precise science, and that keeping the topic taboo only works to the benefit of the employer. “The secrecy that surrounds it prevents organizations from coming up with more effective or more transparent ways of rewarding people,” he says. In recent years, there have been efforts to mandate wage transparency in certain cities and states. For example, California, Washington, New York, Maryland, Colorado, and Rhode Island have had pay transparency laws on the books for years, and a handful more—including Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Vermont—added them this year. Calls for more robust pay transparency have even gone viral on TikTok, and the Kickresume survey suggests Gen Zers and millennials are much more willing to talk about their compensation than Gen Xers and boomers. With more people sharing salary information, the research suggests many won’t be happy with what they learn. Here’s what to do when you discover a colleague is making more for the same job. Don’t assume the worst Not everyone who found out that a colleague with the same job title was outearning them took issue with it. In the Kickresume survey, about 40% didn’t really care what others were making, though the rest did. That includes 45% of women compared to just 33% of men, which may not be surprising given the gender wage gap. But that could be because there are a lot of reasons why two people with the same title may get paid differently—and that any pay discrepancies could be unintended, or simply reflect nuances in talent and market trends. These reasons could range from résumé points, like education and experience, to differences in their responsibilities, even if they share a job title. Plus, those who are hired in a more competitive talent market also typically have more bargaining power than those who are hired in slower economic periods. “I think that people assume that companies have it all figured out in terms of jobs and titles and career paths, but it’s really not that neat and clean,” says career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine. “Even if a company doesn’t do it deliberately, there’s so many opportunities for inequities to develop in compensation, and no one’s going to advocate for your salary more than you will. So you might as well pay attention.” Take a breath, and do your homework Discovering that someone with the same job title is earning more can provoke a lot of emotions, but a heated confrontation is unlikely to resolve the issue. “You don’t want to react the moment you find out,” says Andres Lares, managing partner at Shapiro Negotiations Institute, which offers negotiation consulting and training services. “You want to take some time to digest it, and that also gives you time to find some objective information.” Lares explains that those emotions are best channeled into research about market rates for your role. “That prepares you to have these conversations from a place of knowledge,” he says. “The more you do that, the less reactionary and emotional you are, and the more objective you are when you approach [your manager].” Approach with caution While there are wrong moments to confront your manager—like immediately after finding out someone is earning more—there may never be a right time. “It can be very easy to stall forever waiting for the right time, and the right time will really never happen,” says Lares. “There’s always going to be excuses not to do it.” If you want to talk to your boss about your compensation as it compares to your colleagues, Lares suggests scheduling an in-person appointment or bringing it up during a regularly scheduled one-on-one. Ask questions Rather than opening the conversation with accusations and demands, Lares recommends starting with questions. “Sit down with your boss and ask about pay structures. ‘How does it work?’ ‘How do you come up with the pay structures for each person on your team?’ ‘How do I compare in my compensation with others in the role?’ ‘Where does my performance land compared to my colleagues?’ ‘What would set me up best to increase my compensation?” he says. “Not only are you getting valuable information and seeing a more complete picture, but they can see that you’re approaching this with empathy.” Test the market, carefully The most direct way to understand what you’re worth is to test the market yourself. Even if you’re not ready to jump ship, Vivian Garcia-Tunon, founder of executive coaching, leadership development, talent strategy, and advisory services provider VGT People Advisory, says sending out a few applications may be useful, as long as your negotiation doesn’t become an ultimatum. “Probably eight out of 10 people will go test the market and see if they can get a job offer and then have the conversation with their manager,” she says. “It’s a strategy that brings the individual more confidence. But there’s a risk associated with it, which is that if you use it as a negotiation strategy, you have to be willing to walk.” That other offer, in other words, may be a card you want in your back pocket heading into the negotiations, but not necessarily one you want to play. “If you’re seriously considering leaving, you can put that offer on the table,” Garcia-Tunon says. “If you’re trying to use it to get an increase, you can position it in the conversation as another piece of information.” Be patient Just because you’re walking into your boss’s office to talk about a raise doesn’t mean you’re going to walk out with a higher salary. Those decisions rarely happen on the spot, and may require conversations with other stakeholders, like human resources, accounting, and leadership teams. “Sometimes your manager agrees with you, but they then have to go higher up,” says Ceniza-Levine. “One thing that I’ve actually seen with a lot of people is that they have this initial conversation with their manager, the manager promises them something, and then nothing happens.” Ceniza-Levine explains that your salary will never be as pressing to anyone else, and whether intentionally or not, it can take a long time for managers to follow up. “Be prepared to have multiple conversations, check in on what is happening, and leave a paper trail,” she says. “Send an email saying, ‘thank you so much for meeting with me, as discussed you’re going to talk to senior leader X about a merit raise for me, and then we can schedule another meeting.’” View the full article

OpenAI watchers have spotted something curious over the last week. References to GPT-5.1 keep showing up in OpenAI’s codebase, and a “cloaked” model codenamed Polaris Alpha and widely believed to have come from OpenAI randomly appeared in OpenRouter, a platform that AI nerds use to test new systems. Nothing is official yet. But all of this suggests that OpenAI is quietly preparing to release a new version of their GPT-5 model. Industry sources point to a potential release date as early as November 24. If GPT-5.1 is for real, what new capabilities will the model have? As a former OpenAI Beta tester—and someone who burns through millions of GPT-5 tokens every month—here’s what I’m expecting. A larger context window (but still not large enough) An AI model’s context window is the amount of data (measured in tokens, which are basically bits of words) that it can process at one time. As the name implies, a larger context window means that a model can consider more context and external information when processing a given request. This usually results in better output. I recently spoke to an artist, for example, who hands Google’s Gemini a 300-page document every time he chats with it. The document includes excerpts from his personal journal, full copies of screenplays he’s written, and much else. This insanely large amount of context lets the model provide him much better, more tailored responses than it would if he simply interacted with it like the average user. This works largely because Gemini has a 1 million token context window. GPT-5’s, in comparison, is relatively puny at just 196,000 tokens in ChatGPT (expanded to 400,000 tokens when used by developers through the company’s API). That smaller context window puts GPT-5 and ChatGPT at a major disadvantage. If you want to use the model to edit a book or improve a large codebase, for example, you’ll quickly run out of tokens. When OpenAI releases GPT-5.1, sources indicate that it will come with a 256,000 token context window when used via the ChatGPT interface, and perhaps double that in the API. That’s better than today’s GPT-5, to be sure. But it still falls far short of Gemini—especially as Google prepares to make its own upgrades. OpenAI could make a surprise last-minute upgrade to 1 million tokens. But if it keeps the 256,000 token context window, expect plenty of grumbling from the developer community about why the window still isn’t big enough. Even fewer hallucinations OpenAI’s GPT-5 model falls short in many ways. But one thing it’s very good at is providing accurate, largely hallucination-free responses. I often use OpenAI’s models to perform research. With earlier models like GPT-4o, I found that I had to carefully fact-check everything the model produced to ensure it wasn’t imagining some new software tool that doesn’t actually exist, or lying to me about myriad other small, crucial things. With GPT-5, I find I have to do that far less. The model isn’t perfect. But OpenAI has largely solved the problem of wild hallucinations. According to the company’s own data, GPT-5 hallucinates only 26% of the time when solving a complex benchmark problem, versus 75% of the time with older models. In normal usage, that translates to a far lower hallucination rate on simpler, everyday queries that aren’t designed to trip the model up. With GPT-5.1, expect OpenAI to double down on its new, hallucination-free direction. The updated model is likely to do an even better job at avoiding errors. There’s a cost, though. Models that hallucinate less tend to take fewer risks, and can thus seem less creative than unconstrained, hallucination-laden ones. OpenAI will likely try to carefully walk the link between accuracy and creativity with GPT-5.1. But there’s no guarantee they’ll succeed. Better, more creative writing In a similar vein, when OpenAI released their GPT-5 model, users quickly noticed that it produced boring, lifeless prose. At the time, I predicted that OpenAI had essentially given the model an “emotional lobotomy,” killing its emotional intelligence in order to curb a worrying trend of the model sending users down psychotic spirals. Turns out, I was right. In a post on X last month, Sam Altman admitted that “We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues.” But Altman also said in the post “now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.” That process began with the rollout of new, more emotionally intelligent personalities in the existing GPT-5 model. But it’s likely to continue and intensify with GPT-5.1. I expect the new model to have the overall intelligence and accuracy of GPT-5, but with a personality to match the emotionally deep GPT-4o. This will likely be paired with much more robust safeguards to ensure that 5.1 avoids conversations that might hurt someone who is having a mental health crisis. Hopefully, with GPT-5.1 the company can protect those vulnerable users without bricking the bot’s brain for everyone else. Naughty bits If you’re squeamish about NSFW stuff, maybe cover your ears for this part. In the same X post, Altman subtly dropped a sentence that sent the Internet into a tizzy: “As we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.” The idea of America’s leading AI company churning out reams of computer-generated erotica has already sparked feverish commentary from such varied sources as politicians, Christian leaders, tech reporters, and (judging from the number of Upvotes), much of Reddit. For their part, though, OpenAI seems quite committed to moving ahead with this promise. In a calculus that surely makes sense in the strange techno-Libertarian circles of the AI world, the issue is intimately tied to personal freedom and autonomy. In a recent article about the future of artificial intelligence, OpenAI again reiterated that “We believe that adults should be able to use AI on their own terms, within broad bounds defined by society,” placing full access to AI “on par with electricity, clean water, or food.” All that’s to say that with the release of GPT-5.1 (or perhaps slightly after the release, so the inevitable media frenzy doesn’t overshadow the new model’s less interesting aspects), the guardrails around ChatGPT’s naughty bits are almost certainly coming off. Deeper thought In addition to killing GPT-5’s emotional intelligence, OpenAI made another misstep when releasing GPT-5. The company tried to unify all queries within a single model, letting ChatGPT itself choose whether to use a simpler, lower-effort version of GPT-5, or a slower, more thoughtful one. The idea was noble—there’s little reason to use an incredibly powerful, slow, resource-intensive LLM to answer a query like, “Is tahini still good after one month in the fridge?” But in practice, the feature was a failure. ChatGPT was no good at determining how much effort was needed to field a given query, which meant that people asking complex questions were often routed to a cheap, crappy model that gave awful results. OpenAI fixed the issue in ChatGPT with a user interface kludge. But with GPT-5.1, early indications point to OpenAI once again bifurcating their model into Instant and Thinking versions. The former will likely respond to simple queries far faster than GPT-5, while the latter will take longer, chew through more tokens, and yield better results on complex tasks. Crucially, it seems like the user will once again be able to explicitly choose between the two models. That should yield faster results when a query is genuinely simple, and a better ability to solve complicated problems. OpenAI has hinted that its future models will be “capable of making very small discoveries” in fields like science and medicine next year, with “systems that can make more significant discoveries” coming as soon as 2028. GPT-5.1 will likely be a first step down that path. An attempt to course correct Until OpenAI formally releases GPT-5.1 in one of its signature, wonky livestreams, all of this remains speculative. But given my history with OpenAI—going back to the halcyon days of GPT-3—these are some changes I’m expecting when the 5.1 model does go live. Overall, GPT-5.1 seems like an attempt to correct many of the glaring problems with GPT-5, while also doubling down on OpenAI’s more freedom-oriented, accuracy-focused approach. The new model will likely be able to think, (ahem) “flirt,” write, and communicate better than its predecessors. Whether it will do those things better than a growing stable of competing models from Google, Anthropic, and myriad Chinese AI labs, though, is anyone’s guess. View the full article

Just in time for the busy holiday travel season, Apple has rolled out a new iOS 26 feature that lets users store their U.S. passport on their iPhone. The digitization of the passport is something tech-savvy travelers have longed for, especially as other once physical-only items that have crowded our pockets, like credit cards, driver’s licenses, and even car keys, have made their way onto the iPhone. But so far there are limitations to what you can do with your digitized passport, which Apple dubs your “Digital ID.” Here’s what you need to know about uploading your passport to your iPhone and what you can—and can’t—use it for once it’s there. How to add your passport to your iPhone Adding your U.S. passport to your iPhone is relatively straightforward—provided your iPhone and your passport meet some requirements. As far as your iPhone goes, it must be an iPhone 11 or later; it must be running iOS 26.1 or later; and its region must be set to the United States. You’ll also need Face ID or Touch ID turned on, as well as Bluetooth. Finally, your Apple Account must have two-factor authentication enabled. As far as your passport is concerned, it must be a United States passport, and it must not be expired. If your iPhone and passport meet these requirements, you can add your passport to your iPhone. Here’s how: Open the Wallet app. Tap the + button. Tap Driver’s License and ID Cards. Tap Digital ID. Tap “Add to iPhone and Apple Watch” or “Add to iPhone Only.” Scan the photo page of your U.S. passport when prompted. Use your iPhone to scan the chip on the inside back cover of your passport when prompted. Take a live photo of your face when prompted and follow the facial movement instructions that appear on the screen. Once you’ve gone through the steps above, Apple will verify the details from your scanned passport and your facial movements, and your iPhone will then send you a notification when your passport information, contained in what Apple calls your “Digital ID,” is available in the Wallet app. Verification is usually done within a few minutes. What information does your Digital ID hold? The new Digital ID on your iPhone contains much of the information in your passport. This includes your: Legal name Date of birth Age Sex Passport number Passport issue date Passport expiration date If you open the Wallet app, tap your Digital ID, then tap the “i” button, you’ll even be able to see your passport photo on the “Physical Passport Information” screen. You can’t use your digital passport everywhere The first thing many people are likely to think when they hear they can now add their U.S. passport to their iPhone is, Great! I don’t need to carry my physical passport with me anymore. Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Your passport’s information, stored in your new Digital ID card in iOS 26’s Wallet app, can be used as an identity document to get through some airport checkpoints—but the keyword is some. Apple says its new Digital ID is currently “in beta,” and during that beta stage it can be used at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in “more than 250 airports in the U.S. for in-person identity verification during domestic travel.” But while your new Digital ID will get you past TSA security checkpoints at these 250-plus locations, it cannot be used for international travel or at border crossings. “Digital ID gives more people a way to create and present an ID in Apple wallet even if they do not have a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or state ID,” Apple says. “Digital ID is not a replacement for a physical passport, and cannot be used for international travel and border crossing in lieu of a U.S. passport.” Can I rely on my digitized passport for domestic travel? Even if you’re flying domestically, it’s still wise to carry alternate acceptable forms of ID that will get you through a TSA checkpoint. This includes your REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or your actual physical U.S. passport, which is also REAL ID-compliant. Apple says you can use your newly digitized passport on your iPhone “at TSA checkpoints at more than 250 airports in the U.S.,” but the company was unable to provide me with a list of these airports. An Apple spokesperson told me that most major U.S. airports, including John F. Kennedy International (JFK) and San Francisco International (SFO), accept Digital ID. However, since the TSA is the authority regarding where Digital ID is accepted, Apple directed me to the government agency for a list of airports that recognize the new ID. (As of this writing, the TSA has not yet responded to my inquiry.) You can store your U.S. passport on your iPhone. But should you? One concern individuals may have is whether putting their passport on their iPhone is a wise move from a privacy and security standpoint. Apple says the Digital ID on your iPhone is encrypted, and since your passport’s information is locked behind Face ID or Touch ID, even if someone had access to your phone, they couldn’t access your passport information. Those who worry that using a Digital ID will mean they’ll need to hand their iPhone over to TSA staff at the airport can rest easy, too. If you want to use your Digital ID at a TSA checkpoint, you won’t have to unlock your iPhone or hand the device over to TSA staff. Instead, you’ll present your Digital ID much like you do a credit card you use with Apple Pay: You’ll place your phone near a TSA reader, and your iPhone will alert you to the passport information it will share. Further, it will share this information only with your authorization, which you give by double-clicking the iPhone’s side button and scanning your biometrics using the iPhone’s Face or Touch ID. By allowing users to add their passport information to their iPhone, Apple has made the upcoming holiday travel season a little more convenient for many with domestic flights to catch. Too bad that’s likely to be the only convenient thing about U.S. air travel in the weeks ahead. View the full article

All last week, OpenAI watchers reported seeing strange things. References to GPT-5.1 kept showing up in OpenAI’s codebase, and a “cloaked” model codenamed Polaris Alpha and widely believed to have come from OpenAI randomly appeared in OpenRouter, a platform that AI nerds use to test new systems. Today, we learned what was going on. OpenAI announced the release of its brand new 5.1 model, an updated and revamped version of the GPT-5 model the company debuted in August. As a former OpenAI Beta tester–and someone who burns through millions of GPT-5 tokens every month–here’s what you need to know about GPT-5.1. A smarter, friendlier robot In their release notes for the new model, OpenAI emphasizes that GPT-5.1 is “smarter” and “more conversational” than previous versions. The company says that GPT-5.1 is “warmer by default” and “often surprises people with its playfulness while remaining clear and useful.” While some people like talking with a chatbot as if it’s their long-time friend, others find that cringey. OpenAI acknowledges this, saying that “Preferences on chat style vary—from person to person and even from conversation to conversation.” For that reason, OpenAI says users can customize the new model’s tone, choosing between pre-set options like “Professional,” “Candid” and “Quirky.” There’s also a “Nerdy” option, which in my testing seems to make the model more pedantic and cause it to overuse terms like “level up.” At their core, the new changes feel like a pivot towards the consumer side of OpenAI’s customer base. Enterprise users probably don’t want a model that occasionally drops Dungeons and Dragons references. As the uproar over OpenAI’s initially voiceless GPT-5 model shows, though, everyday users do. Even fewer hallucinations OpenAI’s GPT-5 model fell short in many ways, but it was very good at providing accurate, largely hallucination-free responses. I often use OpenAI’s models to perform research. With earlier models like GPT-4o, I found that I had to carefully fact check everything the model produced to ensure it wasn’t imagining some new software tool that doesn’t actually exist, or lying to me about myriad other small, crucial things. With GPT-5, I had to do that far less. The model wasn’t perfect. But OpenAI had largely solved the problem of wild hallucinations. According to the company’s own data, GPT-5 hallucinates only 26% of the time when solving a complex benchmark problem, versus 75% of the time with older models. In normal usage, that translates to a far lower hallucination rate on simpler, everyday queries that aren’t designed to trip the model up. From my early testing, GPT-5.1 seems even less prone to hallucinate. I asked it to make a list of the best restaurants in my hometown, and to include addresses, website links and open hours for each one. When I asked GPT-4 to complete a similar task years ago, it made up plausible-sounding restaurants that don’t exist. GPT-5 does better on such things, but still often misses details, like the fact that one popular restaurant recently moved down the street. GPT-5.1’s list, though, is spot-on. Its choices are solid, they’re all real places, and the hours and locations are correct across all ten selections. There’s a cost, though. Models that hallucinate less tend to take fewer risks, and can thus seem less creative than unconstrained, hallucination-laden ones. To that point, the restaurants in GPT-5.1’s list aren’t wrong, but they’re mostly safe choices—the kinds of places that have been in town forever, and that every local would have visited a million times. A real human reviewer (or a bolder model) might have highlighted a promising newcomer, just to keep things fresh and interesting. GPT-5.1 stuck with decade-old, proven classics. OpenAI will likely try to carefully walk the link between accuracy and creativity with GPT-5.1 as the rollout continues. The model clearly gets things right more often, but it’s not yet clear if that will impact GPT-5.1’s ability to come up with things that are truly creative and new. Better, more creative writing In a similar vein, when OpenAI released their GPT-5 model, users quickly noticed that it produced boring, lifeless written prose. At the time, I predicted that OpenAI had essentially given the model an “emotional lobotomy,” killing its emotional intelligence in order to curb a worrying trend of the model sending users down psychotic spirals. Turns out, I was right. In a post on X last month, Sam Altman admitted that “We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues.” But Altman also said in the post “now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.” That process began with the rollout of new, more emotionally intelligent personalities in the existing GPT-5 model. But it’s continuing and intensifying with GPT-5.1. Again, the model is already voicer than its predecessor. But as the system card for the new model shows, GPT-5.1’s Instant model (the default in the popular free version of the ChatGPT app) is also markedly better at detecting harmful conversations and protecting vulnerable users. Naughty bits If you’re squeamish about NSFW stuff, maybe cover your ears for this part. In the same X post, Altman subtly dropped a sentence that sent the Internet into a tizzy: “As we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.” The idea of America’s leading AI company churning out reams of computer-generated erotica has already sparked feverish commentary from such varied sources as politicians, Christian leaders, tech reporters, and (judging from the number of Upvotes), most of Reddit. For their part, though, OpenAI seems quite committed to moving ahead with this promise. In a calculus that surely makes sense in the strange techno-Libertarian circles of the AI world, the issue is intimately tied to personal freedom and autonomy. In a recent article about the future of artificial intelligence, OpenAI again reiterated that “We believe that adults should be able to use AI on their own terms, within broad bounds defined by society,” placing full access to AI “on par with electricity, clean water, or food.” All that’s to say that soon, the guardrails around ChatGPT’s naughty bits are almost certainly coming off. That hasn’t yet happened at launch—the model still coyly demures when asked about explicit things. But along with GPT-5.1’s bolder personalities, it’s almost certainly on the way. Deeper thought In addition to killing GPT-5’s emotional intelligence, OpenAI made another misstep when releasing GPT-5. The company tried to unify all queries within a single model, letting ChatGPT itself choose whether to use a simpler, lower-effort version of GPT-5, or a slower, more thoughtful one. The idea was noble–there’s little reason to use an incredibly powerful, slow, resource-intensive LLM to answer a query like “Is tahini still good after 1 month in the fridge” (Answer: no) But in practice, the feature was a failure. ChatGPT was no good at determining how much effort was needed to field a given query, which meant that people asking complex questions were often routed to a cheap, crappy model that gave awful results. OpenAI fixed the issue in ChatGPT with a user interface kludge. But with GPT-5.1, OpenAI is once again bifurcating their model into an Instant and Thinking version. The former responds to simple queries far faster than GPT-5, while the latter takes longer, chews through more tokens, and yields better results on complex tasks. OpenAI says that there’s more fine grained nuance within GPT-5.1’s Thinking model, too. Unlike with GPT-5, the new model can dial up and down its level of thought to accurately answer tough questions without taking forever to return a response–a common gripe with the previous version. OpenAI has also hinted that its future models will be “capable of making very small discoveries” in fields like science and medicine next year, with “systems that can make more significant discoveries” coming as soon as 2028. GPT-5.1’s increased smarts and dialed-up thinking ability are a first step down that path. An attempt to course correct Overall, GPT-5.1 seems like an attempt to correct many of the glaring problems with GPT-5, while also doubling down on OpenAI’s more freedom-oriented, accuracy-focused, voicy approach to conversational AI. The new model can think, write, and communicate better than its predecessors—and will soon likely be able to (ahem) “flirt” better too. Whether it will do those things better than a growing stable of competing models from Google, Anthropic, and myriad Chinese AI labs, though, is anyone’s guess. This story has been updated. View the full article

Energy secretary rules himself out as potential successor to prime ministerView the full article

If you’re in the business of publishing content on the internet, it’s been difficult to know how to deal with AI. Obviously, you can’t ignore it; large language models (LLMs) and AI search engines are here, and they ingest your content and summarize it for their users, killing valuable traffic to your site. Plenty of data supports this. Creating a content strategy that accounts for this changing reality is complex to begin with. You need to decide what content to expose to AI systems, what to block from them, and how both of those activities can serve your business. That would be hard even if there were clear rules that everyone’s operating under. But that is far from a given in the AI world. A topic I’ve revisited more than once is how tech and media view some aspects of the ecosystem differently (most notably, user agents), leading to new industry alliances, myriad lawsuits, and several angry blog posts. But even accounting for that, a pair of recent reports suggest the two sides are even further apart than you might think. Common Crawl and the copyright clash Common Crawl is a vast trove of internet data that many AI systems use for training. It was a fundamental part of GPT-3.5, the model that powered ChatGPT when it was released to the world back in 2022, and many other LLMs are also based on it. Over the past three years, however, the issue of copyright and training data has become a major source of controversy, and several publishers have requested that Common Crawl delete their content from its archive to prevent AI models from training on it. A report from The Atlantic suggests that Common Crawl hasn’t complied, keeping the content in the archive while making it invisible to its online search tool—meaning any spot checks would come up empty. Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, told the publication that it complies with removal requests, but he also clearly supports the point of view that anything online should be fair game for training LLMs, saying, “You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet.” Separately, Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) looked at how the new AI-powered browsers, Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas, handle requests to access paywalled content. The report notes that, when asked to retrieve a subscriber-only article from MIT Technology Review, both browsers complied even though the web-based chatbots from those companies would refuse to get the article on account of it being paywalled. The details of both cases are important, but both underscore just how far apart the perspectives of the media and the tech industry are. The tech side will always tilt toward more access—if information is digital and findable on the internet, AI systems will always default to obtaining it by any means necessary. And publishers assert that their content still belongs to them regardless of where and how it’s published, and they should retain control of who can access it and what they can do with it. The mental divide between AI and media There’s more happening here than just two debaters arguing past each other, though. The case of Common Crawl exposes a contradiction in a key talking point on the tech side of things—that any particular piece of content or source in an LLM’s training data isn’t that relevant, and they could easily do without it. But it’s hard to reconcile that with Common Crawl’s apparent actions, risking costly lawsuits by not deleting data from publications who request them to, which includes The New York Times, Reuters, and The Washington Post. When it comes to training data, some sources are clearly more valuable than others. The browsers that circumvent paywalls reveal another incorrect assumption from the AI side: that because certain behaviors are allowed on an individual basis, they should be allowed at scale. The most common argument that relies on this logic is when people say that when AI “learns” from all the information it ingests, it’s just doing what humans do. But a change in scale can also create a category shift. Think about how paywalls typically work: Many are deliberately porous, allowing a limited number of free articles per day, week, or month. Once those are exhausted, there’s the old trick of the incognito window. Also, some paywalls, as noted in the CJR article, work by loading all the text on the page, then pulling down a curtain so the reader can’t see it. Sometimes, if you click the “Stop loading” button fast enough, you can expose the text before that curtain comes down. One level up from there is to use your browser’s simple developer tools to disable and delete the paywall elements on an article page. Savvy internet users have known about all of these for years, but it’s a small percentage of all users—I’d wager less than 5%. But guess who knows about all these tricks, and probably many more on top of them? AI. Browser agents like those in Comet and Atlas are effectively the most savvy internet users possible, and they grant these powers to anyone simply requesting information. Now, what was once a niche activity is applied at scale, and paywalls become invisible to anyone using an AI browser. One defense here might be server-side paywalls, which grant access to the text only after the reader logs in. Regardless, what the browser does with the data after the AI ingests it is yet another access question. OpenAI says it won’t train on any pages that Atlas’s agent may access, and indeed this is how user agents are supposed to work, though the company does say it will retain the pages for the individual user’s memory. That sounds benign enough, but considering how Common Crawl has behaved, should we be taking any AI company at their word? Turning conflict into strategy So what’s the takeaway for the media—besides investing in server-side paywalls? The good news is your content is more valuable than you’ve been told. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be so much effort to find it, ingest it, and claim it to be “free.” But the bad news is that maintaining control over that content is going to be much harder than you probably thought. Understanding and managing how AI uses your content for training, summaries, or agents is a complicated business, requiring more than just techniques and code. You need to take into account the mindset of those on the other side. Turning all this into real strategy means deciding when to fight access, when to allow it, and when to demand compensation. Considering what a moving target AI is, that will never be easy, but if the AI companies’ aggressive, constant, and comprehensive push for more access has shown anything, it’s that they deeply value the media industry’s content. It’s nice to be needed, but success will depend on turning that need into leverage. View the full article

As I write this my 6-and-a-half-month-old daughter is sitting on my lap in my home office, where she spends an hour or two each day. Despite all the toys I’ve laid out for her, the thing she typically reaches for is my keyboard, occasionally leading to the odd typo. I’ve been a freelance journalist for about 12 years, but never has this work-from-home, choose-your-own schedule arrangement been so valuable. Last year I was able to be with my wife at almost every doctor’s appointment, ultrasound, and blood test before we became parents in April. Since our daughter was born, I have enjoyed the flexibility not only to make it to every pediatrician appointment and give my wife a helping hand during the day but also to be a part of important milestone moments. I couldn’t imagine having to walk out the front door each morning, only to return a couple of hours before bedtime in the evening, but of course that is the reality for most working parents. That is perhaps why solopreneurship is so popular among those with kids, especially women, and particularly those stepping away from extremely demanding careers to start or grow their families. Studies in Australia and Canada have found that many workers make the transition into parenthood and self-employment at the same time, and research even suggests that self-employed mothers outperform those without children. Being more present at home and work When her first child was born, Fernanda Chouza went in the opposite direction, taking on a more challenging role at a fast-growing AI startup in San Francisco. Over time Chouza says she earned the respect and leeway to take time off to care for her kids, but then she got laid off in 2022, when her kids were 2 and 4 years old. “As I looked at hyper-growth companies, I realized I would need to put in, like, two years of elbow grease to get to the point where I can take a week off for my kids,” she says. “The idea of starting from scratch was too hard.” Instead, Chouza started a one-women marketing agency called the Launch Shop, offering fractional product marketing expertise to software companies launching new products. Previously, Chouza says she spent many hours at work feeling guilty for not being home with her kids, and many hours at home worrying about whether she was dropping the ball at work. “Now I have full flexibility. I don’t have to be constantly apologizing for stuff, and I only show up when I’m at the top of my game,” she says. “When I’m off, I’m fully off; I don’t have anxiety on the weekends, I don’t have anxiety at night, and I can be a lot more mentally present with my kids.” Though she doesn’t enjoy the same kind of equity-payout potential, Chouza says her salary is about 50% higher than her previous earnings, while providing significantly more time off. Previously, she said she could take two or three weeks off a year but was expected to be responsive on email and Slack during that time. Thus far this year, Chouza has taken a week or more off from work on eight separate occasions for reasons ranging from her kid’s eye infection to a two-week trip to visit their grandparents abroad. “In corporate, I would have had to grovel and apologize for any time off,” she says. “It felt like I was being penalized for being a mom and they think of me as a liability, like ‘We’re always making so many accommodations for Fern.’” A “side door” to new career opportunities Perhaps one of the most unexpected benefits are the kinds of clients Chouza has worked with as a solopreneur. She says most companies are hesitant to hire executives in the current market but still need short-term support, making a contractor with corporate experience a viable option. “By being fractional I’m actually punching so far above my weight,” she says. “I would have never had this exposure if I was just trying to go through the front door, but I’m coming in through this side door and getting these amazing logos on my résumé and this amazing experience.” That is perhaps one of the most surprising benefits for those who step away from the workforce to start an independent venture while raising a family. Though many choose solopreneurship for the flexibility, they often discover that it can also offer a bridge—or even a ladder—back into the traditional workforce. “You can think of it as not necessarily ‘I’m going to build a startup that’s going to pay me a lot of money,’ but ‘I’m going to write a story for myself that professionally fills those years,’” explains Kyle Jensen, the director of entrepreneurship programs, and associate dean and professor in the practice of entrepreneurship at the Yale School of Management. “I created something new, I operated it, I ran it, and through all of this I developed all sorts of executive acumen and business sense, and maybe some software skills.” Professional benefits aside, Jensen also says part of what makes solopreneurship so appealing to parents is the ability to trade some of the financial rewards for time. “With this manner of entrepreneurship, you can treat your human capital as a luxury good, and you can choose different distributions of time that allows you to enjoy things that are important but not necessarily prioritized in our society—like parenting,” he says, adding, “The only person who’s going to remember that you worked extra hours are your children.” View the full article