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.
[Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO]
“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.
[Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO]
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.
[Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO]
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.”
[Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO]
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.
[Photo: Francis Dzikowski/OTTO]
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 thisalong with its tony locationis 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.
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 isnt 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.
Jack Schlossberg announced he’s running for Congress. And instead of using his last name in his campaign logo, the 32-year-oldborn John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossbergis using the nickname he shares with his famous grandfather, John F. Kennedy.
Schlossberg’s “Jack for New York” logo underlines the “New” in the city’s name in red as if to emphasize a new generation. A red 12 appears in small print at the top right of New York to indicate he’s running to represent Manhattan’s 12th District in the U.S. House.
Schlossberg tagged designer and Only NY cofounder Micah Belamarich in a social media post showing the logo. Belamarich did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s standard operating procedure for candidates to use their last names in political logos, though there are notable exceptions (hi, Bernie!). One study of 2020 campaign logos found female candidates are more likely to use their first names in their logos than male candidates, as their first names communicate their gender to voters in a simple way. For Schlossberg, his first name connects him to the Kennedy family legacy without saying “Kennedy.”
“Let’s Back Jack” was a slogan used in support of Kennedy in 1960. In 2026, it will be a rallying call for Schlossberg in what could be a competitive primary to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler in one of the most Democratic districts in the country. Already, two New York state assemblymen, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, are running for the seat.
[Photos: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston]
The campaign has found other ways to give a nod to the candidate’s storied political heritage without explicitly referencing the Kennedy name. Schlossberg’s logo and branding use typography that evokes mid-20th-century signage (check the “Our Man Jack” sign in the background of one shot in this Instagram gallery) alongside a contemporary take on the classic red, white, and blue color palette.
A “12 for 12” list on the campaign website lists off not policy proposals, but rather 12 “promises to the people of New York’s 12th District” that sound like qualifications for a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, including service, strength, accountability, and optimism.
Overall, it’s a brand that’s nostalgic but still feels contemporary, and combined with Schlossberg’s name recognition and vociferous social media posting, it’s one that could find success in a city that just elected another well-branded and social media-fluent candidate as mayor.
“This is the best part of the greatest city on earth,” Schlossberg said about the district in his announcement video on TikTok, calling New York “the financial and media capital of the world.” He added: “This district should have a representative who can harness the creativity, energy, and drive of this district and translate that into political power in Washington.”
Though JFK’s presidential campaign happened 65 years ago, it continues to inspire political branding and advertising, even across party lines. A super PAC ran a 2024 Super Bowl ad for Schlossberg’s cousin, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that ripped off one of the 1960 Kennedy campaign ads. And today, there’s campaign merch available for Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley that mimics the style of JFK’s, with the candidates’ portraits on a background of horizontal red, white, and blue stripes.
Images of Schlossberg on his campaign website pay homage to his famous family. One shot of Schlossberg backlit against a wall that’s decorated with U.S. and New York flags recalls a photo of a 29-year-old Kennedy running for Congress, while photos of Schlossberg in a suit on a bike emulate his uncle, George magazine founder John F. Kennedy Jr.
By evoking the Kennedy dynasty through image, typography, and nickname, Schlossberg is tapping into his family legacy without using the famous family surname. “Jack” says enough.
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 betheres still quite a stigma around it, says Kickresumes head of content Martin Poduska, who helped conduct the study. The weirdest thing is that we didnt 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 moreincluding Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Vermontadded 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 wont be happy with what they learn. Heres what to do when you discover a colleague is making more for the same job.
Dont 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% didnt 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 differentlyand 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 dont 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 managerlike immediately after finding out someone is earning morethere 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 youre worth is to test the market yourself.
Even if youre 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 youre seriously considering leaving, you can put that offer on the table, Garcia-Tunon says. If youre trying to use it to get an increase, you can position it in the conversation as another piece of information.
Be patient
Just because youre walking into your bosss office to talk about a raise doesnt mean youre 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 expains 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 youre going to talk to senior leader X about a merit raise for me, and then we can schedule another meeting.
OpenAI watchers have spotted something curious over the last week.
References to GPT-5.1 keep showing up in OpenAIs 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 testerand someone who burns through millions of GPT-5 tokens every monthheres what Im expecting.
A larger context window (but still not large enough)
An AI models 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 Googles Gemini a 300-page document every time he chats with it. The document includes excerpts from his personal journal, full copies of screenplays hes 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-5s, in comparison, is relatively puny at just 196,000 tokens in ChatGPT (expanded to 400,000 tokens when used by developers through the companys 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, youll 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.
Thats better than todays GPT-5, to be sure. But it still falls far short of Geminiespecially 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 isnt big enough.
Even fewer hallucinations
OpenAIs GPT-5 model falls short in many ways. But one thing its very good at is providing accurate, largely hallucination-free responses.
I often use OpenAIs 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 wasnt imagining some new software tool that doesnt 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 isnt perfect. But OpenAI has largely solved the problem of wild hallucinations.
According to the companys 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 arent 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.
Theres 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 theres no guarantee theyll 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 its 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 bots brain for everyone else.
Naughty bits
If youre squeamish about NSFW stuff, maybe cover your ears for this part.
In the same X post, Altman subtly dropped a sentence that sent the Interne 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 Americas 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 thats to say that with the release of GPT-5.1 (or perhaps slightly after the release, so the inevitable media frenzy doesnt overshadow the new models less interesting aspects), the guardrails around ChatGPTs naughty bits are almost certainly coming off.
Deeper thought
In addition to killing GPT-5s 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 nobletheres 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 OpenAIgoing back to the halcyon days of GPT-3these are some changes Im 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 OpenAIs 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 anyones guess.
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. Heres what you need to know about uploading your passport to your iPhone and what you canand cantuse it for once its there.
How to add your passport to your iPhone
Adding your U.S. passport to your iPhone is relatively straightforwardprovided 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. Youll 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. Heres how:
Open the Wallet app.
Tap the + button.
Tap Drivers 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 youve 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.
[Photo: Apple]
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, youll even be able to see your passport photo on the Physical Passport Information screen.
You cant 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 dont need to carry my physical passport with me anymore.
Unfortunately, this isnt true.
Your passports information, stored in your new Digital ID card in iOS 26s Wallet app, can be used as an identity document to get through some airport checkpointsbut 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 drivers 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 youre flying domestically, its still wise to carry alternate acceptable forms of ID that will get you through a TSA checkpoint. This includes your REAL ID-compliant drivers 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 passports information is locked behind Face ID or Touch ID, even if someone had access to your phone, they couldnt access your passport information.
Those who worry that using a Digital ID will mean theyll 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 wont have to unlock your iPhone or hand the device over to TSA staff.
Instead, youll present your Digital ID much like you do a credit card you use wit Apple Pay: Youll 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 iPhones side button and scanning your biometrics using the iPhones 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.
All last week, OpenAI watchers reported seeing strange things.
References to GPT-5.1 kept showing up in OpenAIs 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 testerand someone who burns through millions of GPT-5 tokens every monthheres 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 its their long-time friend, others find that cringey. OpenAI acknowledges this, saying that Preferences on chat style varyfrom person to person and even from conversation to conversation.
For that reason, OpenAI says users can customize the new models tone, choosing between pre-set options like Professional, Candid and Quirky.
Theres 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 OpenAIs customer base.
Enterprise users probably dont want a model that occasionally drops Dungeons and Dragons references. As the uproar over OpenAIs initially voiceless GPT-5 model shows, though, everyday users do.
Even fewer hallucinations
OpenAIs GPT-5 model fell short in many ways, but it was very good at providing accurate, largely hallucination-free responses.
I often use OpenAIs 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 wasnt imagining some new software tool that doesnt actually exist, or lying to me about myriad other small, crucial things.
With GPT-5, I had to do that far less. The model wasnt perfect. But OpenAI had largely solved the problem of wild hallucinations.
According to the companys 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 arent 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 dont 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-5.1s list, though, is spot-on. Its choices are solid, theyre all real places, and the hours and locations are correct across all ten selections.
Theres 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-5.1s list arent wrong, but theyre mostly safe choicesthe 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 its not yet clear if that will impact GPT-5.1s 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 its 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-5.1s 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 youre 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 fo verified adults.
The idea of Americas 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 thats to say that soon, the guardrails around ChatGPTs naughty bits are almost certainly coming off.
That hasnt yet happened at launchthe model still coyly demures when asked about explicit things. But along with GPT-5.1s bolder personalities, its almost certainly on the way.
Deeper thought
In addition to killing GPT-5s 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 nobletheres 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 theres more fine grained nuance within GPT-5.1s 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 responsea 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-5.1s 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 OpenAIs more freedom-oriented, accuracy-focused, voicy approach to conversational AI.
The new model can think, write, and communicate better than its predecessorsand 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 anyones guess.
This story has been updated.
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.
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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 toolmeaning 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 shouldnt have put your content on the internet if you didnt 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 accessif 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 thingsthat 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 usersI’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#8217;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 mediabesides 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.
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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 Ive laid out for her, the thing she typically reaches for is my keyboard, occasionally leading to the odd typo.
Ive 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 doctors 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 couldnt 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 doesnt 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 kids 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 Were 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 Im 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 Im 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 bridgeor even a ladderback 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 Im 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 societylike parenting, he says, adding, The only person who’s going to remember that you worked extra hours are your children.
Its a random Tuesday in October, and your kids are home again. A national holiday? Nope. A snow day. Not even a speck of frost on the ground. Its Professional Development Day or Parent-Teacher Conference Half Day or one of the 15 other noninstructional days that appear in the school calendar like little landmines for anyone with a full-time job.
At this point, Ive stopped trying to keep track. Every month seems to come with a surprise, theyre home moment. And as a working parent, there are few phrases that strike fear into my heart quite like: No School Today!
I love my kids, but that doesnt mean I can drop everything every time the school district decides teachers need a day to recalibrate. I want their educators to have the time they need, I truly do. Its a job I dont have the patience or superpowers to handle. But the system is still built around a 1950s fantasy where one parent is home and is available for midday pick-ups, early dismissals, and weeklong winter breaks. Most families dont live that reality anymore.
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The hidden toll of random days off
This juggling act is brutal. Every day off becomes an exercise in logistics, guilt, and creative problem-solving. Whos taking off work this time? Can I trade shifts? Do we have any vacation days left? Should I call in sickAGAIN?
For parents who cant afford nannies or backup care, there arent many options. A babysitter can cost more than what a parent makes in a day. Drop-off programs seem to fill up within minutes and you have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting off the waitlist. And working remote with kids running around, making noise, and needing food hardly makes for a productive day.
Of course, the burden doesnt hit parents equally in cisgender households. Research shows that working mothers are far more likely to take time off or rearrange their schedules to cover the gaps in childcare. A 2023 study found that unexpected school closures forced mothers to cut six hours per week on average. Over a three-month period, that adds up to 72 hours. So, its not just inconvenient, it can have economic consequences. Most families cannot afford to bring home less money, and for single parents, this could cause a crisis.
Surviving this requires even more emotional labor: coordinating carpools, texting neighbors to ask a favor, setting up playdates with a child that has a SAHM. This is about childcare and the mental strain of dealing with an unpredictable and unsupportive system.
There has to be a better way
So, whats the solution? Its not as simple as hiring more babysitters. We need modern policies that reflect how families live and work today.
Here are a few ideas worth exploring:
Community care partnerships. Check out your local YMCAs, libraries, and afterschool programs. Some receive state or district funding to offer affordable coverage on non-school days. Some cities, like Seattle, already do this.
Rethink remote flexibility. If companies can pivot to global time zones and hybrid schedules, they can also accommodate parents during the school-year craziness. Family Flex Days could allow workers to shift hours without penalty.
Policy shifts. Paid family leave cant just be about new babies. It should also recognize the everyday realities of caregiving. That includes the random Tuesday your second graders school closes at noon.
Until the workplace and the school system sync up, parents will keep paying the price in time, money, and peace of mind. The bottom line is, we dont need parents to be more flexible. We need the system to be.
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