Denying reality is one of the most persistent, successful strategies in Donald Trumps playbook. It helped him inject ambiguity into an electoral defeat in 2020, dismiss his surging unpopularity more broadly, and contend he never said things he actually said on live television.
Some aspects of reality, however, are simply undeniable, such as the amount of money in ones bank account and how far it will go at the supermarket. Nevertheless, since Democratic politicians like Zohran Mamdani won big on November 4 with a message of affordability, Trump has been falsely insisting America has seldom been more affordable than it is right now. Its a messaging strategy that may prove an even bigger miscalculation than Trumps galactically fuzzy tariff math.
The reason I don’t want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden, Trump said on November 7 during a summit with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The president has also insisted recently that every price is down, gas is nearly $2, and energy and inflation are both way down.
It should go without saying, of course, that none of this is true. And even some of the presidents historically reality-challenged supporters are taking notice.
High prices are getting harder to hide
Grocery prices are up, with record costs for beef and coffee. Gas prices are hovering around $3, having not come close to $2 since March 2020. Electricity bills are up 11%, and inflation in October 2025 was at 3%up from 2.6% a year prior. Also, while Trump keeps touting Walmarts reduced price on its Thanksgiving dinner this year, he refuses to acknowledge the sale is due to the company including less food in this years meal and a higher proportion of products from its Great Value private brand compared to name brands. (When an NBC reporter asked Trump about this discrepancy, he dismissed her question as fake news.)
As the high-spending holiday season approaches, and as people prepare to watch their health insurance premiums rise, its only going to get harder for Trump to maintain his sunny economic forecast without his supporters noticing the thunderstorms just outside their own financial window. It might temporarily help Trumps case that due to the government shutdown the U.S. will have to wait a while to get fresh economic data. Still, plenty of other economic indicators abound.
The labor market appears to be weakening amid slow job growth and massive layoffs. Consumer sentiment has slumped to its lowest levels since mid-2022around the time inflation hit a 40-year high under Biden. The share of first-time homebuyers has fallen to a record low of 21% this year. Even Trumps Treasury secretary, billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, conceded There are sectors of the economy that are in recession, which may or may not have earned him a private tongue-lashing for the ages. And one economic indicator that should especially concern the president is the uncharacteristically adversarial interview he faced on Fox News this week.
A new angle from Ingraham
Laura Ingraham is typically one of Trumps staunchest defenders on the network, where there is steep competition for the title. On November 10, though, she pushed back against the presidents claim that the economy is as strong as its ever been, asking why people are anxious about it if thats the case. Elsewhere, she questioned the wisdom of his recent move to raise the 30-year mortgage to a 50-year one, and threw shade at the constellation of chintzy gold nonsense now festooning the Oval Office, asking whether it came from Home Depot.
Before getting too carried away with the significance of this interview, it should be noted that Ingraham went right back to vehemently defending Trump hours later. Not all Trump supporters will likely have their concerns as easily assuaged, though.
It would be one thing if Trump simply deflected blame for high costs in 2025. He could trot out any flavor of low-effort spin pinning high electricity bills and persistent inflation on those dastardly Democrats, whose unfair and possibly illegal shutdown wrecked an otherwise perfect economy. But doing so would mean acknowledging that his vast and sundry collection of campaign promises about bringing down prices have gone largely unfulfilled.
Faced with the prospect of accountability, he is instead once again denying reality. As of November 11, for instance, the White House was boasting about positive economic data cherry-picked from the inaugural DoorDash State of Local Commerce Report, citing its four-item Breakfast Basics Index with the mic-drop confidence of total vindication.
People of all political stripes will occasionally swallow lies from their leaders like bitter pills, but sticker shock tends to be spin-proof. Although the economic outlook was indeed rosy for Biden in 2024, the former president had a hard time conveying as much to people hit hard by inflation. The reality in grocery stores looked a lot different than what some economic forecasters were reading in the tea leaves, giving plenty of single-issue voters a case of cognitive dissonance.
But if Biden faced a vibecession, Trump could be fomenting a real one. The gulf has widened between what the administration is saying and what people are experiencingand Trumps cratering approval ratings suggest that those feelings are bipartisan. Whenever Trump finally switches gears from denying reality to casting blame, some of his cash-strapped supporters wont buy it.
Believing the president might be something they literally cant afford to do.
How do you explain the laws of physics to a toddler?
A new children’s book, titled Simple Machines Made Simple, wants to demystify mechanical engineering for kids as young as a year old. It recently beat its Kickstarter goal by 700%raising more than seven times its target. It will be available to ship early next year.
But Simple Machines Made Simple isn’t your typical picture book. Instead of drawings, the book features working models that kids can interact with, like spinning a wheel, sliding a knob up an inclined plane, and pushing a wedge into a block that splits into two. The kids may not graduate with a physics degree, but they might come away with a curiosity for the world around them. “Maybe they can’t explain it, but it starts to build intuition for how things work,” says Chase Roberts, a computer engineer who created the book.
[Photo: courtesy Chase Roberts]
Roberts, who spent the better part of a decade making phone apps, moved away from technology in 2021 to more tangible objects that can teach kids basic and useful skills. His first book, Computer Engineering for Babies (2021), used buttons and LEDs to explain to kids how computers think by teaching them basic logic gates like NOT, AND, OR, and XOR. The sequel, Computer Engineering for Big Babies (2023), swapped buttons for rocker switches and introduced more LEDs to challenge slightly older readers.
Roberts was planning a third sequel when he caught one of his three young children catapulting cereal off a spoon one morning. The idea for a book about mechanical engineering was born.
[Photo: courtesy Chase Roberts]
Book vs. machine
Sooner or later, our children will find out they can learn how something works by simply prompting ChatGPT or asking Gemini. What, then, is the point of teaching them how pulleys or wedges or even computers work? For Roberts, it’s about instilling fundamental skills from a young age. “We still learn to add and multiply even though we have calculators,” he says. “My kids in elementary school are learning how to multiply and divide on paper because weve decided it’s still important.”
[Image: courtesy Chase Roberts]
To help both kids and parents look for “simple machines” in their everyday lives, Roberts has included examples for each machine in the book. Wheels appear in scooters, roller skates, and pizza slicers. Escalators and ramps are nothing but inclined planes. Shovels, knives, and axes act as wedges.
[Image: courtesy Chase Roberts]
“Being able to play with these machines, all together in one place, we’re giving it a name and drawing attention to how magical they are,” he says. “It’s pretty amazing that we figured out these ways to leverage the world. Theres this [lever] you can’t turn, but if we add a huge rod to it, it’s not that hard.”
Making engineering fun
Roberts’s books appear to have struck a chord. “I get emails from people all the time saying ‘This is my daughter’s favorite book, he says, even though his actual target audience is less the kids but the adults who buy the books for them.
[Image: courtesy Chase Roberts]
More often than not, his target audience is made up of engineers. In fact, Computer Engineering for Babies went viral after Roberts posted about the book on Reddit, specifically the Arduino subreddit, where people discuss everything related to the popular microcontroller that Roberts used in his first book. “I thought, Those are my people. If anybody’s going to appreciate it, it’s these guys.”
According to Roberts, his books tend to resonate with engineers not only because they speak the same language but also because they manage to repackage complex systems into something fun that engineers can finally share with their kids.
As it turns out, the best way to teach kids how things work is to play with them.
Data is an omnipresent facet of modern existence, yet the current discourse around it is often too technical, academic, and inaccessible to the average person. Speak Data, the book I’ve just published with my coauthor Phillip Cox, emerges from more than 15 years of living and working with data, both as designers and as human beings.Instead of a textbook or how-to manual for designers, we imagined a more accessible exploration of the human side of data, enlivened by the perspectives of experts and practitioners from many disciplinesfrom medicine and science to art, culture, and advocacy. In an era when we are all talking about AI, the climate crisis, surveillance and privacy, and how technology shapes our choices, we wanted to reframe data not as something cold or distant, but as something deeply personal: a tool we (as human beings) can wield to understand ourselves and the world better. The book explores what we call Data Humanism, an approach that brings context, nuance, narrative, and imperfection back to the center of how we collect, design, and communicate data.
In this excerpt, organizational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant reflects on how we interpret and communicate data, especially in moments of uncertainty, and why stories and emotions are just as essential to understanding information as statistics themselves.
Adam Grant is the Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Yet that impressive title barely covers the full breadth of his activities. Adam is an academic researcher, an award-winning teacher, a best-selling author, a podcaster, and a public intellectual. Hes interested in big human topics like motivation, generosity, rethinking, and potential. Hes also the author of six books, including the best-selling Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Dont Know. In this conversation, Adam talks about learning lessons from the pandemic; datum versus data; and how abstract numbers can lead to very real human outcomes.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
As a psychologist studying organizational behavior, data is a tool that you use every day. What do you think people get wrong about data the most?
People often have a very hard time accepting data that challenge their intuition or experience. I always want to tell them that if the evidence disagrees with your experience, you shouldnt immediately say the data are wrong. It might be that youre an outlier, that your experience is not representative, and the data are actually revealing a trend that you simply dont fit.
A lot of my work relates to how people interpret social science research, because thats where I confront the general public. One thing I see a lot is people reading a study and then figuring, well, that study was done with a sample of only a few thousand people in this industry or that country, and dismissing the results because of that. This is basic confirmation bias and desirability bias. You shouldnt trust your personal opinion over rigorous evidence gathered across many people.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
In an article you wrote for The Guardian, you describe arguing with a friend on the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccine. You wrote, I had fallen victim to what psychologists call binary bias. Its when we take a complex spectrum and oversimplify it into two categories. If we want to have better arguments, we need to look for the shades of grey. This is more or less what youre talking about. With all that in mind, what is the utility of data?
The analogy I use is medicine. Today we have evidence-based medicine, but once upon a time, medical professionals tried to solve problems via bloodletting and lobotomies. Thanks to randomized controlled trials and careful longitudinal studies, we now have much safer and more reliable treatments. With evidence-based medicine, people are living longer and are healthier.
So now look at how we interpret data from medicine. If you were to summarize all the randomized controlled trials of the average effect of ibuprofen on pain reduction and express the findings in the form of a correlation from -1 to +1, most people would think the correlation would be 0.7 or 0.8. After all, we have a lot of Advil in the world. But in actuality, an analysis showed that the average correlation was 0.14. Thats shockingly low to a lot of people, but the fact that its a small effect doesnt mean its insignificant. Thats the first lesson: Patterns in data do not have to be large to be consequential. You play that effect out over millions and millions of people, and a lot of people will benefit. And that benefit will be widely distributed.
Secondly, the treatment doesnt have the same effect on everyone. There are contingencies. So instead of asking whether Advil is effective, we want to ask: For whom is it effective? When is it effective? This question of when and for whom allows us to look at the data and say: This is real, but only under certain circumstances. Now we need to know how widespread those circumstances are. This is real for some people. What are the commonalities of those people?
The last lesson from medicine is that whats effective evolves over time. The problems were trying to treat can change. We need to update our evidence and ask: What are the best available data on any given question or for solving a given problem? Is there a reason why what was true 10, 20, 30 years ago may not apply today? I would still rather base my opinions on strong evidence thats old than no evidence at all, but we need to keep an eye on how things evolve as our contexts change.
Exactly. Whats the context? What are the nuances? Data is a snapshot in time. Tomorrow, or in a month, things might be different. Espcially when we see data represented in a very definite and defined way, we assume it has absolute power to always represent a situation. This became a problem during the pandemic, of course.
I think the biggest pandemic takeaway regarding the role of data is that experts and public officials did a remarkably terrible job communicating about uncertainty and contingency. I should have known it was going to happen. Chapter 8 in my book Think Again, which I wrote before the pandemic, was about how you dont lose trust when you say, More research needs to be done, or Here are the initial conclusions, but there are conditions under which they may not hold, or Here is what our initial trials suggest. Once weve done more trials, well update our conclusions. And let people know what that process looks like and how the scientific research is not only done, but accumulated.
This is probably the most useful thing Ive said to a friend of mine who is very skeptical about vaccines after three-plus years of debate. He would say to me, One study says this and one study says the opposite! My response is that you shouldnt weigh both sides equally. You should weigh strong evidence more heavily than weak evidence.
We need to be much more nuanced in how we communicate. We need to clarify where theres uncertainty. We need to highlight where there are contingencies. We need to be as open about what we dont know as about what we do know. One of the things we saw during COVID-19 is that source credibility dominates message credibility. People will believe a weak argument from someone they trust much more readily than a strong argument from someone they dont trust. One of the ways you become a trusted source is by very clearly admitting your uncertainty, showing intellectual humility, and expressing doubt where appropriate. I hope we dont have to keep relearning that lesson over and over again.
Whats your personal definition of data?
Data are information gathered through systematic and rigorous observation.
We love that you say data are. To us as well, data is plural.
A datum, or a data point, is one piece of information. Data are the collections of those observations.
[Photo: courtesy Pentagram]
To change the subject slightly, youve spoken in the past about the relative power of data versus stories to influence people and change minds. This is also something we think a lot about in our work. When do you think a really powerful statistic is appropriate, versus when a human story is going to be more effective? And when can they be combined?
Its a false dichotomy to say they cant be combined. My point of view on the responsible use of stories is that we should start with the data and then find stories that illuminate the data.
Stories are often more effective at evoking emotion. They allow us to distance ourselves from our own perspectives a bit. In addition to immersing ourselves in the narrative, they immerse us in a character. We get transported into stories, and we tend to experience them more than we evaluate them. Sometimes that can make people less rigorous in scrutinizing data, and that becomes a problem when the stories arent guided by data.
The more surprising data are, the more likely they are to capture attention. If you have data that challenge peoples intuition, youre much more likely to pique their curiosity. But you have to be careful, because, as the sociologist Murray Davis wrote in his classic paper Thats Interesting!, people are intrigued when you challenge their weakly held intuitions, whereas they get defensive when you question their strongly held intuitions. So theres nuance there.
From a visual perspective, we try to anchor stories in more aggregated data, but then disaggregate them by pulling out a couple of data points that can explain the context. By doing this in a narrative way, it can become more accessible, like a plot of a book. Thats really fascinating.
Another way to tell a story about data is to start with what people would expect, then lead them to overturning their assumptions. People often find that journey revealing and enlightening, and it can become an emotional arc.
Yet another thing Ive learned is to present a surprising result and then ask people how they would explain it. It opens their minds quite a bit: they generate reasons they find persuasive, and thus become active participants in the dialogue. Instead of preaching your view or prosecuting theirs, you engage them in the process of thinking like a scientist and generating hypotheses. I quite enjoy that.
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 brains 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 youre 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 youre 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 thatcontrol 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.
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. Its not about handing off tasks. Its 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 isnt micromanagement, but over-detachment. When youre too removed, you miss chances to align strategy, spot risks, or coach your leaders.
Delegation is about managing a polarity
These risks dont happen by chance. Theyre likely to happen when we dont see what delegation really is: a polarity to manage. Its 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 cant 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. Its 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 workuntil they dont. When theres too much autonomy, it can lead to organizational misalignment, missed risks, and late-stage pivots. But when theres too much involvement, that creates decision bottlenecks at the top, and team members can feel micromanaged and disempowered.
The actual trap is the pendulum effectleaders 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. Its a continuous practice of adjustment.
How to show up differently
A tech company Ive 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 wasnt 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 coachingnot just updates.
The result? Leaders werent 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 wasnt present.
And once leaders got comfortable with polarity thinking, they started applying it elsewherecandor 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 shiftfrom either/or choices to both/and leadershipis 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 doesnt 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 isnt about handing off tasks and hoping for the best. Treating delegation as a polarityrather than a skill to masterhelps leaders embrace it as an ongoing practice.
Leaders who do this well dont 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?
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.
