Last month, we shared word of a Stanford University study that found entry-level employment in so-called "AI-impacted" occupations lagging well behind that in other fields. Now, a new working paper from economics researchers at Munich's CESifo finds the opposite, arguing point blank that "there is no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college graduates in absolute or relative levels."

In "The Early Impacts of AI on Employment Among Recent College Graduates," researchers Robert Fairlie and Jane Wu said they decided to focus on recent graduates "because changes in labor demand may first appear through reductions in hiring." As AI gets good enough to at least perform the "relatively standardized tasks" in many entry-level office jobs, they argue, firms could reduce new hiring for simpler roles rather than laying off more experienced long-term employees.

There's some reason to believe 2026's graduating job seekers might be more at risk of AI displacement than those graduating just a year or two prior. The CESifo researchers point to a recent sharp increase in the number of firms "replacing a large number of employee tasks with AI" in a Census survey, as well as broad increases in AI spending per employee and ChatGPT Enterprise token use in the last 12 months.

Anecdotally, some major names also think that this is the year AI is finally capable enough to start replacing the jobs of some recent graduates. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said earlier this year that "AI literally until December [2025] was not actually good enough to do any of the jobs that they’re actually cutting." And BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in March that "the speed at which AI is changing" led him to worry that "when this year's college graduates enter the workforce, we could see the highest unemployment rate among them in years—even without a recession."

Nothing to see here (yet)

To determine if those kinds of worries were valid, the CESifo researchers looked at detailed microdata from the US Census' Current Population Survey to determine unemployment trends among recent college graduates (i.e., Bachelor's degree recipients 22 to 25 years old who aren't pursuing higher degrees). Since these unemployment numbers predictably spike as fresh graduates enter the job market in the summer months, the researchers looked at year-over-year and seasonal trends going back to 2022 (which is both the year employment returned to pre-pandemic levels and the year ChatGPT was released).

At a base level, the summer unemployment rate for those young college graduates in 2026 (7.3 percent) was well within the range seen in previous years (from 6.3 percent in 2022 to 7.8 percent in 2024). The 2026 numbers were similarly unremarkable when expanded to include graduates who told the CPS survey they "want a job" even though they weren't actively looking for one (and thus don't officially count as part of the official "unemployed" labor force).

To test the robustness of these findings, the researchers created statistical tests to compare the recent college graduates both with non-college graduates in the same age range and with older college graduates (aged 30 to 49). They also broke down employment by potential "AI exposure" based on a 2023 study of which job roles AI systems were best equipped for.

In almost all of the comparisons, any trend differences between the groups in the 2022 to 2026 time frame studied were not statistically significant. Overall, the data “tell a consistent story in which unemployment among recent college graduates in summer 2026 was not unusually high relative to earlier summers” across comparison groups, the researchers wrote.

So how does this analysis square with the recent Stanford study that found an almost completely opposite result? Well, Stanford’s study was based on payroll data from HR firm ADP, which covers a decent cross-section of the economy but might miss some elements of a wider Census survey. The ADP data also looks at the total supply of jobs in various fields, while the unemployment rate being studied here also takes into account the aggregate demand for those jobs. That demand could easily shift even if the supply of jobs in certain fields starts contracting due to AI.

Overall, the CESifo researchers conclude that the Summer 2026 unemployment data serves as a “useful first test” of how accelerating AI usage is—or, as the data show, is not—impacting the current US job market. But current trends do not imply future performance, of course, and the researchers warn that “if the intensity of AI use in the workplace continues to increase, the graduating classes of 2027 and later might be more affected than the class of 2026, and additional years of data will be needed to hone in on whether effects emerge as workplace use of AI deepens.”

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As Apple's Tim Cook era draws to a close, we're seeing more experimentation with the iPhone's design than we've seen in a long time, but you wouldn't know it from the iPhone 18 Pro. This absurdly fast, full-featured handset might be eclipsed by the hype around the iPhone Duo this year, but it's still just as good as its immediate predecessor.

Of course, not too much has changed since the iPhone 17 Pro. There's the new variable aperture and other camera controls for those who want to get granular with their mobile photography, a welcome addition given the iPhone's reputation for inflexibly opinionated computational photography.

Beyond that, though, all the most important changes are under the hood: a new chip, better battery life, and much-improved thermals that both give the phone better sustained performance and make it cooler to the touch in many situations.

I think we're seeing something of a transition for the "Pro" iPhones. They may still be the flagships in a sense, but Apple is at least for now saving its flashier design ideas for new products like last year's iPhone Air or this year's iPhone Duo.

The Pro phones aren't the sexy, cool ones right now; they're the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, cover-for-every-kind-of-obsessive-user workhorses. I think that's a great space for them to occupy, and this year's iteration is no exception.

Design

The iPhone 18 Pro mostly looks and feels like last year's flagship. It's a function-over-form design (at least compared to something like the iPhone Air) with good materials.

I'm not normally one to care too much about color in these phones. For my personal phone, I've always just grabbed whatever was closest to black. (Apple says this year's black is the blackest yet, of course.) But I have to admit the new burgundy color of my review unit is appealing, even though it's quite the fingerprint magnet, in a long tradition for iPhones.

The main design difference this time around is a smaller Dynamic Island, that cut-out at the top of the screen that houses the front-facing camera and sensors. Apple has achieved this by moving the IR camera underneath the OLED panel, now in the top-left corner of the screen.

A new pixel arrangement allows infrared light to pass through in that spot, while the pixels in this region operate at twice the brightness to compensate for lower density, so there's little visible effect on the image on the display. You can tell there's something subtly going on in that corner if you know what to look for and look closely, but I don't think most people will notice.

As I wrote when the Dynamic Island was first introduced, the way Apple combines the per-pixel brightness and absolute blacks of the OLED panel with creative software to turn what should be something of an albatross—a big, chunky hole in the screen—into an appealing feature by displaying live activities and other information around the sensors is one of the company's more impressive design ideas in recent years. The execution is excellent and remains so.

Now, that hole is less big and chunky, making it sensible for Apple to now show up to three live activities at once in the region, not just one. The middle one has more information, while those on the left and right are basically dots with just enough to tell you something useful.

It's also now possible to show more information on a second live activity when there are just two being displayed; I found this even more appealing than showing three live activities.

This isn't enough of a reason to upgrade from an earlier Dynamic Island phone, of course, but it has made a good feature a little bit better.

Performance and thermals

Let's talk specs, performance, and the main story with this phone—heat management. For most specs, this is last year's iPhone 17 Pro. But the A20 Pro chip has some improvements that make this one of the more notable performance steps in a while.

A20 Pro

First up is the new A20 Pro chip. Apple has gone from a 3-nanometer process node in the A19 Pro to 2 nm here. It has a 6-core CPU with four efficiency cores and two performance cores—nothing new there. The GPU has seven cores, each with a Neural Accelerator that Apple says helps improve GPU-based AI workloads. (There's hardware-accelerated ray-tracing support, too, though few games or apps utilize it.)

Also for local AI features (which are a big emphasis for this year's iOS 27), there's the dual 16-core Neural Engine.

Apple also says the A20 Pro has "the widest memory interface ever shipped in an iPhone" (naturally) with 50 percent more bandwidth. Based on what Apple has said so far about it, that seems to be mainly to improve AI performance. I'm speculating here, but given that Apple Intelligence and Siri AI features work fine on other recent iPhones, I imagine that's a bit of padding to enable support for future AI features that won't work on the 16 Pro or 17 Pro.

Unsurprisingly, and as the 3DMark benchmark chart below shows, that could make a big difference in graphics performance, too. It's not like many people were complaining about the 17 Pro's frame rates in Genshin Impact or Diablo Immortal, but hey, they definitely won't be now.

Improved heat management

The chip has been re-architected in a couple of ways. New chip packaging promises improved heat management, thanks in part to a design that puts the system-on-a-chip next to the memory instead of stacked on top of it.

The most notable improvement is arguably a larger vapor chamber. Last year's iPhone 17 Pro introduced the vapor chamber as an additional cooling measure, meant to help the phone sustain good performance for longer and distribute heat more sensibly. A copper material on the display plate helps keep the display cooler, too.

Apple promises up to 40 percent better sustained performance compared to last year's Pro and up to 100 percent better than the iPhone 16 Pro before that. That's neat, but sustained performance wasn't a big problem for most users before. The main benefit is that the phone feels cooler and is less likely to overheat.

In my view, the better thermals are the most welcome addition to the iPhone 18 Pro. Many of us who have tried to use our phone as a GPS on the car dashboard on a hot summer day know the frustration of features shutting down when the phone goes into crisis heat-management mode. And even in normal use, like during online gaming or web browsing while streaming video, iPhones from a couple of years ago or earlier tended to get quite hot.

It's been quite cool and overcast in Chicago this week—fall is here at last—so I haven't been able to test the former of those extreme cases, but I've used the phone enough to be able to report that there is noticeable improvement in the more day-to-day scenarios. It still gets warm in some situations, like when I read the 3DMark benchmarks, but most of the time, it subjectively seems better than a couple of generations ago.

It's normally hard to notice the absence of a problem, but my own iPhone 16 Pro has gotten hot frequently enough over the past couple of years that the contrast has been real and felt.

We'll leave the camera specs to the cameras section of the review, but there are a couple of other spec changes worth noting.

A beefy battery (and other updates)

First off, there are further battery life improvements. Apple has long used offline video playback as one of its measures, and it says the iPhone 18 Pro can offer up to 36 hours of that on a single charge, compared to 33 for its predecessor. (It's up to 45 for the 18 Pro Max and 39 for the 17 Pro Max.)

Subjectively, I'm impressed by the battery performance. My personal daily driver is an iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is currently sitting at 86 percent maximum capacity per Apple's battery health panel in the Settings app.

I have no complaints; I charge it for about an hour in the morning, then do whatever I want with it (other than maybe intensive 3D gaming) with the brightness cranked up until the next morning, when I charge again.

I noticed the iPhone 18 Pro showing higher percentages when I wake up in the morning than my 16 Pro Max with similar use, which is impressive for a smaller phone—even though my 160 Pro Max's battery has aged a bit.

In terms of other additions, Apple has put its proprietary C2 cellular modem in the 18 Pro, which uses less energy than the Qualcomm modem in the 17 Pro, so that's part of the battery life story here, too.

And if you're inclined to charge wirelessly rather than with a USB-C cable, the iPhone 18 Pro has wireless charging at up to 25 W.

Cameras

If you've read my iPhone reviews before, you may recall that I am not a photography geek. This is not the review to read if you want a deep dive on optics or how well this thing will work in a professional photo shoot. (I'll leave it to more skilled and knowledgeable people to assess the phone from that perspective, as there are already many such reviews out there.)

I'm a point-and-shooter. Thanks to both new hardware features and developments in computational photography, that's actually where some of the more interesting and fastest-moving developments have been happening in the iPhone and its Android competitors over the past few years.

Sure, the iPhone 18 Pro is "pro" in the sense that it will be used by content creators and others who approach snapping photos or capturing videos far more seriously and creatively than I do. But really, it's the phone that sometimes lets non-pros like me produce quasi-pro-looking images despite ourselves.

Take the new variable aperture feature, which got the most fanfare when this handset was announced. The ability to tweak this setting manually is a niche proposal, really; many people will rarely, if ever, touch it. That said, it adjusts automatically based on what's in the scene by default, so in many cases, even folks like me will get slightly better photos.

There's also Photographic Styles 3, the latest generation of Apple's set of non-destructive presets for the general appearance and vibe of the photos you're taking. Think Instagram filters, but less blunt force. Previously, Photographic Styles were basically just color balance settings, but Photographic Styles 3 allows for texture tweaks, too.

This includes four texture options: film, glow, soft skin, and standard. These options—especially the film one—allow the iPhone's built-in Camera app to compete with some third-party apps that try to give photos warmer, more film-like looks. I won't say it's enough to make everyone drop those alternatives, but it's good to have more options for those who are loyal to the main app.

Apart from these and a few other minor tweaks, it's the same triple-48 MP rear camera system that we reviewed in last year's iPhone 17 Pro, paired with the same front-facing 18 MP camera.

With the variable aperture and the other custom camera controls that are now accessible in the built-in Camera app (all the others are available on other recent iPhones), Apple has finally done plenty to address long-standing complaints that iPhone cameras were a little too opinionated for some users' tastes.

Yes, these new features enable better point-and-shoot photos in some narrow situations, but user control seems to be the main pitch for the cameras this year.

For those who just want a good phone

This was Tim Cook's last year as Apple's CEO, and the iPhone 18 Pro is the quintessential iPhone of the Cook era: practical, pricey, loaded with features to cover ever more niche edge cases, and not especially bold in its design or ambitions—all to a high standard of quality.

This is the formula that has made it the world's most popular flagship smartphone. There's nothing wrong with that formula. Its recent predecessors were all great phones, and this one is, too.

But we all know the era of buying a new smartphone every year or two to enjoy amazing new features has passed. (Which is also great, by the way—for our pocketbooks, for the environment, for a whole bunch of reasons.) If you have an iPhone 17 Pro, there's little reason to upgrade. Yes, we're seeing some notable performance improvement year over year here, but I don't think too many of us were complaining about the A17 Pro's performance to begin with.

My daily driver is an iPhone 16 Pro, and I won't be pulling the trigger this year, either. In fact, I think you're still in great shape with your iPhone 15 Pro, if that's what you have, provided your battery is still holding up.

Go further back than that, though, and all these little things start to accumulate into something enticing. That's where we're at, and that's where we've been for a while now.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the modern flagship smartphone is perfect in all respects; Apple and its competitors still find small ways to refine it and up the ante for specific types of users year after year, and I expect that to continue. And last year's base iPhone 17 is still more than good enough for almost everybody.

But after almost two decades of competition and iteration, it's at least directionally perfect. The basics are all here, and they don't need to change. I wish the price hadn't risen, but I suppose that's the reality we live in right now.

If you want something new and flashy to impress your friends or to satisfy your brain with a novel experience, hold out for the iPhone Duo next month or venture into the slightly more energetic Android market. But if you just want a good phone that leverages all the latest technological progress without overdoing it for attention or progress' sake, the iPhone Pro line is a good fit.

The good

• Greatly improved thermal management has added up over two generations
• Ditto for battery life
• Very strong graphics and AI performance
• New custom camera controls and photographic styles help you get (a little bit) out of the typical Apple-processed look

The bad

• Some might find it a little heavy
• This isn't really a bad thing, but there's not much here to excite you or to inspire an upgrade if you already own a recent iPhone

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Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversy. His latest feature, Musk, has stirred up plenty even before its release, drawing the ire of its subject, Elon Musk, and threats of a defamation lawsuit. After the film debuted two weeks ago at the Venice International Film Festival, rumors swirled that Universal Pictures was getting cold feet about theatrically releasing the film in international markets.

Those rumors appear to be unfounded (at least for now). And Musk is still on track for a US theatrical release, thanks to the folks at domestic distributor Bleecker Street Media, which released the official trailer today.

Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.

While Musk has attacked the film as a "hit piece" and a "psy op," it's been critically well-received thus far, despite a daunting run time of 3 hours and 45 minutes. Per Gibney, Musk declined to be interviewed for the film, so the director created an AI version of Musk uttering verbatim public quotes as a stand-in for a real interview. That, too, is likely to draw some controversy.

The trailer includes a few well-known incidents: Tesla and the fatalities linked to its driver-assistance systems, SpaceX, his purchase of Twitter, DOGE, and his 14 (possibly more) children, among others. Those interviewed include ex-wife Justine Musk, tech journalists Kara Swisher and Zoe Schiffer, engineers Martin Eberhard and Geoffrey Hinton, and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair, who also bore a child by Musk. I spotted Cory Doctorow and physicist Adam Becker in the trailer. David Byrne co-wrote and performs an original song, "Let Me Sell You a Dream," incorporating more of Musk's words.

Musk is slated for theatrical release in the US on October 9.  Per Deadline Hollywood, Universal has confirmed that it is lining up an international release schedule for the first quarter of 2027, which is also when it's slated to start streaming on HBO.

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Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app store has gone 10 years without a major update. That's finally changing: After a multiyear effort, the team has just announced F-Droid 2.0 is rolling out.

The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus.

While the new F-Droid looks nicer, the update was largely about making it easier to find and install apps. When F-Droid first appeared, there wasn't much to see, but now it has thousands of open source apps. Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions—it helps you find things and gets out of the way.

F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names.

When you find an app, F-Droid 2.0 will make the installation process easier. Google has long put up roadblocks for sideloaded apps, citing the security implications. This is also the rationale behind its upcoming developer verification system. For now at least, apps will be easier to install from F-Droid thanks to the use of Google's pre-approval API. Instead of downloading an APK, opening it, and confirming the scary sideloading pop-up, you'll just be able to verify that you want to install an app before the download. So you tap "Install" in F-Droid, and then tap "Install" again in a system pop-up. That's one more click than the Play Store, but it's still an improvement.

The team also says that F-Droid 2.0 will automatically check for and install app updates (unless you disable this). It can also download and install multiple apps simultaneously. Given the auto-updates, F-Droid no longer uses pull-to-refresh on the app screen, which the developers acknowledge may upset their particular user base. Manual updates are still available in the three-dot menu for peace of mind.

Here's the highlighted changelog from F-Droid.

New in version 2.0.0

• UI rewritten from scratch with Kotlin compose
• Improved search, also searching in descriptions and translations
• Easier to discover new apps, also highlighting the most downloaded ones
• Installation approval *before* downloading
• Multiple updates/downloads at the same time
• Notifying user of issues with apps (e.g. signing key changed)
• Optional Material You color theme
• Improved filtering of lists

The new F-Droid client is rolling out in stages over the next two weeks—the default installer on the F-Droid site hasn't been replaced yet. If you want the 2.0 release right now, it's available on the versions page. The official client is not the only way to access F-Droid apps, but now you'll have less reason to seek out an alternative.

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The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Paramount Skydance's plan to sell large equity stakes to the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

Under US law, companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect foreign ownership will reach 49.5 percent after it receives investments from the sovereign wealth funds and filed a petition asking the FCC to waive the foreign ownership limit.

Paramount, the owner of CBS, holds FCC licenses for the 28 local CBS stations that it owns and operates. Paramount is buying Warner Bros. Discovery in a $111 billion deal that is being partially financed with foreign investment but hasn't completed the acquisition because US states filed a lawsuit that aims to block the merger. Trump's Department of Justice approved the merger.

The FCC is letting Paramount sell indirect ownership stakes to "some of the most repressive governments in the world," FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the commission, said yesterday. "An investment this large in one of America's biggest media companies doesn't just buy equity, it secures influence over what gets said and what gets made."

The Paramount/Warner deal would combine two of the largest movie studios, merge streaming service Paramount+ with HBO Max, and give Paramount ownership of CNN and other TV channels.

"The funds plan to invest $24 billion in the Paramount/Warner deal," the Los Angeles Times wrote. "Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is set to contribute $10 billion, while the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Co. will separately add $7 billion."

Concern about foreign influence

Although the Trump FCC has taken a hard stance against foreign-made equipment, such as routers and drones, it said in an order yesterday that granting Paramount's request is in the public interest. "Paramount asserts that, as its Petition makes clear, its 'new foreign investors, which will receive only non-voting equity, will not have any ability to influence the company's editorial decision-making or news or entertainment content or to access its viewers' personal data,'" the FCC said.

The Ellison family and RedBird Capital Partners will continue to own 100 percent of Paramount's Class A voting shares, while the foreign investors will hold Class B non-voting shares. The FCC approved Paramount's petition in a declaratory ruling issued by the Media Bureau. FCC commissioners did not vote on the item.

Gomez said that because foreign owners could hold influence over the company, she "called for this new and novel issue to go to a full commission vote given what's at stake. Instead, the FCC snuck this ruling out as a staff-level decision, with no public vote and no accountability for a call of this magnitude.”

Senate Democrats said in a May letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr that "the foreign governments behind this investment systematically suppress press freedom in their own countries and have made a series of investments and gifts to entities controlled by the president and his family, raising serious concerns about their influence over the independent American media and the potential for corruption." But yesterday's approval has been expected since Carr in March said, "I think this is a good deal, and I think it should get through pretty quickly."

The FCC said its order "permit[s] up to 100 percent indirect foreign equity interest of Paramount, in the aggregate." While Paramount said it expects 49.5 percent of shares to be owned by foreign investors based on its current deals, it told the FCC the number could change "in light of routine fluctuations in publicly held equity interests and to account for potential future investments."

FCC says opposition "unconvincing"

The FCC Media Bureau order rejected concerns that the investment will buy "practical influence," even without voting control. "We find this argument unconvincing. The Proposed Investment is not a loan, which must be repaid, but a purchase of stock that has no voting rights," the order said. "We are persuaded by Paramount’s argument that the Foreign Investors therefore will not be able to wield any influence, let alone control, over decisions involving the Licensees. Paramount has further demonstrated that David Ellison will retain control over Paramount and that the Ellison family will continue to own a majority of the voting stock."

The FCC cited Paramount's commitment to "ensure that there will be no interference with the editorial or decision-making policies of its broadcast stations (or CBS News or any other facets of Paramount news and entertainment programming).” The order said the FCC "has long recognized that foreign investment in US companies and networks, including broadcast, fosters technical innovation, supports job creation, and strengthens the US economy."

Paramount agreed to a few terms to ensure compliance. The FCC said that "Paramount must monitor foreign ownership to ensure continued compliance with the Commission’s rules." It must also ensure that "Foreign Investors will not have any influence, direction, or control over or provide any commentary or guidance on Paramount’s content decisions, company management, or have any Access to Paramount’s non-public US Person Data."

Paramount would need to seek additional FCC approval "in the event it proposes to change any voting, governance or information rights of the Foreign Investors," and before any change that results in "its foreign ownership exceed[ing] the terms and conditions of this Declaratory Ruling," the FCC said.

Media advocacy group Free Press said in an FCC filing that "Paramount will begin its ownership of WBD with nearly $80 billion in debt, which will require deep cuts to Paramount’s pre-merger holdings and existing operations. These cuts will negatively impact the public interest, particularly at Paramount’s broadcast units."

Judge found merger likely illegal

The Paramount merger with Warner Bros. was approved by the Justice Department in June, but a group of 12 states led by California filed a lawsuit that seeks to block the deal. A federal judge ruled that the merger is likely to reduce competition substantially and violate antitrust laws.

The judge halted the deal while litigation continues in the case, which could ultimately be decided by a federal appeals court. Paramount has been threatening to leave California if the state doesn't back down, while California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused the company of trying to "blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through."

The FCC last year allowed Paramount to buy Skydance for $8 billion after the company agreed to install an ombudsman at CBS. Carr, who has repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from news companies that Trump doesn't like, described the required ombudsman as a “bias monitor.”

Paramount obtained FCC approval to buy Skydance shortly after it reached a $16 million settlement with Trump in a lawsuit accusing CBS of deceptively editing a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount settled with the president even though CBS had rebutted Trump's claims by releasing an unedited transcript and camera feeds of the interview.

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Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and preparing a response.

Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research suggests it can.

Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise their brain and maintain cognitive function, whether it is solving crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. Language learning might not seem like the same kind of brain exercise, but it is a complex activity that engages several mental processes at once.

I am a linguist who studies language acquisition, use, and loss. My new book, Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language, examines language and the mind across people’s lifespans.

Research increasingly suggests that language learning and bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits—including for older adults. Learning another language can also create opportunities for communication and social connection.

A workout for the brain

A person’s brain remains capable of change throughout their life. This ability to adapt in response to experience is known as neuroplasticity.

Learning unfamiliar sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical patterns requires the brain to form and strengthen connections. Language learning engages several mental processes at once, requiring people to absorb and retrieve information, notice when something does not work out, and adjust. This sustained mental effort makes language learning a particularly rich form of cognitive exercise.

Research on bilingualism has found differences in both the brain’s gray matter, which contains neurons and their connections, and white matter, which consists largely of nerve fibers linking different parts of the brain.

Studies have shown greater gray matter density or stronger white matter integrity in bilingual people, compared with people who speak one language. These findings suggest that language experience can be reflected in the brain’s structure, as well as its activity.

But brain differences are only part of the picture.

The brain as it ages

One reason researchers are interested in language and aging is the idea of cognitive reserve. This term refers to the ability to maintain cognitive function despite age-related changes or damage to the brain.

Bilingualism has been proposed as one factor that can help the brain cope with the effects of aging, because managing two languages places ongoing demands on people’s attention and cognitive control—ultimately helping to strengthen cognitive reserve.

Some studies have found that bilingual people who develop dementia show symptoms at a later age than people who speak one language. This suggests that bilingualism may provide some protection against the effects of brain aging, although it does not necessarily prevent dementia or the brain changes associated with it.

The potential benefit may therefore be greater resilience in the face of those changes, rather than prevention of the underlying disease.

Learning later in life

This raises another question: If lifelong bilingualism may help protect the brain as we age, can people gain similar benefits by learning a language later in life?

Age changes the way languages are learned, but adults remain capable of learning new languages throughout life. Adults and kids bring different strengths to the task. Children tend to have advantages with pronunciation and some aspects of grammar, while adults bring larger vocabularies and better-developed strategies for learning.

Research involving older adults suggests that learning a language can produce cognitive benefits, although the findings are mixed. The potential benefit may come less from achieving fluency than from the process of learning itself. Language learning is a sustained challenge that keeps people learning, practicing, and adapting.

There are social benefits, too. Learning another language can deepen cultural understanding, improve interpersonal communication and encourage people to empathize with other people’s perspectives and experiences. It can also connect people with others from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, creating opportunities for conversation and friendship.

There is no established formula for how much language learning is needed to provide these benefits. Studies have used everything from intensive classroom instruction to short daily sessions with language-learning apps, over periods ranging from weeks to months, to see whether language learning can improve cognitive function. Rather than a magic number of hours, what matters may be sustained engagement in a challenging activity like learning a new language.

Building cognitive resilience

Learning another language is not a miracle cure for aging, and it cannot guarantee protection against Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

But it is an unusually rich form of mental activity.

Perhaps the most useful way to think about language learning is not as a way to keep the brain young, but as a way to support cognitive resilience—the ability to keep learning, adapting and functioning despite the changes that come with age.

Aging inevitably changes the brain, but people retain the capacity to learn throughout life. Keeping our brains engaged in demanding new activities may contribute to that resilience.

Karen Stollznow, Senior Research Fellow of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder; Griffith University; University of New England. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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