Strange, one of the example photos has a person smiling. I’ve seen several US passports recently with the person smiling. It must not be an important rule if it’s not clearly communicated or enforced. Especially since some (all?) US states allow smiling in ID photos I would think they would be more explicit about not smiling in passport photos.

> This is a good example of the Uncanny Valley just before actual interesting writing.

I had a strange feeling while reading the article, and this describes it so well! This is what I imagine writing generated by an AI to sound like if you give it the prompt “pretentious”.

And that’s coming from a self-described lover of pretentious writing.