Recommended Longform Articles
Recommended Longreads
AI vs. Artists: Protecting Creativity
Kelley Engelbrecht | Chicago Magazine | March 4, 2025 | 6,193 words
What happens in a world where machines are trained on stolen creativity? In this story for Chicago Magazine, Kelley Engelbrecht introduces us to Kim Van Deun, a fantasy illustrator who, a few years ago, began searching for a way to protect her work from generative AI tools that could produce images of anything in seconds. Her search led her to Ben Zhao, a computer scientist at the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab, where he and his team have developed protective tech—software called Glaze and Nightshade—that confuses and corrupts AI models that scrape and train on images without consent. “Take an image of a cat,” Engelbrecht explains. “Apply Nightshade to the image, and the AI model will see not a cat but something entirely different—perhaps a chair. Do this to enough images of cats, and gradually the model stops seeing cats and sees only chairs.” Engelbrecht’s profile of Zhao and the SAND Lab’s efforts to disrupt Big Tech highlights the bigger rift between AI companies and independent artists, but it also lingers on something more fundamental. At one point, when Engelbrecht asks Heather Zheng, Zhao’s wife and co-leader of the lab, about pushback to their work, she says, “I’d rather see Glaze and Nightshade as a way to tell the young generation that they have agency.” As a mother to an imaginative, artistic 6-year-old, I felt this on a deeper level. Engelbrecht weaves in a few quiet yet telling moments about children and their art, reminding us why it’s crucial for future generations to create from scratch, to build off a blank canvas, and to make something that’s entirely their own. Because even the most powerful algorithms are nothing without human imagination. —CLR
What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero
Sam Anderson | The New York Times Magazine | March 9, 2025 | 6,725 words
I grew up in a part of the country with no shortage of folklore, and no shortage of what might be called interesting characters. However, those two categories remained largely distinct. Not so with the Old Leatherman, a denizen of New York and Connecticut who was somehow a) an urban legend, b) a rural legend, and c) very, very real. Every few months, he’d tromp through a town as if on a schedule, wearing a handmade leather ensemble, eating what people left out for him, and communicating mostly nonverbally. Sam Anderson has been obsessed with the Old Leatherman for years. (Honestly, I would have been too if I had known about him.) He considered him a kindred spirit of sorts. So, overwhelmed by ennui on Election Day, Anderson did what anyone would do, or at least anyone who lived in the same region and was regularly paid by a magazine to indulge his curiosity: He set out on the Old Leatherman’s trail. What follows isn’t de Tocqueville, but a more interior sort of journey. “Block by block, mile by mile, I felt my soul begin to unclench,” Anderson writes, “like one of those mattresses that are shipped, supercompressed, in a tiny box.” The more he walks, and the more he tells you about the Old Leatherman, the more you start to feel that same unclenching. After all, no one ever knew why the guy walked. They just knew that he did. They came to welcome him, even to worry about him. His difference didn’t make him an enemy, but simply an interesting character. It’s something we might all do well to remember. —PR
Inside the Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Wolf
Lindsey Liles | Garden & Gun | March 5, 2025 | 4,286 words
Tracking red wolves with wildlife biologist Joe Madison, Lindsey Liles comes across a young lone wolf. “That red wolf right there represents five percent of the entire wild population,” Madison informs her. There are only 17 wild red wolves on North Carolina’s Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula. It’s a shocking statistic. Red wolves used to be plentiful, or as Liles more eloquently puts it, “For thousands of years, when night fell, howls echoed through the eastern half of the country.” But, in a story all too common, hunting decimated the population. The few remaining began to hybridize with coyotes until only 14 true red wolves remained. In the late ’70s, the US Fish and Wildlife Service pulled them from the wild and started a captive breeding program. Re-introducing them to the wilderness has been a painful journey, with initial success thwarted by disputes with landowners. Joe Madison took over the disheartened team running the North Carolina Red Wolf Recovery Program in 2017, and his tenacity has breathed new life into the project. A large sign in his office reads: ENDANGERED MEANS THERE’S STILL TIME. Yes, the work can still be devastating—13 pups were lost in 2024—but the tiny team’s passion has not dwindled. The program itself is fascinating, with Liles deftly guiding you through coyote sterilization (to stop cross-breeding), and the “big red wolf dating game” (matching captive-born males with wild females), but the focus stays on Madison’s gritted determination. Add in beautiful photographs from Mac Stone, and you’ll come away from this piece yearning for the red wolf to make it. THERE’S STILL TIME. —CW
My Friend Chooses How and When to Die
Jeannette Cooperman | The Common Reader | January 17, 2025 | 7,416 words
Imagine that a good friend reveals they’ve chosen an assisted death in the coming year. This is what Jeannette Cooperman confronts in her essay for The Common Reader. Ann Mandelstamm was in her mid-80s, and despite some minor physical issues was vital, vibrant, and fiercely independent. She also knew, as she’d known for more than a decade, that she wanted to complete her life while she was still fully in control of it. Cooperman grapples with writing about Mandelstamm’s intent. She’s conflicted, feeling honored to write about her brave friend, yet somehow complicit in a death she is unable to stop. As Cooperman witnesses Mandelstamm in her final year and the care with which she discloses her plan to family and friends, she comes to understand and appreciate Mandelstamm’s strength and agency. Mandelstamm refused to wither, using her final year to write cards and notes to those she loved. Her apartment was festooned with cards and letters she had received in return. She put her affairs in order to lighten the load for her daughters. “We plan our weddings and babies and careers and investments and retirement,” Cooperman writes. “But when it comes to our death, the capstone of our life, we shrug and leave it to fate.” Ann Mandelstamm left nothing to fate. Because we know the outcome from the start, this is a difficult read at times. You navigate the stages of grief alongside Cooperman for a woman you didn’t know, one who teaches us that planning a good death can be an important part of living a good life. —KS
A ‘Jeopardy!’ Win 24 Years in the Making
Claire McNear | The Ringer | March 11, 2025 | 2,678 words
Ringer writer Claire McNear has consistently owned the Jeopardy! news beat since Alex Trebek’s 2020 death, including hastening the departure of initial replacement Mike Richards. But it’s stories like this one that really explain the game show’s foothold in the cultural firmament. More than two decades ago, a man named Harvey “H-Bomb” Silikovitz auditioned for Jeopardy! He failed the test. Over the years, he auditioned nine more times. Those times, he passed the test. But he still never got on the show. He became friendly with the producers. He became a well-known personality in the larger trivia subculture, which is a thing that exists. He developed Parkinson’s disease. Finally, last fall, he was invited to be a contestant. And in his first episode, which aired earlier this week, he won. (Alas, that would be his only victory; he was vanquished by a nuclear engineer the next night.) On its own, that’s a mildly heartwarming story. Buoyed by McNear’s reporting, though, it’s a fascinating look behind the buzzer. Jeopardy! has somehow only become more popular in the post-Trebek era—more than 65,000 people have taken the online test in the past year alone—and by now is a subculture of its own, beloved by alumni and spectators alike. McNear navigates its intricacies with a breezy assurance, less an anthropologist than a confidant. When you have that many people fighting to get on, simply getting to the lectern is a victory of its own. The winding nature of H-Bomb’s journey makes it all the sweeter. —PR
Audience Award
My Grandpa, the Fascist?
Stefania D’Ignoti | New Lines Magazine | March 4, 2025 | 3,133 words
In this personal essay for New Lines Magazine, Stefania D’Ignoti uncovers her grandfather’s hidden past—and her Italian family’s history. While helping to declutter her mother’s parents’ home, she finds old photographs from her grandfather’s days as a soldier. D’Ignoti notices one detail: In each photo, he wears fascist military attire. She then learns that he settled in Libya in 1938, when the first wave of Italians arrived as part of Italy’s colonial project. Through family memories and historical research, D’Ignoti examines Italy’s largely forgotten campaigns of colonial violence and ethnic cleansing. “The Libyan case is possibly the most powerful example of what historians like [Libyan author Ali Abdullatif] Ahmida have called colonial genocide in North Africa,” she writes. D’Ignoti’s piece explores an overlooked chapter of world history and the challenges of confronting historical complicity. —CLR
Tags
AI, Art, Assisted Death, Chicago Magazine, Claire McNear, Conservation, Garden & Gun, Jeannette Cooperman, Jeopardy!, Kelley Engelbrecht, Lindsey Liles, New Lines Magazine, New York, North Carolina, Sam Anderson, Stefania D’Ignoti, Television, The Common Reader, The New York Times Magazine, The Ringer, Trivia, Urban Legends, Walking, Wolves