Five Long Reads Worth Your Week: Faces, AI Art, and the Politics of the Humanities

This week is unusually good for essays about how people, institutions, and machines learn to read one another. The strongest pieces are not the ones chasing the fastest news cycle; they are the ones that take familiar debates -- faces online, AI in art, campus politics, abortion, literary inheritance -- and make them stranger, older, or more materially specific.

Cal Revely-Calder's New Yorker essay begins with the mild comedy of moving into a mirrorless apartment, then quietly expands into a history of how the face became something people expect to inspect, optimize, and prove. The piece moves from Murano mirror-making and Versailles to cosmetics, portraiture, physiognomy, passport bureaucracy, facial-recognition policing, Clearview AI, and the algorithmic standardization of beauty 1.

The argument is stronger than a simple "screens made us vain" complaint. Revely-Calder is interested in the older temptation to treat the face as readable data: Lavater and Lombroso tried to infer character from features; Ekman's microexpression theory promised a portable code for emotion; modern systems turn faces into searchable records and risk repeating old physiognomic assumptions under a technical name 1.

Why read it: it gives a modern anxiety a long backstory without flattening it. The best parts are the shifts in scale, from a bathroom mirror to police databases, then back to the ordinary moral work of reading another person's expression without pretending it can be reduced to a score.

Spencer Kornhaber's Atlantic profile follows artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst as they prepare an AI-inflected installation for Venice while arguing that artists should engage with AI rather than simply denounce it. The piece includes the expected questions about slop, copyright, labor, and machine-made culture, but it is anchored in studio visits, installation logistics, music experiments, and the artists' failed attempt to build an opt-out registry for training data through their company Spawning 2.

The reporting is useful because it keeps changing pressure. Herndon and Dryhurst believe AI could push culture toward more collective creation and away from the attention economy. Kornhaber lets that idea breathe, then tests it against bad AI art, energy and labor concerns, artists who oppose training on their work, and the stubborn fact that execution still matters. His final question is not whether AI art is permitted to exist. It is whether the details of any particular work can still cast a spell when the production process has moved so far upstream into systems, prompts, and protocols 2.

Why read it: this is the rare AI-and-culture essay that has enough contact with actual art-making to avoid both press-release optimism and easy disgust.

Ann Manov's Harper's piece asks whether the American right is trying to rescue the humanities, replace them, or both. She returns to the University of Florida, where she studied as an undergraduate, to report on the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, one of the new civic centers that red-state legislatures and conservative education groups have backed as alternatives to existing humanities departments 3.

The story has real institutional detail. Manov traces the movement back to Arizona State's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, describes the National Association of Scholars' role in drafting civic-center legislation, and reports that Florida's Hamilton School receives $10 million a year, has about fifty faculty members, and has grown quickly while surrounding departments face leaner hiring 3.

What makes the piece worth the time is its refusal to treat every participant as a cardboard partisan. The politics are obvious: Florida's laws on general education, identity politics, and Israel loom over the whole project. But Manov also takes seriously the appeal of Great Books courses, the exhaustion of departments reduced to service teaching, and the possibility that some students simply want a demanding liberal-arts education. The result is a better question than "is this good or bad?": what happens when the only expanding humanities institution on campus is built through political pressure that many humanists distrust?

Erin Maglaque's Guardian Long Read is partly personal essay and partly early-modern history. It starts from her own abortions and the inadequacy of rights-language to describe pain, blood, relief, memory, and grief. From there, she turns to Europe between roughly 1500 and 1800, where abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, infanticide, theology, forensic midwifery, and community practice were far messier than present-day slogans allow 4.

The piece is at its best when it shows how unstable the categories have always been. Maglaque explains that Catholic doctrine did not always treat abortion as a mortal sin from conception; she writes about Sixtus V's 1588 bull, its reversal three years later, the early-modern distinction between pre- and post-animation, and the later eighteenth-century merging of embryology and theology into a more absolute claim about life at conception 4.

Why read it: it makes the past neither a simple horror story nor a comforting progress narrative. It also gives the current abortion debate something it badly lacks: a vocabulary for physical experience, uncertainty, and memory.

Christine Okoth's LRB essay reviews Margaret Busby's Part of the Story, but it becomes a compact history of how Black writing reached readers through editors, anthologists, presses, bookshops, salons, and fragile public institutions. The page gives an exact length of 2,286 words, which makes it the shortest pick here and the easiest to finish in one sitting 5.

Okoth follows Busby from childhood in Ghana and early jobs in London publishing to Allison & Busby, which she co-founded with Clive Allison in 1965. The essay explains the importance of publishing Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Busby's later anthologies Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa, and her place among editors and anthologists who both preserve Black literary history and decide which version of it becomes visible 5.

Why read it: it is sharp about canon-making without treating it as an abstract culture-war word. A canon here is offices, unpaid labor, community spaces, book fairs, lost funding, and the practical work of getting writers into print.

Start with The New Yorker if you want the most elegant idea essay: it will change how you think about mirrors, faces, and surveillance. Pair it with Harper's if you want the week's most reported institutional story. If you want the most emotionally difficult piece, read Maglaque; if you want the strongest art-and-technology debate, read Kornhaber; if you want the cleanest short literary essay, read Okoth.