The 60th annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition attracted more than 59,000 entries from 117 countries, and just recently announced the winners. The owners and sponsors have kindly shared some of this year’s winning and honored images below. The museum’s website has many more images from this year and previous years. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. Captions were provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

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When Clark Giles first heard about ticks making people allergic to meat, he found the notion so unbelievable, he considered it “hogwash.” Then, in 2022, it happened to him. Following a spate of tick bites, he ate a hamburger and went into sudden anaphylaxis. His lips became numb, his face swollen, and his skin a “red carpet from my knees to my shoulders,” he says. Eventually, Giles—who raises sheep on a homestead in Oklahoma—had to give up eating not just beef but pork, and, yes, even lamb.

From there, his allergy started to manifest in stranger ways. During lambing season, the smell of afterbirth left him with days of brain fog, fatigue, and joint aches. To touch his sheep, he now needs nitrile gloves. To shovel their manure, he now needs a respirator. And Giles doesn’t even have it the worst of people he knows: A friend with the same allergy was getting so sick, he had to give up his sheep altogether.

This unusual allergy is most often caused by the lone-star tick, whose saliva triggers an immune reaction against a molecule, alpha-gal, found in most mammals besides humans. The allergy is also known as alpha-gal syndrome, or AGS. In recent years, the lone-star tick has been creeping northward and westward from its historical range, in the southeastern United States. (Oklahoma is in fact right on the edge; ticks are more prevalent in its east than its west.) Alpha-gal syndrome, too, is suspected to be on the rise. Farmers who spend their days outdoors are particularly exposed to lone-star ticks, and repeated bites may cause more severe reactions. And so, Giles is among a group of farmers who have become, ironically, allergic to the animals that they raise.

There are no official numbers for how many farmers are afflicted with alpha-gal syndrome. But AGS has become prevalent enough, says Charles Green, Virginia’s deputy commissioner of agriculture, that the state farm bureau’s upcoming annual convention is offering an alpha-gal-safe meal option. Green himself developed the allergy after getting tick bites on his family farm. And he isn’t even the only ag commissioner I’ve interviewed with the condition: A couple of years ago, I spoke with the commissioner in North Carolina, a top hog-producing state, who could no longer, as his job usually requires, “eat more barbecue than any human being on the face of the Earth.”

For most people with AGS, just avoiding the meat from mammals is enough. But for those who are more sensitive, anything of mammalian origin is off the table: dairy, wool, gelatin, lanolin, and even more obscure products such as magnesium stearate, a fat derivative often found in pills and drug capsules. And for farmers like Giles, who are extremely sensitive, even the fumes from manure, dander, and amniotic fluid can set off reactions. “It’s so much more far-reaching than just, Don’t eat this. It’s, Don’t touch it. Don’t work with it. Don’t be around it,” says Jenna Olcott, who is no longer able to help out on her family’s small cattle farm in Missouri. Farmers with severe AGS find it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to care for their animals at all.

Sonya Bowes has lost count of the number of tick bites she’s gotten on her tiny farm in rural Kentucky. They’re hard to avoid, she says, when taking care of grazing animals in tall grass. She knew something was wrong when she started experiencing mysterious symptoms around her dairy cows, such as sudden drops in her blood pressure, that turned out to be signs of an allergic reaction. She can no longer milk them without getting sick. When we spoke last week, she had already sold her three cows as well as her rabbits. She’s planning to sell her pigs too, at a probable financial loss, because she cannot care for them anymore. Bowes’s small farm has been her livelihood and her lifelong dream. “It’s just been devastating” to give up on that dream.

Antonia Florence and her husband downsized their cattle farm in Virginia after their allergic reactions became so severe, they lost a calf because they were unable to physically help in the birthing process. “We had to stand back and ask ourselves, ‘Did that calf die because we could not care for it?’” she says. “It wasn’t ethical.” Amniotic fluid from cows is known to contain alpha-gal, and anecdotally, it seems to be a strong trigger of AGS. It is also, however, sometimes simply unavoidable; when a calf gets stuck during birth, a farmer may have to get up to their shoulders inside the mother to help. When Olcott helped her husband pull a stuck calf, she told me, everywhere the fluid splattered on her skin became swollen and red, as if she had been scorched. A case study in Spain has also documented three cattle workers who reacted to touching or even breathing amniotic fluid.

A second factor in the Florences’ decision was that their cattle were also becoming ill—with a different tick-borne illness called theileriosis. This bovine parasite does not affect humans, but managing it requires farmers to get up close with their cattle, which Florence and her husband could no longer do. Together, she told me, these two tick-borne illnesses are killing their farm. Raising cattle isn’t their only source of income, but the couple had put “every evening, every weekend, and every holiday” into the endeavor. Her husband also grew up on this farm, and some of the animals they raised even traced their lineage back to his grandfather’s cows. Unable to fully give up the animals, he still keeps about 10 cattle, but no more mothers or calves. Florence worries about the toll on his health, getting exposed to animals he’s allergic to all the time. He needed a pacemaker recently, and she wonders if it is related to an increased risk of heart disease with AGS.

Alpha-gal syndrome is forcing affected farmers to ask existential questions—not just about their identity as a farmer but about even the long-term viability of their industry. AGS is still unusual enough that it is likely to be underdiagnosed; a survey published in 2023 found that 42 percent of health-care providers had never heard of the syndrome. But as lone-star ticks continue to spread across the country, more and more Americans may eventually find themselves unable to eat beef and pork. (Of course, those opposed to eating animals on ethical and environmental grounds might find cosmic justice in the spread of alpha-gal syndrome. A bioethicist, inspired by the lone-star tick, once proposed decreasing the world’s red-meat consumption by inducing a human immune intolerance to it.)

A few farmers I spoke with have considered switching to raising poultry for other people with AGS, including chicken as well as more exotic species, such as emu and ostrich. The big, flightless birds have red meat that bears a striking resemblance to beef, and they’ve gained popularity in the AGS community. Olcott, in fact, is raising these birds for herself on her family’s cattle farm. They’ve butchered and eaten an ostrich already—“I don’t taste any difference between it and beef”—and still have four emus. She jokes to her husband about switching the whole farm to emus and ostriches, as more sustainable sources of red meat. He isn’t sold yet. But he is much more careful about ticks these days.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that AI would kill the undergraduate essay. That reaction came in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT, when the sudden appearance of its shocking capabilities seemed to present endless vistas of possibility—some liberating, some catastrophic.

Since then, the potential of generative AI has felt clear, although its practical applications in everyday life have remained somewhat nebulous. Academia remains at the forefront of this question: Everybody knows students are using AI. But how? Why? And to what effect? The answer to those questions will, at least to some extent, reveal the place that AI will find for itself in society at large.

[Read: The college essay is dead]

There have been several rough approaches to investigate student use of ChatGPT, but they have been partial: polls, online surveys, and so on. There are inherent methodological limits to any study of students using ChatGPT: The technology is so flexible and subject to different cultural contexts that drawing any broadly applicable conclusions about it is challenging. But this past June, a group of Bangladeshi researchers published a paper exploring why students use ChatGPT, and it’s at least explicit about its limitations—and broader in its implications about the nature of AI usage in the world.

Of the many factors that the paper says drive students to use ChatGPT, three are especially compelling to me. Students use AI because it saves time; because ChatGPT produces content that is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the content they might produce themselves; and because of what the researchers call the “Cognitive Miserliness of the User.” (This is my new favorite phrase: It refers to people who just don’t want to take the time to think. I know many.)

These three reasons for using AI could be lumped into the same general lousiness: “I’m just lazy, and ChatGPT saves my time,” one user in the study admitted. But the second factor—“Inseparability of Content,” as the researchers call it—is a window to a more complex reality. If you tell ChatGPT to “investigate the themes of blood and guilt in the minor characters of Macbeth at a first-year college level for 1,000 words,” or ask it to produce an introduction to such an essay, or ask it to take your draft and perfect it, or any of the many innumerable fudges the technology permits, it will provide something that is more or less indistinguishable from what the student would have done if they had worked hard on the assignment. Students have always been lazy. Students have always cheated. But now, students know that a machine can do the assignment for them—and any essay that an honest, hardworking student produces is written under the shadow of that reality. Nagging at the back of their mind will be the inevitable thought: Why am I doing this when I could just push a button?

The future, for professors, is starting to clarify: Do not give your students assignments that can be duplicated by AI. They will use a machine to perform the tasks that machines can perform. Why wouldn’t they? And it will be incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to determine whether the resulting work has been done by ChatGPT, certainly to the standard of a disciplinary committee. There is no reliable technology for establishing definitively whether a text is AI-generated.

But I don’t think that new reality means, at all, that the tasks of writing and teaching people how to write have come to an end. To explain my hope, which is less a hope for writing than an emerging sense of the limits of artificial intelligence, I’d like to borrow an analogy that the Canadian poet Jason Guriel recently shared with me over whiskey: AI is the microwave of language.

It’s a spot-on description. Just like AI, the microwave began as a weird curiosity—an engineer in the 1940s noticed that a chocolate bar had melted while he stood next to a cavity magnetron tube. Then, after an extended period of development, it was turned into a reliable cooking tool and promoted as the solution to all domestic drudgery. “Make the greatest cooking discovery since fire,” ads for the Radarange boasted in the 1970s. “A potato that might take an hour to bake in a conventional range takes four minutes under microwaves,” The New York Times reported in 1976. As microwaves entered American households, a series of unfounded microwave scares followed: claims that it removed the nutrition from food, that it caused cancer in users. Then the microwave entered ordinary life, just part of the background. If a home doesn’t have one now, it’s a choice.

[Read: The future of writing is a lot like hip-hop]

The microwave survived because it did something useful. It performed functions that no other technology performed. And it gave people things they loved: popcorn without dishes, hot dinners in minutes, the food in fast-food restaurants.

But the microwave did not end traditional cooking, obviously. Indeed, it became clear soon enough that the microwave could do only certain things. The technologists adapted, by combining the microwave with other heat sources so that the food didn’t feel microwaved. And the public adapted. They used microwaves for certain limited kitchen tasks, not every kitchen task.

Something similar is emerging with AI. If you’re going to use AI, the key is to use it for what it’s good at, or to write with AI so that the writing doesn’t feel like AI. What AI is superb at is formulaic writing and thinking through established problems. These are hugely valuable intellectual powers, but far from the only ones.

To take the analogy in a direction that might be useful for professors who actually have to deal with the emerging future and real-life students: If you don’t want students to use AI, don’t ask them to reheat old ideas.

The advent of AI demands some changes at an administrative level. Set tasks and evaluation methods will both need alteration. Some teachers are starting to have students come in for meetings at various points in the writing process—thesis statement, planning, draft, and so on. Others are using in-class assignments. The take-home exam will be a historical phenomenon. Online writing assignments are prompt-engineering exercises at this point.

There is also an organic process under way that will change the nature of writing and therefore the activity of teaching writing. The existence of AI will change what the world values in language. “The education system’s emphasis on [cumulative grade point average] over actual knowledge and understanding, combined with the lack of live monitoring, increases the likelihood of using ChatGPT,” the study on student use says. Rote linguistic tasks, even at the highest skill level, just won’t be as impressive as they once were. Once upon a time, it might have seemed notable if a student spelled onomatopoeia correctly in a paper; by the 2000s, it just meant they had access to spell-check. The same diminution is currently happening to the composition of an opening paragraph with a clear thesis statement.

But some things won’t change. We live in a world where you can put a slice of cheese between two pieces of bread, microwave it, and eat it. But don’t you want a grilled cheese sandwich? With the bread properly buttered and crispy, with the cheese unevenly melted? Maybe with a little bowl of tomato-rice soup on the side?

The writing that matters, the writing that we are going to have to start teaching, is grilled-cheese writing—the kind that only humans can create: writing with less performance and more originality, less technical facility and more insight, less applied control and more individual splurge, less perfection and more care. The transition will be a humongous pain for people who teach students how to make sense with words. But nobody is being replaced; that much is already clear: The ideas that people want are still handmade.

A reversible print by John Kay, 1789.

The renowned portrait photographer reflects on his work, his relationship to philosophers, and the nature of portraiture. Continue reading →

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