Amy Merrick

Chicago

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

@DePaulJOUR faculty, @14eastmag and @SPJONAdepaul adviser. Bylines: @TheAtlantic, @NewYorker, @ChicagoMag, @WSJ. Exploring human voice in the age of AI.

Articles

Trowel and error: a look at the personal plots of Britains leading garden designers

6 days ago | worldofinteriors.com | Amy Merrick

How do the cream of Britain’s horticulturalists choose to fashion their own outside spaces, free from the pressure of deadlines, rigid master plans or client demands? In Wonderlands, Clare Coulson pushes open the garden gate to find out.
Anne Applebaum - Autocracy, Inc. [Feature Review]

Nov 27, 2024 | englewoodreview.org | Amy Merrick

A Feature Review ofAutocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the WorldAnne ApplebaumHardcover: Doubleday, 2024Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]Reviewed by Amy MerrickBeginning in the 1990s, politicians and investors justified their efforts to expand trade deals with China and the former U.S.S.R. by claiming that closer economic ties would inevitably spread liberal democracy.
Why Charities Can Have Strange Spending Habits

Jul 18, 2024 | chicagobooth.edu | Amy Merrick

The microfinance site Kiva entices lenders with a promise that every dollar will go directly to the small business that the lender chooses. It’s a powerful strategy: people have funded more than $1.6 billion in loans through the site. As for raising money to administer the loans, Kiva makes that feel like an afterthought. Lenders are asked to tack on a donation to contribute to Kiva’s operating costs—and they’re welcome to decline.
How to disagree

Jul 9, 2024 | kellogg.northwestern.edu | Amy Merrick

IN AN ERA OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION, and in a modern workplace where co-workers have more ways to communicate than ever before, managers might be tempted to forbid workplace discussions of contentious topics. But quashing debate doesn’t make different viewpoints go away — it only keeps conflicts simmering in the background. And many employees want to talk about complex subjects at work.
Consumers Say They Care about ESG, but Don’t Spend Like They Do

Jul 7, 2024 | chicagobooth.edu | Amy Merrick

Regulators increasingly require companies to report environmental, social, and governance information. The US Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules in March 2024 requiring public companies to explain climate-related risks when they publish annual reports and registration statements. Beginning with company reports published in 2025, the European Union will apply strengthened rules making large and listed companies disclose the risks and opportunities related to their ESG activities.
The Morningside: A Novel [Feature Review]

Jun 27, 2024 | englewoodreview.org | Amy Merrick

A Feature Review of Hardcover: Random House, 2024Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ] [ Audible ]Reviewed by Amy MerrickThe novelist Téa Obreht constructs extended dreamscapes that allow her characters to move in a shimmering borderland that blends reality, myth and fantasy. She sets her books in places that are disrupted by war and disaster, and her characters’ interior worlds are correspondingly fragmented.
Aaron Angell's Hoxton Gardenware trains young Eastenders to make hand-thrown terracotta vessels in small batches

Jun 19, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Amy Merrick

You have either spent an awful lot of time thinking about, lusting after and searching for terracotta pots, or you’ve barely given them a second thought. It is an affliction of the horticulturally minded, a purist’s pursuit that often leads to disappointment or, worse, the DIY shop. Those with the bug know that wheel-thrown is best; despite being elusive and expensive, such containers are always worth it.
Rewriting the Code

May 6, 2024 | chicagobooth.edu | Amy Merrick

Early in his career as an engineer in the Chicago area, Dave Liguang Chenn, ’00, faced a crossroads. He had achieved his goals of moving to the United States from China and completing graduate studies in engineering, but he couldn’t stop thinking about something a coworker had said. One day, in casual conversation, the man told Chenn he had been doing the same work, in the same place, for 20 years. The comment stopped Chenn cold. “I felt I needed to do something different,” Chenn says now.
An Ode to the Gardens of England

Dec 27, 2023 | virtuoso.com | Amy Merrick

Stop to smell the roses. If you go on a pilgrimage to see English gardens, please let it be in June, when the rural lanes sway with wild roses, and hedgerows of white hawthorn and frothy cow parsley lead the way. And if you do go in June, you really should head to the bucolic corner I think of as “Bloomsbury country” (for its ties to the early twentieth-century literary and intellectual group), just an hour-and-a-half drive south of London.
Leading AI: Organizations, Ethics and Society

Dec 7, 2023 | kellogg.northwestern.edu | Amy Merrick

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, questions that had long been simmering about the impact of artificial intelligence suddenly felt more urgent. Within two months, ChatGPT had reached 100 million users. Giant corporations such as Microsoft and Google are incorporating AI into software that millions of workers use every day.