Your Face Tomorrow

Harper's contributing editor and novelist Michael Clune (author of the 2025 Penguin Press novel Pan and the memoir White Out) opens with renewing his US passport at a CVS in November 2023, the harried clerk leading him to a corner of consumer-medical-product chaos and telling him to take off his glasses for an AI-readable photo. The essay walks through how modern facial recognition actually works — turning a face into a faceprint, feeding it through a trained neural network — and uses that as the frame for a deeper question about "facial control": what it means that strangers and machines can now read our faces, what we used our faces for before, and what we'll use them for tomorrow.