The hallmark of quantum information is its capacity to be non-local, woven into correlations among two, three, or many entangled particles. By contrast, the interactions between particles are necessarily local, restricting the types of quantum states that appear in nature. Nevertheless, non-local interactions feature in a wide range of conceptual models, from spin models encoding hard optimization problems to toy models of quantum gravity and information scrambling in black holes. Motivated by prospects for exploring these concepts in the laboratory, I will present recent progress in engineering and probing effectively non-local interactions in experiments with cold atoms, with photons serving as messengers conveying information between them.