Since its inception in 1925, The New Yorker has garnered remarkable reverence as much for its editorial style as it has for its inimitable covers, a singular medium for political and sociocultural visual satire matched perhaps only by Al Jaffee’s legendary MAD magazine fold-ins. In Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See, Françoise Mouly, New Yorker art director of nearly two decades, offers exactly what it says on the tin — a delicious forbidden taste of the art that didn’t quite nail it, or nailed it a bit too hard.

From Monica Lewinsky with a lollipop to Osama Bin Laden appraising proposed designs for the new World Trade Center, the images come from a slew of beloved New Yorker regulars, including Brain Pickings favorites Christoph Niemann, R. Crumb, and Art Spiegelman (who happens to be Mouly’s partner), and explore — some might say, exploit — our most deep-seated cultural conceits, our grandest fears, our most irrational beliefs, and our greatest unspoken truths. What emerges is a fascinating and unprecedented glimpse of the creative process behind the art of walking the fine line between the humorous and the haughty, the keen and the crass, the unapologetic and the too unapologetic.

Before arriving at the right character set to poke fun at our fears of terrorism -- two Arab men -- Barry Blitt tried the idea with two children and two businessmen. Ultimately, the idea was scrapped -- the reference to the mild DIY explosive, despite the viral fame of the Mentos + Diet Coke mixing experiments, was deemed too obscure for the magazine's audience.

Art Spiegelman winked at Norman Rockwell's 'Freedom from Want' to comment on anti-Muslim violence.

Immediately preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Christoph Niemann captured the anti-French sentiments sweeping America.

After Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was assaulted by white NYPD officers in 1997, Harry Bliss zeroed in on then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's semi-secret paranoia.

Though Art Spiegelman didn't make the cover cut with this 1993 sketch, he and Mouly made it into the family's Christmas card that year.

Much of what makes the book special — and, no doubt, what makes New Yorker covers sing — is Mouly’s relationship with the artists, whom she consistently encourages not to self-sensor or hold anything back. There emerges a kind of “fail better” mentality, underpinned by her conviction that even the most outrageous idea may serve as a gateway to an inspired, publishable line of thinking.

The book’s companion site offers a weekly cover contest, the entries to which have been surprisingly excellent. My favorite, by writer and illustrator Ella German, came last week, themed “The Gays,” in light of the recent historic moment for marriage equality, but also referencing Maurice Sendak, who had passed away the previous week. Though far from a gay rights activist, Sendak lived as an openly gay man with his partner of half a century. The two never had the opportunity to marry.

What Here At The New Yorker did for the magazine’s editorial voice on its 50th anniversary in 1975, Blown Covers has done for its brand of visual satire, offering a rare glimpse of Oz behind the curtain. And to those whose first blush might be that Oz is better off unseen and omnipotent, Mouly offers the following lens in this interview on Imprint:

One could have to do with demystifying, making the process more predictable. But I actually think that it’s so rich and so interesting that it’s actually even more interesting if you have a sense of how the images are thought about, rather than less. It doesn’t explain anything because it still is genius when somebody gets the right idea.

Images courtesy of Abrams Books

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It’s that time of year again, the time when cultural icons and luminaries of various stripes flock to podiums around the world to impart their wisdom on a fresh crop of graduating seniors hungry to take on the world. After last year’s omnibus of timeless commencement addresses by J. K. Rowling (“Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself. But poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.”), Steve Jobs (“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”), Robert Krulwich (“You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places.”), Meryl Streep (“This is your time, and it feels normal to you. But, really, there is no ‘normal.’ There’s only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.”), and Jeff Bezos (“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.”), here are five-ish more packets of timeless wisdom.

Across them runs a common thread of what seems to be as much a critical message, the message, for the young as it is an essential lifelong reminder for all: No social convention of success should lure you away from or could be a substitute for finding your purpose and doing what you love.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AT KENYON COLLEGE (2005)

In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a remarkable speech that revealed in equal measure his singular, potent, wildly eclectic mind and his wounded spirit, peeling the curtain on the triumphs and tragedies of being David Foster Wallace. When Wallace took his own life in 2008 in a way referenced from the podium, the address took on a whole new layer of meaning for those who revered, mourned, and tried to understand the beloved writer. In 2009, the speech was adapted into a short book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Full transcript here.

ELLEN DEGENERES AT TULANE (2009)

In 2009, the great Ellen DeGeneres — icon, notorious happy-dancer, and one of my big heroes — sent off the graduating “Katrina class” at New Orleans’ Tulane University with a hurricane of a speech that swirls you into a whirlwind of wit and humor, shakes you up with its humility and deeply personal candor, and puts you back down with a new understanding of

As you grow, you’ll realize the definition of success changes. For many of you, today, success is being able to hold down 20 shots of tequila. For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity, and not to give into peer pressure. to try to be something that you’re not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person. to contribute in some way. So to conclude my conclusion: follow your passion, stay true to yourself. Never follow anyone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path, and by all means you should follow that.

AARON SORKIN AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (2012)

Earlier this week, Aaron Sorkin took the stage at Syracuse University and addressed the graduating class with equal parts wit, wisdom, and disarming candor. His remarks about how the government failed to address the dawn of the AIDS epidemic because a disease that affected mostly homosexuals didn’t seem worth the trouble, and how misguided that was in retrospect, make one think of the recent momentous strides forward for LGBT rights and wonder with what mix of bewilderment and shame we might look back on the days of government-sanctioned bigotry in a few decades.

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt. My junior and senior years at Syracuse, I shared a five-bedroom apartment at the top of East Adams with four roommates, one of whom was a fellow theater major named Chris. Chris was a sweet guy with a sly sense of humor and a sunny stage presence. He was born out of his time, and would have felt most at home playing Mickey Rooney’s sidekick in “Babes on Broadway.” I had subscriptions back then to TIME and Newsweek. Chris used to enjoy making fun of what he felt was an odd interest in world events that had nothing to do with the arts. I lost touch with Chris after we graduated and so I’m not quite certain when he died. But I remember about a year and a half after the last time I saw him, I read an article in Newsweek about a virus that was burning its way across the country. The Centers for Disease Control was calling it “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” or AIDS for short. And they were asking the White House for $35 million for research, care and cure. The White House felt that $35 million was way too much money to spend on a disease that was only affecting homosexuals, and they passed. Which I’m sure they wouldn’t have done if they’d known that $35 million was a steal compared to the $2 billion it would cost only 10 years later.

Am I saying that Chris would be alive today if only he’d read Newsweek? Of course not. But it seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less of each other, and that’s got to change. Your friends, your family, this school expect more of you than vocational success.

BARACK OBAMA AT WESLEYAN (2008)

Philosopher Daniel Dennett once offered his key to the secret of happiness: “Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.” In his 2008 address to the graduating class at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama put it just as eloquently: “[O]ur individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.”

[S]hould you take the path of service, should you choose to take up one of these causes as your own, know that you’ll experience the occasional frustrations and the occasional failures. Even your successes will be marked by imperfections and unintended consequences. I guarantee you, there will be times when friends or family urge you to pursue more sensible endeavors with more tangible rewards. And there will be times where you will be tempted to take their advice.

But I hope you’ll remember, during those times of doubt and frustration, that there is nothing naïve about your impulse to change the world. Because all it takes is one act of service — one blow against injustice — to send forth what Robert Kennedy called that tiny ripple of hope. That’s what changes the world. That one act.

CONAN O’BRIEN AT DARTMOUTH (2011)

Count on Conan to hit on the Big Truths with his signature blend of irreverence, self-derision, and keen cultural observation.

For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host The Tonight Show. It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000 — in 2000 — I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.

BONUS: RAY BRADBURY (2001)

Though not technically a commencement speech, this remarkable keynote address by Ray Bradbury at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea is brimming with the kind of invaluable wisdom you wish someone had pinned to your mind in your early twenties, so you could laminate it for the rest of your life.

I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say “Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…”, you know. Now, to hell with that. It’s not work. If it’s work, stop and do something else.

Now, what I’m thinking of it, people always saying “Well, what do we do about a sudden blockage in your writing? What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it?” Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, don’t you? In the middle of writing something you go blank and your mind says: “No, that’s it”. Ok. You’re being warned, don’t you? Your subconscious is saying “I don’t like you anymore. You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for”. You’re being political, or you’re being socially aware. You’re writing things that will benefit the world. To hell with that! I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.

I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: “Am I being joyful?” And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you’re writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.

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It’s a momentous year for LGBT rights, with Barack Obama’s recent historic endorsement of marriage equality reminding us how far we’ve come since the days of legally punishing sexual orientation — for a grim flashback, we need look no further than computing pioneer Alan Turing, whose centennial we’ll be celebrating next month and who committed suicide shortly after being criminally prosecuted for his homosexuality. Whether bigotry can ever be wholly uprooted from insecure hearts and narrow minds remains to be seen, but we’ve certainly come a long way. How, exactly, did we get here?

In Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire, writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz explores the millennia-long quest to regulate and mandate one of the strongest drivers of human behavior, and the tragic deformities that result from the dictatorship of external authority over the most intimate of inner realities. Tracing how we went from the male bonding ceremonies commonly performed in medieval Mediterranean churches to the lesbian executions in 18th-century Germany, along the entire spectrum of cultural attitudes towards mistresses, goat-lovers, prostitutes, medieval transvestites, adulterers, and other sexual-norm nonconformists, Berkowitz brings an eye-opening lens to one of the most mercilessly judged yet universal aspects of being human.

In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean. These unions were sanctified by priests with many of the same prayers and rituals used to join men and women in marriage. The ceremonies stressed love and personal commitment over procreation, but surely not everyone was fooled. Couples who joined themselves in such rituals most likely had sex as much (or as little) as their heterosexual counterparts. In any event, the close association of male-marriage ceremonies with forbidden sex eventually became too much to overlook as even more severe sodomy laws were put into place.

Particularly interesting is a discussion of same-sex female relationships, which most scriptures — even those most vehemently condemning of male-male sex — have historically ignored, not because those were considered acceptable but because they appeared too unfathomable to be considered at all:

Can two women love each other sexually? Eighteenth-century morals said no, at least where the females involved were respectable. Among the better classes, lesbian relations were impossible to imagine. Good women could love and embrace each other, sleep together, and write each other passionate letters; all that was noble. But loving and making love were entirely different matters. Unless they were gratifying their husbands, women of ‘character’ were imagined as sexually numb creatures. British judges allowed that females of ‘Eastern’ or ‘Hindoo’ nations might act differently, but not the women of the ‘civilized’ world.

Boing Boing has an excerpt. Sex and Punishment is fascinating in its entirety.

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Noam Chomsky — political critic, education anarchist, father of modern linguistics — has described the Occupy movement, which began on September 17, 2011, as “the first major public response to thirty years of class war.” His new book, simply titled Occupy (public library), is at once a vivid portrait of the now-global movement and a practical guide to intelligent activism, infused with Chomsky’s signature meditations on everything from how the wealthiest 1% came to steer society to what a healthy democracy would look like to how we can separate money from politics. Alongside Chomsky’s words are some of the most moving and provocative photographs from the Occupy movement.

From the very dedication, Chomsky’s stance and conviction reverberate:

Dedicated to the 6,705 people who have been arrested supporting Occupy to date, from the first 80 arrested in New York on September 24, 2011, to the woman arrested in Sacramento on March 6, 2012, for throwing flower petals. May our numbers swell and increase.

Chomsky peels away the many sociocultural layers of what culminated in OWS, examining the history of the American economy, the ecosystem of the working class, the osmosis of politics and money, the environmental catastrophe, and much more.

From his Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture on October 22, 2011:

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that ‘we’re gonna get out of it,’ even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that ‘it will get better.’

[…]

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a kind of pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

Along with the historical context, Chomsky also offers some practical points on engaging with protest in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize your freedom. For instance, some laws to be aware of:

You have First Amendment rights to protest lawfully. You have a right to hand out leaflets, rally on a sidewalk, and set up a moving picket line, so long as you don’t block building entrances or more than half the sidewalk. The law requires a permit to march in the street, rally in a park with 20 or more people, or use electronic sound amplification. In New York, a “Mask Law” makes it unlawful for three or more people to wear masks, including bandanas: the NYPD aggressively enforces this law. Police will seize signs on wooden sticks, metal, or PVC piping — it’s OK to attach signs to cardboard tubing. The police will not allow placing signs on fences or trees. If you hang a banner from a bridge over a highway, you risk arrest for Reckless Endangerment.

And some advice on what to do if the police try to talk to you:

You have a constitutional right to remain silent. If the police try a friendly conversation, you can say nothing and walk away. If the police say, ‘MOVE!’ or give some other order, you may ask, ‘Why?’ but you are advised not to say anything more. Notify a Legal Observer about the order. If the police ask to search you or your bag, you should say, ‘NO, I do not consent to a search.’ If the police search anyway, you are advised to continue to say, ‘I do not consent to a search.’ If you physically interfere with the search, you risk arrest. If the police question you, including asking your name, you may say nothing and walk away. If the police prevent you from leaving, ask, ‘Am I free to go?’ If they answer ‘YES,’ you may say nothing and walk away. If they answer ‘NO,’ say, ‘I wish to remain silent. I want to talk to a lawyer,’ and wait for the police to arrest or release you.

So there you have it, a What-Would-Chomsky-Do for the modern revolutionary.

Occupy comes from Zuccotti Park Press as part of the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series and is a fine addition to these 10 essential books on protest.

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Whether we call it “rationality vs. intuition,” as Albert Einstein, Anne Lamott, and Steve Jobs did, or “reason vs. emotion,” being human means being bedeviled by the near-constant polar pull of two opposing forces. And yet, we’ve seen the “divided brain” is a reductionist myth, and perpetuating it has dangerous sociocultural consequences.

In 1943, however, the clear-cut dichotomy between reason and emotion was not only perfectly acceptable, it was also a perfectly exploitable propaganda talking point. This animated Disney short film, created the same year as the now-infamous Disney employee handbook, enlists the same comically appalling era-appropriate gender stereotypes to deliver a steady dose of wartime propaganda against the Axis, portrayed as governed by unreasonable emotion, which the Allies could combat with the force of reason and restrained emotion.

As amusing as the gender treatment might be in its appallingness, one particularly appalling chasm is what happens to each gender when its bearer is possessed by emotion and negligent of reason: The man merely gets his sexual advances met with a slap, whereas the woman spirals into food binges, which promise an undesirable body, which in turn makes her unworthy of said sexual advances. In other words, reason ultimately serves the man in both scenarios, while emotion merely distracts from his most desirable outcome.

Of course, the analysis of what any of this has to do with going to war is best left to Freud.

For a similar look at wartime propaganda from the other end of the world, see this collection of vintage Russian animated propaganda.

↬ Open Culture

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NASA may have given us decades of cosmic awe, but the agency’s future and thus the future of space exploration are hanging by a thread. Neil deGrasse Tyson has argued that the only way to get NASA back on track is to get those to whom the president is accountable — the electorate, “we the people” — excited about space exploration again, and Pursuit of Light, a beautiful short film from NASA with original music by Moby, seeks to do exactly that. With my jaw agape and my breath a gasp just a few seconds into it, I dare say it is succeeding — it’s the most magnificent reminder of the whimsy of the universe since The Sagan Series.

↬ It’s Okay To Be Smart

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Our voyage into space, propelled by equal parts curiosity and awe, is among humanity’s bravest quests and most rewarding leaps of the imagination. Carl Sagan knew it. Neil deGrasse Tyson knows it. We believe it. And yet the future of space exploration is more precarious than ever. From University of Oregon copywriter Nickolaus Sugai and interaction designer Lauren Geschke comes this poignant, poetic piece of video poetry, a kind of love letter to NASA posing a difficult question that we as a culture and a society must answer.

…because if we ignore the calls of the sky, who then will draw the maps of the universe?

Visit theskyiscalling.us to tell Congress you want more of your taxpayer money diverted to space exploration. For a deeper look at the politics of the issue and just what’s at stake, see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicles.

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Three of my great fascinations — cartography as art, propaganda design, and antique maps — converge in Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art. The lavish tome collects cartographic curiosities from the golden age of display maps — the period between 1450 and 1800, when maps were as much a practical tool for navigation as they were works of art and affirmations of cultural hegemony or social status — culled from the formidable collection of the British Library.

Peter Barber, who heads the map collections at the British Library, and Tom Harper, BL’s Curator of Antiquarian Mapping, contextualize the maps with detailed descriptions of how and where they were used, from schoolrooms to bedchambers, and explore their parallel role as art and propaganda.

Fra Mauro World Map, 1450

This is an 1804 copy of perhaps the first ‘modern’ world map, made by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro in about 1450. It points south because 15th-century compasses were south-pointing. It shows the Portuguese discoveries in Africa and questioned the authority of medieval and classical sources. Intended for display in Venice, it emphasizes the feats of Marco Polo. The British East India Company commissioned this copy, thus implying that Britain was heir to the Portuguese empire.

The Americas by Diego Gutiérrez, 1562

This is a powerful celebration of Spain's New World Empire, beginning in the late 15th century. In the upper left-hand corner is the arms of King Philip II (reigned 1554-1598). In the sea, Philip appears on a chariot, riding through a turbulent Atlantic. The map aimed to strengthen Spain's political image in Europe and its claim to the Americas.

Psalter World Map (mappa mundi), 1265

Despite its small size, this is one of the ‘great’ medieval world maps. It is probably a copy of the lost map which adorned King Henry III's bedchamber in Westminster Palace from the mid-1230s. The original colors are intact. Showing east at the top, it is a visual encyclopedia, embracing ancient history, politics, scripture and ethnography as well as geography.

'The Island' by Stephen Walter, 2008

The Island satirizes the London-centric view of the English capital and its commuter towns as independent from the rest of the country. The artist, a Londoner with a love of his native city, offers up a huge range of local and personal information in words and symbols. Walter speaks in the dialect of today, focusing on what he deems interesting or mundane.

'Tea Revives the World' by MacDonald Gill, 1940

Commissioned by the International Tea Market Expansion Board, this map aimed to promote wartime strength, Allied resolve, and international trade during WWII through a celebration of Britain’s adopted national beverage and its pictorial history of tea.

Complementing Magnificent Maps is an interactive site from the British Library that lets you explore some of the maps with curatorial context.

For a related treat, see BBC’s fantastic The Beauty of Maps, which visits the British Library to explore five of the world’s most beautiful maps and their sociocultural context.

Images and captions courtesy of the British Library; thanks, Sonja

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In 1946, Columbia University anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish published a pamphlet intended for American troops, entitled The Races of Mankind, which presented in simple language and cartoon illustrations a scientific case against racism. That same year, the pamphlet was adapted in the lovely animated short film The Brotherhood of Man, which makes a humorous but articulate case for equality despite physical dissimilarity and argues for extending to all people “an equal chance in life.”

How civilized a person is depends on the surroundings in which he grows up. The differences in the ways people behave are not inherited from their ancestors.

The pamphlet is now in the public domain and is thus available in its entirety, courtesy of The Internet Archive. It’s worth it if only for the wonderful illustrations.

UPDATE: Reader Jesse Jarnow (son of the great Al Jarnow) points out that The Brotherhood of Man is the work of legendary animator John Hubley, previously featured here.

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Last month, we explored The Bomb and the General, a little-known 1966 children’s book by celebrated novelist, list-lover, and philosopher Umberto Eco, which offered a conceptual introduction to semiotics — the study of signs and symbols. The book was part of a trilogy, the second installment of which, titled The Three Astronauts (I tre cosmonauti), came out later that year and featured the same beautiful, abstract illustrations of Italian artist Eugenio Carmi, full of recurring symbols teaching the child to draw connections between text and image.

It tells the inspired and irreverent story of space exploration and world peace as a Martian shows concern for a frightened bird and teaches three astronauts — an American, a Russian, and a Chinese — a lesson in tolerance despite difference.

One fine morning three rockets took off from three different places on Earth.

In the first there was an American, happily whistling a bit of jazz.
In the second there was a Russian, singing ‘The Song of the Volga Boatman.’
In the third there was a Chinese, singing a beautiful song — though the other two thought he was all out of tune.”

Like The Bomb and the General, The Three Astronauts is a fine addition to these little-known but fantastic children’s books by famous authors of adult literature.

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