The world can be divided, I think, into two camps: those who like to play games and those who do not. I plant myself firmly in the former group. I love charades, Bananagrams, and Paperback, in which players are prompted to guess the first line of a book based solely on the cover. I love a bet, a joke, a test. I’m a quietly competitive person. Though I’m a terrible singer, I love karaoke, like most Filipinos. This forty-second newsletter, covering the art in the March 12 and March 26 issues, is brought to you from my dedicated charades night. I have a group of friends who’ve met regularly for the past fifteen years to share home-cooked suppers and play games together. In these horrifying times we carve out a few hours every month or so for some existential relief, laughing so hard we need to either pee or curl up on the floor. At this point, our bar for clues is high. “Gone with the Wind” is child’s play. We prefer “Adobe InDesign CS5.” (I documented some of the group twelve years ago for T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)
The cover of the March 12 issue is a painting titled Coat Zipper (2024), by the Philadelphia-based artist Aubrey Levinthal. Levinthal has contributed paintings for a few of our reviews, most recently a Michael Kazin essay about American history in June last year.
I thought the winter-set, parka-hooded figure in Coat Zipper, foregrounded by a shadow, evoked the images coming out of Minnesota, of protests and varietals of ice. The art gallery David Zwirner recently made a selection of Levinthal’s monotypes available to view online.
The Buenos Aires–based illustrator Sol Cotti made a portrait of the novelist Diana McCaulay surrounded by Jamaican flora and parish life for Colin Grant’s review of her latest novel. And for Edward Mendelson’s essay about the early-twentieth-century popular novelist Margaret Kennedy, Grant Shaffer made a pink-inky likeness of the doe-eyed writer.
I was happy to discover that the Montreuil-based Yann Kebbi is a big Bernie Sanders fan, and, despite a busy schedule, he took on a drawing of the Vermont senator for Thomas Powers’s review of Dan Chiasson’s recent Bernie biography. (Our illustrators often have less than a week to go from assignment to sketch to final art. This is short, in publishing terms. Not as short as, say, The New York Times op-ed page, where illustrators sometimes have only a few hours, but much shorter than, say, The New Yorker, where lead times can be a number of weeks.)
I’ve been assigning the Montrealer Alain Pilon a lot of portraits lately, but for Linda Greenhouse’s essay about Justice Anthony Kennedy’s memoir—and his legacy—I asked him to go back to his talent for sharp conceptual thinking.
Essays about dance and theater often bring to mind James McMullan’s legendary posters for Lincoln Center, so I emailed him after reading Marina Harss on Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet The Art of the Fugue. He agreed to the assignment, and as always, his figures—so alive—animate the text.
We wanted a portrait of Gisèle Pelicot for Elaine Blair’s review of her memoir. I thought Camille Deschiens’s sensitive, pensive style might suit the depth of the subject and crossed my fingers that she was available. I was touched when she accepted the assignment and wrote, “Thank you for your trust.”
The series art in the issue, titled Keiner Worte (No Words), is by the Paris-based artist Simone Goder.
The cover art for the March 26 issue, Cold Weather (2023), is by Henni Alftan. This is her second cover for us, after we used her painting Tiptoeing for our December 8, 2022, issue. I’ve been trying to get more graphic with the covers, in part because of the vagaries of print quality but also because I try to imagine our issues as they might appear in my periphery: flung on a coffee table or poking out from a tote bag. (Speaking of graphic covers and tote bags, we’ve made our November 30, 1972, cover into a handsome, sturdy tote bag.)
Alftan’s pop optic grid of a coat is a perfect example of the kind of bold and captivating image I’m looking for. Something with contrast and crackle. I’d originally wanted to place the issue’s cover lines on the figure’s hand, but Alftan pushed back on that idea, arguing it would ruin the composition, which I agreed with and appreciated.
I read Anne Enright’s intense foray into one day of the typo-riddled Epstein emails and knew I could find some existing art that we might run alongside the essay. The Mexican multimedia artist Rachel Levit Ruiz’s work involving women and bodies is always fresh and strong. Scrolling through her website I found a sculpture that both was disturbing and seemed to reference the redactions the Department of Justice made to the emails.
Lorenzo Gritti made a loose portrait of Andrew Ross Sorkin for Jacob Weisberg’s review of Sorkin’s history of the 1929 stock market crash.
The UK-based illustrator Maya Chessman framed her portrait of the writer David Greig in an intricate Book of Kells–inspired border for Meghan O’Gieblyn’s review of Greig’s novel The Book of I. Tom Bachtell was a natural choice to caricature Jeff Bezos for Robert G. Kaiser’s essay on what the billionaire has done to The Washington Post. Kaiser was an editor and reporter at the Post for more than fifty years, so he’s well positioned to comment on Bezos’s recent decimation of the institution.
David Cole has been on a tear for us recently—in the last month alone, he has written about the war in Iran, Trump’s tariffs, and affirmative action. After I accidentally sent the designer Lisa Naftolin the wrong Cole essay, she graciously redrafted her illustration when I followed up with the right assignment—in this case, the article about the future of affirmative action in academia. We chose a conceptual image that relied on folded paper, wordplay, and Naftolin’s signature use of typography.
The Paris-based collage artist Emmanuel Pierre read Aaron Matz on the subject of satire and sent a buzzing, animated scene of early modern figures, one holding a piece of paper, surrounded by birds, bugs, and sundry objets.
The series art in the issue is by the New York–based illustrator Carly Blumenthal.
English (US) · 