Protest by means of Withdrawal

Jeet Heer reviews a book which collects the most controversial New Yorker covers:

Mouly and Spiegelman were hired at The New Yorker in 1993 by Tina Brown, then at the start of her brief, contentious reign at the magazine. Brown herself was, if not exactly a radical (she hailed from the high-glitz world of Vanity Fair, after all), at least a provocateur, and she arrived with a mandate to revitalize the literary institution after her immediate predecessor Robert Gottlieb had failed to shake off the interminable torpor produced by William Shawn’s editorial dotage of the 1970s and 1980s. There were worse places to start than the cover. Characteristic of his perverse late-life preference for producing a sleep-inducing publication, Shawn once said that he wanted New Yorker covers to provide a “restful change” from the more eye-grabbing images offered by other magazines. As John Updike once noted, the tumultuous year 1968 — a time of assassinations, street protests, and international turmoil — was marked by New Yorker covers that showed

A world at peace with itself, of blooming trees and sleeping dogs, of students studying in libraries and voters lining up in docile multitudes at the democracy’s gigantic voting booth […] It is almost as if, during these troubled and contentious Sixties and Seventies, The New Yorker protested, on its covers, by means of withdrawal.

The magazine’s covers, as Shawn himself explained, “tend to be more aesthetic and the subject matter for the most part is New York City or the country around New York City. The suburbs, the countryside. Sometimes it’s just a still life of flowers or plants. It’s not supposed to be spectacular.”

Also, you might have heard about Jonah Lehrer fabricating Bob Dylan quotes. This isn't the first time such a thing has happened, we mustn't forget. And while we're on the topic of falsities and fact checking, here's an interview with the editor of the late Gore Vidal.