The New Yorker and NYMag covers subtly, and unsubtly, nail life during a pandemic

New York-based glossies The New Yorker and New York Magazine are out today with covers that reflect the new realty of life in the midst of a pandemic. The New Yorker’s cover is titled “Critical Mass” and was drawn by Christoph Niemann. As Niemann tells Françoise Mouly in a short making-of post, [T]he genesis for this image, the idea of a sneezing domino standing on top of a globe packed with other domino pieces, came to me when I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. ... Only the next day, when I sat down to turn the concept into a proper artwork, did I realize that the globe and the pieces actually resemble a virus. The New Yorker’s continuing coronavirus coverage is indexed here. As for New York Magazine’s simple, scrawled cover, it tweaks boilerplate crisis-time rhetoric, “Don’t Panic,” by crossing out the word “Don’t.” David Haskell, the magazine’s editor, writes in a statement about the cover, Every day of March has felt like an eternity, the news moving faster than anyone even thought possible. In New York City, the psychological temperature has swung wildly, and the low-key eeriness that dominated the beginning of the month now feels like an ancient mood. We tried with this cover to document that shift—the way, over the course of a handful of days, the city’s nerves became completely shot, as we all woke up to a nightmare. The cover story, headlined “A City of Bodies” (subhead: “The week we started hoarding beans”), is by Molly Fischer.

The New Yorker and NYMag covers subtly, and unsubtly, nail life during a pandemic

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