The New Yorker in the context of Henry Fairlie

A gag cartoon (also panel cartoon, single-panel cartoon, or gag panel) is most often a single-panel cartoon, usually including a caption beneath the drawing. In some cases, dialogue may appear in speech balloons, following the common convention of comic strips. A pantomime cartoon carries no caption (see also: pantomime comics).

As the name implies—"gag" being a show business term for a comedic idea—these cartoons are most often intended to provoke laughter. Popular magazines that have featured gag cartoons include Punch, The New Yorker and Playboy. Some publications, such as Humorama, have used cartoons as the main focus of the magazine, rather than articles and fiction.

Dame Winifred Mary Beard (born 1 January 1955) is an English classicist specialising in Ancient Rome. She is a trustee of the British Museum and formerly held a personal professorship of classics at the University of Cambridge. She is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, and Royal Academy of Arts Professor of Ancient Literature.

Beard is the classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement, for which she also writes a regular blog, "A Don's Life". Her frequent media appearances and sometimes controversial public statements have led to her being described as "Britain's best-known classicist". In 2014, The New Yorker characterised her as "learned but accessible".

Patricia Smith Churchland (born 16 July 1943) is a Canadian-American analytic philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has taught since 1984. She has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies since 1989. She is a member of the Board of Trustees Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Philosophy Department, Moscow State University. In 2015, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and Somerville College, Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984 and is married to the philosopher Paul Churchland. Larissa MacFarquhar, writing for The New Yorker, observed of the philosophical couple that: "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."

Hans Koning (born Hans Königsberger, July 12, 1921 – April 13, 2007) was a Dutch American author of over 40 fiction and non-fiction books. Koning was also a prolific journalist, contributing for almost 60 years to many periodicals including The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harper's, The New Yorker, and De Groene Amsterdammer. He used the pen name Hans Koningsberger (with an added letter 'n'), and from 1972 Hans Koning.

Death of a Salesman is a 1949 stage play written by the American playwright Arthur Miller. The play premiered on Broadway in February 1949, running for 742 performances. It is a two-act tragedy set in late 1940s Brooklyn told through a montage of memories, dreams, and arguments of the protagonist Willy Loman, a travelling salesman who is despondent with his life and appears to be slipping into senility. The play addresses a variety of themes, such as the American Dream, the anatomy of truth, and infidelity. It won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. It is considered by some critics to be one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. The play is included in numerous anthologies.

Since its premiere, the play has been revived on Broadway five times, winning three Tony Awards for Best Revival. It has been adapted for the cinema on ten occasions, including a 1951 version by screenwriter Stanley Roberts, starring Fredric March. In 1999, New Yorker drama critic John Lahr said that with 11 million copies sold, it was "probably the most successful modern play ever published."

Peter Charles Schjeldahl (/ˈʃɛldɑːl/; March 20, 1942 – October 21, 2022) was an American art critic, poet, and educator. He was noted for being the head art critic at The New Yorker, having earlier written for The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The New York Times.

Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and pioneering narrative journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975. She wrote under the pen name "Genêt". She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City.

She was a prominent member of America's expatriate community living in Paris before WWII. Along with her longtime partner Solita Solano, Flanner was called "a defining force in the creative expat scene in Paris". She returned to New York during the war. Flanner split her time between there and Paris until her death in 1978.

Mariana Enríquez (born 1973) is an Argentine journalist, novelist, and short story writer. She is a part of the group of writers known as "new Argentine narrative". Her short stories fall within the horror and gothic genres and have been published in international magazines such as Granta, Electric Literature, Asymptote, McSweeney's, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The New Yorker.

Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman (/ˈspiːɡəlmən/ SPEE-gəl-mən; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Spiegelman began his career with Topps (a bubblegum and trading card company) in the mid-1960s, which was his main financial support for two decades; there he co-created parodic series such as Wacky Packages in the 1960s and Garbage Pail Kids in the 1980s. He gained prominence in the underground comix scene in the 1970s with short, experimental, and often autobiographical work. A selection of these strips appeared in the collection Breakdowns in 1977, after which Spiegelman turned focus to the book-length Maus, about his relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor. The postmodern book depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice, ethnic Poles as pigs, and citizens of the United States as dogs. It took 13 years to create until its completion in 1991. In 1992 it won a special Pulitzer Prize and has gained a reputation as a pivotal work.

Larissa MacFarquhar (born 1968) is an American writer known for her profiles in The New Yorker.

She is the daughter of the sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar. She was born in London, and moved to the United States at the age of 16.

Max A. Boot (born September 12, 1969) is a Russian-born naturalized American author, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for The Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Since then, he has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has written for such publications as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biography, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party", in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend, was a New York Times Bestseller and named one of the New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2024, as well as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post and The New Yorker.

Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is an American writer and academic, and is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Lemann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (/ˈbɛərmən/; June 9, 1893 – September 9, 1973) was an American playwright, screenwriter, biographer, and longtime writer for The New Yorker. His son is the composer David Behrman.

Robert Myron Coates (April 6, 1897 – February 8, 1973) was an American novelist, short story writer and art critic. He published five novels; one classic historical work, The Outlaw Years (1930) which deals with the history of the land pirates of the Natchez Trace; a book of memoirs, The View from Here (1960), and two travel books, Beyond the Alps (1962) and South of Rome (1965). During his unusually varied career, Coates explored many different genres and styles of writing and produced three experimental novels, The Eater of Darkness (1926), Yesterday’s Burdens (1933) and The Bitter Season (1946). Highly original, these novels draw upon expressionism, Dadaism and surrealism. His last two novels—Wisteria Cottage (1948) and The Farther Shore (1955)—are examples of crime fiction. Simultaneously to working as a novelist, Coates maintained a life-long career at the New Yorker, whose staff he joined in 1927. The magazine printed more than a hundred of his short stories many of which were collected in three anthologies; All the Year Round (1943), The Hour after Westerly (1957) and The Man Just ahead of You (1964). Also, from 1937 to 1967, Coates was the New Yorker’s art critic and coined the term “abstract expressionism” in 1946 in reference to the works of Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and others. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1958. Coates was married to sculptor Elsa Kirpal from 1927 to 1946. Their first and only child, Anthony Robertson Coates, was born on March 4, 1934. In 1946, they divorced and Coates married short story writer Astrid Meighan-Peters. He died of cancer of the throat in New York City on February 8, 1973.

Anthony Boucher praised Coates as "one of the most persuasive recorders of the unaccountable and disturbing moment," singling out his fantasy stories for their "haunting tone of uncertainty and dislocation." Floyd C. Gale said that The Eater of Darkness "has been called the first surrealist novel in English".

Robin B. Wright (born August 22, 1948), is an American foreign affairs analyst, author and journalist who has covered wars, revolutions and uprisings around the world. She writes for The New Yorker and is a fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Center. Wright has authored five books and coauthored or edited three others.

On April 9, 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a large statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square was destroyed by Iraqi civilians and United States Marines. The event received global media coverage, wherein it came to symbolize the end of Saddam's rule in Iraq.

U.S. government officials and journalists, citing footage of jubilant Iraqis jumping on and sledgehammering the statue, claimed the event symbolized a victory for the United States. However, the development of an Iraqi insurgency undermined this narrative. A retrospective analysis by ProPublica and The New Yorker concluded that the media had exaggerated both the size and enthusiasm of the crowd, had influenced the crowd's behavior, and subsequently had turned the event into "a visual echo chamber" that promoted an unrealistically optimistic account of the invasion at the expense of more important news stories.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark is a 1969 British television documentary series written and presented by the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark.

Its thirteen episodes outline the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy since the Dark Ages. It was produced by the BBC and aired from February to May 1969 on BBC2. Then, and in later transmissions in Britain, the United States and other countries, it reached an unprecedented number of viewers for an art series. Its production standards were praised and set the pattern for subsequent television documentary series. The New Yorker described it as revelatory for the general viewer.

The Swimmer is a 1968 American drama film starring Burt Lancaster. The film was written and directed by Academy Award-nominated husband-and-wife team of Eleanor Perry (screenplay adaptation) and Frank Perry (director). The story is based on the 1964 short story "The Swimmer" by John Cheever, which appeared in the July 18, 1964, issue of The New Yorker. The 95-minute movie adds new characters and scenes consistent with those in the original 12-page short story.