Friday, May 27, 2011

Reading the Rural Through New Yorker Covers


After yesterday's piece on Gillian Welch and her music's position on the vanguard of rural-urban relations, we received an email about the current cover of the The New Yorker.  While their cartoons are often the subject of gripes and jokes, the magazine's cover art can occasionally take the culture's temperature in a single image (see the "terrorist fistbump" or the post-9/11 cover). In the covers included here, we see six different political and social commentaries on rural life and rural place, each telling for what's included or omitted, given the situations on the ground in rural communities when these issues hit the newsstand. I'll leave our readers to provide their own parallel narratives here, and their own captions for these images. Enjoy, and have a good weekend.