Updated May 5, 2025 at 12:10 PM EDT
The first issue of The New Yorker published 100 years ago this week.
The cover featured the magazine's mascot: a dandy, looking through a monocle at a butterfly.
The character and artwork was meant to be an "image of sophistication and making fun of itself at the same time," Françoise Mouly, who has served as the magazine's art editor for 32 years, told Morning Edition.
"And that's something that we try to do every week to not take ourselves too seriously while still looking and scrutinizing the world with a distinctive monocle," Mouly said.
This week’s special Anniversary Issue celebrates The New Yorker’s centenary with new investigative reporting, a special cover extravaganza, and pieces examining the personalities and ideas that have defined the magazine. https://t.co/iCIrAiowsx pic.twitter.com/TISdCKU5vr
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 10, 2025
That distinctive view has led to the publication of some of the most important pieces of cultural commentary and landmark storytelling in U.S. history, including the publication of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Ronan Farrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé on Harvey Weinstein that sparked the MeToo Movement.
Throughout it all, the first thing print readers see are the weekly magazine's standout covers, some of which are meticulously hand-crafted, Mouly said.
"It looks different from all the other magazines because it was started in the era where magazine was a prime visual medium and the cover, as been for all of this time, a drawing done by an artist and signed by the artist," Mouly said.
Other magazines, she continued, have moved on to formulas that feature celebrities or cover lines that explain to readers what's inside and why they should pick up that magazine.
"The New Yorker has none of that," Mouly said, adding that the artists who design and sign the covers just try to bring out a feeling.
"Ideally [to] make you laugh or touches you emotionally, gives you a sense of what's going on in the world, but not through words," Mouly said.
To mark its 100-year anniversary, The New Yorker has published six covers by different artists, which are all riffs on its dandy mascot. You can see them here.
Copyright 2025 NPR
