Exhibit 10.25

Not content to play it cool like their benign, cookie-perfecting brethren, the New Yorker has decided to throw a grenade into the relative calm of the mid-early-mid election coverage with their most recent cover. Naturally, people are upset.

The problem isn't that it's unidentifiable as satire or that it's a prima facie ploy for attention, but that it's satire without an obvious referent. The necessity here is that we know the New Yorker is joking because they're the New Yorker, not because there is one consistent, universally identifiable image they are mocking. At best it can be said that they satirizing a problematic conservative meme but their method of doing so confuses the issue by using imagery that, with the exception of the fistbump, is completely from the artist's (rather than the public's) consciousness.

It's a perfectly reasonable response to see this image's heresy (the flag burning) and its stereotyping (poor Michelle) as trumping whatever chuckles, if any, it gets. Mostly there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what role the New Yorker plays in our culture. I think most of us would agree that this image is not so obviously satirical that if it were, say, on the cover of a conservative magazine like the National Review, we'd all recognize it as funny rather than horrific and offensive. If the same image could be used to make exactly the point it's supposed to be satirizing, is it successful satire? And is that 'THE NEW YORKER' up top capable of turning the fear, hate, and racism of the image into a joke all by itself?

It is for me, but that's probably not good enough.

When this image is plastered all over the news tonight--as Mr. Remnick et al. surely knew it would be--the country will be left to make a decision about this image without benefit of an enlightened dialogue on the subject. What discussion there is will be about the controversy, thus effectively removing any element of satire before most Americans get the opportunity to even see the image. Katie Couric isn't going to turn to look at this image as it hovers over her tiny shoulder and laugh tonight. No, she's going to talk about it in an even, grim voice and we're all going to study this like a Jim Crow-era cartoon (except for me, I'll probably be playing Civilization or baking cookies).

As someone from the plains, I'm never one for underestimating "the public" but I think it's a legitimate issue here. Had this been the cover of Mad Magazine, we wouldn't have an issue, but for a magazine that's likely to have diverse and even contradictory connotations to those who don't regularly read it, placing such a problematic image on the cover without only the magazine's name as context risks quite a bit. We already know how this ends, of course, and now that familiar black THE NEW YORKER header is going to loom quite a bit darker for many.

The real question here is why they didn't find a way to use this image--which I think is actually quite funny in the proper context--in a way that was actually, you know, satirizing something. If, say, this image had been on the television screen being watched by two scared looking farmer-types, suddenly the joke is on the media and the rubes.

It's perfect. If we know anything about the New Yorker, it's that they hate the rubes.