Vladimir Putin Is Next Week's New Yorker Cover Boy

This week in The New Yorker, three reporters worked on a long, deep dive into the reasoning and history of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Congratulations to you if you already finished it, but uh, I'll get around to it eventually. Anyway, to celebrate the longread, the magazine decided to put the man driving so much of speculation about the interference, Vladimir Putin, on the cover.

"I’m boning up on my Cyrillic," cover artist Barry Blitt joked, in reference to the magazine's title appearing in the language above Putin. If the illustration looks familiar, it's because it's a riff on the New Yorker's first cover, in which the magazine's mascot Eustace Tilley inspects a butterfly. In this case, the mascot has become Eustace Vladimirovich Tilley, and the butterfly under inspection is Donald Trump. This isn't Blitt's first instance of putting Putin on the cover of the magazine, but the Russian president didn't dominate the illustration the way he does in this one.

And speaking of Putin, if you want to read more about the way America's obsession with him reflect on the country, The Guardian has a breakdown on what it all means.