YOU WENT FULL PAULINE KAEL, MAN. NEVER GO FULL PAULINE KAEL: While the New Yorker’s cover illustration of a wall about to envelop the magazine’s venerable masthead is of course a shot at Trump and the idea of a nation with a properly functioning border and immigration policies, it’s a dual-edged sword. The New Yorker was of course the home of film critic Pauline Kael, who in the midst of championing such nihilistic Hollywood fare as Bonnie and Clyde and Last Tango in Paris famously said, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

And it was for the New Yorker whom only a few years later artist Saul Steinberg drew his famous cover “The View of the World from 9th Avenue,” a witty parody of the insular worldview of the magazine’s staff and core readers, with nothing but blank space in-between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean. With its latest cover, the New Yorker is cocooning itself infinitely more so than the wall Pink Floyd built around itself in the late 1970s. Will a glimmer of reality intrude the tiny mummies’ offices ever again?