At right is the cover of The New Yorker's July 21 edition. It depicts, as Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar summarized, Barack and Michelle Obama enacting "every smeary right-wing stereotype imaginable: ...[Barack] Obama in a turban and robes fist-bumping his be-afro'd wife, dressed in the military fatigues of a revolutionary and packing a machine gun and some serious ammo. Oh yes, this quaint little scene takes place in the Oval Office, under a picture of Osama bin Laden above a roaring fireplace, in which burns an American flag." The image has caused considerable uproar in the States—to take one example of many, CNN's Wolf Blitzer today suggested that it was something a neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan publication would create—and Obama's campaign immediately called it "tasteless and offensive."

Newsstand: November 23, 2009