459. Gay Talese, Em Dashes and Artistry in the Age of AI, & Scribbling For the Kids at Bellevue

#459: Plus! My Substack Subscribes, KAL talks Authoritarianism, Autumn in New York, & Morris says hello from dreamland.

In this week’s edition:

• G

and more!

Hey again, friend.

Welcome to Issue #459 of New York Cartoons. Fall has well and truly fallen here in NYC. My measure of the seasons is basically how quickly Morris poops when I take him outside. We’re in ‘9-minute’ territory, which means it’s getting positively NIPPY!

It’s getting nippy out there for us artists, in general. More reports coming in of people getting their wings clipped for drawing/saying the wrong things about the Dear Leader. Whispers of lay-offs and castigations. It’s not sounding too good.

As

Kevin KAL Kallaugher

said in an interview recently, ‘The thing about being a cartoonist is that a single speck of sand, if it gets into the eye of a target that you’re trying to get, it really bugs them a lot. This is the reason why cartoonists and satirists are sometimes the first people that get clamped down on around the globe by any society that wants to be authoritarian.”

In May 2023, a renowned British cartoonist Martin Rowson faced intense backlash after publishing a Guardian cartoon that was widely criticised for invoking antisemitic tropes, prompting an immediate apology despite Rowson’s stated lack of intent. Two weeks ago, Turkish Leman magazine’s Dogan Pehlevan was arrested over a cartoon accused of blasphemous depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Earlier this year, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation from The Washington Post, citing an editorial decision to scrap a cartoon that included Post owner Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Mickey Mouse bowing to Donald Trump.

Satire and parody are strongly protected as free speech under the US First Amendment, with the Supreme Court affirming editorial cartoons’ essential democratic role in the Hustler v Falwell (1988) case and emphasising the need to protect ‘vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks’ on government and public officials.

…
Protecting cartoonists who operate at the intersection of journalism, satire, and political commentary is a complex and increasingly urgent challenge for a robust democracy.

‘If we’re being harassed and pressured not to aim our pens critically, we won’t be able to call ourselves editorial cartoonists much longer – we won’t be able to create anything but mushy, uncontroversial drawings’, warns

Ann Telnaes

.

(source)

As if it isn’t already hard enough to make a crust of a crust as a cartoonist these days, with AI cutting our lunch and dwindling opportunities for publication, we have to worry about cowardly nepo-babies who own media conglomerates deciding what we can and can’t see. Fun!

If you enjoy reading my work this week, consider becoming a paid subscriber to New York Cartoons—it’s the best way to keep the ink (and the caffeine) flowing. Or, if commitment issues run deep, you can always buy me a coffee—which, if we’re being honest, is just printer ink in liquid form.😍

I wrote about the illustration market all but drying up this week (sorry to be so doom-and-gloom), but my outlook is this:

Yes, things are tough. The industry’s shrinking, attention spans are collapsing, and artists are competing with robots. But I’m still here, pen in hand, caffeine (and sometimes beer) in system, trying to make people laugh -and, at a stretch, maybe think- with a few good lines.

Because, as hard as it gets, I’d rather draw for a living in a broken system than stop drawing altogether. At least this way, when the robots take over, they’ll have something decent to trace.

Click here to read the rest of the essay.

On a slightly different topic, apropos this excellent foreword in Wendy Higgins’ newest book: (h/t

Vivi Kew

)

This irksome trend is something I’ve noticed this year regarding the discussion around AI-generated content. The prevalent use of the em dash is now apparently a common sign of content generated by ChatGPT and similar LLMs.

This annoys the shit out of me— I’ve been using them for years in my writing, and I’m loath to excise them. But, I’ve noticed myself avoiding them so people don’t think anything I’ve written was artificially generated. I wrote a note about it below: chime in with your comments.

As

Erin OConnor

said:

Don’t let AI win. I find — and perhaps you do too — that em-dashes are essential for capturing my thoughts in writing. To lose them is to lose critical nuance — not to mention my passion for qualification and semi-tangent. We must reclaim the em-dash and trust that our writing is so specific to ourselves that it won’t reek of AI. We must make Emily Dickinson proud.

You can hear me talking about this topic with Alex Hallatt in the replay of our DMA chat yesterday. Click below to watch.

And with that— we’re going to kick on with this week’s edition… beginning with:

This is what my studio has looked like for the past week. I’ve been all-in on one single project. I did it all by hand, in dip pen and ink. I’m happy to say I can finally share the first part of it with you today.

I’m sharing with you today something I’ve been working on for a while, along with my friends and colleagues at The Metropolitan Review. This is the first in a series of works we’re sharing this week. Keep your eyes peeled for more.
If you’re unsure of Talese and his work, you might recall my writing about Ed Sorel and his iconic cover illustration of Talese’s profile of Frank Sinatra for Esquire in 1966.

From Editor in Chief, Ross Barkan

A major project here from The Metropolitan Review, perhaps era-defining: I am very excited to announce the launch of Gay Talese week!

We’ve got, today, an extensive interview Lou Bahet and I conducted with the literary and journalism master. We spoke for several hours with Talese, who, at 93, took us through his remarkable career, from interviewing Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra to documenting the rise of the largest suspension bridge, at the time, on earth. Talese is a marvel, the very last of his kind, and you’ve got to read all of this. Huge thanks to Alex Vadukul, Max Vadukul for the outstanding photos, and Cartoons Editor Jason Chatfield for his amazing illustrations.

Keep reading below:

1. Drawing for the Kids at Bellevue Hospital

I headed over to the East side on Saturday with my fellow scribbler, Michelene Hess, to draw Halloween cartoons for the kids. We scribbled Franken-monsters based on the kids’ suggestions, and then had them draw their own for the rest of the afternoon. The organisation that ran the event is called the Inkwell Foundation

The group was started by artists to use drawing to bring laughter, creativity, and encouragement to kids braving illness and hardship. You can make a donation to the Inkwell Foundation (which is a 401(c)(3) non-profit) by clicking the button below:

2. Banksy for sale?

I spotted this little nugget on 14th street this past week… surely it isn’t real. But is it

Aaaand finally, You’re invited to my guest lecture at Stanford

…I’ve been invited to deliver the Fall Liu Lecture at Stanford. The one where they bring together people working in design, art, technology, architecture, science and let them loose on an unsuspecting audience. If you’re in California, you should come along! It’s now open for booking for the public.

Catch KAL Talking tomorrow!

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to draw cartoons under a dictatorship—and who among us hasn’t while procrastinating on our fifth coffee—my old pal KAL (Kevin Kallaugher), the longtime political cartoonist for The Economist and, until recently, The Baltimore Sun, is doing a free online talk this Thursday, October 31, at 1pm ET. It’s called Cartoonists Under Pressure—which sounds like the Queen/Bowie collab we never got.

It’ll dig into the lives and risks of cartoonists working in authoritarian regimes. Kal’s brilliant and funny and thoughtful, and this’ll be well worth your lunch break (or your guilt-ridden drawing time). Register here →

If you want to catch up on our talk in this topic, you can find it here:

As always, be sure to leave a comment, say hi, and ask a question. I love hearing from you every week.

If you want to support my work, please take out a premium subscription (just $1 per week).

The Sketchbook I’m sharing with you this week is a selection of live caricatures I did at a staff event, and a few that I drew of people’s dogs as gifts this past week.

If you have a friend with a dog, send me a photo and I’ll draw them into the book for you.

Via

Michael Maslin's Ink Spill

:
Here’s a fast paced promo for the documentary, The New Yorker At 100. The film which premieres at The New Yorker Festival, will be on Netflix, December 5, 2025/

If you’re new here, or you haven’t had a moment to wander back through the archives of profound genius I’ve shared up to this point, take a peek at the following scribblings: