Tag: New York Times

My Left Hand vs My Right Hand: Creativity Revisited

Breaking a bone is common, but when it happens to you, it’s all consuming. I broke my arm a few months back, and wrote about it for The New York Times. For the first time in my life, during the healing process, I couldn’t draw with my right hand.  I got to know my left had very well, and wrote about it.   The Times published some of the drawings and writing about the experience in the Sunday Op Ed section (7/22/18) and online. Here is the link.
During the months of healing, The New Yorker published one of my drawings that I did with my left hand!  

 

And here are some of the drawings. 

 

Unconscious Bias: Illustrating Journalist Nicholas Kristof’s words

kristof finish-1New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof contacted me last week to ask if I would be interested in drawing a cartoon or illustration based on his column  that appears today in the Times.  Mr. Kristof said that The Times did not want art next to his column in the actual paper, but that he would use it within his newsletter that promotes his column and the work he does; and he would share it on social media. He said he was having trouble finding a photograph  that expressed the points and wondered if a cartoon would work well. Not having read the column yet, excited to be asked (and I rarely can’t think of solutions to this problems), I said sure!

Mr. Kristof’s  column this week is on Unconscious Bias, and in it, he does focus more on white men and their unconscious bias even though of course we all have it.   I drew the above cartoon and it appears in his newsletter.   Was honored to work with him and hope do so again!

Cartoons 1, Photographs 0

Stone Age Print

The future of print media is, to put it mildly, uncertain. I don’t read any magazines any more (except for, ahem, The New Yorker. I have to say that), and still hang on to reading the paper version of the New York Times, as well as online. It’s not exactly becoming obsolete, but is a different form of news gathering. I read the paper edition of the Times to see what they consider worthy of being in the print edition. The online version is for me up-to-date news.

But my first love for immediate news is, of course, Twitter.

 

 

Risk Taking


We Americans try to understand and sympathize with what is going on in Egypt.  It’s hard, but the least that we can do is try, like this misguided woman in the cartoon above.

An article in the New York Times recently profiled 26 year old Egyptian protest organizer, Asmaa Mahfouz.  Ms. Mohfouz had posted a video on youtube–a daring act by a woman in that part of the world–explaining her work and passion in helping to organize the uprising in Egypt.  She says,

“I felt that doing this video may be too big a step for me, but then I thought: For how much longer will I continue to be afraid and hesitant? I had to do something.”

How many of us American women have felt that? About anything–asking for a raise, a job, respect. Granted, it is not life-threatening for us to take risks in most cases, as it is in Ms. Mahfouz’s part of the world.  In our country, the decision to wear pants, when you know everyone else will wear a dress, is scary. That’s how different–or similar–we are with women in the Middle East.

I noticed on television, and read in the New York Times and DoubleX, that there are more women involved in the uprising in Egypt than in previous protests in the region. It was refreshing to see their faces on the streets, chanting and hoping for freedom along with their male counterparts. Who knows, could the measure of peace in the protests have anything to do with their presence in the square?  I wonder.

When women take risks, and try to change things, it benefits all.  Amr Hamzawy, a research director at the Carnegie Middle East Center who has spent most of the last week in central Cairo, said,  “It’s very impressive. It’s not about male and female, it’s about everyone.”