what i learned roz chast

Younger, femaler, and a less orthodox draftsperson than her colleagues, Chast drew with a "ratty" cartoon style akin to Lynda Barry . Chapter 5 - What I Learned - Exploring the Text: On the second page, the middle frame is a large one with a whole list of what Roz Chast learned "Up through sixth grade." Is she suggesting that all these things are foolish or worthless? My poster was just a bunch of people standing on a street with "honor America" written above them. She read the note and said, You can go in and see him. It was a really scary feeling, like I wish I were not here. But, though her work thematizes her apprehension and anxiety, she is, in not so slowly dawning fact, a woman of considerable authority, and unstinting appetites. The composition and publication of Cant We Talk happened to overlap with her younger childs coming out as trans. CHAST: Not really. The standpipes are like hedges, and the hydrants are like city grass.) She has spotted what is evident to her eye, but what anyone else would have walked right by: the upright masculine shape of the hydrant has somehow cast an entirely feminine shape on the sidewalka shape that looks like a prehistoric fertility figure, a Venus of Willendorf. His wife, Jeanne, has thousands of them. I decided to call up The New Yorker even though I didn't think my stuff was right for them. I would like to feel earnest about something, but its hard to feel that way. Youre not funny anymore. I didnt know how to do it, but I had one of those brown envelopes with the rubber band. Do all these cartoons suck? Rosalind "Roz" Chast was the first truly subversive New Yorker cartoonist. "I feel like these are people who . Her cartoons and covers have appeared continuously in The . . You could go there almost any time of day or night and find an open darkroom. I'm thinking about the two long journalistic pieces about lost luggage and the alien abduction conference in Theories of Everything. And at my first New Yorker party, Charles Saxon came up to me and had things to say about my drawing style. I like that she has this whole world, and I feel like I can go into that world. Krysten Chambrot: I read a Q&A with you in The New Yorker, where you said you learned to embroider in the sixth grade, in school. I always loved New York and felt like it was my home. [3] She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. I've had them break at every stage of the game. It's called What I Hate: From A to Z. GEHR: Is there a technical term for balloon phobia? One of the more terrible things about cartooning is that youre trying to make people laugh, and that was very bad in art school during the mid-seventies. The distinctive Chast-mosphereof wistfully rundown circumstances with an undertow of Dada-inflected absurditypervades the room. 5 Pages. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her . Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. 3. Roz Chast: I liked it! Roz Chast at the 2007 Texas Book Festival. Even in just a few lines of stitching, Chast reveals puzzlement and concern, in Plant People, 2022. The New Yorker doesn't have drop-off days anymore, but Im sure websites have ways to submit material. I find it disgusting and embarrassing for all concerned. This is it, even when I give characters contemporary haircuts. But small things dont really need to be in color. Topics Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists, Roz Chast. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Painting, but returned to cartooning after graduating. I remember walking down the hallway in a little bit of a daze, thinking, This is extremely peculiar, Chast says. There were the Tuesday people [who were on contract] and the Wednesday people. Her fluent, hyperconscious vibe is more like that of a novelist than a comedian. CHAST: A kid my age had some Zap comics when I was young. Ad Choices. "I learned it in sixth grade, in Brooklyn," Chast says of her introduction to embroidery. It gives me the cringes to even think about it. GEHR: I'd throw out some names, but David Byrne's the only person I can think of right now. Patty rewrites the lyrics of songs that are in the public domain. I use it in longer pieces because its more fun to look at if its in color. Its really invalid!. Because that was Jules Feiffer, Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack. I felt very bad. A significant part of the humor in Chast's cartoons appears in the background and the corners of the frames. I dont like deer jumping out at you. When I drag the point like this, it feels great. Then you carefully melt all the wax off the egg, so only the colors remain. CHAST: I did illustrations for Ms. magazine. . Her viewpoint reflected both the elderly Jews she grew up among in Brooklyn, as well as the upwardly mobile liberal cosmopolitans who, like Chast, fled to the burbs (Ridgefield, Connecticut, in her case) to nest with their offspring. I didnt show them to anybody. And you can play just about anything. [10], Her New Yorker cartoons began as small black-and-white panels, but increasingly used more color and often appear over several pages. Sometimes the Q. But, for the past twenty-five years, he has devoted himself chiefly to raising a family, and preparing the Halloween spectacle. Deep down, I think I still wanted to be a cartoonist. Let Teenagers Try Adulthood. In a 2006 interview with comedian Steve Martin for the New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes, often involving lamps and accentuated wallpaper, to serve as the backdrop for her comics. I did lithography, silk-screening, etching. Some of them are long, but a two-page thing still only counts as one. Interview with Roz Chast on NPR's "Fresh Air," 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Roz_Chast&oldid=1135002474, Members of the American Philosophical Society, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from December 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 2015 Reuben Award, Cartoonist of the Year, This page was last edited on 22 January 2023, at 00:39. For me, drawing was an outlet. I bet they paid you more than ten dollars for it. from Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Such wonderful experiences. CHAST: I love anything to do with fairytales, like the Three Little Pigs or Rapunzel. GEHR: What other projects are you working on? That wasnt how the older generation felt. Im not interested in whether or not this guy can make a cat with googly eyes, she says. GEHR: Are you thinking about doing something long-form? Too Busy Marco. Comics criticism, journalism, reviews, plus exclusives! New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Artist Roz Chast (b.1954) has loved to draw cartoons since she was a child growing up in Brooklyn.She attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Painting, but returned to cartooning after graduating. Its possible. GEHR: You do more different types of cartoons than almost anyone else I can think of, including single-panel gags, four-panel strips, autobiographical comics, and documentary work. But it was very hard. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review. GEHR: Have you ever had to fight to keep something in a cartoon? She is one of New York's most distinct Jewish cultural voices, most famous for her New Yorker cartoons over the past . I think Tina Brown first suggested using color on the inside of the magazine, although, the first cover I did was in 1986, when William Shawn was editor. This is an individual assignment, and will count as a 100 point class participation grade. Trying something different was really fun. So now people are going to send me balloons! I cant make a living only doing New Yorker stuff. They were so funny and so irreverent, and, it has been pointed out, one of the first institutions that made fun of American culture. She was ninety-seven. Shakespeare's lovers begin a new sonnet, cut short when Juliet's nurse tugs her away. Superheroes, cartoons, animationdidnt matter. GEHR: When did you start getting recognition for your art? GEHR: How much of an affinity did you feel with the underground comics scene? As people got to know my cartoons, they knew they weren't going to get straight illustrations; they were going to get something sort of funny. GEHR: Did The New Yorker open doors at other outlets? Bill would say that this has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up in Brooklyn at a time when New York was a little rougher, she says, contemplating her own sidewalk contemplations. Chast: I do have great, I don't know what the word is, empathy I guess, for the protestors. CHAST: No. They played at one of the first RISD dances I went to and they were extraordinary. RICHARD GEHR: Were you one of those kids who drew constantly? They thought it was fun. Roz Chast. Just go! Richard Gehr | June 14, 2011. That sounds good. I did meet him later, and he doffed his hat and I doffed mine, and I wondered why I was doing this. I was only sixteen when I left for college and I just did not have the strength of character to stand up to my parents and say, I dont want to take any more academic classes. I'm afraid of someone popping them. Thats what gets me. To be sure, the awkwardness of her hand is willed in a way that Thurbers was not, as she demonstrates with heartbreaking, freely drawn portraits of her mother on her deathbed in Cant We Talk About Something More Pleasant? But the confessional nature of her work lies in the individual range of obsessions and images it draws upon. I hate that. Chast, Roz. In one scene from the comedy series, Chast, in character, confesses to her fictional son that her long-standing claim about having had a platinum record back in the sixties was a lie. But what if people think Im gay? There were other Brooklyn schoolteachers, mostly Jewish, mostly without children. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher. The title page, including the Library of Congress cataloging information, is also hand-lettered by Chast. Franzen is himself a humorist of great gifts; his story collection Hearing from Wayne, particularly 37 Years, is still taught in classes on comic writing. Buy the books at: Indie-bound Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon. Roz Chast was born in 1954 and grew up in Kensington, Brooklyn (then a part of Flatbush). He knew Playboy's cartoon editor, Michelle Urry. In Chasts hands, the neighborhood features a Little Vermont section, with its House of Cheddar, and a Central Park Country Fair (Come see brawny Akitas pull many times their weight in Sunday papers!), while its apartment dwellers are not above a little radiator cookery: Potato: 3 weeks, 5 days. This is not entirely a joke; there was a period in the late seventies when, living in a stoveless apartment on West Seventy-third Street, Chast cooked on a hot plate that was not much hotter than a radiator. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. CHAST: DoubleTake magazine sent me. The formats are different but the style is similar. I was heartbroken. Horace Mann. We were told not to submit for a few weeks because they'd overbought and had a lot cartoons they wanted to use up. The author derived the book's title from her parents' refusal to discuss their . She has, once again, Chast-ized the world around her, finding an image of startling sexual complementariesor is it dubious gender battle?on an Upper West Side street. Or a goiter. Leon Botstein. Every resident of the Village Landais has dementiaand the autonomy to spend each day however they please. When my parents took me, they let me hang out., At an angle to Addamss sly morbidities were the broad lines and clear colors of Mad magazine, its issues illicitly possessed. George Booth and William Steig, by contrast, lived decade after decade only in their heads, which they allowed us, occasionally, to visit. CHAST: His name is Rick Fiala. GEHR: If you taught cartooning, what would you tell your students? in painting in 1977. So I came home and I drew it and felt better. You know she doesn't shy from the weirdness or . New Yorker cartoons can be very timely but also not, yet somehow they reflect their time even if they're not addressing the week's events. When single-panel emphasis is essential, we get magnificent single panelsamong them an audacious and painful drawing of a blue baby, her older sister, who lived for only a day. My dream was to be a working cartoonist for the Village Voice, she says. I lock myself up with my little ideas and just stay in here and work. GEHR: Did you return to New York after RISD? But, unlike some artists, she doesnt see much difference between the classic cartoon and the graphic novel or memoir. I dont like it when its kind of random. To add to the creepiness, Franzen hangs skeletons along the street. It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller." - from the publisher. Maybe it's because cartoonists can do what they want; they arent told what to do by an editor who wants all of an issue's cartoons to be on a specific topic. But our mental processes aremore mysterious than we realize. You dont want to outstay your welcome. She goes back to the uke, looking as serious as Daniel Barenboim at the piano. Only by making a million mistakes and taking a million false turns could I get there. Getcheroni,eek, having weirds, goingDarwin, OYO (on your own), and farrapo velhoPortuguese for old rag.. Chast has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including What I Hate,A Friend for Marco, Too Busy Marco, Theories of Everything, The Party After You Left,Childproof,Mondo Boxo, Proof of Life on Earth,The Four Elements,Parallel Universes,Unscientific Americans,Poems and Songs,and Last Resorts. But I didnt like it. CHAST: And I used it as a trade school. In "Pleasant," Chast wrote that her mom was "a perfectionist who saw things in black and white," who'd even coined her own term "a blast from Chast" for her terrifying outbursts. The assertion of personal style in cartooning is, for her, all cartooning is. Her frenetic style perfectly conveys the heightened drama that often erupts from the . GEHR: We were talking about your process and got distracted in the idea stage. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do more than anything else. In recognition of her work, Comics Alliance listed Chast as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition. It's just horrible! And she wasnt even one of the people who worked there. I wanted to be a grownup. At some point theyre just going to say, You know what? Playing Caf Carlyle was like a dream. The quintessential work of that time would be a video monitor with static on it being watched by another video monitor, which would then get static. One realizes that what this collection illustrates is, to use a phrase she would hate, Chasts historical role: to reconcile the sophisticated, specific-minded humor of The New Yorker with the gawky, confessional truth-telling and boundary-crossing of graphic forms. It is, one realizes, a dream image in her sense, at once absurd and significant. GEHR: Birthday parties actually contain nearly limitless phobia possibilities. I think it was a WednesdayI called up and found their drop-off day, and I left my portfolio. I was pretty shocked, but he said to come back every week with stuff. I got a few illustration jobs. Since 1978, Ms. Chast has worked as a regular cartoonist for The New Yorker, which has published over 800 of her cartoons.She previously worked for The Village Voice and . Too Busy Marco, the first one, came out last year. Maybe the way they're surrounded by all that type unifies New Yorker cartoonists in a funny way. Absolutely. Guests for the inaugural series will include Roz Chast 77 PT, Jill Greenberg 89 PH, Angela Guzman 06 ID MFA 09 GD, Rose B. Simpson MFA 11 CR, Silas Munro 03 GD and Brian Johnson 05 GD. I loved living on West Seventy-third Street. The underlying jauntiness of this appreciation is what puts Chasts people in a soberly smiling mood as they compare cut-rate drugstores, and what puts them in high chefs hats even as they cook on those radiators. Both style and subject matter can be seen as an ongoing projection onto adult life of the even more straitened Flatbush world where Chast grew up, in a four-room apartment. Cow and the various permutations of cow and ox and bull gets into a whole thing. Cartoon by Frank Cotham, June 16& 23, 2003, Cartoon by Michael Maslin, April 11, 2016, I just cant understand how they keep unlocking the door., Cartoon by Mitra Farmand, November 27, 2017, Cartoon by Saul Steinberg, February 23, 1963. My parents used to go to Ithaca in the summerthey lived in student quarters and it was cheap. It's not something she enjoys, as one of her cartoons makes clear: The highway is divided into three lanes, for control freaks, clueless numbskulls and passive . CHAST: Some like to really get in there and muck around. Her Jewish parents were children during the Great Depression, and she has spoken about their extreme frugality. I dont know. I didnt even know how to pick out my own clothes. [Fiala also drew under the names "Lublin" and "Bertram Dusk."] [13], Chast lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut[14][15][16] with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen. Were already inside.) One would not be surprised to see a melancholy, off-kilter fez on the manager. Her parents, with whom she would have a lifelong troubled relationship, both worked in the local school system: George Chast was a French and Spanish teacher at Lafayette High School and Elizabeth Chast was an assistant principal at various public schools. They were very appealing.. One of the best examples of this is during kindergarten and. Roz Chast has been a cartoonist at The New Yorker for about four decades. They taught me to look at everyone as if I was looking at something else. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. . I didn't think I was going to get work as a cartoonist, but I was doing cartoons all along because there was really nothing else to do. No one in school said, 'Oh, she can do sports,' or, 'She's pretty,' but I could draw. Ive very much pulled toward that now. Its basic chordsits really easy. You go to dinner with someone and have two glasses of wine in the city, you get on the subway, you dont think, Now Im going to have to deal with deer. Yet, very much in the Chast spirit, when you are her passenger, she drives skillfully and speedily down rain-slicked Connecticut roads. I transferred to RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] after two years. Its a cigar box with four rubber bands on it. Its too educational about stuff I wanted us to do. My favorite cartoonists at this moment on this day are Keith Knight, Joel Christian Gill, Paige Braddock, Tauhid Bondia, Alison Bechdel, Lynda Barry, Roz Chast, Jackie Ormes, Dana Simpson, Steenz, Pete Docter, and Mike Luckovich. Was your gender ever a problem? Her graphic memoir chronicling her parents final years, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the inaugural Kirkus Prize, and was short-listed for a National Book Award in 2014. D Eggs provide a unique surface to paint on 4 Why does Chast enjoy the process of decorating eggs _____ A She never knows if the egg will break before the design is completed B She can add multiple details to the design to communicate her idea C So, yeah, I think culture is always changing. By my senior year I kind of went back to drawing cartoons, but only for myself. Did you win any awards? An heiress?". But I write romance, and the genre does not admit tragedy . GEHR: You've adapted the Ukrainian pysanka egg-decorating tradition to your own style by painting Chast-ian characters on them. She was raised by schoolteacher parents, who were notable for the truly awe-inspiring extent of their phobiastraits that she richly bodied forth in her hugely successful 2014 graphic memoir, Cant We Talk About Something More Pleasant? She has long signed her work as R.Chast (not in honor of R.Crumb but not not in honor of him, either); her never-used full name, Rosalind, was, she explains, a forlorn gift from her parents upon her birth, in 1954, taken from Shakespeares incandescent heroine in As You Like It., The paradox is that, although she has created this imagery of limits and losers, the grownup life she has made for herself is luxuriously filled with friends, family, and obligations. I even liked Dave Berg, and I know its not cool to like Dave Berg. Then I sold a few oddball mini-panel things to the Village Voice for the centerfold, which was edited by Guy Trebay. Outside USA: 206-524-1967, The Magazine of Comics Journalism, Criticism and History. Im an only child, and most of their friends didnt have children, so if they were forced to drag me somewhere it was like, Heres some paper and crayons. This truthof weight beneath apparent whimsyextends even to her appearance. I sold several cartoons to National Lampoon, where Peter Kleinman was art director. You can find me in the second volume of The Rejection Collection. Just shy, hostile, and paranoid. Aired: 02/28/23. The New Yorker seems to be reintroducing color. But I had to learn to drive when me moved out here. Although she pined for Manhattan in her early Connecticut years, Chast heartily affirms that it was a great place to raise her children. I got yelled at not that long ago, by some French woman at Uniqlo, because I was looking at some sweaters and I messed up the pile. Chast, Roz. I would make up math tests and give them out to kids in class for fun. Once you have read the excerpt, respond to the questions below in complete sentences. And Jules Feiffer. Order Toll-Free: 1-800-657-1100 Roz Chast is a cartoonist and has been a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker for 30 years. She also holds honorary doctorates from Pratt Institute, Dartmouth College, and the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University;[7] and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A teacher and I figured out how to photo-silkscreen together, but we didnt have the right tools so we did these makeshift things. GEHR: Who were some of the extraordinary ones? The New Yorker has let me explore different formats, whether its a page or a single panel, and that's very important to me. You melt a little wax in these things called a kistka and draw on the egg with the melted wax, then you dip it into different dyes, which don't color the part you've drawn on. Chast is driving through their leafy little town for lunch at her favorite Greek diner, the one corner of the Upper West Side in the state. They were sort of clunky, but there was something funny about the way he drew expressions. On a Sunday in October, the Chast-Franzen household in Connecticut is getting ready for Halloween. Chast's drawing style shuns conventional craft in her figure drawing, perspective, shading, etc. Her 1978 arrival gave the magazine its first real taste of punk sensibility, although she herself was anything but. I didnt know how to talk to anybody. It made me laugh so hardCheese & Sandbag Coffee! 1. A very intimidating woman with red hair named Natasha used to sit there like she was guarding the gates. Make A Donation This in itself is not so unusual. We always had a good relationshipI hope! I wish I could have said something back to her that was really quick and devastatingher head would have exploded. They were a lot older and might have had it with having a kid around. She plays it . This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Making your work accessible to the audience is a great approach . Cartoonists at The New Yorker have always fallen into two basic categoriesthe Stylish Satirists and the Klutzy Konfessionalists. Are you excited? Yeah, I am, I said. I didnt feel like I was in the middle of the pack; I felt like I was at the bottom. CHAST: Something about my parents is going to be my next big project, actually. "The great band of illustrators have shown us to ourselves and I am proud to be among their company." If I had to do a newspaper strip where its boom, boom, punch line, I would kill myself. These are books that I discovered at the browsing library at Cornell. Truth-telling and story above all else, a friend explains. I just want to go to art school.. In a small apartment, you have a pen or a pencil and youre done. She adds, You dont need to go out and buy a bunch of stuff, a whole ton of hockey equipment, speaking ruefully, as the outdoorsy Connecticut mother she has become. The excitement of the approaching display has penetrated even Dimitris Diner, where the manager demands instantly to know how Franzens work is going. We took her to the vet, who had to muzzle her because she was going so crazy. No one encouraged me to be a cartoonist, she recalls. My mother didnt let me read comics growing up. I went through a big origami phase, too. The two traditions flow, respectively, from Peter Arno and James Thurber, with Arno, in the nineteen-twenties, already picking up details of social life and delivering them in supremely elegant stenography, inventing such virtuosic icons as the drunk whose eyes form a simple X of inebriation, and the nude chorine caught in six neatly curved lines. We spoke mostly in Chast's studio, on the second floor of the comfortable home she shares with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen. But when I first walked into that room, it was all men. It wasnt ideal but it worked out all right. It's terrible. Throughout the book, you will learn about a wide range of re- search findings from psychologists, economists, market researchers, and decision scientists, all related to choice and decision making. His stuff was the first grown-up humor I really loved. It was my first time in this famous place, and Im talent! I cooked up these pastiche styles of whatever. I cried like a little girl [laughs] which I was! Horrible! I don't think very many people entered. June 6, 2015 through October 26, 2015 This exciting installation will present the art of award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, whose graphic memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? CHAST: I kind of wanted to be, but I didnt cut it in some way. An artist whose drawings portray the everyday anxieties and insecurities of modern life, she provides a social commentary for our times. My teacher was Malcolm Grear, a famous graphic designer who designed the Amtrak logo, and the idea was to strip everything down to the minimum. We kept adding to this made-up story. Her father, George, died at the age of 95 and her mother, Elizabeth, who worked as an assistant elementary school principal, died at the age of 97. GEHR: You've always done autobiographical comics, of course. How did you get those assignments? The subway is how God intended people to get around. The lamb cycle involves the songs Mary Had a Comfort Lamb and the restaurant plaint Blah-Blah, Waitstaff. Looking down gravely at the lyric sheets, they begin to sing, sort of. Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. Contact Cartoons Books Other Stuff News Bio. Roz Chast is a worrier. Tod Gitlin. Her first cartoon for the magazine, "Little Things," was a miniature piece of surrealism championing the "chent," "spak," "kellat," and other homely objects of everyday life. I wanted people to stop asking me questions about some tax law of 1812. CHAST: Well, yeah. She has vintage Steig, early Helen Hokinson, and, of course, all of Charles Addams. Michelle liked my stuff, though, and said, Maybe you can try doing these with more of a Playboy kind of feeling. I tried, but they came out like Playboy parody cartoons. But it wasnt about drawing a horse correctly, because thats not what cartoons are about. ROZ CHAST: Oh yeah! Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like The Spirit of Education, What I Learned, from Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education and more. Roz Chast. It might be something someone did that really annoyed me but actually made me laugh after I thought about it. a fire hydrant. The Liberal Arts in an Age of Info-Glut. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what youre like isnt who you are. It was the first time I'd ever been with that many other really good artists. Seattle, WA 98115 Her 1978 arrival during William Shawn's editorship gave the magazine a stealthy punk sensibility. But I was a good girl and I studied. CHAST: I started out in graphic design but I wasn't good at it. We're all part of the culture. Thurber, arriving shortly after Arno, was hardly able to draw at all, except in his gingerbread-man style, but he could travel deep within his own mind and put funny hats on his nightmares: you see the bedrock of his private-poetic style in the guilty-looking hippopotamus (What have you done with Dr. Millmoss?) or the bewhiskered, flippered creature at a couples headboard (All right, have it your wayyou heard a seal bark!). So I feel better that they should look at it in private when they have time; when Im not sitting there. Question 5: what New Yorker cartoonist has been responsible for over 800 cartoons in the magazine over the last 45 years? Diane Ravitch. Its not the only thing about him, and its not even among the most important.