When The New Yorker drops through the letterbox, it’s like Santa on Christmas Day. Long-form, idea-based journalism that flatters the reader, with features and ideas by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell that eventually appear in the mainstream conversation. Each issue is framed up by an illustration on the cover – because it’s looser than conventional covers, more open, the illustration enables a wide variety of content. Christoph Niemann’s nuclear flowers cover about the Japanese Tsunami, playing with familiar iconography, is desperately poignant.