On the Street

Trump was inaugurated and Françoise Mouly, editor at The New Yorker, decided the right response was to make a newspaper and hand it out directly. She and her daughter Nadja, a cartoonist, assembled Resist!—comics and essays from various artists, all circling the same question: what do you actually do in this moment?

The paper was aimed specifically at young women, immigrants, queer people. The ones for whom this isn’t abstract political theater but the texture of their actual lives. There’s work about abortion, racism, sexism, the specific gravity of fear that becomes your baseline. You wake with it. You sleep with it. You make plans around it.

There’s always been something clarifying about dark moments for artists. Institutions feel less important. The idea of reaching someone directly, concretely, matters more. Comics work best for that—there’s almost nothing between the image and what it makes you feel. It travels faster than argument, faster than think pieces. Just picture and understanding.

I don’t know if a newspaper actually changes anything at the level of policy or law. But I understand the impulse to try. To decide that what you had—your platform, your daughter’s talent—mattered most when handed directly to someone, actual paper and ink in their hands, when everything else feels controlled from above. That matters. Even if it doesn’t shift votes, there’s something defiant about insisting on directness like that.