ENVISIONING EXTINCTION

Tragicomic creatures of a terrifying future.

- Mark Singer

For several years, until the pandemic and declining health dictated otherwise, Edward Koren, who turned eighty-seven this month, made a point of trading life in northern New England for a few weeks in Paris, where he set up shop at Idem, the still thrumming nineteenth-century printing studio in Montparnasse. A contributor to The New Yorker for sixty years—more than a thousand cartoons and thirty-one covers, and counting—Ed has always been an eclectic cottage industrialist, bringing forth sui-generis art and artifacts (drawings, lithographs, books, utilitarian ceramics, wood sculptures, repurposed household objects), each of which bears the Koren quintessence: exquisitely textured draftsmanship, an insatiable eye, perfect pitch, and a droll empathy for earnest overthinking.