_Pollux writes_:
Deep layers of snow cover a lot of America and Europe at the moment. While commuters may not be having a good time, skiers have the opportunity to revel in resorts reporting record attendance levels.
Skiers are on top of the world, both literally and figuratively, and “Top of the World” is the name of “Jan Van Der Veken’s”:http://www.fabricagrafica.be/content/page.asp cover for the January 11, 2010 issue of _The New Yorker_.
This is the Belgian illustrator’s second cover for _The New Yorker_, and it depicts, like his first cover, a smiling, winter-bound young couple. However, while Van Der Veken’s December 7 “cover”:http://emdashes.com/2009/12/sempe-fi-o-christmas-tree.php was the very picture of closeness, depicting two Christmas shoppers literally wrapped together, the skiing couple on his January cover share the ski-slope and little else.
The young man takes a picture of the snowy landscape. The young woman chit-chats with someone on her cell phone. They are having a pleasant time, but are not really sharing the experience together.
On her blog, designer Poppy Gall has written a “post”:http://poppygall.com/blog/tag/jan-van-der-veken/ on this cover:

The way artist Jan Van Der Veken juxtaposes a stylized retro ski poster look and digital gizmos makes me smile. This is a familiar scene at any ski area. Skiers with iPhones know they’re worthless while wearing gloves. But those slim cameras do fit nicely in your pocket.

Van Der Veken’s juxtaposition of retro and ultra-modern is seamless. He fuses past and present into an image that comments on our own era while reaching back to artistic styles and designs of the 1950s. Van Der Veken’s young skiers are thoroughly modern, and there’s no better way to depict a couple of 2010 than to include the technological gadgets that we can’t seem to do without.
It would be pointless to lament about how disconnected people are when they are together and connected, not to each other, but to their iPhones, Panasonic Lumixes, and Blackberries.
But that is how we function nowadays, whether we like it or not. While iPhones may be useless while wearing gloves, they may come in handy when it comes to finding directions to the ski lodge or, God forbid, in an emergency situation. A true vacation for some would be to go offline for days on end; for others, the prospect of that would be nightmarish.
Van Der Veken’s mountaintop scene, however, is not a nightmarish vision, but one of splendid semi-isolation.

_Pollux writes_:
It’s not just out with the old and in with the new. The old are condemned to hard labor for all eternity, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill.
“Ivan Brunetti’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Brunetti trademark egg-headed, stick-legged little people appear as lab technicians on the January 4, 2010 cover of _The New Yorker_. The cover, called “Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New,” gives us a twist on the old iconography associated with New Year’s.
In Brunetti’s vision, Baby New Year is being manufactured and readied by hard-working scientists, mathematicians, data analysts, and technicians.
Father Time, meanwhile, who is associated with the older, passing year, is unhappily mopping the floor of the manufacturing plant. 2009 was a year that will forever be associated with economic woes; perhaps Brunetti’s Father Time has found that he cannot retire comfortably. He must keep on working. Despite his experience, he is at the bottom of the ladder at the factory.
Will the same fate await Baby New Year 2010? The year 2009 was once full of hope and energy too, until economic and political challenges added wrinkles and gray hair to its once youthful frame.
Brunetti’s technicians, perhaps fueled by hopes of green jobs and economic recovery, work hard to ensure that 2010 will be a good year.
However, despite their best, most scientific efforts, other forces will be at work in the coming year as well: chance, chaos, divine intervention, randomness, serendipity, and fate. It’s a new year: may it be a happy one.