Port Lockroy. The bones of giants are left over from years of large-scale whale-hunting operations in Antarctica. Since their flesh was rendered to make candles up until the nineteenth century, the invention of the electric lightbulb may well have saved the whales. 

Last month, we blogged about the yearlong trip that the photographer Magda Biernat and her husband, the illustrator Ian Webster, are taking from Antarctica to Alaska. We checked in with them last week, after the first stop of their journey—Antarctica. “Antarctica is contradictory: the world’s largest desert covered with frozen water, seemingly barren but teeming with wildlife,” Magda and Ian told me. “Antarctica is severe and dramatic. It’s hard not to wonder at its perfect stillness, but just as the silence becomes overwhelming a violent outburst occurs, like calving glaciers, the very occasional exploding iceberg, or a pod of orcas surfacing. It is the most unusual, dreamlike landscape we’ve ever seen. It was overwhelming, and we only touched a very small part of an entire continent.”

Click-through for a selection of Magda’s Antarctica photographs, with captions from the couple: http://nyr.kr/YaKwoX

Danco Island, Errera Channel. A gentoo penguin uses one of the penguin highways to make its way to the water. Penguins roost exclusively on bare rocks, severely limiting the number of potential nesting sites and making for long commutes. 

He whittled down wooden blocks to make a whole bunch of pens, matchboxes, postcards. He made speech bubbles with quarter-inch wood, geometric shapes, notebooks, all drawn upon and painted with ink and wax crayons. Then he’d glue them to large sheets of wood, making dioramas of his life…

- Anton von Dalon, speaking about his friend, the artist Saul Steinberg.  Steinberg’s “Union Square, 1973” is featured on the cover of this week’s issue. Click-through for more on the artist, and for a slideshow featuring some of the 87 New Yorker covers he published in his lifetime: http://nyr.kr/QWcgjT

The New York-based photographer Jason Nocito, who made Kid Rock’s portrait for Kelefa Sanneh’s piece in last week’s issue, is holding the first gallery exhibit of his project “I Heart Transylvania” in San Francisco’s Little Big Man Gallery. The series, Nocito said, is meant to evoke a particular period of his life: the time he spent in Vancouver with his long-distance girlfriend, Meghan, before she moved to New York City and married him. It’s “a love letter to her,” he said, “and a thank you for showing me that beauty, love, and honesty can exist.” Here’s a look at “I Heart Transylvania,” which has also been published as a monograph by Dashwood Books: http://nyr.kr/10nL1Px

(Source: newyorker.com)

On Wednesday evening, the Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael accepted the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant for Humanistic Photography in a ceremony at the School of Visual Arts. The grant is awarded to support and encourage a photographer working in the spirit of the legendary photojournlaist, and van Agtmael plans to use the thirty-thousand-dollar grant to build on “Disco Night September 11,” his ongoing project on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences in the United States. “As an American of the generation shouldering these wars, I feel a strong responsibility to document their cost,” van Agtmael said.

Click-through for more from Elissa Curtis on van Agtmael, and a slide show of van Agtmael’s images, along with those of Massimo Berruti, who won the W. Eugene Smith fellowship to continue his work on Pakistan. “The Dusty Path,” Berruti said, is a project “about a nation trapped between violence and political corruption. A trembling giant on the brink of a deep abyss.” Also included is work by Michael Christopher Brown, Bharat Choudhary, Jon Lowenstein, Justin Maxon, Ami Vitale, Farzana Wahidy, and Robert Yager, who were all finalists for these grants. See the slideshow.

See a slideshow of some of the great New Yorker town-hall cartoons of the past: http://nyr.kr/Rz8tEb

Could this year’s Presidential debates possibly be as funny as a New Yorker debate cartoon? Click-through to see the cartoon slide show, watch the debates, and judge by your own laughter: http://nyr.kr/VhmoUR

And be sure to join New Yorker writers and editors for our debate live chat.

Cartoon of the night. For more cartoons from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/HiL0ol

(Source: newyorker.com)

Though the photojournalist Lynsey Addario recently relocated to New Delhi, she spends very little time at home; she’s best known for her work as a conflict photographer, moving between global hotspots such as Afghanistan, Congo, and Darfur. In August, we asked her to look at the TB crisis in India for Michael Specter’s story in the current issue. In the northeastern province of Bihar, Addario visited the crowded neighborhoods of Patna, the TB and AIDS clinics at the Medical College Hospital, and the private clinics on Hospital Road in Darbhanga. Here is a slide show of what she saw, with narration by Specter.