“From ‘The New York Times Magazine,’ this is ‘Behind the Cover.’” “I’m Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief.” “And I’m Gail Bichler, design director.” “Our cover story this week is actually two stories, and they’re about the GOP effort to really take over the federal judiciary under Trump. Obviously, this is a very serious topic, but we wanted a cover that just made it lively.” “We love working with Matt Dorfman because he’s been able to bring wit to concepts that could otherwise be pretty dry. Matt gave us a number of different sketches. We ended up narrowing it down to two. We love the judge’s robe with the cap.” “But it implies these judges are die-hard Trump supporters, and that’s just not fair.” “Yeah.” “But it’s funny.” “It is funny.” [both laugh] “Then there’s this image of the elephant. Everybody in the office who saw it just immediately started to laugh.” “It’s a little bit absurd.” “That’s right.” “Normally, when we approach a topic that has a lot of clichéd visuals attached to it, we try and avoid those visuals. But somehow, Matt was able to use pretty much all of them and come up with something new.” “You kind of can’t take your eyes off of it.” “Yeah.” “And that’s what we like.” [jazz music]