The painting on the cover of this issue of The New Yorker is by Art Spiegelman, whose Maus, a two volume narrative of the Holocaust in comic-book form, was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. About the painting, Spiegelman writes: "This metaphoric embrace is my Valentine card to New York, a wish for the reconciliation of seemingly unbridgeable differences in the form of a symbolic kiss. It is a dream, of course--in no way intended as any kind of programmatic solution. The rendering of my dream is intentionally, knowingly naive, as is perhaps, the underlying wish that people closed off from one another by anger and fear--Serbs and Croats, Hindus and Muslims, Arabs and Israelis, West Indians and Hasidic Jews--could somehow just 'kiss and make up.' Though I'm a maker of graven images by profession, I respect the fact that in the real world, the world beyond the borders of my picture, a Hasidic Jew is proscribed from embracing a woman outside his sect and his family. (I won't disingenuously attempt to claim that the woman in my painting is his wife, an Ethiopian Jew.) I'm also painfully aware that the calamities facing black communities in New York cannot be kissed away. But once a year, perpaps, it's permissible, even if just for a moment, to close one's eyes, see beyond the tragic complexities of modern life, and imagine that it might really be true that 'All you need is love.'"