New York Times not half bad on Charlie Hebdo

It’s not brimming with political insight, but this piece by Robert Mackey about the reaction to some of the cartoons in the most recent issue of Charlie Hebdo is reasonably good. The headline is accurate. He discusses the images in the context both of the surrounding text in the magazine itself (imagine that!) and of the responses of the artists themselves to the uproar. (The article unfortunately doesn’t show the issue’s cover and in fact uses that photograph of the cover overlaid with one of the cartoons from the back pages, which is highly misleading and should be corrected.) He does do the twitter-shot thing, but the tweets from Nathaniel Tapley are helpful. He also includes a link to a BuzzFeed selection of “respectful” cartoons so schmaltzy and treacly they put in sharp relief the need for Charlie Hebdo’s raw satire.