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DECEMBER 19TH 2020

Cover Story
How we chose this week’s image

This week we publish our end-of-year double issue, containing 19 special

features (and an online quiz) to light up your holidays. It is the one time
our cover image has nothing to do with our main editorial, which is on—
what else?—the dread coronavirus.

The uncoupling of cover and leader allows us to have some fun. Usually,
we pick one article and hint at a few of the others in the illustration. This
time we decided to create a treasure hunt, by alluding to every one of the
19 features in the main image—Easter eggs at Christmas, if you will.

For the main design we picked our account of Mars, which follows
NASA’s Curiosity rover on its travels. Many people have spent too much
of 2020 confined to their own homes, avoiding the coronavirus. The great
outdoors was not enough of a contrast. How much better to transport
them halfway across the solar system to enjoy panoramic views of the
southern highlands from the desert plains of Mars.

Here are a couple of sketches of our Martian adventurer.

In one we had a Christmas tree made of aerials and other bits of space kit,
but the other, on the right, was better. We asked our CGI wizard to work
it up.

Next we needed to work out all how to use details to allude to each of our
features. Some of them are as obscure as a shadow, a written character or
the play of light on perspex. If you want to spot them yourself, look away
now, because here come the answers.
1. This is the astronaut with a festive star atop the spectral outline of a
Christmas tree.
2. Our essay explains why girlhood is special, difficult and better than it
used to be.
3. The rainbow sheen stands for Leo Abse, a Welsh lawyer and politician
who worked to decriminalise homosexuality.
4. Here is some dazzle camouflage to illustrate a piece on military
deception.
5. Stand back and squint and you will spot the ghostly image of Abraham
Lincoln, who features in our story on the Reconstruction era.
6. With its diseased bite, this blighter has changed humanity.
7. These characters can be found at the Shaolin monastery where the
stories about a “CEO monk” obscure the complex business of faith in
China.
8. An easy one: a pebble, for a story about the lure of pebbles.
9. An obscure one: the raised texture and the stitching echoes the charts in
our piece on how data analysis can enrich the arts.
10. The Zululand coat of arms heralds our article on a deal done in the
dying days of apartheid that still afflicts South Africa.
11. We publish a history of home-working, so here is an astronaut sitting
under his suburban roof.
12. Our build-your-own-bauble and our fiendish crossword are
represented by 7—across or down, the choice is yours.
13. The hiking culture in South Korea reflects its social pressures—and
offers a reprieve from them.
14. Given the peach-coloured background of this spacesuit, you’re going
to have to work hard to pick out the apricot that symbolises life in a
French village.

15. Another tricky one. We have a feature on a Russian scientist’s grand

plan to repopulate the Arctic with large grazing animals. If you imagine
the two tubes as a mammoth’s tusks, can you see the shadow as its head?
16. In an earlier age the newsfeed was refreshed once a year, by post. At
least you had time to think.
17. Erasmus was a champion of moderation who had the misfortune to
live in a revolutionary era. We add to a long tradition of finding human
faces in Martian rock.
18. Economists are rediscovering Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the
first African-American to earn a PhD in their discipline.
19. A map of Sidney Street in London, site of a gunfight in 1911 between
the police and army and some Latvian revolutionaries.

So that’s it: 19 covers in one. Now, as we all take a week off, our
exhausted designer can at last catch his breath.

I hope you thoroughly enjoy both our double issue and your well-earned
holiday.

Cover image

• View large image (“Christmas double issue”)

Zanny Minton Beddoes

Editor-In-Chief