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the magazine’s fondness for simultaneously sending up and embracing the stereotype of New Yorkers as sophisticated, cultured, and cosmopolitan. How does the cover read in the context, for example, of various jokes about how New Yorkers think of themselves relative to the rest of the country, such as the cover depicting the United States as two large coastlines, east and west, connected by an almost nonexistent middle?

Armed with the knowledge that the covers are not only characteristically laughing at the rest of the country but also at New Yorkers themselves, you might begin to make explicit what is implicit in the cover.

Here are some attempts at making the cover speak. Is the cover in some way a “dumb blonde” joke in which the dark woman with the pronounced beauty mark and calculating gaze participates in but also sets herself apart from some kind of national “beauty” contest? Are we being invited (intentionally or not) to invert the conventional value hierarchy of dark and light so that the dark woman—the sort that gets represented as the evil stepmother in fairy tales such as “Snow White”—becomes “the fairest of them all,” and nobody’s fool?

Let’s end this sample analysis and interpretation with two possibilities—somewhat opposed to each other, but both plausible, at least to certain audiences (East and West Coast Americans, and readers of the New Yorker). At its most serious, the New Yorker cover may speak to American history in which New York has been the point of entry for generations of immigrants, the “dark” (literally and figuratively) in the face of America’s blonde northern European legacy. Within the context of other New Yorker covers, however, we might find ourselves wishing to leaven this dark reading with comic overtones—that the magazine is also admitting, yes America, we do think that we’re cooler and more individual and less plastic than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it.

GUIDELINES FOR MAKING INTERPRETATIONS PLAUSIBLE

Laying out the data is key to any kind of analysis, not simply because it keeps the analysis accurate but because, crucially, it is in the act of carefully describing a subject that analytical writers often have their best ideas. The words you choose to summarize your data will contain the germs of your ideas about what the subject means.

All explanations and interpretations occur in a context, which functions like a lens for focusing your subject. An important part of getting an interpretation accepted as plausible is to argue for the appropriateness of the interpretive context you use, not just the interpretation it takes you to.

Look for a range of plausible interpretations rather than assuming only one right answer exists. Control the range of possible interpretations by attending carefully to context.

It is interesting and sometimes useful to try to determine from something you are analyzing what its makers might have intended. But, by and large, you are best off concentrating on what the thing itself communicates as opposed to what someone might have wanted it to communicate. Besides, intentions can rarely be known with much accuracy.

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Assignments: Making Interpretations Plausible

1. Build a Paper from Implications. Begin this assignment by making observations and drawing out implications for one of the topics below. Then use your list as the starting point for a longer paper.

Having done the preceding exercise with inferring implications, you could now make up your own list of observations and pursue implications. Make some observations, for example, about the following, and then suggest the possible implications of your observations:

• changing trends in automobiles today;

• what your local newspaper chooses to put on its front page (or editorial page) over the course of a week;

• shows (or advertisements) that appear on network television (as opposed to cable) during one hour of evening prime time; and

• advertisements for scotch whiskey in highbrow magazines.

2. Analyze a Magazine Cover by Researching an Interpretive