WaPo gets it badly, hilariously wrong.

The fine print on this cover to WaPo's free publication Express is about a "massive march" in support of women's rights:



What an embarrassment.

They tweeted an apology — "We made a mistake on our cover this morning and we’re very embarrassed. We erroneously used a male symbol instead of a female symbol" — and a visualization of how it should have looked.



That's not as good graphically. If they'd known they'd have to use that shape, I don't think they'd have gone with that idea at all. With the female symbol, you lose the centrality of the circle and the dynamism of the moving-onward arrow. You lose the symbolism of people gathering together in a circle and then marching out — shooting forward.

With the female symbol, the circle is shunted off center by the clunky cross, which absorbs too many of the little people, and they're not breaking out into a march, but fixed and planted, like a stay-at-home wife, no symbolism of progress at all. In fact, they're at cross-purposes and getting in each other's way at the jammed intersection.

No wonder WaPo got it wrong. The male symbol is a better symbol.

And quite aside from the mistake, there's the problem of constructing a circle out of lots of tiny beings. It looks like this:



IN THE COMMENTS: traditionalguy said:

Maybe the artists were still under the spell of Hillary's campaign signage posted all over the WaPo offices.

And Laslo Spatula said:

They got it right the first time.

A mass of women, drawn together by the force of One Man.

He gives them their Shape as a whole: the Shape to put in all their fears and narcissism and self-congratulation, all within the context of Him.

A herd, they have been corralled...

I am Laslo.

That called to mind the famous frontispiece for "Leviathan":



"This is the most famous picture in the history of political philosophy," writes polisci prof Larry Arnhardt.



"The king's body is composed of the human bodies of his subjects, who have their backs turned to the reader as they stare upward at the king's face.... These pictures convey visually Hobbes's teaching that a state of nature without government must become a state of war, in which human life must be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Therefore, to escape such a condition, any government is better than no government. And a highly centralized government with absolutely sovereign power is best of all."