“Victor Navasky, the ex-editor and publisher of the iconic leftist weekly The Nation, author of six books on American history and media, and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, is a pillar of contemporary journalism. His latest entry, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, is a compendium of political cartoons that have rattled power brokers from Nixon to Napoleon.

Over lunch at Nick & Toni’s on New York’s Upper West Side, Navasky, 80, talked about how he got interested in cartoons while editing the political satire magazine Monocle, which he cofounded as a student at Yale Law School. In putting together the magazine — “a ‘leisurely quarterly,’ which means it came out twice a year” — Navasky enlisted cartoonists like Ed Sorrell and David Levine as illustrators. But it wasn’t until he took the helm of The Nation that he truly began to understand the power cartoons had to provoke.”

For more, read Elizabeth’s article on Archetypes.