Paul Blow Unpacks the Broligarchy for Colossus Magazine

Paul Blow’s lead illustration for Colossus Magazine’s “The Education of the Broligarchy” does what the best editorial illustration has always done. It reads the text, then reads past it.

The piece accompanies Blake Smith’s essay on the “Silicon Valley Canon”, the reading list of biographies, histories, novels, and theory (from Tolkien and Ayn Rand to René Girard and Clayton Christensen) that circulates among the Valley’s founders and financiers, now turning to politics. But Blow’s illustration doesn’t depict a person reading. It proposes that the books have replaced whatever was originally inside.

This is a recurring concern across Blow’s editorial work for The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, and dozens of other publications. His characters seem shaped by forces they may not fully understand.

Blow has spoken about the formative influence of Brad Holland, the American illustrator who essentially invented the modern conceptual editorial image through his New York Times Op-Ed work beginning in 1970. Holland believed that illustration should offer its own interpretation of the subject. As Blow recalled in a V&A interview, seeing Holland lecture during his student years was an epiphany. Here was an illustrator who was seen as an equal to the writers he worked with. That principle is visible throughout Blow’s career and particularly here. The tangle inside the split head isn’t a literal depiction of anything in Smith’s essay. It’s Blow’s own reading of what it means to be built from a reading list you didn’t so much choose as absorb.

“These are the books that have inspired the Broligarchy — I’ve not read one of them, but I am such a luddite,” Blow wrote on Instagram.