How the cover gets made

① “Our cover story is an interview with the president.”

“What’s the interview about?”

“It touches on a few different things, like his daughters and what he would do in the private sector, but mostly it’s about the economy.”

“It’s funny to think of Obama having a normal job. Maybe the cover should be his hypothetical résumé. It could have all these boring bullet points, and at the bottom it could look like he scrawled something at the last minute, something like ‘P.S. Folks, I helped save the gosh darn economy, OK? Now gimme this dumb temp job, please!’ It would be funny, because it makes him seem weird and desperate like the rest of us.”

“Maybe we should take a photo of him, since he agreed to a shoot.”

“Ah, I wasn’t expecting that, based on our track record.”