Instagram’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoons of 2018

The end of a year is an excellent time to take stock of the things you’ve done over the past twelve months. Did you grow and learn important truths about life, and who you are? Did you take meaningful steps toward accomplishing your hopes and dreams? Did you look at your phone a bunch? The first two are a bit tougher, so, if you only did the phone thing, don’t beat yourself up about it too much. If you were looking at your phone a bunch, you may well have been using an app called Instagram. I have learned, after doing extensive research, that Instagram lets users show things to others and look at things others show them. I definitely used Instagram a lot to post photos of things, and like photos of things. And it seems like you did, too, given the popularity of the cartoons posted by @newyorkercartoons.

2018 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s best.

In 2018, the most popular cartoons ranged in subject matter from dogs to cats, from parents to children, and from normal, emotionally balanced people to Donald Trump. They spanned a wide range of dates, too—the most popular cartoon on Instagram, by Peter Steiner, was originally published in 1990, which is quite a throwback, even if it wasn’t posted on a Thursday. And numerous new cartoons were extremely popular, too—twenty-eight years from now, they may well appear in an end-of-the-year roundup of the most popular New Yorker cartoon posts on an app that’s like Instagram but is controlled by either our evil machine overlords or our evil human overlords. Either way, I hope that the evil overlords will treat me nicely, because I alone predicted their existence. I’d like to make another prediction: if you take a look through the cartoons below, you’ll enjoy them. If you don’t, please pick a fight with all the people who did, in the comments below each post.