“We don’t exist in a vacuum,” says artist Nora Krug, the designer and illustrator of a new, graphic edition of On Tyranny just released this month. Contextual details that can get lost in writing come to the fore in images - clothing, cars, the use of color or black and white: these all key us in to the historicity of his observations. It’s also important to remember that Snyder’s book dates from a particular moment in time and draws on a particular historical perspective.

Ideas about how to combat anti-democratic movements remain relevant as ever. If you’ve paid any attention to the news lately, maybe you’ve noticed that the threat has not receded. Indeed, the problem with rigid conformity to populist ideas became the subject of Snyder’s 2017 bestseller, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, “a slim volume,” Mouly and Bormes note, “which interspersed maxims such as ‘Be kind to our language’ and ‘Defend institutions’ with biographical and historical sketches.” (We posted an abridged version of Snyder’s 20 lessons that year.) On Tyrannybecame an “instant best-seller… for those who were looking for ways to combat the insidious creep of authoritarianism at home.” These books include bestsellers like Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and the controversial Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, a book whose arguments, he said, “are clearly not my effort to win a popularity contest.”

Snyder timothy on tyranny