Gleefully ferreting out deception and laughing at it. An overall spirit of irreverence arising out of the rigid white-bread conformity of the 1950s, Mad Magazine has published its last all-new edition. Today we talk with national affairs correspondent for The Nation Jeet Heer, whose new article is Mad Magazine Told the Truth About War, Advertising, and the Media. William Gaines, long term publisher of Mad, exemplified the ethos of never letting himself be intimidated by the powerful. Millions of American teens got their introduction to politics from Mad, which respected them, and young people learned they were able to participate and fight injustice. With humor. As Heer says, Mad celebrated the “sheer pleasure of chaos.” With its artistic freedom and good-natured disrespect for authority, Mad was a seedbed for a lot of today’s successful political humor. Which Donald Trump never got. Luckily the rest of us do.