A NYT Glitch Appears to Have Punched Kamala Harris and MTG in the Mouth

Sharp-eyed readers of The Morning, The New York Time‘s daily A.M. newsletter, may have noticed something rather comically amiss today over their morning coffee, provided that their phone or web browser happened to have certain settings applied. Those reading on desktop probably just saw the article as intended: “Who’s Running in 2028?”, a wide-ranging consideration of the vast field of potential candidates for the Democratic and Republican nominations for the Presidency, with each candidate represented by a small, circular portrait. Those reading the same newsletter on their mobile device, however, saw something notably different if that device was set on Dark Mode: Kamala Harris and Marjorie Taylor Greene both looking like they had suffered from a serious dental misadventure. The gap-toothed image seen above is how each of their portraits loaded for users viewing the newsletter in Dark Mode.

This is, first and foremost, mildly amusing on the level of a visual gag–they look like lost members of the Little Rascals cast, or like they’re working on makeup for hobo Halloween costumes. But at the same time, you sort of have to wonder: Why these two, specifically? Does someone in The New York Times design department want to head off any accusations of partisan bias in their schoolyard graffiti by drawing from both the left and right sides of the aisle? Why no gap-toothed gentlemen? What, do we not deserve the “doodling on the portrait of someone you dislike in the school yearbook” treatment? I want to see curly mustaches and eyepatches, damnit.

The NYT newsletter in question quietly received a correction at the bottom of the page this morning, acknowledging the error: “Because of a technical glitch, some images in an earlier version of this newsletter appeared with errors when viewed in Dark Mode. The images have been updated to fix the issue.” Nevertheless, the gap-toothed images remain visible for me in the already delivered version of the newsletter still sitting in my inbox.

So, are we buying the “technical glitch” line? It certainly seems like quite a coincidence that the only visual problem in the entire newsletter happened to precisely land on the narrow white strip of teeth possessed by Harris and MTG–whose recent attempt at a face turn, by the way, should not be entertained by any serious people. The New York Times designers certainly can’t pretend that it was an organic error that simply affected any widely exposed grins: There’s even more teeth being flashed in the article/newsletter by potential candidates such as Doug Burgum, Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Wes Moore, and none of their mouths ended up looking like they’d just taken a ball-peen hammer to them. I mean, look at the MTG one in particular, how it’s off-centered with the perfect comic flair for maximum absurdity. It’s pretty hard to imagine that as anything short of intentional.

A statement from a New York Times spokesperson to Jezebel/Splinter said the following, regarding the error: “There was a problem with how phones render images in ‘dark mode.’ The whitest teeth were confused with the background, and the phone darkened them. If you turn your phone off dark mode, the problem goes away. Editors have corrected the graphics and you can view the updated newsletter here.”

Regardless, at the end of the day, it’s merely an absurd-looking image, albeit of two of the country’s more prominent female politicians. The Gray Lady has bigger issues at any given moment than a gap-toothed glitch, like keeping itself from becoming just as infected by “fake news” as Trump so often claims it to be, while fending off a $15 billion defamation lawsuit from the same tantrum-prone POTUS. Maybe with so much going on, the occasional tooth pixel just slips under the radar.