2 Quotes & Sayings By Oleg Atbashian
Oleg Atbashian is a Russian-American artist, UC Irvine professor, and blogger, best known for his satirical political cartoons, which have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, National Lampoon, and elsewhere. Atbashian was born in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1979. Atbashian earned his BA from San Francisco State University in 1985 and an MA from UCLA in 1988. He received his PhD from U.C
Berkeley in 1994. He has taught at UC Irvine since 1992. His work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Cartoon Art Museum at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and other venues.
Atbashian started making political cartoons on a Macintosh computer while studying for his PhD at Berkeley. He began posting his cartoons to an Internet discussion group called alt.oslo.nkp a few years later after a fellow student suggested that he post them on a newsgroup named alt.fan.comics because "it was a bad name." The suggestion worked out better than expected: "alt" was soon taken over by teenage hackers who vandalized it with pornography and obscenity before being driven off by U.S. federal courts via National Security Agency action against hacking groups such as L0pht Heavy Industries and the Legion of Doom.
As a result of this intervention "alt" became one of the earliest examples of netiquette ("netiquette" is basically Posting Etiquette on the Internet). In 2004 he released a book called The New Yorker Gets A Second Chance: An Illustrated History of The New Yorker's First 100 Years (New York: Little Brown & Co.).