I was just transported to another universe, an alternate reality. Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I just traveled through time, thanks to the electronic version of a satirical New York Times edition distributed outside subway stations this morning.

Today’s “Times” looks like any other—that familiar layout, the reassuring masthead, the names of the usual columnists along the right-hand sidebar—except that the headlines are unlike any I’ve seen:

IRAQ WAR ENDS.

NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE ACT PASSES.

CONGRESS RETURNS CIVICS TO HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM.

Hold it. What? I did a double take and realized the date at the top of the page reads “July 4, 2009.” I clicked around to see what else the future holds.

An ad from Exxon (at right) blares PEACE can be lucrative, while an ad from American Apparel, complete with topless model, flashes: We’ve been very very naughty. But now we are unionizing our employees. Because we care about what they have to say, as well as what they look like.* (The asterisk corresponds with a note at the bottom: Due to new Federal Regulations.)

A sign appears in the model’s hand. It reads “I have a VOICE too.”

Curiouser and curiouser, I clicked on the video link and learned that 1.2 million copies of this special edition were printed at six different presses, then distributed by thousands of volunteers across the city last night. And it has lots of people asking questions like “Why not?” and “What’s possible?”

Gawker has a story about the “longtime liberal prank group” responsible for this. Apparently they’ve been working on it for more than a year!

The site’s fine print encourages readers to “begin to make the news in this paper the news in every paper” by volunteering with or starting progressive organizations around a number of causes. I’d add that if you decide to volunteer with an existing organization, you can search through more than 81,000 of them on Idealist; if you want to start one of your own, you can use our Nonprofit FAQ as a guide.