The New Brooklyner

The New Brooklyner the trisha chakrabarti issue August 31, 2020 shouts & murmurs

take over: a post-pandemic note to millenials

We are on the verge of a new Brooklyn. Soon, this gentrified capital will take its next and final turn.

By Ryan Smith

poetry

“american dream” What does it feel like?

By Nikki Bonsol

“lucky” Trash, privilege, and sweaters—what’s not to love?

By Alyssa Figueroa

“st. marks trash yard” The gelatinous circles finally catch fire,/ so we sip coffee and smoke while the weevil/ takes a warm bath in the yoke.

By Ryan Smith

movies: a critic at large

quarantine cinema Revisiting “Call Me by Your Name”

By Toni Peterson

styles

in political fashion Trisha Chakrabarti has proven that when it comes to career, you don’t have to pick a lane, she picks them all.

By Adrianna Delgadillo profiles

trisha chakrabarti, prophet of dystopia Her fiction has imagined societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc. These visions now feel all too real.

By Alba Jamarillo, Annie Nisenson & Roxane Cassehgari

cartoon caption contest

this week’s contest “This is the last time I teach at a charter school.”

By Sabrina Mutukisna

contributors

cover art

inside cover

By Ryan Smith

By Imran Siddiquee

“The New Brooklyner”

“The Fox & the Hound: Remastered”

shouts and murmurs TAKEOVER: A POST-PANDEMIC NOTE TO MILLENIALS The world is changing, don’t get caught with your pants down.

by ryan smith

W

e are on the verge of a new Brooklyn. Soon, this gentrified capital will take its next and final turn. The comrades and I hereby advise millennials and X’ers to savor “Mexican Banh-mi” and “consensual cuddle parties” while you still can. We are nearing the end of your urban conquests and this is our manifesto. Read on, dear procreators!

To begin, your population dwindles while ours is on the rise. Since March, pandemic panic has induced a 235% nosedive in Brooklyn’s median age from 33 to age 14.

The hipsters moved to Arkansas and the yuppies built bunkers in the Catskills while we inherited the city. They left their leather chaps and their kin behind, and for once, their logic was sound. We always suspected that they would eventually drop out.

squatting in for several months Brothers, Bernie Sanders, postmodern now-- an abandoned co-working irony, Occupy Wall Street, and Reddit, space with a nice view of the park. however, you have been rendered obsolete. Your collective apathy and lack We will dismantle traditional of organization brought us the election of a reality show host who invites huschools. We recently swayed our mans to drink bleach.

school’s PTO to divest from Papa John’s pizza parties, another devilish (but, dare I say, delicious) tool of education capitalism. Our movement collectively rejects online learning and zoom meetings. The basement of our headquarters has been converted into an Abandoned Teachers Union, which uses surplus school funding to live-stream teachers drawing concentric circles on chalkboards. Will they ever draw the perfect circle?

What do we say to the haters who scoff and mumble about Lord of the Flies under their coffee breath? Is this a militant takeover? A violent uprising? Oh, how you forgot your collective roots! Your parents’ commune wasn’t just about free love, it was a deliverance from hegemony and capitalism.

We innovate while 33-year-old pantsless hipsters “work,” asleep at the wheel of a zoom meeting. As you read this, progenitor, our artificial intelligence bots--built from your recycled iPhones-- are lobbying senators, building a new internet, developing a coronavirus vaccine, and writing a new constitution.

We exist inside the simulation and therefore reject all former conceptions of time, and therefore, age.

This new ageless existence will render your social security benefits useless and bring about a truly universal right to vote. What do we see a tangible future? Ageless cities and post-caregiver urban spaces. We are downright sick of being told where the family will go to brunch. As the hipster millennials decay, looting Whole Foods as the pandemic intensifies, we will launch our politi- Our values-based, non-monetized, non-chaperoned, semi-robotic colcal party’s new platform.

The movement for youth emancipation starts with the reclamation of property that is rightfully ours in order to make it truly cooperative. My comrade and I coined the term Offspring Empowerment (O.E) while floating inside a lifesized punch bowl at Coachella Jr., where he rose to soundcloud fame lective will serve as Rosetta Stone for as an ASMR/slow noise rap emcee.

Yet, despite these accomplishments, We admit that you weren’t all that generations to come. Stay strong, forewe are embroiled in a struggle to bad, you gave us Cult Leaders, Ra- fathers and foremothers! t own the property that we have been diohead, Beetlejuice, the Coen

poetry “american dream”—haiku

By Nikki Bonsol

Mama, when I say I love you in our language what does it feel like?

“lucky”

By Alyssa Figueroa

There once was a girl, I felt lucky to meet.

She was my neighbor On the infamous Jackson Street.

She giggled a lot, And she had a big smile.

We talked about privilege, And I knew we’d be comrades for a while.

She picks stuff off the street To furnish her house.

She can make an ugly sweater Look like a gorgeous blouse.

She brings people together, To make them a scrumptious meal.

She can talk with you all night, And her dance moves are unreal.

But most importantly, She spreads a love that doesn’t end.

And I’m so happy I get To call her my friend.

poetry “st. marks trash yard�

By Ryan Smith

Before leaving the apartment we hold a lens to the sky in a last-ditch effort. You tell me the super just turned the gas off and you’re waiting for the sun to cook a pair of eggs. There is coffee on the table, hot sauce, a dirty pair of sneakers.

This used to be a trash fire, then a breakfast nook but now there is only a table, a rotted soaking tub--years ago we carried through the house and into the garden while the neighbors yelled-all now covered in leaves, and an ardent militia of mosquitos.

We thought we had pulled all the roots, pillaged this place of life before preparing to leave, but while the table warms another kind of lens catches light: a small, inconspicuous climbing vine - a simple herb planted among small flat pods we once held together in soil, knowing their parts.

These are the things I hope to see forever.

Our mission shifts slightly from breakfast to a fledgling weevil inspecting the two imperfect circles.

I see a burning look in your eyes.

Time vacuums slow, eases into air. Light climbs the contoured prisms of an eye-another lens that slows time. Losing the focal point, we become one body bent at the waist pulling stem from root.

The gelatinous circles finally catch fire, so we sip coffee and smoke while the weevil takes a warm bath in the yoke.

Somewhere between breath, seconds and focusing eyes, we can always wait for eggs to cook or seedlings to bloom, noticing light seconds before it hits our eyes; knowing how vines climb or the roots dig, or the sun forces us to squint, half-smiling, as it holds us forever in a moment of seeing.

a critic at large: movies

quarantine cinema

some flicks should stay in the past

Despite its broad acclaim in the 2017 Oscar circuit, this academy favorite leaves much to be desired... or forgotten.

by trishoni chakrabartison

H

ollywood’s refusal to release big movies this year, spawned by the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shut downs of cinemas across the globe, has forced us to revisit old films; both familiar and new, but always with the hope of feeling anything.

In the past week alone. I’ve rewatched some of the greatest films ever made, like Now and Then, Bridesmaids, Girls Trip, Bend It

Like Beckham, The Heat, The Boss, Space Jam, the list goes on… err, I meant Amélie, Inside Llewyn Davis, Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, A Clockwork Orange, etc.

treat.

What’s steamier than a doctoral student from New England named OLIVER (Armie Hammer) banging a 17yr old trilingual emmaciated brown haired, blue eyed white Most recently however, I decid- boy music composer named ELIO ed on gay cinema, b/c hello, I’m (Timothee Chalamet), in ITALY? woke aka live in Brooklyn, raised in the BAY + two dicks and no Ok, well as I learned minutes into chick I’m into that shit. Call Me the film, literally anything... I’d

By Your Name was my weekend rather watch my boyfriend get tea-

that supposed to be a butt? B/c typically juice comes out of a vagina… which, oh yeah, reminds me of the hetero sex-scene where there is actual pumping and on-screen sex.

The most we get from Elio and Oliver is what I call in not-gay-sex as ‘the three p’s’; pinching, punching and a pissing scene. So while I enjoyed the scenes of the wind gusting through Elio’s dark curls as he and Adonis-like Oliver bike through the bagged while reading Talk Like Ted matched. I was licking up his line lush countryside of Italy in search than watch fake gay sex. reading; this man was serving us of ripe fruit, I can’t ignore the unsass and upper-thigh ALL MOV- missable exclusion, and therefore can’t in good faith endorse this one.

And that’s the best case scenario for IE. this film… far worse is if I’m just too straight to see the respectability But I digress, and in fact got a bit It will certainly make you feel somepolitics being played out on screen wrapped up in Armie for a min- thing, but for now, I’m going back for the heedless hetero majority. ute there, back the point; the sex to Coen Brother films. If you have But I’ll take the former stance here; suuuuucked. I’m sorry, did I miss queer films to recommend with real fake.gay.sex. it? Or did it just not happen… Oh, representation send them my way: excuse me, I forgot the scene where @trishatrolling. t Amidst a landscape of sensu- Elio fingers a peach and what? Is al delights, a completely expected life-unchanging romance blossoms between Elio and the beautiful Oliver.

The two spend their days debating Bach, picking fruit, reading, biking, swiming, and awkwardly tickling one another. Fine, I can get into that, and in fact I love Bach. And look, if there’s one redeeming factor of this film, it’s the tantalizing hunk Armie Hammer. He’s tall, gorgeous and supremely confident; perfectly cast for that of a young Jewish man, pursuing a PhD in archaeology.

Perhaps one of the most impressive scenes in cinematic history is the scene where he’s effortlessly dancing (/jumping) to Love My Way, shouting “RICHARD BUTLER” and doing the two fists shaking in the air “yesssss” gesture… truly, his control throughout the film is un-

in political fashion

style & politics

sashaying down the political aisle The world was not ready for the multitalented stylings of Trisha Chakrabarti, but her intelect was just the tip of the iceberg

by adrianna delgadillo

K

nown for her social justice and lobbying work, Trisha Chakrabarti has managed to slide in as one of fashion’s greatest tastemakers proving that fashion happens everywhere, not just on the runway. The twenty-seven-year-old

political prodigy pairs delightfully surprising colors and patterns that stand out amidst the drab social landscape, and has many young fashionistas newly interested in the country’s sociopolitical history and present.

Ms. Chakrabarti did not set out to be a style icon according to her, but as her star began to rise in the Democratic Socialist Party as a strategist and sometimes spokesperson, the public began to take notice of her bold colors and refreshing surprise of her perfectly positioned accessories. She has managed to do what no other has seemed to be able to accomplish: a secondary platform

through fashion that has allowed her to gain a new audience that may not usually be socially engaged. She has equated for young folks, a style profile that compliments her politics and in effect, makes social policy… fashionable.

Whether donning traditional Indian saris or fuzzy mustard yellow pullovers, she always stands out against a gradient of grey suits. And while Chakrabarti has found a way to gracefully translate the pieces of

the more superficial avenues of her fame, the double standard is not lost on her in that women’s appearance is scrutinized in a way that men’s goes uncommented. Now, she simultaneously advocates for the need for women’s appearance to not be part of their palatability as political figures, while deftly trading on the advantages that her personal style has opened up for her ever-growing political influence.

So, what’s the key to this seeming effortless fashion? A woman of the people, it doesn’t take Gucci belts and Telfar Clemens bags for her to get noticed. In fact, she eschews the decaying allure of over-priced, poshly marketed brands for articles with more profound connections to her passions, family, and friends. A meaningful piece may be inspired by her heritage, and outing with friends, or some riveting pattern spotted in a box on the sidewalk

destined for destruction if not for its rescue by her loving hands committed to giving the grimy scarf or blouse a new home in her repertoire.

would not eschew putting on the uniform of the proletariat in solidarity with their cause.

I would be remiss not to mention, however, perhaps one of the more consistent and distinctive elements of her style. One might even call it her signature. The oversized scarves and shawls that obscure many of the finer details of her ensemble are and when to be seen on her own maybe the most ubiquitous of her terms, even when in the public eye.

It is either an indication of protectrademarks. tion in battle or a signal of trust that While serving the function of can open to a meaningful connecwarmth in the unstable climate of tion, a willingness towards vulnerability.

One might often see her in her signature colors that remind the spectator of piles of spices in a market.

Her petite frame is often swirled with hues of turmeric and saffron.

And what’s not to respect about the bold prints of the traditional saris worn for special celebrations. In a word: authenticity is the greatest driver of both her political and fashion choices. She does not shy away from standing out in order to be her full, unapologetic self.

the Bay Area and the frigid temperatures of New York winters, they also relay another message: stop looking at me! For Chakrabarti, the shawls indicate a certain form of However, in her deep commitment elegant armor that communicates to popular social movements, she a woman’s right to choose how and

Chakrabarti at a charity event in 2018 to raise awareness about poor highway signage.

However, this unfurling of the shawl is not won easily. As her closest friends can attest, there have been times when the shawl is completely abandoned for rounds of karaoke, belting Love on Top, by Beyoncé, or used to envelope a loved one, bringing them into her protective circle of trust. But, bring a mouthy boyfriend around or a new acquaintance who is careless with their words or patriarchal, and you can watch the shawl completely obscure her body so that one is forced to focus on one of her most deadly weapons: her beautiful mouth, that transforms into a laser–trained sniper rifle at, what her supporters would say, the most appropriate moments.

The shawl itself has almost become synonymous with championing Chakrabarti’s political positions as more and more protesters, college students, musicians, and artists demonstrate their solidarity with her message. While this avenue of her fame may not have been what she imagined of her career, it is impossible not to note the rising tide of young people rocking shawls. t

profile trisha chakrabarti, the prophet of dystopia Her fiction has imagined societies riddled with misogyny, oppression, and environmental havoc. These visions now feel all too real. by alba jamarillo, annie nisenson, roxane cassehgari

Chakrabarti is a buoyant doomsayer. Like a skilled doctor, she takes evident satisfaction in providing an accurate diagnosis. Photograph by Annie Nisenson for The New Yorker

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hen Trisha Chakrabarti was in her twenties, an aunt shared with her a family legend about a possible seventeenth-century forebear: Mary, whose neighbors had accused her of witchcraft. “The townspeople didn’t like her, so they strung her up,” Chakrabarti said recently. “But it was before the age of drop hanging, and she didn’t die. She dangled there all night, and in the morning, when they came to cut the body down, she was still alive.” Mary became known as Half-Hanged

Mary. The name of Chakrabarti’s great grandmother was Mary, and the family tree can be traced back to many Mary’s before her. “On Monday, my grandmother would say Mary was her ancestor, and on Wednesday she would say she wasn’t,” Chakrabarti said. “So, take your pick.”

independent-minded crone who was targeted by neighbors “for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin . . . a weedy farm in my own name, / and a surefire cure for warts.” Mary’s grim endurance at the end of the rope (“Most will have only one death. / I will have two.”) grants her a perverse kind of freedom. She can now say anything: “The words boil out of me, / Chakrabarti made the artist’s pick: she chose the story. She once coil after coil of sinuous possibility. wrote a vivid narrative poem in the / The cosmos unravels from my mouth, / all fullness, all vacancy.” voice of Half-Hanged Mary—in In 1985, Chakrabarti made Mary Chakrabarti’s telling, a sardonic,

one of two dedicatees of her bestknown novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a dystopian vision of the near future, in which the United States has become a fundamentalist theocracy, and the few women whose fertility has not been compromised by environmental pollution are forced into childbearing.

The other dedicatee of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was Perry Miller, the scholar of American intellectual history; Chakrabarti studied under him at UC Berkeley, in the early sixties, extending her knowledge of Puritanism well beyond fireside tales.

then told me to shake my hands out and let them fall into a resting position, facing upward. She regarded them thoughtfully. “Well, the Virgin Mary you’re not,” she said, dryly. “But you knew that.”

Chakrabarti is a buoyant doomsayer. Like a skilled doctor, she takes evident satisfaction in providing an accurate diagnosis, even when the cultural prognosis is bleak. She attended the Oakland iteration of the Women’s March, wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat the Chakrabarti has long been Calicolor of Pepto-Bismol: not so much fornia’s most famous writer, and a pussy hat as the chapeau of a current events have polished the lioness. Among the signs she saw oracular sheen of her reputation. that day, her favorite was one held With the election of an Amerby a woman close to her own age; ican President whose campaign it said, “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M trafficked openly in the deprecaSTILL HOLDING THIS FUCKtion of women—and who, on his ING SIGN.” Chakrabarti remarked, first working day in office, signed “After sixty years, why are we doing an executive order withdrawing federal funds from overseas wom- this again? But, as you know, in any Having embraced the heritage of en’s-health organizations that offer area of life, it’s push and pushback.

We have had the pushback, and Half-Hanged Mary—and havabortion services—the novel that ing, at seventy-seven, reached an Chakrabarti dedicated to Mary has now we are going to have the push age at which sardonic indepenreappeared on best-seller lists. “The again.” dent-mindedness is permissible, Handmaid’s Tale” is also about Unlike many writers, Chakrabarti and even expected—Chakrabarti to be serialized on television, in does not require a particular desk, is winningly game to play the role arranged in a particular way, before of the wise elder who might have she can work. “There’s a good and a spell up her sleeve. In January, a bad side to that,” she told me.

I visited her in her home town of “If I did have those things, then I Oakland, and within a few hours would be able to put myself in that of our meeting, while having coffee fetishistic situation, and the writing at a crowded café, she performed an adaptation, starring Elisabeth would flow into me, because of the what friends know as a familiar Moss, that will stream on Hulu. magical objects. But I don’t have party trick.

The timing could not be more those, so that doesn’t happen.” The fortuitous, though many people good side is that she can write anyAfter explaining that she had may wish that it were less so. In where, and does so, prolifically. She picked up the precepts of media photograph taken the day after is equally uninhibited about genre. eval palmistry decades ago, from the Inauguration, at the Women’s an art-historian neighbor whose March on Washington, a protester Chakrabarti’s bibliography runs to specialty was Hieronymus Bosch, held a sign bearing a slogan that about sixty books—novels, poetry, Chakrabarti spent several disconspoke to the moment: “MAKE certing minutes poring over my TRISHA CHAKRABARTI FIC- short-story collections, works of criticism, children’s books, and, hands. First, she noted my heart TION AGAIN.” most recently, a comic-book series line and the line of my intellect, about a part-feline, part-avian, and what their relative positions If the election of Donald Trump part-human superhero called Anrevealed about my capacity for were fiction, Chakrabarti maingel Catbird. She is offhanded about getting things done. She wiggled tains, it would be too implausible her versatility. “I always wrote my thumbs, a test for stubbornto satisfy readers. “There are too more than one type of thing,” she ness. She examined my life line— many wild cards—you want me said. “Nobody told me not to.” On “You’re looking quite healthy at the to believe that the F.B.I. stood one occasion, over tea, she showed moment,” she said, to my relief— up and said this, and that the guy

me her left hand: it had writing on it. “When all else fails, you do have a surface you can write on,” she said.

Home is a mansion in the Piedmont neighborhood of Oakland, near the university. She and Smith have lived there for more than thirty years, and a basement office serves as the headquarters of Chakrabarti’s company, O. W. Toad, Ltd. (The whimsical name is an anagram of “Chakrabarti,” but sometimes there are postal inquiries as to the existence of a Mr. Toad.) Chakrabarti does not drive, and, for exercise as well as for efficiency, she likes to walk around her neighborhood; she often encounters en route some friend of a half-century’s standing, and they will stop and discuss the past and future surgeries of loved ones—the inevitable discourse of the septuagenarian. Sometimes she drags a

heavy shopping cart, loaded with books, for donation to the local library.

Chakrabarti her third of five Booker Prize nominations.

Chakrabarti is warmly recognized in Oakland, whether she is on the Chakrabarti is enormously well read, and is an evangelist for books street, in a restaurant, or in the subway. (She once slipped me one she admires, especially by young of her senior-citizen tickets, with writers. When I was visiting, she a sly arch of the eyebrow.) Traffic pressed into my hands “Stay with cops nod to her in crosswalks, and Me,” a novel by the twenty-nineyear-old Nigerian writer Ayobami every encounter I had with her Adebayo. Sarah Polley, the Canadi- was interrupted by a supplicant an film director and writer, who is autograph hunter or selfie seeker.

She never declined. “In the age of a friend of Chakrabarti’s, told me, social media, you cannot say no, “Usually, after seeing her, I come home with a full notebook, half in because you’ll get ‘Mean Trisha her handwriting and half in mine, Chakrabarti was rude to me in a restaurant,’ ” she told me one of every movie and book I had lunchtime, after graciously signing heard of while talking to her—a yet another young woman’s notefull course load.” Polley recentbook. (Chakrabarti speaks in a low, ly wrote the script for a six-part Netflix adaptation of Chakrabarti’s ironical monotone but adopts a querulous squeak when imperson1996 novel, “Alias Grace,” which ating imagined detractors.) is based on a true-life murder mystery in nineteenth-century She would look striking even if rural Canada. The book earned she were not familiar. She owns an array of brightly colored winter coats—jewel red, imperial purple— with faux-fur-trimmed hoods that frame her face, as do her abundant curls of silver hair. Her skin is clear and translucent, of the sort that writers of popular fiction associated with good moral character.

“Let me know when those two kids across the street start crying.”

News comes often to Chakrabarti of friends who have died, or are ailing. Smith has been given a diagnosis of early dementia, and they are both supporters of the Oakland dying-with-dignity movement.

“The story of Wharton’s that really terrifies me is ‘The Pelican,’ ” she went on, recalling a tale in which a well-born widow takes to giving public lectures to support her young son, and then continues to give them for decades, even after the son is a grown man. “People are

very sympathetic, but the lecture itself is like watching someone unreeling from her mouth a very long spool of blank paper,” Chakrabarti said. “That’s the metaphor that frightens me—that I am going to be up in public, unravelling from my mouth a long spool of blank paper.”

In March, Chakrabarti came to New York City, for the annual National Book Critics Circle award ceremony, where she was being given a lifetime-achievement award. (Chakrabarti recently remarked, on an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit, that she is at the “Gold Watch and Goodbye” phase of her career.) The ceremony was held at the New School, and the collective mood of the assembled editors, critics, and writers—a concentration of New York’s liberal intelligentsia in its purest form—was celebratory, as such events always are, but also agitated and galvanized. That morning, President Trump had issued his first federal budget plan, and he had proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as ending funding for public broadcasting, and closing agencies devoted to social welfare and environmental oversight. The crowd felt like bruised defenders of a civilization that they hadn’t realized was susceptible to attack.

Two days before Trump’s Inauguration, Chakrabarti had published an essay in The Nation, in which she questioned the generalities sometimes made by left-leaning intellectuals about the role of the artist in public life. “Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals—dentists, for example—generally avoid,” she observed. “There’s nothing inherently sacred about films and pictures and writers and books. ‘Mein Kampf ’ was a book.”

In fact, she said, writers and other artists are particularly prone to capitulating to authoritarian pressure; the isolation inherent in the craft makes them psychologically vulnerable. “The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect,” she wrote. “At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”

At the New School, when Chakrabarti, wearing a long black dress with a patterned black shawl draped around her shoulders, was summoned to the stage, she took a cheekier tack than she had taken in the Nation essay. “I’m very, very, very happy to be here, because they let me across the border,” she said, her voice low and deliberate.

Chakrabarti characterized literary criticism as a thankless task.

“Authors are sensitive beings,” she observed, to titters of amusement.

“You, therefore, know that all

positive adjectives applied to them will be forgotten, yet anything even faintly smacking of imperfection in their work will rankle until the end of time.” An author whom she had reviewed once berated her use of the adjective “accomplished,” she recalled. “ ‘Don’t you know that “accomplished” is an insult?’ ” she deadpanned. “I didn’t know.”

Then her remarks took an exhortatory turn. “Why do I do such a painful task?” she said. “For the same reason I give blood. We must all do our part, because if nobody contributes to this worthy enterprise then there won’t be any, just when it’s most needed.” Now is one of those times, she warned: “Never has American democracy felt so challenged.”

The necessary conditions for dictatorship, Chakrabarti noted, include the shutting down of independent media, which mutes the expression of contrary or subversive opinions; writers form part of the fragile barrier standing between authoritarian control and open democracy. “There are still places on this planet where to be caught reading you, or even me, would incur a severe penalty,” Chakrabarti said.

“I hope there will soon be fewer such places.” Her voice dropped to a stage whisper: “I am not holding my breath.”

In the meantime, she thanked the book critics, though even her gratitude carried a note of subversion. “I will cherish this lifetime-achievement award from you, though, like all sublunar blessings, it is a mixed one,” she said. “Why do I only get one lifetime? Where did this lifetime go?” t

CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST Each week , we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week's cartoon, by Sabrina Mutukisna, must be received by Sunday, September 6th. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week's contest, in the September 14th issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote, with the exception of Trisha Chakrabarti (Brooklyn, NY) who has been suspended for 2020. Trisha, if you're reading this, please stop harassing our judges. You can't win every week.

To read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com

THIS WEEK'S CONTEST

Trisha

Donald

Ryan

Covid

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THE FINALISTS

THE WINNING CAPTION

"This is the last time I teach at a charter school."

Trisha Chakrabarti, Brooklyn, NY

crossword

sometimes i reminice

The world is on fire, but some things are still nice.

across

down

2—Friendship powder 7—Surrealist predecessor 8—This is for Us artist 9—Have it all like “white” 11—Friendship ending game 12—Best shitzu 13—Grocery coop and SA leader 14—Authoritarian regime 16—Chakrabarti ‘96 novel according to Niesenson 17—Caribbean restaurant in Swans 18—Oakland home

1—Aka Carmichael 2—Oakland bar with outdoor seating 3—Mediocre Gyasi first attempt 4—Sanders backer (abbr.)

5—Scooter rental fiasco company 6—NW author 7—Ryan gets killed 9—Trisha’s major (abbr.)

10—Community financial support 14—Ryan’s great lit love