This Week’s New Yorker Cover Is Peak Brooklyn
The brilliant cover in question
via newyorker.com
Was it only just last week that I sucked it up and shelled out a hundred bucks in order to subscribe to The New Yorker for another year, an annual decision which leaves me a little poorer but much richer in quality reading material for the bathroom, the subway, and… yeah, mostly those two places? Yes! Yes, it was. And already I’m congratulating myself on this financial decision because this week’s Adrian Tomine cover, titled “Recognition,” is one of the funniest comments on Brooklyn, writers, dads, and Brooklyn writers who are dads in a very long time.
As pictured above, Tomine depicts what has to be a common occurrence in the parts of Brooklyn that are both parent- and writer- and stoop-saturated, namely that a gleeful child points out to her father that his life’s work is literally garbage. Tomine explains that the cover concept is lightly self-satirizing: “I’ve had the experience of seeing stacks of New Yorkers with my cover out on the street, though I haven’t seen my books put out—but then, I also don’t have a giant photo of myself on the back cover.” And he clearly isn’t over-thinking the whole phenomenon of what it would actually be like to see your face on the street, next to unwanted, scuffed shoes, and a standing fan with a “Works Just Fine” sign taped to its front, but, well, I am overthinking it to the point in which I am sitting at my desk quietly laughing at the sheer number of Brooklyn male writers—particularly the white and bespectacled ones—who just got massively subtweeted on the cover of a magazine to which most of them only aspire to be included, but in which some of them have been included, and yet from which they still get no respect. Lol. Happy Monday, everyone.
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen
