This platform is for sharing stories that can inspire readers to take care of things worth caring about. Unfortunately, doom comes with the territory because we are not as good at taking care of as we are at caring. Lawrence Wood offers a respite from the doom in the book to the left, excerpted below in the Atlantic. It is a reminder of one of the many options to work out that doom on a regular basis. In his case (followed by some in our own family), it is this caption contest.
Try this weekly workout yourself, or just read about how best to approach it:
How I Became the Ken Jennings of the New Yorker Caption Contest
I hold the competition’s all-time record. And I might have some insight into how you can beat me at my own game.
When my twin daughters were 10, they created an animated slideshow depicting scenes from our life. One slide showed a cartoon version of me happily daydreaming on the toilet with my pants around my ankles. Above my head they put a thought bubble that read, “New Yorker, New Yorker, New Yorker.”
This got a big laugh, and deservedly so. I have spent much of the past 25 years obsessing over that magazine’s cartoon-caption contest, in which readers compete to supply the cleverest line of dialogue to a captionless drawing. I have entered more than 900 contests, losing almost all of them. But, because I have won eight contests, and made it to the final round in seven others, I hold the all-time caption-contest record. And I might have some insight into how you can beat me at my own game.
Every Monday morning, The New Yorker posts a new captionless cartoon, and every Monday morning, before I do anything else, I stare at the drawing until I’ve come up with at least three ideas. Technically, readers have a week to submit a caption—but I never wait that long. Once I have my three ideas, I send them to a few trusted friends for their reactions. Often they ignore me. Sometimes I don’t even give them a chance to respond, because I simply can’t get on with my day until I’ve submitted my entry.
Clearly something’s wrong with me. The chances of becoming a finalist are infinitesimally small, but that has never discouraged me, even though it should have. In fact, when the contest started in its weekly format, in 2005, I was sure that I would make it to the finalists’ round every week, and every week I was disappointed. Still, I never considered the possibility that I could stop trying. This was partly for the pure love of the game—as the former cartoon editor Bob Mankoff told me, “If you have a talent for the contest, your brain starts to itch when you see a captionless drawing”—but mostly because I wanted to become part of a New Yorker cartoon. I also wanted what the late film critic Roger Ebert, who won the contest 13 years ago after 106 unsuccessful attempts, called the glory of seeing one’s name in the magazine…
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