This is the End

“To many Americans, every day was anguish, and the only salve for our pain was Chappatte’s cartoons. They could help us come to terms with what was happening, even, perhaps, help us better understand our anguish. How else do you deal with something as grotesque, ridiculous, and unbelievable, but nonetheless real and consequential?”

—From the foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Laureate

PATRICK CHAPPATTE’S EIGHT—AND LAST!—COLLECTION OF EDITORIAL CARTOONS PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

This is the End offers us a witty, savage, and thought-provoking testimony of a dizzying world, swirling around an oxygen-sucking black hole named Donald Trump. In this era of strongmen, closing borders and selfie narcissists, humor is needed more than ever.

On June 10, 2019, Chappatte posted an essay titled “The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times,” breaking the news that was quickly confirmed by the newspaper. Chappatte’s piece, which received worldwide attention and triggered a global discussion about self-censorship by the media in the age of internet angry mobs, appears as an appendix to this cartoon book. It has inspired a TED talk given by Chappatte on July 23, 2019 at TED Summit.

Patrick Chappatte has been an editorial cartoonist on the global stage for 20 years, first with the International Herald Tribune and then The New York Times. He now contributes to German magazine Der Spiegel, French satirical Le Canard Enchaîné, as well as Swiss newspapers Le Temps in Geneva and NZZ am Sonntag in Zurich. He was three times the recipient of NY Overseas Press Club of America’s cartoon award—the only non-American cartoonist to have received it. Chappatte was also an early proponent of comics journalism, since 1995. One of his latest projects is a web series about death row in U.S. prisons that was published by The New York Times. Born in 1967 in Karachi, from a Lebanese mother and a Swiss father, Chappatte was raised in Singapore and Geneva. He lived in New York and Los Angeles and is now based in Geneva.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University and the recipient of a John Bates Clark Medal and a Nobel Prize. He is also the former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. His books include Globalization and Its Discontents, The Three Trillion Dollar War, and Making Globalization Work. He lives in New York City.