LAPOWINSA: Look, we not want to seem patronizing—after all, it’s your duffel cloth—but we been in Mannahatta long time. And, sure, it seem dazzling and sophisticated at first. But living here? (He makes a skeptical face.) It not everything it cracked up to be.

PETER MINUIT: (worried) Why? Is there a scourge? Warlike neighbors?

LAPOWINSA: Not “scourge” per se. (Pinches fingers philosophically.) More like cultural pathology.

PETER MINUIT: I don’t follow.

LAPOWINSA: You know, little things: like how people only interested in “what you hunt,” not “who you are”; the relentless sarcasm; Fashion Week—oh, and how everyone always talking about Greenmarket! Seriously, it’s just produce! It make you feel like social pariah because you don’t like rainbow chard.
Calkanicha interjects.

LAPOWINSA: Chief say chard thing even worse in Brooklyn.

Mannahatta, May 24, 1626 (Yoni Brenner, New Yorker)

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