When the Grim Reaper comes a-knocking, the first question on his liplessness will be: How many books do you have left to read? If the number you offer is high enough (and if you remembered to leave out carrots for his reindeer), he’ll leave you be and go on his morbid way.

“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity.”
— A. Edward Newton

This is false — I think, I’ll report back later — but it’s the subconscious justification for tsundoku. I’d like to say that this Japanese word for the tendency to buy books you never get around to reading comes from the same root as tsunami, bringing to mind an encroaching ocean of erudition, but my Japanese is too rusty to make such a claim. As far as I can tell, it’s from tsumu, meaning to pile up, and doku, meaning reading.

“The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.”
— Gabriel Zaid

The great thing about tsundoku is that it’s apparently not a judgmental term. They haven’t added it to the Japanese version of the DSM and you can’t be prescribed peptides for it. The closest English translation, bibliomania, has been pathologized as a subset of hoarding, which in turn falls under obsessive-compulsive behaviour, which is then grouped under the larger category of totally missing the point.

“A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.”
— Francois Mitterrand

One question worth asking: Do you hoard other things? Is having more clothes than you can ever wear, more food than you can ever eat, or more houses than you can ever occupy a similar condition? Having more books than you can ever read is aspirational in a different way. Would you be a different person if you finally sailed in every yacht you owned? That reminds me that I’ve happily tsundokued the wonderfully titled Evan Osnos book The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.

“The thing about books is, there are quite a number you don’t have to read.”
— Donald Barthelme

It’s bad form to read a book called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, but a quick scan of said book reveals the parable of Musil’s Librarian. In the modernist novel A Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, the character in question explains that the “secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents.” He doesn’t dare dig deeper. The love of all books, equally like children, forbids him from giving any one volume preferential treatment.

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
— W.H. Auden

In Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan — another book I haven’t read, this one probably because of the irritatingly precise jacket blurb that calls it “The most influential book of the past seventy-five years” — there is the story of Umberto Eco’s 30,000 book library and the idea that anyone who asked if he’d read them all just didn’t get it. “Read books are far less valuable than unread books,” Taleb writes, and then suggests that your collection of unread books be called your antilibrary.

“A library is thought in cold storage.”
— Herbert Samuel

And herein lies the solution for tsundoku: After removing atlases, dictionaries, almanacs, yearbooks, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and all other books that aren’t actually meant to be read, add the sum total of your library to your antilibrary. This is the actual number of books that you own. Isn’t that a relief? Just ensure that your library and your antilibrary never come into contact, obliterating all useful knowledge and thus forcing you to start watching Summer House.

“The book collector’s caveat: Never lend a book; never give a book away; never read a book.”
— John Sparrow

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“It is one of the misfortunes of life that one must read thousands of books only to discover that one need not have read them.”
— Thomas de Quincey

The concept of the antilibrary reminded me of Anti-Garry Gum from the classic British educational parody series Look Around You. Write that down in your copy book now. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. I just finished and enjoyed Ben Lerner’s Transcription, which is fundamentally about our phones and what they’ve done to us, but not at all in the preachy annoying way that sounds. I wouldn’t call it witty at the sentence level, but here are two highlights:

“I wondered if Thomas’s name and number would show up on her phone or if it would say ‘Spam Risk’ or ‘Unknown Caller,’ a phrase that sounded Victorian to me.”

“I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me: books, paintings, analog photographs, a vinyl record spinning somewhere in my mentor’s house.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 372 briefly considered Marie Kondo’s apocryphal suggestion to max out your library at 30 books, looked it in the eye, decided it did not spark joy, and thanked it for its service before taking it out behind the shed with the captive bolt pistol Javier Bardem used in No Country for Old Men. The mascot is Magnus the magpie, who had to be a magpie with a name like that. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, and you ought to own a whole pile of them. If you have or haven’t read it, let me know by tapping the ❤️ below.

Do people’s names define their life’s trajectory? One of the leading proponents of this theory was Carl Jung, though he only thought of it when he was old. He suggested this in his book Synchronicity, which is also the name of the greatest album by The Police, who never enforced any laws. So the answer is no.

“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Fittingly, this phenomenon really took off when it found the proper name for itself. At the turn of the last century, they were called aptronyms and made for easy filler in items columns with reports of a cemetery keeper named William Graves and a firm of physicians called Gore & Trueblood. But was it aptronym or aptonym? And what did it mean, again?

“Although my father wanted me to become an engineer and my mother a bishop, I myself am quite contented to have become an adjective.”
— Federico Fellini

The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen (said to have bested Robert Fulford for the longest-running column in the English language) often filled the inches with “namephreaks” such as fisherman Buzz Minnow, dentist Rodney Pain, piano teacher Patience Scales, etc. Obviously, no one has used the term namephreaks since.

“And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith—
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Credit for nominative determinism goes to C. R. Cavonius, who submitted the phrase to John Hoyland’s Feedback column for New Scientist magazine in this 1994 column. Therein, it was noted that “Sidney Ray is one of the foremost British authorities on camera optics; R. A. Sparkes has written numerous textbooks on electronics; C. J. Berry is the expert on homemade wines; and Muriel Watt is a leading Australian researcher on solar power.”

“The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.”
— Elias Canetti

Once it had the right name, nominative determinism took off. When John Hoyland died in 2014, it was in the headline of his obituary. And people so glommed onto it that New Scientist keeps saying they will no longer accept examples; the deluge continues.

“No, Groucho is not my real name. I’m breaking it in for a friend.”
— Groucho Marx

Despite its technical appellation, nominative determinism is entirely anecdotal. My favourite case: In 1986, the oil magnate Armand Hammer bought a stake in in the company that made Arm & Hammer baking soda because people kept asking if he owned it.

“No good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn. But particularly Gwladys.”
— P.G. Wodehouse

There is also reverse nominative determinism, wherein the person changes their name to reflect their life’s work. Credit for this joke goes to Yuri Vishnevsky, who gave as his example Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematician who discovered the recursive geometric shapes called fractals and gave himself the middle initial B, which (per his obituary) maybe stood for Benoit B. Mandelbrot? But the real joke is that this might be a case of reverse reverse nominative determinism, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the Mandelbrot set of fractals contained many mandalas, the circular geometric patterns used in Eastern religions. And what’s more, Nelson Mandela may have enjoyed mandalas!

“A name is a road.”
— Iris Murdoch

And there’s nominative contradeterminism, wherein the person chooses a profession that is the opposite of what their name suggests. In addition to the oft-cited Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, I’m partial to Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, who devoted her academic study to uncommon names, refused to change hers, and uses neither of those products. Had Vandyck failed in her career, that would have been nominative deterrentism.

“I’ve always thought my creative life began the moment my mother named me Twyla.”
— Winston Churchill (just kidding, obviously Twyla Tharp)

The natural endpoint for this flavour of chicanery is monogrammatic determinism, in which your initials seal your fate. It was briefly found that having positive initials like VIP or ACE caused people to live longer than those with downer initials like PIG or DIE. Upon further review, scientists found that this theory was, like all of the above, quite ridiculous.

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“Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.”
— Bob Marley

Has anyone ever cast a Bob Marley impersonator in the role of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol? Or a woman named Carol? A free idea I’ll just leave there for the taking. Next week? Is it finally tsundoku time? Loyal supporter , who is not a safecracker, is presumably hoping so!

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. In my interview with Tom Allen, master trombonist and compiler of the superb Classical Musick Almynack, I asked him about the story of Peter Maxwell Davies, the composer who recovered a swan that had been electrocuted by power lines near his home on the Orkney Islands. As Allen wrote, Davies “kept the wings for a future operatic costume, cooked the liver and was investigated for being in possession of the corpse of a protected species. When officers called, he offered them swan terrine, which, by his own admission, was ‘probably a mistake.’ He was eventually cleared of wrongdoing.”

Was this a knowing homage to Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl’s famous story of the woman who murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the weapon to the detectives investigating the case? Said Allen:

“I don’t think so, but I can imagine, had he still been alive, that Alfred Hitchcock could have done something darkly wonderful with the story of a composer, a pair of enormous wings and a terrine.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 371 will say this: If you name your son Thelonious Sphere Monk, he’s gonna do something interesting. The mascot is Magnus the magpie, who had to be a magpie with a name like that. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. My nickname for you is Tappy, so you’d better tap the ❤️ below.

If you’ve ever wondered why kids are so obsessed with dinosaurs, take a look in the mirror. Wait! I am not suggesting you, dear reader, are a dinosaur, but rather that our entire civilization is besotted with the terrible lizards who were long ago compressed into the liquid energy we call light sweet crude. Our whole world runs on dinosaur juice! The little ones are just teaching themselves modernity’s backstory. And extra credit if they use plastic toys to do so!

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were roaring drunk on petroleum.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

Was it, in retrospect, a good idea to base all human activity on the burning of earth-bound hydrocarbons? You already know the answer to that question and likely try not to think about it. But let me offer this edge case, ideal for the marketing campaigns of the Pathways Alliance: It was once thought that petroleum saved the whales! Before we figured out how to get oil out of the ground, humans devised a way to take rickety wooden ships from Massachusetts into the middle of the Pacific, board even smaller, ricketier vessels, stab the largest mammals on the planet in the head, and scoop out all the foul-smelling substances therein. This, for a surprisingly long stretch of our history, was just something we did. And in the mid 1800s, when we discovered how to get oil out of the ground, it was estimated that the global whale population was about a decade away from extinction.

“If you haven’t struck oil in your first three minutes, stop boring!”
— George Jessel

Once we powered our boats with oil, we could really go after those whales, and that’s actually when we pushed them to the brink. So no, petroleum didn’t save the whales. You can’t make Chanel No. 5 without ambergris, and the only place to get this waxy bile is from the intestines of sperm whales, so what are you gonna do? Not have perfume?

“The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.”
— J. Paul Getty

So we swapped whales for dinosaurs, which at least did us the favour of being already dead and under dry land. Was this the work of God or Satan? In his zippy folio On Oil (part of Biblioasis’s fun Field Notes series), Don Gillmor lays out the arguments for each. In the hellish camp is Juan Pablo Perez Alphonszo, the founder of OPEC, who declared that his country of Venezuela was “drowning in the devil’s excrement.” It is, after all, located under our feet and emits sulphurous fumes. “When you strike oil, you let loose Hades,” says an East Texas oilman.

“The best business in the world is a well-run oil company. The second best business in the world is a badly run oil company.”
— John D. Rockefeller

On the side of the angels are John D. Rockefeller, John Howard Pew, and the early oil barons who argued that the Heavenly Father put the oil there for us. Ernest Manning, the Alberta premier who opened up the tar sands, spoke of “the oil which in the lamp of God’s Word produces a light that shines across the darkness of this world in order that men may find their way to Jesus Christ, the one who alone can save and who can solve their problems, whatever they may be.” As Gillmor writes, “Evangelical Christians like Tim Dunn believe that God alone can create a kingdom on earth. Instead, oil created a kingdom on earth, though it’s sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Both are omnipresent, mysterious, sustaining, and glimpsed by a privileged few.”

“The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil.”
— Don Huberts

What if, after going to the ends of the earth for our energy, it was right here the whole time, warming our faces while we were harpooning whales, blowing through our hair while we were building pipelines. Wind and solar are becoming more efficient every day, and here’s a suggestion for their respective industry associations: License the pink Energizer Bunny from those classic ads in the 1990s, so whenever fossil fuel types say “but what about when it’s not sunny or windy?” you can remind them that we now have batteries. Good ones, too!

“History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.”
— Joseph Heller

Just imagine, energy delivered directly, without drilling or sailing or harpooning or (spoiler alert) canniballing. Every fossil fuel era — every era of magnificent, destructive ingenuity — was spent extracting energy from things that had stored it, rather than simply catching it as it arrives. Future generations, should they exist, will find this mildly amusing.

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“I like Chopin and Bizet
And the songs of yesterday
String quartets and Polynesian carols
But the music that excels
Is the sound of oil wells
As they slurp, slurp, slurp into the barrels.”
— Marve Fisher

Ounce for ounce, it’s hard to pack more energy into any other liquid. Even $17 green smoothies! In a sense, I emulate petroleum in this high-octane newsletter. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This month’s issue was a stone-cold classic with reader comments that made my week as well as an interview with Tom Allen, master trombonist and compiler of the superb Classical Musick Almynack. The choicest bit:

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Get Wit Quick No. 370 heartily recommends Into the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, one of the great whaling books that tells the true story behind Moby Dick. Also, this issue halfheartedly recommends the Ron Howard film adaptation of same, which is very corny but offers the chance to see Thor and Spider-Man as ancient mariners. Early on, Tom Holland isn’t sure he can climb the rigging, but come on, dude, you’re Spider-Man! The mascot is Magnus the magpie, whose plumage is oil black. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The pipeline to my ❤️ can be turned on with a single tap.

Often you can’t see them coming.

One of my favourite movies is The Big Lebowski: Endlessly quotable dialogue, perfectly convoluted plot, threaded through with life lessons that ring true, and plenty of bowling.

So when Thomas Pynchon, one of the All Time Greats and a famous recluse who has cameoed with a paper bag on his head not once but twice on The Simpsons, wrote a Lebowski-coded Los Angeles detective novel called Inherent Vice, I thought, yes! More slacker noir! This is the milieu we need!

But it didn’t quite work. And neither did Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation. I willed it; it stayed a dream.

Of course, PTA hit a home run with One Battle After Another (which really should have been in this great New York Times story on the logbook of misremembered titles at the Lincoln Center cinema), based on Pynchon’s Vineland.

Meanwhile Pynchon went to Milwaukee for his most recent novel, Shadow Ticket. And this time, it worked.

He’s got his trademark ludicrous character names (Hop Wingdale…

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If you’re like me, you’re a precious little hothouse flower who can’t bear the thought of haggling over anything. But we’re doing it wrong! We need to get in the other guy’s face, threaten to take our business elsewhere, turn on our heels and walk right out that door, raise the stakes, and the rest of it. Honestly, I’m exhausted just having typed that.

“Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he has a firm handshake, is hiding something.”
— Clifton Fadiman

Life is a negotiation, right? That’s why, many years ago, I picked up a copy of the classic text Getting to Yes. I can see it on my shelf right now, and yet, I’ve never even opened it. Hence my book idea: Getting to Getting to Yes. If I can convince a publisher to buy it, just imagine the deal I won’t drive.

“The fellow who says he’ll meet you halfway usually thinks he’s standing on the dividing line.”
— Orlando Battista

All the behavioural psychology tips on negotiation suggest it’s best to just calm down. Show up with coffee and pastries, use language of collaboration, and if possible, sit in a higher chair, ensure the sun is shining, and — since so many of these suggestions have the whiff of irreplicable social science papers — show up doing the debunked Wonder Woman power pose.

“If two people agree all the time, one of them is unnecessary.”
— David Mahoney

But really, the main thing to bring to a negotiation, besides bear paws, is your BATNA, which stands for Needless Acronym Designed To Make Common Sense Seem Uncommon. In other words, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement means you already got a better deal elsewhere. At the very least, give the impression that this is the case.

“When a man tells me he’s going to put all his cards on the table, I always look up his sleeve.”
— Isaac Hore-Belisha

There’s a great throwaway exchange in Christopher Guest’s 2000 mockumentary Best in Show wherein Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy’s characters visit the home of one of her many exes, this one played by the great character actor Larry Miller:

“It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.”
— Quentin Crisp

As usual, Ben Folds has all the answers. Every negotiation is a cover of his 1997 classic, The Battle of Who Could Care Less, which is really just a clever reiteration of the principle of least interest, meaning the person with the least amount of interest in a relationship has the most power. “Sucks me in when you’re aloof,” he sings, “It sucks, it works.” No one wants to help the person who needs help! Also, Mr. Folds posits the idea of creating fine pewter portraits of General Apathy and Major Boredom and selling them to — his words, not mine — “the Franklin fuckin’ Mint.” This was truly the anthem of a generation.

“A banker is a person who is willing to make a loan if you present sufficient evidence to show you don’t need it.”
— Herbert V. Prochnow

So here’s your problem: You care too much. You want to avoid the awkwardness of negotiation? Good! Pretend you’re not negotiating at all. Exhale, space out, eat all the crullers, stare at the ceiling, and double your salary, just like that. Whatever and ever, amen.

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“There are very honest people who do not think they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.”
— Anatole France

Given all my references and generational stereotypes, you might conclude that Generation X are the best negotiators. In fact, they/we (I identify as an Xennial) couldn’t even convince Coca-Cola to keep OK Soda on the shelves. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. New issue landing soon! With the knowledge that the composer John Cage was a renowned mushroom expert who once won five million lire on an Italian game show for correctly naming the 24 mushrooms of the species Agarici in alphabetical order. Also, because he believed catsup was too thin, he invented a mushroom-based condiment he called dogsup. Which means he almost invented the classic Updog joke! I learned this from Tom Allen’s very entertaining Classical Musick Almynack, more on which soon!

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Get Wit Quick No. 369 found your old ID and you’re all dressed up like The Cure. Is that worth another week of vacation? The mascot is Magnus the magpie, collector of shiny bits of ephemera. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below or don’t, I don’t care … or do I? (I do!)

Is there truly no such thing as a free lunch? That axiom may well be true if you’re the hungry person looking for a complimentary meal. Should you be the sandwich maker, though, you can dispense as many free lunches as you please. And so it becomes less of an immutable law of economics and more of a personal choice, like announcing “I never share my sandwiches.” But you could!

“The free lunch was originated by saloonkeepers during the Depression. Free verse also often originates during depression. If this happens to you, try to nip it in the bud by taking a drink.”
— Fran Lebowitz

My Substack pal loves to celebrate the work of his hero Mitch Hedberg, and recently shared this gem:

“I got a business card because I wanna win some lunches. That’s what my business card says: ‘Mitch Hedberg, Potential Lunch Winner.’ Gimme a call, maybe we’ll have lunch. If I’m lucky!”
— Mitch Hedberg

As Kaplan wrote, this entirely plausible joke turns “the business card into a PLEASURE card,” one that transforms an analog data harvesting technique used by restaurants in olden times into a reason for being. Free lunch! And to think, he shared this for free!

“After all, doesn’t free love cost the most?”
— Tom Masson

Many freebies are provided under duress. The baker’s dozen, by which you get 13 loaves for the price of 12, dates back to a 1266 English law that punished bakers who shortchanged their customers. The weight of the bread was pegged to the fluctuating price of grain and the penalties for shortchanging customers were severe, so the “vantage loaf” was a way to err on the side of extra carbs. They didn’t want to give away free bread, but they really didn’t want to be flogged.

“The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.”
— Coco Chanel

This month’s Atlantic cover story is some cleverly calculated counterprogramming to everything in the news right now in which Caity Weaver sets out to find the best free restaurant bread in America. (In the spirit of freebies, that’s a free gift link.) Why do they give you free bread? Because in the days of tavern dining, you paid a flat fee for everything, and since bread was cheap, that was the first thing you were offered. The tradition has been hard to shake, though most of the food professionals she talked to hate it if they’ll even deign to opine. We regular schlubs, on the other hand, love it: “No one outside the food industry ever tells me they’d prefer paying for excellent bread to receiving mediocre bread for free. Most people just want to be given bread they have not paid for.” Best thing I learned from Weaver’s gluten-rich reportage: At Lambert’s Cafe in Missouri and Alabama, they throw the free bread at you!

“People seldom read a book which is given to them. The way to spread a work is to sell it at a low price.”
— Samuel Johnson

If something is thrown at you for free, does that mean you’re the product? It’s a good shorthand for the attention economy, one that Will Oremus dated back to the glory days of network television in a 2018 Slate investigation. But he argues strenuously against the idea that social media is free, arguing that we pay in time, data, and attention. The real sleight of hand is the idea of free time; someone’s always monetizing it.

“I haven’t heard of anybody who wants to stop living on account of the cost.”
— Kin Hubbard

Once, at the start of a fancy meal on the Iberian peninsula and possibly suffering from sunstroke, I invoked the ancient figure of Don Phillip Onabreda. He haunts us still. Would a restaurant called Do Fill Up On Bread be a smashing success or instant bankruptcy? I leave the concept here, free for the taking.

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“You can always judge a man by what he eats, and therefore a country in which there is no free lunch is no longer a free country.”
— Arthur Baer

Freedom isn’t free, goes Trey Parker’s profane song from Team America: World Police that got stuck in my head this week. Freedom costs a buck o’ five. Still pretty cheap! Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. The April edition will be landing soon (albeit in a month we’ll call Second April for accounting purposes), and it’s full of gems like this sticker from Evan Doherty, the Toronto genius behind Arcane Bullshit and founding father of the bumper sticker renaissance:

I find myself mumbling “these blems have indeed gone pro” and I honestly don’t mind.

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Get Wit Quick No. 368 cost you four minutes of reading time but provided fodder for 12 minutes of conversation, which via space-time conversion means it was worth 0.008 acres of your attention. What a deal! The mascot is Magnus the magpie, collector of shiny freebies. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I won’t charge you to tap the ❤️ below.

Every story about a hermit is the story of someone being bothered specifically because they’d been asked to be left alone. When The Guardian set out to find five modern-day hermits, they shone a light on people who had left the glare of public life behind. They’re the human particles of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: By knowing them, we undermine them. Rachel Denton, their lead hermit, has been interviewed and photographed by Reuters, the BBC, the Washington Post, and many others: Please tell us more about your seclusion! You might even get to meet the Pope!

“You can’t find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.”
— Terry Pratchett

But maybe that’s the point of hermits. It worked for Will Cuppy, the funniest modern example. He moved to a shack on the outskirts of New York City in the 1920s and proceeded to write a series of humorous sketches of hermit life for popular magazines of the day. He became a hermit for the publicity, and he got it with a bestselling book called How To Be A Hermit: Or, a Bachelor Keeps House. So much so that Robert Moses, that infamous leveler of neighbourhoods, made an exception for Cuppy’s hermitage.

“A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”
— Will Cuppy

Early in his quasi-solitude, Cuppy questioned his convictions in a dreamed conversation with a cat named Finnegan:

“I’m not so sure about the place of asceticism in modern life. Morality, you know, is essentially social. Life—”

“A lot you know about life,” said Finnegan. “Life is within and no man hath seen it. I guess I read that somewhere, too. Anyway, you’re not going to be so damned ascetic!”

“Right,” I agreed. “I really don’t want to be a cenobite or an eremite just at present. I want to be good, in moderation, but you’ll have to let me go to literary teas in New York every few weeks.”

The word eremite is a synonym for hermit and comes from the same Greek word for desert, originally used to describe Moses wandering in the desert for forty years. A cenobite, by contrast, is a member of a monastic religious order that transmutes the silent companionship of others into excellent beer and cheese.

“Hermits have no peer pressure.”
— Steven Wright

The best modern source for all hermit knowledge is hermitary.com, a charmingly maintained website from back when the internet appeared to be a benevolent or at least neutral force in the world. The homepage disclaimer says it all: “Hermitary does not use social media, telephone, or physical address.” The contact form goes directly into a cave, one assumes.

“If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.”
— Jean Cocteau

The goofiest turn in eremetic history was the ornamental hermit craze of 18th-century England. It was a time of elaborately landscaped gardens, writes Gordon Campbell in his history, and the best of them featured a genuine hermit living on your property as a sort of glorification of the simple life. Of one of these hermits, a Father Francis, Campbell writes:

“Nothing is known of Father Francis save that he had the secret of eternal age and only worked in the summer. There is some evidence, however, that Father Francis was from time to time replaced by a stuffed hermit.”

Unless you’re going to go full hermit, the choice to retreat from society is a matter of degree. Here I was going to make some vague moralizing suggestion about getting off social media, but if hermit life is a retreat into the self, maybe the true modern hermit is the person who posts only selfies. That’s why I’m building a shack in my backyard, stuffing it with digital hermits, and waiting for The Guardian to come calling.

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“The hermit’s strength is measured not by how far away he has gone to live, but by the scant distance he requires to detach himself from the city, without ever losing sight of it.”
— Italo Calvino

Introverts have so much to teach us, if they could just become extroverts. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week I want to call out Futility Closet, a survivor of the golden age of blogs that’s still a regular source of delight. Just yesterday Greg Ross introduced me to Paul Hindemith’s 1942 piano work Ludus Tonalis, or Game of Tones, in which the postlude is the prelude, but backwards and upside down.

It’s a sonic ambigram and as such is best listened to on SONOS speakers!

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The best nugget of Get Wit Quick No. 367 is Gordon Campbell’s theory that garden gnomes are the direct descendants of ornamental hermits. The above painting features a distant relative of Magnus the magpie, the mascot of this newsletter, though they aren’t on speaking terms. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. To really commune with the eternal consciousness of things, it certainly couldn’t hurt to tap the ❤️ below.

Here’s the secret decoder ring to all advertisements, an entire media literacy class in a single sentence, an observation I’ll shamefacedly brand as Errett’s Axiom: A company’s clever tagline is usually a coded admission that the opposite is true.

“Advertising is legalized lying.”
— H.G. Wells

If Ford tells you that Quality is Job 1, that means it’s probably not even in the top ten. Tim Hortons introduced the tagline Always Fresh precisely when they started parbaking all their pastries. When HBO said it’s not TV, it’s HBO, it was still TV, though now it’s not even that. When L’Oreal says “because you’re worth it,” it’s because the cosmetics industry has spent decades convincing you that you’re not. When Staples says “that was easy,” it is the opposite of how it feels to buy a printer cable in their big box stores. And every family you meet at Disneyland is more proof that it’s not the happiest place on Earth. Except for mine of course, as we were in on the joke:

“Advertising—a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.”
— Northrop Frye

Bill Bernbach, one of the great Madison Avenue ad men of the 1960s, put my axiom to the test with campaigns like “We Try Harder” for Avis Rental Cars. Does being second to Hertz really inspire them to increased effort for your precious dollar? Or is the fact that they couldn’t beat Hertz actually proof that they still aren’t trying hard enough? Or is all car rental a painful ordeal with an inescapable amount of waiting around an understaffed office that never seems to have the car you reserved? Yes! Can we upgrade you to a Pontiac Aztek?

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.”
— George Orwell

If my scandalous allegation of widespread fraud is true, should advertising be banned? Let’s ask David Ogilvy, the legendary ad man who conveniently has a chapter in his supremely readable 1963 memoir Confessions of an Advertising Man titled “Should Advertising Be Banned?” He notes that even critics of ads grudgingly accept “informative factual advertising,” which he says is the best kind, as “the more informative your advertising, the more persuasive it will be.” Further, Ogilvy argues, “if you disapprove of social mobility, creature comforts, and foreign travel, you are right to blame advertising for encouraging such wickedness. If you dislike affluent society, you are right to blame advertising for inciting the masses to pursue it.”

“People hate advertising until they lose their cat.”
— David Droga

But of course an ad man can sell advertising! And he does it with plenty of caveats, saying it should never be allowed in politics, and admits he is “angered to the point of violence by the commercial interruption of programs. Are the men who own the television stations so greedy that they cannot resist such intrusive affronts to the dignity of man?” I must here turn to one of my foundational quips, the one spoken by Danny DeVito’s character in David Mamet’s Heist: “Everybody needs money. That’s why they call it money.”

“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”
— Stephen Leacock

Ogilvy, that wide-eyed innocent, died in 1999, thus missing 27 uninterrupted years of intrusive affronts including but not limited to website popups, behavioural microtargeting, branded urinal cakes, biometric neuromarketing, banners that follow you around the web to tell you about shoes you bought three months ago, and soon seamless integration with AI to directly exploit our deepest insecurities by selling us StepBoost Maxx heel lifts. Naturally, I learned that through the informative factual Claude’s Super Bowl commercial. Anthropic’s tagline, Keep Thinking, is exactly what their product is designed to stop you from doing. Errett’s Axiom: Always right, even when it’s not.

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“The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife.”
— David Ogilvy

How dare Mr. Ogilvy make assumptions about my wife’s intelligence! This was a fun one, I must admit. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week I have to tip my hat to my newest paid subscriber, the writer Zev Borow. His long and illustrious career includes co-writing the underappreciated 2022 movie Confess, Fletch, featuring Jon Hamm doing a much better job in the role than Chevy Chase in the 1980s Fletch motion pictures. Hold up, did I just write a whole issue on advertising and only reference Jon Hamm for his portrayal of investigative journalist Irwin Maurice Fletcher? Yes! And what’s more, I maintain that Hamm would have been better than Liam Neeson in the Naked Gun remake. See?

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Bonus Bolus: Vocab Rehab!

Did you know I’m in the process of pitching a column on language to a publication of record? It’s true! I wrote a sample column in the process and fear that it will be too dated to ever actually appear in print (should this gambit succeed), so here it is for your reading pleasure:

AI;DR, n. In the early days of internet message boards, the abbreviation TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) was an efficient insult to hurl at anyone who unloaded a block of text into the group chat. Now, it’s almost easier to generate that text block than it is to type the five-character insult. Hence “artificial intelligence; didn’t read,” a human clapback to the pervasive GPT text that fills our inboxes. But how can you be sure?

Kill chain, n. When you need your boss to sign off on something, how long does it usually take? In a U.S. military operation, this bureaucratic metric is called the kill chain, and it’s just what it sounds like: How many people do I need to check in with before I can hit the button that ends a human life? According to a defence expert quoted in the Financial Times, this process used to take hours if not days, requiring senior commanders to study printouts. Now, AI-powered systems are identifying targets in seconds and we can safely assume (or unsafely, depending on the result), acting on their findings. This explains the speed and intensity of the U.S. assault on Iran, a military campaign that has hit many thousands more targets than previous attacks. And it suggests that AI;DR is too little, too late: You may choose not to read what a chatbot has cranked out, but you have no choice when that chatbot sends a murder drone after you.

Slopulism, n. As the dominant political force of our time, populism needs no explanation. Slop, in current usage, refers to the terabytes of mindless content churned out every second by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and the rest of our semi-sentient AI helpers. Slap them together and you have … what, exactly? Certainly nothing good. Slopulism is used to describe viral ideas that become official policy, even if they don’t stand up to scrutiny. This is Artificial Intelligence; Didn’t Read; Quickly Implemented; Much Worse. A Canadian example might be abolishing the CBC to combat misinformation. When deployed by Trump-aligned creators in the U.S., slopulism has taken the form of videos purporting to uncover fraud and illegal immigration. In Minneapolis, a YouTube post to this effect by Nick Shirley was re-shared by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance shortly before the ICE crackdown on that city. On the left, as Ben Ritz wrote in The Atlantic about a Democratic plan to exempt the entire middle class from federal taxes, slopulism looks like “half-baked policy proposals that sound good only if you don’t think too hard about them, and that would, if enacted, hurt the people they’re supposed to help.” And that may be how it fizzles out: When citizens feel the effects of bad policy ideas, they’ll presumably turn against them. The feedback loop happens on the agonizingly slow timeline of electoral politics, but at least it exists. As long as chatbots don’t get the vote, there’s hope.

Get Wit Quick No. 366 tastes great and is less filling. Actually it tastes like pixels (mildly acidic?) and will leave your brain bursting with extraneous information. You know how we put bands on birds to track them? Why not attach ads to those bands, thus targeting the affluent birdwatching community? I’ll voluntell Magnus the magpie, the mascot of this newsletter, for the job! The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. When you tap the ❤️ below, ba-da-ba-da-da, I’m lovin’ it.

My friends, we are living in anvilicious times. That neologism is the perfect antonym of subtlety, a portmanteau of delicious anvils that can be dropped on the soft noggins of anyone who’d rather tune you out. Per TV Tropes, anviliciousness happens when someone labours “so unsubtly convey a particular message that they may as well etch it onto an anvil and drop it on your head.” It’s not so much that they say the quiet part out loud as that we can’t hear the quiet parts over all the yelling.

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.”
— Robert M. Pirsig

One might posit that surtle is a better antonym for subtle, but no: It’s too subtle.

“Subtlety is not a proof of wisdom. Fools and even madmen are at times extraordinarily subtle.”
— Alexander Pushkin

Many celebrated communicators have inveighed against subtlety. Tell them what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em what you told ’em, remind them they got told, and then tell ’em that Churchill told you to tell ’em that way. Or to tell you that again:

“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time — a tremendous whack.”
— Winston Churchill

Consider the widely reported note that Netflix gave filmmakers, asking them to recap plot details in every scene to help retain distracted viewers. Less on the nose, more in the eyes, as per the best Conan O’Brien skit at this year’s Oscars. As this overcorrection spreads through society, expect to see cars with multiple speedometers, eulogies that continually repeat the full name of the deceased, and clocks that highlight the time with the word “that’s now!”

“Don’t be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.”
— Billy Wilder

At some point, though, do people get sick of being pile driven? Maybe they shout at us is we’ve all turned down the volume on their metaphorical hearing aids, like the beleaguered husband at the end of Revolutionary Road.

“On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle.”
— Linus Torvalds

Subtlety is good. More of it would be welcome! Anvilicious is a slang term for heavy-handed messaging. Anvils are not delicious. They are made of metal.

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“Art is like theater. If you want to whisper, you have to whisper loudly enough so that the audience hears you, and knows it’s a whisper. So the artist has to be able to blow the subtleties up proportionately, and at the same time have them be recognized as subtle. It’s what makes a good artist, even if he is painting badly.”
— Eric Fischl

The good news is that there’s never been a better time for subtle insults. I’m writing this from California, where I can adapt Will Rogers’ old line and say that whenever a Canadian moves to the U.S., it raises the IQ of both countries. Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This week I’m happy to have contributed to Molly Young’s Treasury of Book Dedications, an ongoing collection of the best authorial inscriptions. A subtle gem from the most recent installment:

“This book is dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks.”
— Diane Wakoski, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems

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Blink enough times and you’ll have missed Get Wit Quick No. 365. You can always hear the squawks of Magnus the magpie, named after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If you gently gently tap the ❤️ below, only you and I will notice.

Why do grudges start? In the archetypal example, no one remembers. That way, the grudge holder can darkly mutter “they know what they did” — a great way to ensure the very act of forgetting becomes material for further resentment! By harnessing the power of this perpetual emotion machine, scientists believe we can finally wean ourselves off fossil fuels, just so long as we pledge to keep being angry about how much they cost.

“I try to bear grudges but in the end the original reason for it drifts away and I’m left with just a sort of negative feeling about someone, but no evidence, and I don’t know whether to carry on the grudge or not.”
— Lucy Ellmann

Speaking of oil, no one can hold a grudge like a painter. Is it because smelling turpentine all day snuffs out any latent compassion? While I admit to being an armchair epidemiologist, I must clarify that I dabble in the study of diseases that affect armchairs and thus have no standing on the causes of painterly grudges. But I will herewith unfurl two wonderful examples.

“I have no grudge against success, only against its being achieved by others.”
— Gore Vidal

Lucian Freud, one of the great British painters of the last century, used a version of The Shaggy Defense whenever someone he didn’t like came to own one of his paintings: He said it wasn’t his. His art school rival Dennis Wirth-Miller came into possession of Freud’s The Man in the Black Cravat in the 1930s and attempted to unload it throughout his life. But even when art historians and analysts determined with certainty that the painting was authentic, it proved impossible to contradict the artist’s denials. After Wirth-Miller died in 2001, his will stated that “I want it sold as loudly as possible to really upset Lucian.” Freud died in 2011; the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? show declared the portrait genuine in 2016, but there’s been no report since of the $500,000 work selling.

“It is no use carrying a grudge. While you are carrying the grudge, the other guy’s out dancing.”
— Buddy Hackett

I have another painterly grudge, but let’s take a quick corvid break: Crows can hold a grudge in their sharp talons for 17 years. This according to John Marzluff, who captured seven crows in a big net while wearing an ogre mask in 2006. He did this for science! He’s a biology professor, and whenever he or his students would wear the mask around the campus of the University of Washington, they would hear “aggressive caws” referred to by crowologists as scolds. These scolds persisted across campus long after the original crownapping. This is why you can’t spell “crowdsource” without a crow.

“The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.”
— Franz Kafka

There’s a Buddhist observation that holding a grudge is like grasping a hot coal to strike another, burning yourself in the process. But if you’re a genuine S.O.B., you might somehow fuel your brilliance with these metaphoric coals. James Whistler, the man most famous for painting his mother, only made art when on break from expelling vitriol at everyone who came into his orbit. No one adequately appreciated his genius, so he compiled all his angry correspondence in a volume titled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. In his words, “if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death.” Which, if you’re looking for a succinct and universal complaint, is pretty solid!

“I have always liked the phrase ‘nursing a grudge’ because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.”
— Marilynne Robinson

How do grudges end? Not with death, as estate law is designed to cultivate and nurture them. Not with forgiveness, as that doesn’t usually involve forgetting. Not with victory, as it’s never as satisfying as the sense of being wronged. Best to assume they never end and harness their power to do something productive, like run a refrigerator. At least then when it comes time to serve revenge, the dish will be cold.

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“I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there’s any grudges I should start.”
— Roz Chast

Hold up, I’ve just received word that the Hatfield and McCoys stopped feuding! Apparently they shook hands in 2003 and proclaimed, “We’re not saying you don’t have to fight because sometimes you do have to fight. But you don’t have to fight forever.” Got it! Next week?

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Famous on Wikipedia! For one night only!

There is no more delightful guide to the world’s best website than Annie Rauwerda, curator of Depths of Wikipedia. She’s currently on tour with her stage show, which has more laughs per minute than most standup comedy and more slides per minute than most PowerPoint presentations. In addition to a thorough exploration of ’s Bloordale Beach, she gave our recursive plaque a nice shoutout as well as this newsletter, which prompted a flurry of new subscribers from people sitting around me in the Randolph Theatre. Truly delightful!

Famous in MAD Magazine! In comic book stores only!

As threatened back in GWQ No. 354, I’ve joined the unusual gang of idiots who have resuscitated MAD Magazine, albeit only for one issue. Led by and featuring an all-star lineup of comic creators, MAD About DC is in better and worse comic-book stores now. My contribution was an issue of the Daily Planet, wherein Superman finally acknowledges that his Fortress of Solitude is on the traditional lands of the Inuit:

Great Caesar’s Toast! Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. The March edition just dropped! In that edition, devoted reader Craig C. sent along this nominee for the best film review ever written:

“A movie as rich as a buttered steak topped with grilled eel.”
— Akira Kurosawa

The director was talking about his own movie, a little picture called The Seven Samurai, but we’ll allow it.

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Get Wit Quick No. 364 can’t even remember why it suggested grudges as a topic in the first place. What a beacon of forgiveness and grace! The mascot is a magpie, not a crow, but still not a bird you should wrong. He’s named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, naturally. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I honestly don’t keep a list of people who ought to tap the ❤️ below.

What is a crazy salad? It is of course the name of Nora Ephron’s 1972 collection of essays about women, which took its title from this line:

“I’m certain that fine women eat a crazy salad with their meat.”
— William Butler Yeats

But in the 1970s, it was also, according to a review of a new book called The Secret History of French Cooking, a “popular concoction of truffle, foie gras and vegetables by Michel Guérard, the creator of “cuisine minceur” — slimming cuisine.” And it’s the title of the painting featured above by the late Toronto artist Vera Fischer.

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Everyone knows that the War To End All Wars (if not excursions) began when Franz Ferdinand was shot. But only Schweik dared ask the pertinent question: Which Ferdinand? “I know two Ferdinands. One is a messenger at Pruša the chemist’s and once by mistake he drank a bottle of hair oil there. And the other is Ferdinand Kokoška who collects dog manure. Neither of them is any loss.”

“I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”
— François Truffaut

Which Schweik? The one rendered in the original Czech as Švejk and the hero of The Good Soldier Švejk. This satirical 1921 novel by Jaroslav Hašek follows this conscript whose can-do attitude and can’t-do ability made him the worst thing that could happen to the Austro-Hungarian war effort. He follows every order to the letter, happily shares his irrelevant thoughts while doing šo, and in the process completely derails the military machine.

“Employing low cunning and high spirits, a Schweikist loudly proclaims his loyalty to the prevailing authority while simultaneously defying it in a thousand small ways.”
— Joshua Glenn

As the original blank Czech, Schweik is to his country what Don Quixote is to Spain. And the geniuš of the book, the reason the Soviets didn’t ban it, is that it’s hard to pin down whether Schweik is obstinate by nature or on purpose. Either way, Schweikism is the ultimate štatement against war, the inspiration for Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, and a recurring theme in Czech history.

“Workers now don’t just come late to their job, if they come at all, and knock off for a beer an hour later, as they have been doing all those years,” an economist told a New York Times reporter in Prague in 1969. “They follow šafety regulations to the letter, say they don’t understand work norms or interpret them wrongly, and slow down plant tempos tremendously.” If you want to subvert bureaucratic lethality, overload the bureaucracy.

“I hate war, for it spoils conversation.”
— Bernard de Fontenelle

War is God’s way of teaching us (or, more pointedly, Americans) geography, as they used to joke during the first Iraq War. That line came to mind as I read this New York Times interview with General Stanley McChrystal, who led U.S. Special Forces during the second Iraq war and only slightly undermined his many years of expertise when he mixed up his histories of Iran and Iraq. The article has since been corrected but the geography lesson is incomplete; good thing there’š more war!

“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
— Robert Lynd

Every schoolchild learns that the First World War was caused by -isms — nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and (as if we wouldn’t notice this one isn’t like the others), entangling allianceš. But Schweikism might be the one išm that stops wars. Unless of course we count -isms that don’t end in -ism, which is basically Dadaism, yet another byproduct of that war.

“We may not be interested in this war, but it is interested in us.”
— Fannie Hurst

And Schweikism, the art of subversion through idiocy, is alive and well if you know where to look. On their Election Profit Makers podcast, David Rees and Jon Kimball recently discussed the logistics of dying the Strait of Hormuz green for St. Patrick’s Day. It would be difficult, given all the mines and the fast-moving water, but what better way for Iran to defy the U.S. military? It’s too late now — but there’š always next year!

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“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
— Jeannette Rankin

As Einštein famously didn’t say, World War III will be fought with drones, World War IV with šticks and stones, World War V with Nerf guns, World War VI with Chekhov’s guns, and World War VII will be fought against Roman numerals. Enough with all the fighting, though! Next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. The March edition is coming your way soon! This is what’s at the end of the rabbit hole!

This week I was chewing through The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, a deathbed screed against the things that are going wrong by Will Self in Harper’s. It’s dense and allusive, like all Self’s writing; the opposite of a hot take. A cool give, if you will. He writes about taking a 15-month break from the news, after which it seems like everything has šped up tremendously but no one noticed:

The people around me seemed blissfully unaware of this—largely because those who lose touch with the rate and speed and manner with which the world turns are not the Rip Van Winkles among us; they’re those who stay continuously awake, wired on the methamphetamine of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, all while they deceive themselves that this means they’re somehow participating in history.

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Get Wit Quick No. 363 didn’t even touch upon The War of Jenkins’ Ear, The 335 Years War, or The War of the Bucket, none of which ended all wars. This newsletter’s mascot, a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, prefers flight to fight. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I may have overdone it on the š’s, treating them like word garnish. A rally-around-the-flag effect ought to prompt more taps of the ❤️ below.

Around about the time I decided wit would be the ideal subject for enjoyable study over the long term, Ryan Holiday appears to have made the same decision about stoicism. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering the Art of Being Interesting came out in 2014, the same year as his The Obstacle Is The Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs. His book sold 2M copies; mine, less. Clearly, I needed a more alliterative subtitle. Also, I picked the wrong subject. I was so close! Grin and bear it, but I went with “grin” while he chose “bear it.”

“If you would thank the gods, and be grateful for your past life, you should contemplate how many men you have outstripped. But what have you to do with the others? You have outstripped yourself.”
— Seneca

But even this complaint is thwarted by the Stoics, who taught us that comparison is the thief of joy. Holiday wins again! But were the Stoics witty? I think it depends how stoic the audience is. For instance, true believers bust a gut over this one:

“I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived – and dying I will tend to later.”
— Epictetus

Whereas so many witty observations turn on the gulf between the world as it is and as we’d like it to be, stoicism elides that gap. So, by the theory of stoic comedian Michael Connell, the joke can’t be “Airline peanuts are stupid. Opening them makes me frustrated…” Instead, it’s “I’m stupid. I make myself frustrated opening airline peanuts…” It’s not comedy that punches up or down, but rather it punches in! Which leads the audience to ask, why are you hitting yourself?

“Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.”
— Arnold Bennett

Of all the Stoic philosophers, the clam from Shel Silverstein’s unepic poem “It’s All The Same To The Clam” is my favourite. Man may sing his endless songs of wronging rights and righting wrongs and it’s all the same to the clam. Is this not stoicism par excellence? And if an entire school of thought can be replicated by a brainless bivalve, how good is it?

“That’s what stoicism is: the avoidance of bother when bother’s the other option.”
— Jonathan Meades

There I go again, trying to toss zingers at the unzingable! For as Epictetus wrote, “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.’” So he admits it!

“But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: “Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.”’

I breathed a bit stertorously.

‘He said that, did he?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.’”
— P.G. Wodehouse

Who can forget Chrysippus, one of the great Stoics who laughed himself to death after seeing a donkey eat some figs that had been soaked in wine? After hearing that, you know what the clam did? Exactly. In the end, like Ryan Holiday, the clam always wins. Even in linguine alle vongole? Especially in linguine alle vongole. It’s delicious!

“Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge

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“I think that’s what maturity is: a stoic response to endless reality.”
— Carrie Fisher

Where’s The Stoic’s Guide To Wit when you need it? While you’re looking for it, I’ll digress about suicide food, the marketing technique in which adorable animals beg you to eat them. Who can forget Cluckin’ Chicken from SNL, voiced by in his very first role on the show? The clam could do the same, or not. It doesn’t care! You could pick any of these subjects for next week and it would offer the same reaction!

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Each month my paid subscribers and I share some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This is what’s at the end of the rabbit hole!

This week really must celebrate Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, certainly the best film ever made in and about Toronto — and/or anywhere else. It’s hard to describe how winning this film is, or really what it’s even about, but let’s just call it the Back to the Future parody you didn’t know you desperately needed.

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Get Wit Quick No. 362 was completed before death, so if death had come, it wouldn’t have been finished. But since death didn’t, here we are. Ha? Hey, I just noticed that clam is an anagram for calm. Maybe that explains everything? This newsletter’s mascot, a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, could take a clam in a fight. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. Despite it all, the book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I will not change my emotional state based on whether you tap the ❤️ below. Well, maybe a smidge.

If you’ve got a wacky theory, déjà vu could be just the proof point you need to convince a gullible world. In The Matrix, seeing the same black cat walk across a doorway twice is enough to make Keanu Reeves emit the most understated “whoa” of a whoa-ful career — proof there’s a glitch in the simulation that will require the immediate use of wire fu. The fact they made three more movies and then packaged them in a box set called The Matrix 4-Film Déjà Vu Collection underlines this point.

“It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another — it’s one damn thing over & over.”
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Even if the copycat was a matrix glitch, it wasn’t actually déjà vu. In his cranky usage guide The King’s English, Kingsley Amis points out that the original term describes a “transient psychological state, not uncommon among those under about forty, in which the subject feels that he has seen before some place where he has provably never been in this life.” Nowadays, he complained, people use the French term to talk about actual memories, which has “added to the stock of verbal garbage.” Ooh la la, la la, la la, etc.

“Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
— Stephen Wright

For Friedrich Nietzsche, déjà vu proved the theory of eternal recurrence. If a room seems oddly familiar, what other explanation could there be than “the eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!” Or as Geoff Dyer explained in a most Keanu like riff: “The strangest aspect of déjà vu is the way that the sensation always extends slightly beyond the moment when we have registered it as such so that it includes our saying, ‘I’ve just had a déjà vu,’ and we are briefly locked into the loop of the moment just as we are locked into endless loops of life.” Whoa.

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
— Franklin Pierce Adams

For Sigmund Freud, if a room looks awfully familiar it’s because a womb is awfully familiar. In The Interpretation of Dreams, the Viennese witchdoctor asserted that déjà vu in a dream is about “invariably the genitals of the dreamer’s mother; there is indeed no other place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once before.” At the very least, this assumes you aced the Apgar test.

“Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast,
The repetition kills the wretch at last.”
— Juvenal

For J.M. Coetzee, watching televised sports was an eternal recurrence. In a letter to Paul Auster, the Nobel-winning novelist calculated that he’d seen every possible permutation of the game of cricket, and yet he still watched. “By the age of thirty, any serious spectator must have moments of déjà vu — more than moments, extended periods. And justifiably so: it’s all been done before. … So why waste my time slumped in front of a television screen watching young men at play? For, I concede, it is a waste of time. I have an experience (a secondhand experience), but it does me no good that I can detect. I learn nothing. I come away with nothing.”

“It’s déjà vu all over again.”
— Yogi Berra

And for Yogi Berra, déjà vu was more like jamais dit. As Quote Investigator explains, when William Safire asked the wisecracker-of-bats in 1987 if he’d really said his all-over-again line, he denied it. But by 1998, he claimed it as his own — and even dug up a specific recollection of blurting it after witnessing Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit back-to-back homers in 1961. Berra provably was on that Yankees team, and with enough repetition of the line, his memory manifested it. Even when it’s made up, history repeats itself.

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“You mean now?”
— Yogi Berra’s response when asked for the time.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve some reasonable explanation of what déjà vu actually is. And in this essay, psychologist Anne Cleary argues that it usually pertains to the shape of a room and is a form of recognition without immediate recall, leaving us looking inward as our brain frantically rifles through its filing cabinet, searching for the applicable memory. Obviously there’s no actual filing cabinet in the brain, just a whole mess of neurons wrapped in manila sheaths. And next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I share some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This is what’s at the end of the rabbit hole!

This week’s taste comes from The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, a new sitcom that’s a welcome chip off the old 30 Rock. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that in the show’s universe, there’s a network drama called FDNY Chicago. The tagline: “In the New York Fire Department there is a special unit that fights fires in Chicago. These are their stories.” Excerpts follow throughout episode three, wearing down even the most skeptical viewer:

“This is actually quite compelling,” admits documentarian Arthur Tobin, played by Daniel Radcliffe in his best outing since the title role in the Weird Al biopic. “It was clever how they couldn’t find the subway fire because the train was above ground.”

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Get Wit Quick No. 361 never arrived at vuja de, the phenomenon of seeing something familiar as though it were new. The idea was coined by George Carlin, popularized by innovation scholars as a way to solve problems, and certainly never approved by the L’Académie française. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. I feel like I’ve asked you to tap the ❤️ before? No?

When’s the last time you used a real password? Not a hard-to-guess combination of letters, numbers, your mother’s maiden name, plus a special character in your mother’s family, like Uncle Charlie. I’m talking about the original meaning of passwords, the phrases you need to whisper to gain access to a secret room. Where did all the secret rooms go? For obvious reasons, I can’t tell you.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?”
— Sigrid Nunez

Without speakeasies, passwords are horrible and perhaps almost obsolete. The passkey revolution is upon us, you see. And what’s a passkey? I just read this whole article about them and couldn’t tell you. And that’s why they’re so safe: Zero chance I will hack your account.

“I would imagine that if you could understand Morse Code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy.”
— Mitch Hedberg

Happily my extensive review of humorous quotations has uncovered the perfect password, which I will share with you at the end of this article. Because if I share it here, everyone will know what it is. But by burying it under a few Chesterton lines, it’s basically invisible.

“An aristocracy is a secret society; and this is especially so when, as in the modern world, it is practically a plutocracy. The one idea of a secret society is to change the password.”
— G.K. Chesterton

It’s been reported that, at the time of the Louvre heist last year, the password to the museum’s video surveillance system was “Louvre.” It has yet to be confirmed that this password was chosen by their sandal-wearing head of security, Philippe Fillope.

“Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember but easy for computers to guess.”
— Randall Munroe

If you’ve spent your whole life typing random strings of highly memorable characters into little grey boxes, you must be really good at it, right? Of course not. This annual study of the passwords most commonly found in large data breaches found that Generation Z and the Silent Generation both favoured 12345. The more sophisticated and security-aware Gen Xers, Millennials, and Baby Boomers picked 123456. No points for guessing which demographic had “skibidi” in their top ten.

“Every password was swordfish. Whenever anyone tried to think of a word that no one would ever guess, they always chose swordfish. It was just one of those strange quirks of the human mind. ”
— Terry Pratchett

But you know what no one picked? Swordfish! This despite a whole TVTropes article titled “The Password is Always Swordfish.” The tradition dates back to a routine in Horse Feathers, the Marx Brothers movie that’s not quite as tasty as Duck Soup. If you show up with a sword and a fish, as Harpo does, they’ll let you in. And that’s how we discovered two-factor authentication.

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“Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder.
‘Harpo, my boy,’ he said, ‘I’m going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember.’
My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic password to a rich, full life from the master himself.
‘Yes, sir?’ I said. And he told me three things.
I regret that I’ve forgotten what they were.”
— Harpo Marx

Harpo is an anagram for Oprah, and if you rearrange the letters of The Oprah Winfrey Show, you get “Oh wow, fine hyper trash.” The English language contains so much truth, assuming we remember the correct order of the letters. And next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I share some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. This is what’s at the end of the rabbit hole!

And did you know we’re in the middle of the McGuaneissance? The literary outdoorsman Thomas McGuane is suddenly being re-appreciated with big profiles in The Atlantic (gift link!) and The Believer (I read ’em all), but TBH his Wikipedia is hard to top with lines like this:

“In 1973, he crashed his Porsche on an icy Texas highway. While not seriously injured, he was left speechless for several days.”

And this:

“He entered a period where he became known as ‘Captain Berserko’...”

And also this:

“The early 1970s included an affair with actress Elizabeth Ashley, divorce from first wife Becky (who went on to marry Peter Fonda), marriage to actress Margot Kidder, the birth of their daughter, Maggie, and his second divorce—all in less than a year.”

What a year! I’ll serve up some choice cuts from McGuane’s 92 in the Shade in the next Get Wit Picks! It’s like Hunter S. Thompson after a month at the Betty Ford Center.

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I used a common hacking technique to write Get Wit Quick No. 360, the same one I’ve deployed for the 359 issues that preceded it: The dictionary attack, wherein I try every single word until I find one that works. And if that doesn’t work, I brute force it by punching the keyboard. Bust the process! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Tap the ❤️ below to enter the speakeasy that is the upper echelon of my readership.

Obscurity used to have a negative connotation; now I’m not so sure. Everyone is known, in the sense that your identifying details are openly traded on advertising markets with the wholesome intent of serving you content that better reflects your interests. Wouldn’t it be nice to opt out?

“The pleasantest condition of life is in incognito. What a brave privilege it is to be free from all contentions, from all envying, from being envied, from receiving or paying all kind of ceremonies!”
— Abraham Cowley

Famous people have told us over and over again that becoming famous only made them miserable on a grander scale. So is happiness to be found in obscurity? If you consider that the best way to stop worrying about your own problems is to look outward, then perhaps a bit of selflessness with an emphasis on less self, is the key.

“He who can live unknown and not fret, is he not a gentleman?”
— Confucius

What is the hunger for fame but a sublimated denial of death? Just look at the 1980s movie and TV series Fame, the theme song of which sings the quiet part out loud: “Fame! I’m gonna live forever. Baby, remember my name.” Who can forget that singer, old what’s-her-teeth, and of course all the fantastic stars of that show, whosit and that lady and the other guy?

“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte

But if you’re famous and tired of it, please remember that becoming infamous is not the same thing as becoming unfamous. This weird grammatical quirk has confused the likes of O.J. Simpson, R. Kelly, and Sam Bankman-Fried, to name just a few.

“Many men and women enjoy popular esteem, not because they are known but because they are unknown.”
— Nicolas de Chamfort

Against this constant Warholian quest to be known and to amass followers, it’s good to remember that going the other way is not only an option but a fundamental freedom. “The right to be forgotten,” a tenet of European privacy law that lets you purge your digital past, seems almost poetic in its anachronism.

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
— Mignon McLaughlin

There is of course a certain romance in the artist who dies in obscurity, only to be discovered after death. The conceit is that if the world had only known how great they were, they could have been showered in hosannahs whilst among the living. But this invalidates the whole premise, as all collectors benefit from the death premium.

“I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark, like celery.”
— Aldous Huxley

Consider Emily Dickinson, the wonderfully witty poet who overused em dashes before ChatGPT made it cool. She remained unknown throughout her life, only achieving the rare feat of being the subject of an Apple TV series starring Hailee Steinfeld 133 years after her death. (Speaking of which, that series featured Wiz Khalifa as Death.) And Dickinson enjoyed her obscurity, as per her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” that goes like this:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Dont tell! they’d banish us - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

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“Obscurity and a competence: That is the life that is best worth living.”
— Mark Twain

Back in the 1980s, the U.S. prohibited video stores from sharing your rental history without your consent. This law was passed, says Reuters, “after a video store clerk gave a newspaper reporter a list of 146 movies rented by then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork and his family. (He liked Hitchcock films.)” Since we have fired all the video store clerks, this is no longer an issue. And for next week?

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Each month my paid subscribers and I share some of the wittiest things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced. This is what’s at the end of the rabbit hole! To prime the pump, here’s a great little excerpt from the talky GWQ-approved novel Television by Lauren Rothery:

“My friend from Belgium, once he was trying to tell me that he wanted to cast Champagne in this movie.” I affected a Belgian accent, “Champagne, eee’s so good, Champagne. I kept asking him, Who the hell is Champagne? And he just kept repeating it. Finally he goes, Champagne, you know im! I yam sam!” “Oh! Sean Penn?” laughed the writer.

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Get Wit Quick No. 359 is further reminded of Woody Allen’s line that he’d rather achieve immortality by not dying than through his work, and also the Susan Ertz line that “millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” which in turn brings to mind the Allen line about the restaurant where the food is awful and such small portions! Life is a slog, and it ends too soon! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Being known as one of the wonderful people who tapped the ❤️ below is exactly the right level of obscurity.

So, what’s good?

Welcome to Get Wit Picks, a new monthly collection of gems by and for the paid subscribers of Get Wit Quick. I want to know: What are the supporting enthusiasms of my enthusiastic supporters? What’s been tickling your brain in 2026 to date?

I’m looking for turns of phrase, pearls, clever jokes, tweets, highlights, articles, tidbits, books, movies, nuggets: Anything that’s delivered that satisfying click in the mind.

You can share yours in the comments below, or hit reply to this email and send some along. They can have backstories or simply speak for themselves. I’ll recap the sweetest drops of honey from the hive mind in a followup email. Let me know how to credit you (first name, full name, nickname, alias, etc) and if you’d like me to link back to your online presence in some form.

I’ll go first with some recent gems and the rabbit holes that led me to them…

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It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. The fact that this Danish proverb is variously attributed to Yogi Berra, Mark Twain, and Niels Bohr suggests it’s nearly as difficult to predict the past. And yet we hurtle forward, unclear on where we’ve been or where we’re going.

“You can only predict things after they have happened.”
— Eugène Ionesco

But there are prediction markets now! Just as Ouija boards help us chit chat with the dearly departed, sites like Polymarket can harness the wisdom of crowds. Or as Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of the prediction market Kalshi, told the Financial Times: “We’re making the world a little bit smarter about the future, and I think that’s a very valuable thing to build.”

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
— A. Gary Shilling

Except that more than 90% of all the predictions on these platforms are sports bets, so the real business model is making the world a little bit poorer about professional football.

“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”
— Hugh Keough

There’s gotta be a word for the chillingly cold comfort that comes from seeing a bad guy devoured by an even bigger, badder guy. The cinematic example is the T. Rex dispensing with the velociraptors at the end of Jurassic Park; in the business world, the big box stores that wiped out neighbourhood bookstores in the 1990s were then destroyed by Amazon. And now the sports betting apps that somehow convinced governments to let them turn every game into a gamble are being undercut by prediction markets. Who could have seen it coming?

“Prophecy, n. The art and practice of selling one’s credibility for future delivery.”
— Ambrose Bierce

My hunch is this boom in predictions boils down to the fact that we’re all desperate to know one very specific thing about the future: When exactly will the robot from The Jetsons take my job? With the second, much more general thing being, how screwed are we?

“Most science fiction can predict the car, some science fiction can predict the drive-in theater, but science fiction that can predict the changes in teen-age sexual behavior as a result of the drive-in is vanishingly rare.
— Gardner Dozois

The answer will always be unsatisfying, what with complexity, free will and the ease with which we can all bet against ourselves. So take solace in the ever-expanding collection of confidently wrong predictions about technology made by those closest to it. The successes of steam engines, telephones, light bulbs, airplanes, machine guns, space travel, and nuclear energy were all dismissed by experts in their respective fields. William Goldman’s observation about Hollywood applies: Nobody knows anything. Or in the case of prediction markets, all the nobodies put together know the exact same amount.

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“Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
— George Eliot

There’s now an online gambling site that lets you put money on a CCTV livestream of traffic. How many cars will go through a random Tokyo intersection in the next three minutes? Imagine if you made your fortune on such wagers and then had to explain as much at dinner parties? It makes one nostalgic for the days of cow pie bingo. And next week?

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You’ve got a collection of gems, I’m sure; bits and bobs of cleverness you’ve picked up along the journey that you’re just waiting to share. And that’s precisely the venue that Get Wit Picks provides my supporters. Join them today to get the first issue!

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Get Wit Quick No. 358 saw all of this coming. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. The punters have even money on you tapping the ❤️ below; don’t let them up!

Everyone wants to buy you a puppy. No one wants to buy food for said puppy. (“I’m hungry,” said puppy.) I borrowed that observation from David Cooper, a transit consultant who was telling the Toronto Star about the city’s problems funding transit, but he may well have been talking about maintenance. Or puppies.

“After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
— Mierle Laderman Ukeles

The patron saint of modern maintenance is the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. She is the living response (at age 87!) to Cyril Connolly’s observation that “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Ukeles was an accomplished artist when she had her first child in 1968, and said child went into that pram. (“Push me,” said child.) And, Ukeles recalls, “people said to me, when they saw me pushing my baby carriage, “Do you do anything?“...Then I had an epiphany... I have the freedom to name maintenance as art. I can collide freedom into its supposed opposite and call that art. I name necessity art.”

“My life is a constant struggle between the maintenance of my apartment and the maintenance of my sanity.”
— Fran Lebowitz

Ukeles’ works include painstakingly scrubbing the steps of a museum and a Japanese snowplow ballet performed in the middle of summer (“I asked ‘people believe you are the heroes in winter’ when I met snow-clearing workers and they answered ‘yes’. I then continued ‘but people forget about you in summer’ and they grinned and said ‘yes’. I said ‘why not remind them of your presence this summer’.) She was named the first-ever artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation in 1977 and her 1979-80 magnum opus, Touch Sanitation Performance involved her personally greeting and thanking the more than 8,500 people responsible for taking out New York’s trash.

“There’s birth, there’s death, and in between there’s maintenance.”
— Tom Robbins

Is Ukeles underappreciated because she’s a woman or because she chose to focus on maintenance? Yes. If you define art as innovation, maintenance is the opposite. Make it new, Ezra Pound said, leaving someone else to dust the old.

“Women are the true maintenance class. Society is built upon their acquiescence and upon their small and necessary labours.”
— Phyllis Diller

And so arrives Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, the new book by hippie prophet Stewart Brand that puts the man in manifesto. His subjects: Guns! Cars! Solo sailing around the world! Assault rifles! YouTube teardown videos! Rocketry! The also-87-year-old founder of The Whole Earth Catalog celebrates such classics as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and admits that he’s a reluctant convert to maintenance as the underpinning of civilization. “Maybe we prefer to think in ideals,” he writes, “and the gritty reality of things constantly decaying and breaking offends our sense of the world.” One of the sailors he profiles refers to it as “sailorizing.” It’s the whole job.

“If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra

If Brand succeeds in making maintenance an avatar of manliness, great: Everything needs upkeep and everyone needs to pitch in. But there’s a scent of Columbusing about the project, a discovering that’s more of a noticing. “This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general,” Brand writes — so general, in fact, that not a single woman is mentioned. But someone washed the steps that Brand walks. Ukeles’ manifesto predates Brand’s by 56 years, and the ideas of said manifesto were built to last. (“Keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advanced; renew the excitement; repeat the flight,” said manifesto.)

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“My mother used to say that the best way to keep a man is in a jar of formaldehyde.”
— Dorothy Parker

I didn’t intend to write about gendered maintenance! And yet the prospects of duelling 87-year-olds captivated me. This week we replaced the ice maker on our 10-year-old fridge and I’m happy about it. Next week?

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I’ve had a good long think about what to do for the scores of paying subscribers to this newsletter. For almost two years, I commissioned Riposte Cards, beautifully illustrated quips created by artists I admire. Then I made Aphoristicks, a series of witty stickers. In between, there was Recommentions, a catalogue of all the best books, movies, shows, and spectacles referenced herein. And all the while, I felt like a passenger on the sinking ship that is Canada Post.

Now, thanks in part to the Ninety-Second Get Wit Quick Reader Survey that only took you three minutes to complete and served as a balm to my spirits, I figured something else out: We’re in this together. The esoteric ephemera and random connections that deliver the dopamine for me each week do the same for you. This clever community is what it’s all about.

So, you guys write the newsletter from now on while I sip mai tais by the pool. No! I don’t even like mai tais!

First, I’ll now be calling my paying subscribers my Supporters, because that’s what you’re doing. (Those who pay a bit more are heretofore known as Generous Supporters). When you plunk down some dinero, I’ll mail you a welcome package of all the analog ephemera I’ve created over the years. And every month, I’ll curate a special issue for Supporters called Get Wit Picks, wherein we share the great quotes, books, movies, ideas, zingers, aphorisms, and logical twists that have recently inspired, amused, intrigued, and jollified us. I imagine it as a top-notch creative recommendation engine for enthusiasms powered by this clever community, and I can’t wait to see what it produces. Supporters, I’ll follow up with you wonderful people shortly. Everyone else, thank you for reading and do consider jumping on this brilliant bandwagon!

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Get Wit Quick No. 357 is in its maintenance phase. But also innovation! And, per Jack Donaghy, innovention. And I don’t not like mai tais. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Dust off the ❤️ below with a tap.

It’s a funny thing when your neighbour discovers neighbourliness. The neighbour, I write with a conspicuous U from Canada, is the United States, and the discovery is bubbling up from all corners. Here’s Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: “If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it ‘neighborism,’ a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.”

“We are commanded to love our neighbor because our ‘natural’ attitude toward the ‘other’ is one of either indifference or hostility.”
— W.H. Auden

“When you cut through all the idiot chatter of these topsy-turvy modern times, what is the underlying secret to true swag?” ask the authors of Blackbird Spyplane, the densely jargoned style ’stack. You might think it’s really, really big pants, but no. They say they’d be “hard pressed to give you a better, more eternally resonant, and more concise answer than neighborliness.” Yes, “leaving your home and being kind, helpful & chill to others” is their underlying principle of Mach 3+ decor. It’s not the message you’d expect in a guide to expensive ceramics but it’s welcome all the same.

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”
— G.K. Chesterton

For those of us blessed to not be under siege, how does one practice good neighbourism? Step One is to master the friendly wave, a simple acknowledgment of the person you see on a regular basis, even if the name escapes you. In his Book of Delights, the poet Ross Gay lists The Wave of Unfamiliars as Delight No. 73, specifically citing his Minnesotan grampa as the tidal waver. “To the driver of every passing truck or car he raised his first two fingers to the stiff brim of his John Deere ball cap and cut them through the air like the gentlest initiation of a curve ball ever,” Gay writes. “It was an elegant wave, understated, that intimated an older time of hat-tipping and such.”

“Do not love your neighbour as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence; if on bad, an injury.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Step Two is tapping the emergency bakes. “Lend me some sugar,” Andre 3000 implores in Hey Ya!, for “I am your neighbor.” He was talking about sex, but let’s take him at his word. In most urban areas you can get instant delivery of granulated sucrose in exchange for money plus delivery fee, services fee, tax, and tip via a tech platform. But there’s something better about borrowing from a neighbour, not least because you’ll owe them something in return, perhaps a few slices of the banana bread that got you into this sugar-needing situation. When anthropologist Laura Bohannan visited a Tiv village in central Nigeria, she was presented with “two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts.” The expectation, she learned, was that after some period of time she had to roughly return the favour. Not by replaying the exact value of goods, as that would rudely signal the end of the exchange, but rather by returning a bit more or a bit less to knit neighbours together. The result was “endless circle of gifts in which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received but in which, over months, the total exchange was never much more than a penny in anyone’s favor.”

“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say.”
— Cyril Connolly

And finally, Step Three is to give your neighbours space. “The best neighbour is the neighbour who leaves you alone unless asked for help,” wrote Auberon Waugh in 1994, “not the neighbour who is forever ringing the doorbell to ask if you are all right, and the council tenants of Stonebridge Park Estate are a shining example to us all.” He was responding to a news report of an elderly man who’d died in his apartment and wasn’t discovered for four years. The standard take was that this was a grim sign of social alienation, but Waugh differed. “I think it is greatly to modern society’s credit that he lay undisturbed by the local welfare busybodies for all that time, or even by convivial neighbours. Through three Christmas seasons, while the police were out trying to terrorise motorists, and the nation’s 5.2 million public employees were otherwise occupied, his corpse quietly recycled itself with the kitchen linoleum.” It’s perhaps extreme to prefer a cold body to a busybody, but it’s also undeniable that nothing kills neighbourly vibes like a buttinsky.

“But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.”
— George Eliot

If your neighbour becomes your friend, it matters more that they’re your pal. If your neighbour becomes your enemy, it matters more that they’re your neighbour. In all other situations, wave hello, borrow the occasional egg, and leave them be. Caveat if you’re American: Alert them when the secret police are coming and keep your phone handy. Caveat if you’re America: Focus on the “leave them be” part.

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“Ask your neighbour only about things you know better. His advice might prove valuable.”
— Karl Kraus

Canada also shares a land border with Denmark, thanks to the peaceful resolution of the Whisky War in 2022. Technically the Danes brought schnapps to a whisky fight, but these are precisely the sort of differences you need to overlook if you want to be a good neighbour. And for next week?

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Get Wit Quick No. 356 is happy to shovel the walks of the emails on either side of this one in your inbox. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Give the ❤️ below an elegant wave.