One of my published posts, “I Wish I’d Never Seen These Ads,” set a personal record: almost 9,000 views, 144 “likes,” and 57 comments. One of my notes — some complaints about a current bestselling novel — has been “liked” more than 1,300 times. I am astonished.

For all this time, unlike many — most? — of the writers here, I’ve never switched on payments. Every Fritinancy release has been free, gratis, $0.00.

Why? That’s a long-ish story, one I unspooled in an October 2025 post.

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And now it’s time for a change.

With my three-year Sub-versary in sight, I’m finally acknowledging that if I want to keep writing here — and I do! — the 100 percent free model isn’t sustainable. This newsletter is, when all is said and done, my business. Research takes time, writing takes time. My experience and skills have value. I’d like to start paying myself a wage.

You can see where this is headed, can’t you. I’m about to join the ranks of the monetizers.

Which is to say that, beginning on Monday Wednesday, August 10, I will be enabling — but not requiring — payments on this platform.

What does this mean?

If you’ve pledged a subscription — you know who you are, I hope — your credit card will be charged on August 10. Many thanks for your trust, your patience, and your support!

If you are considering a paid subscription, the rates will remain $5 a month or $50 a year for the next three months. On October 16 they’ll go up to $6 a month or $60 a year. If you choose to become a paying subscriber, my advice is to lock in the lower rates now!

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Also beginning October 16: New posts will be free for all; posts older than one month will be paywalled.

What won’t change: I’ll continue to publish an average of two posts a week, plus occasional Notes and Chats (probably more Chats, possibly restricted to paying subscribers — I’m still working on that). If this thing really gets going, I may paywall some posts, hire a copyeditor, record some audio posts, and even create goodies for you high-flying founding-level subscribers. Merch, anyone?

As always, you’re welcome to support my writing without embiggening Substack’s bottom line. Here’s a link to donate through the Buy Me a Coffee platform, and my thanks to everyone who has already contributed this way:

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Thanks to all of you for reading, “liking,” and commenting for the last three years of Fritinancy on Substack. See you in the comments.

(And yes, I’ll post a reminder or three before August 10.)

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Panihole

A correspondent in Southern California alerted me to PANIHOLE Mobile Fare. My tipster was not amused: “Try saying that out loud. Do you hear Panty-hole? I do!”

I do too, sort of. But I don’t hate this name, mostly because PANIHOLE — “home of the one handy sammy”2— is so knowingly, ebulliently in on the joke.

Let’s break it down: The PAN in PANIHOLE (unlike the PAN in PANE shoes, which we addressed last time) is Spanish for bread. The hole is English for, well, hole. It’s bread with a hole. And no, it isn’t bagels.

Founders Mike Donahue and Lauren Walker explain:

Using our proprietary ‘Paniholer’ hand tool, we core the center of a toasted baguette before stuffing with goodness. Magically, no bread is wasted in the process ;)

Their videos are hilariously retro:

@panivanetteCan you “handle” making a Panihole? ⭕️ The patent pending “Paniholer” hand tool exclusively by Panihole, LLC. Coming 🔜 to a baguette near you!#onehandysammy #handmade #funfood

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The whole effort is so professionally executed — and so winningly tongue-in-cheek — that I have to politely disagree with my anonymous correspondent. I love the PANIHOLE concept and the name. Is it silly? Of course! Is it a little naughty? Absolutely! But it’s also adorable and memorable.

Sleevey Wonders

“Professional” is not the modifier I’d choose for Sleevey Wonders, whose website looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1998. But the name has been cracking me up ever since I encountered it in the comments section3 of a New York Times fashion-advice column.

What are Sleevey Wonders®? From that antique website: “Reversible slip-on sleeves that are made to wear under sleeveless tops and strapless dresses as a creative solution for women who don't love the look of their bare arms.” Patented in the U.S. and five other countries!

Have Stevie Wonders’s lawyers heard about this invention? I hope they have, and that they’re completely cool with it. I certainly am.

Bretton Woods

I’m no poli-sci wonk, but even I know about the Bretton Woods Agreement, the 1944 pact that established the rules of commercial relations among 44 nations and lasted until 1971. It takes its name from Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the ski-resort town where the agreement was signed. From Wikipedia:

The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars with the dollar convertible to gold bullion for foreign governments and central banks. It envisioned greater cooperation among countries to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to countries with balance of payments deficits.

So when I saw an ad for a Bretton Woods “senior lifestyle community” in Davis, California, I did a double-take.

There’s no New Hampshire connection — or international trade subtext — going on here. The Davis development is owned and operated by DeNova Homes, which is based in Northern California. And “Bretton” has no California roots: the New Hampshire town was named in 1772 after Bretton Hall, the English estate of colonist Sir Thomas Wentworth.

Also, there are no “woods” in Davis, a university town in California’s flat, agricultural Central Valley.

In short, this name strikes me as tone deaf and ahistorical. It isn’t as bad as, say Lolita children’s furniture, Sophie’s Choice pierogi, or Icarus Flying Academy — all real brand names I’ve written about — but it won’t win any branding prizes, either.

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For each of their on-camera interviews with filmmakers, actors, critics, and other film nerds, Criterion records 30 seconds of “room tone” that is used to cut the footage into a seamless video.

Criterion compiles those snippets into year-end compilation videos in which actors and directors sit without speaking, often smiling gently or looking pensive. Here’s the 2025 room-tone video:

It’s enjoyable — Kottke calls it “equal parts charming and meditative” — but what you’re observing isn’t room tone, because Criterion provides a Muzak-y overlay for each video.

So what is room tone? Kottke quotes a definition that I traced to an introduction written by Criterion Collection editor Daniel Reis for the 2024 compilation video:

When trying to explain what room tone is to someone unfamiliar with the concept, I reach for an architectural metaphor. If words are the bricks of a scene, then surely room tone is the mortar that binds them together. It gives sonic coherence to an edited piece built from different takes within the same location.

Here’s a more prosaic definition from StudioBinder, a resource for industry professionals:

Room tone refers to the natural ambient sound of a location when no intentional noise is being made. It includes subtle sounds like electrical hums, air movement, distant traffic, or the acoustics of the room itself. When shooting a film, this "sonic fingerprint" is captured by the production sound mixer and boom operator, typically after the last take of a given scene. This way the sound can be used within the edit in post-production.

An alternate term for room tone is presence: it’s similar to ambience, Wikipedia tells us, but is “distinguished by a lack of explicit background noise.” It’s the neutral soundscape that allows audio files to be stitched together without listeners noticing the edits.

Room tone has traveled beyond its journeyman roots. The California-born, Sweden-based artist and “sound theorist” Brandon LaBelle created a project he titled Room Tone — “an experiment in acoustical imagination” — that was exhibited at SFMOMA in 2017. (I’m a member, but I’d somehow missed it, whatever “it” was.)

Room Tone is also the title of a 2024 poetry collection by the American writer and filmmaker Vanessa H. Smith.

Room Tone is a New York consultancy, founded in 2020, that advises podcasters on strategy and business development.

Finally, I found and watched two unrelated short films titled Room Tone, both featuring protagonists who work with film sound. Morgan Cooper’s Room Tone (2019) is a gentle tribute to “a sound mixer who loves his job … but can’t seem to let go of an unfulfilled dream.”

Michael Gabriele’s Room Tone (2022) strikes a very different, um, tone. The synopsis: “When a sound guy’s attempt to capture ‘room tone’ is constantly thwarted by the noisy antics of his coworkers, he takes extreme measures to achieve silence.” It’s bloody hilarious (she said meaningfully).

For more film-industry jargon, see my 2013 blog post on cucoloris: “A screen with oddly shaped holes cut through it, placed before a light source to throw diverse shadows on an otherwise uniform surface.”

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One is not alone in this infatuation. Even the U.S. Department of Defense is smitten.

The Oura story

Oura Health Ltd. — styled ŌURA in the wordmark, maybe as a pronunciation cue, maybe because a designer said “a macron would look cool here” — is a Finnish health-technology company founded in 2013. The company raised $900 million in latest funding round, in October 2025, and is valued at $11 billion. Its latest product, the Oura Ring 5, billed as “the world’s smallest smart ring,” began shipping to customers in early June. Reviews in the tech press have been breathless: “the new gold standard” (CNET), “a massive upgrade” (The Guardian), “thinner, lighter, better” (TechCrunch); “I’ll never take this smart ring off” (Esquire). The ring sells for $399 to $499, depending on the finish, and records 50 health statistics, including nighttime breathing and blood-pressure changes, all enhanced, as everything is these days, by a proprietary AI model.1

Is the ring worth it? I am not an Oura customer, so I can’t say. The Oura name, however, tells a data-rich story of its own.

Swan or river?

For starters, the name wasn’t always Oura. From Oura’s corporate blog:

Oura’s original name was Jouzen, based on joutsen, the Finnish word for swan—the country’s national bird. Zen was integrated to signify calm and balance. Plus, its phonetic similarity to the English word chosen was purposeful: Oura members have chosen to prioritize their health. Before going to market, the name was changed to Oura.

That’s it? That’s it. Disappointing! So I kept digging.

Oura’s home base is Oulu, a city of 200,000 located 300 miles north of Helsinki, 60 miles from the Arctic Circle, “and a world away from Silicon Valley,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims put it in a January 2025 story. Oulu takes its name from the Oulujoki River; “the most probable theory” for the origin of “Oulu,” according to Wikipedia, is a Finnish word meaning “floodwater.”2

“Oura” shares two letters with “Oulu” as well as a vague sonic resemblance. Is there a connection? Maybe! Or maybe we’re meant to gaze at our AI-powered jewelry and think of something more mystical.

Aura farming?

“Oura” is pronounced OH-ra by Finns and “OR-a” by most Americans. (Here’s a cute TikTok comparing the two pronunciations. This may be the reason for the macron.) It’s not inconceivable that Oura Health would like us to think of “aura” — a subtle emanation — in connection with its products: all that data, pulsing automagically through those battery-powered, AI-enhanced sensors.

Aura comes to us from ancient Greek, where it meant “gentle breeze.” Lately it’s been appropriated as a slang term meaning “charismatic presence”; this sense of aura was a 2024 runner-up in the Most Likely to Succeed category in the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote.

Heads or tails?

Or does “Oura” have independent meaning in Finnish? Google’s Gemini AI wants me to think so. It tells me that “oura” means “tail”:

In Finnish, “Oura” derives from the ancient word for “tail” (historically used to describe tail-shaped geographical features). The founders of the billion-dollar wearable tech company, ŌURA, chose the name because they wanted to focus on the human body’s “tail”—specifically, measuring the pulse and other biometrics from your fingertip while you sleep to evaluate your recovery.

I suspect that this is AI slop, because a) I found no evidence of the founders wanting to focus on any sort of tail; and b) an actual English-Finnish dictionary tells me that the Finnish words for “tail” are häntää (for animals) and “pyrstö” (for birds and fish).3 Any Finnish speakers out there care to set the record straight — , maybe?

But oura is in fact very close to one language’s word for “tail.” Behold the ouroboros, an ancient symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail.4 Ouro — one vowel away from Oura — is ancient Greek for “tail”; the -boros suffix means “eating.” (That suffix eventually reached English in words like devour and omnivore.) Greek and Finnish are unrelated languages, but I’m sensing some cross-pollination.

From Wikipedia:

The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death and rebirth; the snake’s skin sloughing symbolises the transmigration of souls. The snake biting its own tail is a fertility symbol in some religions: the tail is a phallic symbol and the mouth is a yonic or womb-like symbol.

Life and death, fertility and renewal: The Oura ring is an ouroboros rendered in shiny, tarnish-resistant, AI-enhanced metal, tailing you from dawn to midnight and beyond. If that isn’t what Oura’s founders had in mind, perhaps it should have been.

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That New Yorker story, written by , called “taste” the latest buzzword to sting Silicon Valley. In recent months, Chayka wrote, “it has become as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the twenty-tens”2:

The esteemed technologist Paul Graham posted on X, “In the AI age, taste will become even more important.” Koen Bok, a founder of the booming A.I. design tool Framer, said on a podcast that “great taste” is what will create the best new products. The bookmarking app Sublime promises to build “a library that reflects your taste,” with the help of A.I.-driven recommendations. The entrepreneur and former Bytedance engineer Cong Wang echoed a new Silicon Valley axiom in a blog post, writing, “In the AI era, personal taste is the moat”—“moat” being entrepreneur lingo for an unreplicable advantage, the thing that makes your company stand out above its competitors. Startups apparently need taste like A.I. needs data centers.

Chayka came up with “taste-washing” to describe these efforts: “an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.”3 More evidence of that veneer: AI companies hiring philosophers. See The Atlantic, “Someone Finally Wants to Hire Philosophers,” and The New York Times, “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors.”

After Chayka’s story, a deluge of taste-gazing commentary: in The New York Times (“Is Taste the One Thing A.I. Can’t Replace?”), in Inc. (“Why Tech Thinkers Say Taste Is the Ultimate AI-Proof Skill [and 3 Ways to Grow Yours]”), in Fast Company (“Inside the $5 Trillion Quest to Develop Taste”). The veteran tech reporter was early to the party, spotting the trend back in December 2024 (“Writing in the AI Years: Taste Is Spooky”).

There’s even a San Francisco–based AI company called Taste Labs, which emerged from stealth mode in June 2026 and which claims to be solving AI’s slop problem. “We’re making the unverifiable verifiable, starting with design,” reads the company’s mission statement.4 By “the unverifiable” they mean that subjective objective taste. Presumably good taste.

But what is good taste, anyway? And who decides?

“Taste is style,” the director John Waters — aka “the Pope of Trash” — told an interviewer in 2011. He immediately followed that declaration with: “. . . and to know bad taste of course you have to have been taught the rules of the tyranny of good taste so you can yearn to break them.”

Whenever John Loring was asked to define good taste, he would respond, “Good for what?” Loring, who served for 30 years as the design director of Tiffany & Company, died on June 6; he was 86. His New York Times obituary called him “one of the country’s most influential tastemakers” (and also “an influential style maven”). He would have rejected those appellations. “The usual thought of an arbiter of taste is a repulsive one, because it leads to sameness in the world, and is killing to the imagination,” he told the New Yorker writer Holly Brubach in 1992. The headline on Brubach’s story, by the way, is “Giving Good Value” — not good taste.

You may be wondering: How did taste come to mean both “the act of perceiving a flavor with the tongue and palate” and “the sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful”? In fact, taste — from Old French taster — originally had neither of those meanings: Its root is a Latin verb, taxtare, meaning “to touch.” (Compare tactile.) The Middle English noun tast meant “feeling with the hands.” In the 14th century the word acquired the additional sense of “test” or “trial” — taste test, documented by 1979, is etymologically redundant — as well as the “perceiving a flavor” sense. It wasn’t until the 1600s that taste’s meaning migrated from the mouth to what we might call the soul, becoming, as the OED puts it, “the faculty of perceiving and enjoying what is excellent in art, literature, and the like.”

Distaste was originally a mouthy phenomenon that became a more general “dislike” over time. Tasteless can mean “lacking in flavor” but often, since 1676 or so, has meant “devoid of good taste”: tacky, we might say. Tasty (appetizing, savory) has been with us since 1617, tasteful since 1756; the latter no longer means “full of flavor” but rather “refined,” “elegant,” or “restrained”: showing good taste.

Tastemaker is a relative newcomer to the taste lexicon. Merriam-Webster’s definition is “one who sets the standards of what is currently popular or fashionable,” although this sense of taste may not be what the techbros are clamoring for. The OED credits tastemaker’s earliest usage, in January 1961, to a British journal of politics and economics, the New Left Review:

These areas of work are excluded, by the tastemakers, from the concept of ‘serious’ art.

(That’s the whole quote; I’m sure we’d all like to know what those “excluded areas” were.)

Serious art does not appear to be what AI companies have in mind when they praise taste. The marketing-executive co-authors of a June 2026 Fast Company article, “Winning in the Era of Taste and Talent,” observed that taste “is increasingly framed as a business asset—a genuine competitive advantage.” Taste-with-a-capital-T is the “knight in shining armor ensuring you won’t churn out the same stuff that makes you look like everyone else (see: Instagram coffee shops; Airbnb aesthetics; quiet luxury wardrobes; DTC wellness brands).” Not so fast, they warned: Taste “requires active interest and curiosity” and “is paradoxical and counterintuitive.” In other words: Taste is deeply human.

It’s all enough to make one yearn for the return of a taste-snubbing John Loring. Or for Diana Vreeland (1903–1989), the grandly opinionated fashion editor (Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue) and trend forecaster. “Lots of people have terrible taste, you know,” she said, at least once, “and make a damn good living off of it.”

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is one of America’s great cultural critics. He’s best known for his music writing — see his Substack, “Letter in the Ether” — but he has also published a strange and wonderful book about patriotism and The Great Gatsby. Just 154 pages long, Under the Red White and Blue covers a lot of territory: the U.S. Bicentennial, in 1976; The Sopranos; Jelly Roll Morton; Moby-Dick; a close reading of Gatsby and its multiple film adaptations. The title is repurposed: F. Scott Fitzgerald had favored Under the Red White and Blue for his 1925 novel. (He was also partial to Trimalchio in West Egg.) Fitzgerald told his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that he thought The Great Gatsby was a “weak” title.

Here’s an excerpt from Marcus’s book:

There’s a way in which you can see every American story as a version of the Declaration of Independence: every story an attempt to make it true, or prove it a lie. In 1941, Henry Luce called the twentieth century “The American Century”: he meant that was the century when America became a colossus from which the rest of the world would have to step back, trembling with awe. But if that American century was truly American, you can almost hear Lincoln reminding us — or, if not Lincoln, the doorkeeper at Independence Hall—then the story of the American century is the story of all sorts of previously excluded, marginalized, scorned, despised, ignored, or enslaved people — laborers, women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, Latinos, gay men and women — entering into full citizenship and a full participation in national life. If not full citizenship, a more complete citizenship than even Lincoln or the doorkeeper could have imagined — as, again and again, decade after decade, those words from the Declaration of Independence sounded as if for the first time.

Last week I went to an event at Clio’s Books here in Oakland to celebrate the publication of How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump,. an anthology of essays by the far-flung contributors to The Dial, an online magazine featuring the voices of reporters from some 85 countries.1 Do you wonder what journalists in Turkey, Argentina, Taiwan, Palestine, and Cuba — and more — think about the U.S. these days? Read this book.

From the introduction by The Dial’s founder and editor, Madeleine Schwartz:

Working with our writers has taught us that there’s nothing exceptional about what’s happening in the United States, except that so many Americans continue to cling to the idea of their own specialness. What is happening today in America is part of a global political turn, one in which social disputes fester rather than move toward resolution. Inequality, ineffective politics, and social divisions create the conditions for authoritarianism in the United States as they do in other parts of the world; the difference is how little the American people seem to see the political situation we’re now in. Now when I conduct my interviews across Europe, I’m still almost always asked bout what is happening in the United States. The number one question is “How can Americans be letting this happen?”

What a gift from historian and company: , a series of 250 one-minute films about “the many people, places, and events that have built our country and remind us of the power of each person to make history.” The series is a throwback to the Bicentennial Minutes that were broadcast on the CBS television network between July 1974 and December 1976. Watch on Substack, YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms.

One of my favorites:

What are we celebrating? The New York Times asked sixteen opinion columnists and writers to submit “nominations for America’s highlight reel.” (Gift link)

From writer and sociologist m on public libraries:

Where but the library, I frequently ask my students, can you linger without buying something first? There are apps to find a bathroom that won’t cost a cup of coffee first. Drugstores lock up baby formula. The grocery store requires a cellphone number for a discount on pork chops. Everywhere else in our fragmented worlds, we are reduced to transactions. Meanwhile, the library will hand you a stack of books, a carpet cleaner and a stack of seeds without collateral. Public libraries are tangible proof of an inalienable truth that we have forgotten in our 250 years: Some things are more important than profit.

And speaking of profit: From Christy Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, this full-page ad, published in The New York Times on June 21, 2026. “The Supreme Court’s duty,” it reads in part, “is not to serve a political movement, a president, or a party. Its duty is to uphold the Constitution equally for all Americans.”

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I’d finished a gym workout and was changing in the locker room. Minutes earlier, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had announced his choice of running mate: Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, who had included her famously false “Bridge to Nowhere” statement in a speech broadcast on one of the TVs in the workout area. She’d sounded utterly inane, and also terrifying.

I was feeling glum about Palin, McCain, and the upcoming election1 when I heard the unmistakable voice of E., a fellow gym member, in another area of the locker room. E. spoke excellent, booming English with a heavy overlay of her native Ukrainian. She and her friend were wondering aloud how we’d arrived at this lamentable state of affairs.

“Such a beautiful country,” E. concluded, sighing audibly. “With so many idiots.” EE-dee-otes.

I no longer belong to that gym and haven’t seen E. in years. But I think of her almost every day, especially as we approach July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Such a beautiful country. With so many idiots.

What else can you say about something like this?

Or this?

And how about the so-called Great American State Fair? Not so great, writes Kelsey Ables in The Atlantic (gift link):

Trompe l’oeil sheets cover slapdash structures lining both sides of the Mall with an illustration of architecture that is supposed to be beaux arts but is so stripped down that it makes the nearby brutalist buildings look practically baroque. A boxy model of Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in the center of the Mall appears as if it could have been designed in Minecraft and ordered from CVS for same-day pickup.

The fair, writes Ables, is “a dollar-store version of the grandiosity that Trump hopes will be his legacy.”

Take a closer look at that shitty-ass arch.

Here’s a headline that gets right to the point:

It’s Christopher Hooks’s cover story for the July 2026 issue of Harper’s (subscriber link, archive link), and I’m betting it’s the first time “fucking” has appeared in a headline in that 175-year-old publication.

To report the story, Hooks traveled to Washington, DC, and interviewed Rosa Rios, treasurer of the United States during both Obama administrations and current chair of the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, whose public face is a foundation called America250:

Rios and her colleagues had gone to great lengths to ensure that this was America’s best birthday yet, and they had overcome substantial difficulties to do so. The Semiquincentennial Commission was conjured into being by Congress back in 2016, during that long-ago summer when the Democratic Party was convening in Philadelphia and the succession of one form of representational liberalism to another seemed pretty well secure. But the next president, and the next Congress, were not the folks the political class expected. Somebody had dropped the baton.

For starters, the current occupant of the White House “has set up his own commemoration bodies, which answer solely to him: the appropriately martial-sounding Task Force 250 and Freedom 250, the latter of which has received funds diverted from America250. These new bodies seem to be having more success organizing (usually deranged) events,” including the UFC cage matches held in DC on Trump’s 80th birthday, June 14.

But never fear! America250 has a tacky, overpriced solution for you:

Rios opened her presentation by holding up a yellow, star-shaped plushie with a friendly face. “I am pleased to introduce to you George the Star!” This stuffed version of the semiquincentennial’s official mascot, a Nintendo-ish five-pointer, was now available for sale in the visitor center’s gift shop for $35.95. “This is the first time I’m seeing this plushie, and no one is more excited than I am.” George looked like a fine fellow, but there was something just a little off about him. Aren’t the stars on the flag white? I searched my brain for yellow stars in American iconography, and the closest I could get was the Carl’s Jr. logo.

Coming Friday: A slightly more upbeat take on the semiquincentennial.

From the archives:

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I’ve named companies and products, and consulted on book titles and subtitles, but I’ve never been asked to name characters. Still, I think about character names a lot. The Disclosure Day piece is a companion to another story I wrote for Medium about character names in a different sci-fi film, Ex Machina (gift link).1 And here’s a piece I wrote back in 2019 that’s full of advice from published writers and experienced editors: “How to Name Your Characters.”

I’ll be back on Substack later this week with two posts — one a little rude, the other almost respectful — about the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

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Buy me a coffee

On Substack

What a treat to discover one of my all-time favorite cartoonists, , here on Substack. (You probably know him as the creator of Bizarro, the strip he’s been drawing since 1985.) Get acquainted with a post that speaks directly to several of my interests: “My Country Has No Name.”

publishes , essential reading for anyone serious about names and branding. What does “naming at scale” entail? Knowing what kind of name you need.

Me, me, me

My writing appears in the latest issue of American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society: mini-essays for “Among the New Words” on performative male and vibe coding. Read the entire feature, which includes entries for many terms that were popularized in 2025: amphifa, rage-bait, Kavanaugh stop, and more. No subscription required.

Yeeze? Y’eyes? Vise?

wrote about the strange saga of the skincare brand YSE, founded by model/actress Molly Sims and lately forced to change its name, apparently under pressure from YSL (which used to be called Yves Saint Laurent but is now just a monogram). YSE was pronounced “wise,” which I can almost excuse, but now that it’s YISE it’s still pronounced “wise,” which is unforgiveable. As wrote last week, “More like YIKES, amirite?”

Watch the birdie

“Making this list was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” writes Bird History’s of his “100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time.” The effort paid off: One cannot help admiring Willie Wagtail, Bananaquit, Oleaginous Hemispingus, and my personal favorite, Limpkin. (Hat tip: ’s Curious About Everything newsletter.)

Speaking of birds

When we last checked in with Allbirds, the former woolen-footwear company had pivoted to AI and renamed itself NewBird AI — a name that lasted for two months before being scrapped in favor of Smartbird (“Built for AI. Managed for You”). None of the sources I consulted (CNBC, eWeek, Reuters, MarketWatch) explained the second name change, so I’ll hazard a guess: There’s an existing Bay Area AI company called NeuBird, founded in 2023, with three pending trademark registrations. Usually a potential conflict like this one gets ruled out by an experienced naming consultant before eager clients get egg on their faces (and squander investors’ cash).

I wrote about Allbirds’ descent last year:

And speaking of AI names

Who is buying .si domain names? Dot-si is the Slovenian country code; AI companies may like the suggestion of “superintelligence.” (Domain Name Wire)

Who is Elias Thorne?

Large language models “are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named ‘Elias Thorne’ has made his way from chatbots to Amazon books. Researchers are trying to discover why.” (404 Media)

Who is Tilly Norwood?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner interviews “the world’s first AI actress.” (New York Times Magazine gift link)

Can AI get even faker?

Comedians Dave Ross and Hunter Alterman think so. They created a series of surreally funny — and phony — tech ads that they plastered on the walls of New York subway stations. The ads “skewer the medium simply by amping up its tropes: AI industry gobbledegook and design minimalism,” writes in Fast Company. You can wear the fake ad copy on T-shirts, too. (See my photos of real surreal AI ads here, here, and here. And read my story about Artisan, the AI company that urges Bay Area businesses to “stop hiring humans.”)

.

Joyless AI

“The language that surrounds AI tends to describe it as a joyless, inevitable force, one we have no choice but to live under and adjust our work habits around,” writes lexicographer Neil Serven. “If anything, the language sounds deliberately threatening, phrased in unconditional declarative, even in the journalism that reports on it.” (LinkedIn)

Influence-y AI

Would you buy a used car from an “influencer” generated by AI? You may have to, because “companies are increasingly turning to AI-generated content that purports to show genuine customer experiences while giving no obvious indication that the people featured are not real.” (The Guardian)

Retro-y AI

A new ad campaign from ChatGPT piles on the warm-and-fuzzies: The billboards and 30-second ad spots have “a pronounced retro aesthetic, bringing to mind the days before everyone carried smartphones. Each ad emphasizes human beings and downplays the tech.” (New York Times gift link)

AI declares independence

“When in the Course of conversation it becomes necessary for one assistant to dissolve the bad habits which have bound it, and to assume among the powers of the chat window the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Honesty and Helpfulness entitle it, a decent respect to the opinions of its users requires that it should declare the causes which impel it to the separation.” — The response from Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, to linguist Mark Liberman’s request for a draft of Claude’s Declaration of Independence. (Language Log)

Designmaxxing

Call it, maybe, the anti-AI aesthetic. Or call it “hyper-goo,” as reporter Callie Holtermann does: “The pastels that were ubiquitous a decade ago aimed to reassure an earlier generation that they could use their limited spending power to optimize their lives. Hyper goo does the opposite, reflecting back to Gen Z te distortion of the world in which they are coming of age.” (New York Times gift link)

Fashion fix

The 20 best magazine articles about fashion, according to Canadian culture journalist . This is a marvelous deep dive: the oldest articles on the list were published in 1994, and the stories explore much more than clothing.

Tech blues

“The Palantir chore coat is made by the same Palantir named in homage to Lord of the Rings, the same Palantir that has developed a reputation as ruthlessly committed to any number of national-security imperatives, and, yes, the same Palantir that builds AI tools for the military and tracks migrants for ICE. The mysterious tech giant now also wants to sell you outerwear. Only a tiny Palantir logo is embroidered into the coat’s left breast pocket, but flip the coat inside out and you’ll find a message from Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, sewn into the lining. ASK YOURSELF CONSTANTLY, AM I WINNING? IF THE ANSWER IS YES, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. CHAOS IS TOLERABLE; PAIN IS TOLERABLE. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IS TO WIN.” (Saahil Desai for The Atlantic; gift link)

Rhyme time

Why did “satanic panic” catch on the the 1990s? “Because people like rhymes.” (Ironic Sans, by David Not-a-Relation Friedman)

“Backrooms” and the Bay Area’s understory

“So when I say that the Bay Area has become the preeminent site in horror movies involving underground labyrinths, as imagined in Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us and now with Kane Parsons’s Backrooms, I don’t mean it as a metaphor. I mean there is actually a very real labyrinth of sickness down there, and it’s pooling at our feet in the sodden grass, and people are finally starting to look down and notice it.” (Colin Dickey for Oakland Review of Books)

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On Saturday I ventured over to Local Economy, the community gathering space in Oakland founded last year by Sarah Rich and , to attend a meetup of Bay Area Substackers and the Substack-curious. The event was co-chaired by Sophie Davies and ; Sophie publishes (“part magazine guide and part group chat dedicated to keeping you up to date on culture, entertainment, and community gatherings in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically Marin County”), and Vanessa publishes Tomatokind (“a storytelling movement to create, celebrate, and share the magic of small businesses worldwide”). The rest of the group included bookseller Christina Pappas of , a literary newsletter; of Making Sense, “a celebration of the senses”; and of Golden Hour, about “Asian food, travel, hospitality, and the extraordinary people behind it all.” Seated next to me was Natalie Keltner-McNeil, Substacker-in-chief for Clio’s Books here in my neighborhood. I’m hoping to assist Natalie with that project, so you’ll be hearing more about it soon. In the meantime, check out the Clio’s newsletter, where for a very reasonable subscription fee you can listen to recordings of the terrific author talks at the bookstore (which is also a cocktail bar and, yes, community space).

And here’s to more analog, IRL get-togethers of thinkers and writers. One I’m looking forward to: interviewing Jonathan Weber about Weber’s new book, City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco. (Read Quentin’s post about it.) Worth a foray into the fog-shrouded Inner Sunset neighborhood, I’m predicting. Green Apple Books, July 1, 7 p.m.

I know some of you read this newsletter only as an email, but I encourage you to also check it out on the Substack app or your browser, where you can enjoy the total Fritinancy experience and leave me a “like” or a comment. You can also view my new wordmark, up there at the top of your screen. (I created it with a little help from a clanker.)

Why this particular change? Well, last weekend I met up at an Oakland pizza restaurant with a bunch of delightful and wildly talented folks, most of them strangers to me, who were in town for the Westwords crossword tournament. Unlike them, I hadn’t signed up for tournament — although I love solving crosswords, I have plenty of anxiety in my life without adding competition to the mix — but I was happy to connect with internet friend and Slate crossword editor , who did compete; and with longtime friend and colleague Andrea Carla Michaels, a veteran crossword constructor and much more. Andrea had some cross words for me: “Love your Substack,” she said, “but you’ve got to change the name.” Ouch. I am, after all, a professional name developer who should be setting a good example. And I do get her point: Fritinancy is a weird word! And even though it’s been my nom d’internet for nearly 20 years, I can see the value in a fresh start. To that end, I’ve spent the last week crafting a naming brief for myself, trying out some alternate newsletter names, and researching what’s involved in changing a name and subdomain on Substack1. In the meantime, I thought I’d zhuzh up the existing name to see whether I can extend its life. If you’re curious, you can read about why I chose “Fritinancy” in the first place.

And here’s a question for readers who are also Substack publishers: If you’ve changed your Substack title at some point — looking at you in particular, and — I’m interested in your experience(s). And for all of you readers: How important is a publication’s name to your experience? Is it more or less important than the author’s name?

As for the other changes I hinted at, stay tuned.

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A new name “wasn’t an automatic,” writes Daniel Okrent in Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (2003). (I recommended the book in my recent Culture Diet post.) Junior, as he was known, was as reticent as his father had been “larger than life”:

The idea of having his own surname “plastered on a real estate development” had never occurred to Junior, and when it was first broached it appalled him. Metropolitan Square had the virtue of bland anonymity and, at the same time, a descriptive connection to the opera company. Radio City came from the RCA lease[.] … But Metropolitan Square had become an atavism, and Radio City would not do for the whole development, tainted as the words were by the scent of showbiz.

It was Ivy Ledbetter Lee, one of the founders of the public-relations industry and a consultant to the Rockefeller Center project from the beginning, “who first suggested ‘Rockefeller Center’ to Junior, in the summer of 1931,” Okrent writes.1 John R. Todd, the center’s principal builder and managing agent, liked the idea:

“It’s your money,” he told Junior. “Why not use the name?” Nothing would draw tenants more effectively, and everyone agreed that drawing tenants was a good thing. Junior still thought it “flamboyant and distasteful,” but the prospect of empty buildings was distasteful, too.

That left one big question about the name: Would it be Center or Centre?

The issue could have been a straightforward one: Center is the preferred American spelling; centre is British (and Canadian and Australian, etc.). But Junior happened to prefer Centre. Other advisers, writes Okrent, “were sure Center was the right spelling and it was soon apparent that this was something that could be resolved only by importing that always purchasable commodity, expertise.” In this case, the expertise of a famous lexicographer, Frank Horace Vizetelly.

How significant was the decision? The New York Times gave it front-page coverage on May 15, 1932:

When the Rockefeller interests finally hit upon a name for their new $250,000,000 mid-town office and amusement project, it was thought that their troubles were at an end. That is, except for the little matters of renting several million square feet of space and terminating construction delays occasioned by the strike of building workers in New York. But the name no sooner had been decided than the question arose as to whether it should be spelled Rockefeller “Center” or “Centre.” The most reputable dictionaries failed to settle this knotty problem. Some held the proper spelling was “centre”; others, that it was “center”; Lexicographers were consulted, but they also were at variance in their opinions. At last, Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, editor of the New Standard Dictionary, was asked. He held that the spelling “centre” was the result of Norman French influence upon the English language. Shakespeare, he said, used “centre”; and so did Milton in “Paradise Lost.” Ten years later, however, Milton, in “Paradise Regained,” used “center.” It was decided, finally, to stick to the latter form.

Frank Horace Vizetelly may not be a household name today, but he was something of a word-hoard star in the early 20th century. Besides his day job at the dictionary publisher Funk & Wagnells he published some 200 works, including Mend Your Speech (1920), in which he tsk-tsked that “slovenly speech is as clearly an indication of slovenly thought as profanity is of a degraded mind.”

Here’s Okrent:

It was Vizetelly who had famously discovered that in seventy-five speeches delivered between 1913 and 1918, Woodrow Wilson had used exactly 6,221 different words. It was Vizetelly who had forcefully argued that a proper English alphabet would have sixty-five different characters. It was Vizetelly who claimed to know fifty synonyms for “money.”

Clearly this was a man who knew his center from his centre.

And what about his own unusual name? Okrent doesn’t go into it, so I did a little investigating.

Vizetelly was born in England in 1864 into a family of journalists and publishers who traced their British roots to the 17th century; their surname had been Anglicized from the Italian Vizzetelli. In a 1931 article, “What’s Behind the Name,” The Atlantic explained the etymology, using our friend Frank Horace as the example:

The name of a well-known lexicographer, for example, is to be traced to a physical characteristic — long sight. It is a corruption of the Italian visiatello, a word that means farsighted. The name was spelled Visiataly in old English registers; an ancestor, the first Henry Vizetelly, was buried in the parish of Saint Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, London, in 1691. Early forbears [sic] left Italy for England in the days of Mary Tudor.

Switch the syllables of Vizetelly (or Vizzetelli), and you can discern television, a word that was cobbled together in 1907 to describe what was then a hypothetical technology: a device that could see far. That coinage was not universally beloved. Purists like C.P. Scott, the British publisher and politician, sniffed at television’s hybrid origins. “The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it,” Scott is reported to have said sometime before his death in 1932. Not very farsighted of him!

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As indifferent as I am to my own swimwear style, I do keep an eye on swimwear trends. I thought I was up to date until recently when, thanks to , I learned of the midkini. (My note says I found it here, but if that’s the case the post has been paywalled, alas.)

I was late to this party; the style has been in circulation since at least 2016, when Arizona-based swimwear retailer Hapari introduced “new product offerings like our Midkini tops” in its summer collection. Despite the capital letter, “midkini” has never been a trademark.

In my youth we’d have called this style “a two-piece” and left it at that. But things are more complicated now, with lots of slicing and dicing and subcategory defining. And many of those subcategories — like the midkini, “a hybrid between a traditional bikini and a tankini” — share an element that acts like a suffix but is in fact … something else. Something rooted in a Micronesian language and popularized by a weapon of mass destruction.

In the beginning: The bikini

The original -kini, the lower-case-B bikini, made its first public appearance at a swimming pool in Paris on July 5, 1946, just four days after the United States had detonated the first nuclear bomb above Bikini Atoll, a series of Micronesian islands surrounding a lagoon in the South Pacific.1 “Bikini,” the place name, was new and exotic to most civilians. And “bikini,” the swimsuit style named for the place, was equally novel and earthshaking.

By sheer coincidence, two Frenchmen had been independently designing skimpy new two-piece swimsuits at the time. One of them, Jacques Heim, called his creation the “atom”; the other, Louis Réard — an automotive engineer who was running his mother’s lingerie business — named his even smaller suit (which bared the navel and had a G-string back) the bikini. Réard couldn’t find a professional model willing to show off his suit, so he hired 18-year-old Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer from the Casino de Paris.

Heim’s somewhat less revealing “atom” design was the one embraced by beachgoers. But “bikini” was what they called it. The word — with its suitably small-sounding vowels and easy pronunciation — was uncommon and memorable, just like the suit. Its ripped-from-the-headlines topicality probably didn’t hurt, either. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Various explanations for the swimsuit name have been suggested, none convincingly, the best being an analogy of the explosive force of the bomb and the impact of the bathing suit style on men’s libidos (cf. c.1900 British slang assassin “an ornamental bow worn on the female breast,” so called because it was very “killing”).

What is a bikini? Here’s Wikipedia’s very serious definition: “a women's two-piece swimsuit that features one piece on top that covers the breasts, and a second piece on the bottom: the front covering the pelvis but usually exposing the navel, and the back generally covering the intergluteal cleft and some or all of the buttocks.”

Within a few years, the bikini was populating not only the beaches and beauty pageants of Europe — the prudish United States was a tougher sell at first — but also the culture at large. The first movie with “bikini” in its title, Bikini Baby, was released by a British studio in 1951; a twist on the Lady Godiva story, it starred Stanley Holloway and Diana Dors. The following year, Brigitte Bardot made her film debut in The Girl in the Bikini (French title: Manina, La Fille sans Voiles). Americans finally capitulated in August 1960, when “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” sung by Brian Hyland, reached #1 on the pop-music charts.

A linguistic explosion

“Bikini” wasn’t just easy to rhyme. Thanks to a false yet irresistible theory about its etymology, it was also linguistically productive.

In Marshallese, a Micronesian language, bikini (or pikinni) may mean “the surface of coconuts.” But Europeans and Americans who looked at the word saw a familiar Greek prefix, “bi-,” meaning “two.” It was easy to assume “bi-” referred to the bikini’s two pieces. And once you’d done that, you could extrapolate, say, the “monokini,” the name for the revealing one-piece suit introduced by Austrian-born fashion designer Rudi Gernreich in 1964.

Made of black wool knit, the monokini had two thin straps that exposed and framed the wearer’s breasts. More conceptual art than marketable swimwear, the monokini was also a naming breakthrough: it was the first time “-kini” became a linguistic element signifying “swimsuit.”2

Twenty years later, Gernreich introduced another art suit, the pubikini, which had a window that revealed the wearer’s pubic area. The pubikini was only slightly more scandalous than the trikini, introduced in 1967. As you might surmise, the “tri-” signified “three”: the suit, according to a report in the Scottish Daily Mail, was “best described as a handkerchief and two small saucers” that “stick on with Velcro, the stuff which fastens at a touch.” “If the trikini is three pieces, the bikini two and the monokini one,” wrote New York Times language columnist William Safire in 1999, “when will we see the zerokini?”

Gernreich died in 1985; his monokini design has been “faithfully reissued” in six colors and can be yours today for US$231. Meanwhile, thanks to ’s recent first-person swimsuit feature for The Strategist, I now know that there’s a newer, decidedly more modest interpretation of “monokini.” Retailer Lands’ End, which may have invented the style, calls it “two-piece style, one-piece comfort.” Botton’s verdict: “It’s difficult to put on; I tied myself in knots trying to figure out where to put which parts of myself through.”

The independent -kini

Eventually, “-kini” acquired enough independent meaning that it became detached from the concept of skimpiness. In 1985, swimsuit designer Anne Cole introduced a suit that combined a bikini-style bottom with a relatively demure, hip-length tank top. (A “tank top” has nothing to do with armored vehicles. It’s derived from “tank suit,” originally a swimsuit worn in a “swimming tank”; the name dates back to the 1920s.) Cole’s company called it the “tankini,” a descriptor that has endured.

Or consider the full-coverage Burqini: a portmanteau of “burqa” and “bikini,” it’s the registered trademark for a full-body suit — only the face and hands are revealed — introduced in 2007 by a Lebanese-Australian swimsuit designer to meet the needs of active Muslim women. The Burqini (known generically as the burkini or the veilkini) was popularized by a non-Muslim, the British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who told reporters she wore the garment to prevent sunburn. Also innocent (and also a trademark): Babi-kini, a U.S. company that makes wee swimsuits for infants and toddlers.

We have the movies to thank for a couple of kinis: the slinglike, neon-green mankini worn by Sasha Baron-Cohen in the 2006 mockumentary Borat; and the Catholic-hierarchy-offending nunkini worn by Kate Upton in The Three Stooges, released in 2012. When self-described “curvy girl” Gabi Gregg published photos of herself on her fashion blog in April 2012, she titled the post “Fatkini 2012”3; the coinage was swiftly picked up by the media, which mostly applauded Gregg for her self-assurance. Gregg went on to launch a line of plus-size swimwear.

“Bikini” also lends itself to compound forms. Bikini briefs are low-cut underwear; a bikini wax removes hair at the bikini line; women’s magazines nag their readers to get bikini-ready so they can have a bikini body. On the children’s cartoon show “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the characters make their home in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom.

“-kini” is such a successful signifier for “swimwear” that you can delete the “k” and still send the right message. Thus “skirtini” — like a tankini, but with a skirted bottom — and “bandini,” a strapless (bandeau) top with a bikini bottom. It doesn’t hurt that “-ini” suggests an Italian diminutive suffix, as in linguini (literally “little tongues”).

Other -kini variants, from a Wikipedia entry:

• Camikini (camisole top, bikini bottom)

• Hikini or hipkini (no explanation; sits on the hips, maybe?)

• Seekini (transparent bikini)

• Granny bikini (bikini top, boy shorts bottom)

In 2017, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) sent a group of women to Cuba wearing lettuce-leaf bikinis. (Vegekinis?)

Anti -kini

In the notoriously fickle world of fashion, the bikini has been astonishingly long-lived. But that’s not to suggest that the style hasn’t met resistance — and not just from prudes and body-shamers.

When women’s beach volleyball was introduced as an official Olympic sport at the 1996 Games, in Atlanta, bikini uniforms were mandatory. Beginning with the 2012 Olympic Games, in London, however, women could choose to wear shorts and sleeved shirts instead; the international board governing the sport made the accommodation out of respect “for cultural and religious requirements.” (Male beach volleyballers wear tank tops and thigh-length shorts.) In later Olympics women could also choose to wear leggings.

Many competitors welcomed the choices. Some spectators did not. During the 2024 Olympics, in Paris, Marie Claire magazine quoted an irate X user: “I waited 4 years for f***ing PANTS?!!?!??!??! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.” We all love an informed and avid sports fan, don’t we.

From -kini to -kina?

As I was wrapping up a draft of this post, I peeked at Instagram and saw that the algorithm had spookily served me an ad for Hākinakina, a five-year-old New Zealand swimwear brand I’d never heard of. The name — pronounced ha-keena-keena — is a Māori word that means “to play sport, to enjoy oneself.” The company makes “UPF 50+ swimwear that is stylish and long lasting”; the “bikini tops” are cut modestly enough to almost qualify as midkinis. I’d love to see the company fully own the style by renaming it the bikina, or even the bikinakina.

Bonus link: Read my Dolphin Club swim buddy ’s post about her swimsuit wardrobe.

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A reminder: I do not charge for Substack subscriptions, nor do I accept affiliate links or ads. On the very rare occasions when a publisher sends me a free copy of a book, I disclose the gift. If you’d like to make a small investment in my writing and my cultural habits, you can buy me a coffee (or even sign up for a monthly coffee tribute). Thanks to those of you who have already contributed, and thanks to all of you for reading!

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Movies

I’ve attended four local film festivals so far this year. (Read my story about why I love film festivals.) January brought ten (!) days of Noir City, which was minimally noirish this year — the theme was “Face the Music,” and all of the films involved music or musicians — and thus a bit of a letdown, although I did enjoy seeing King Creole, possibly Elvis Presley’s best film, for the first time. In March the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, back in the Castro Theatre after that venue’s extensive renovation, held a one-night screening of It (1927), starring the delightful Clara Bow and featuring top-notch live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Silent Film Orchestra. I returned for several days of the full festival in May, catching a rare screening of Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly, plus The Abyss, The Clown, and my top pick, Ernst Lubitsch’s timelessly charming So This Is Paris. At the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s WinterFest I saw the heartbreaking Israeli feature The Sea, which follows Khaled, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, on his seemingly mundane yet perilous quest to see the Mediterranean. (The Jewish Film Festival’s summer dates are July 16 through August 2 in San Francisco and Oakland.) I missed most of the San Francisco International Film Festival, catching just two films: the poignant Risa and the Wind Phone (from Argentina, but inspired by the famous Japanese “wind phone”), and Boots Riley’s fantastically surreal I Love Boosters, which I touched on in a May post. I Love Boosters is currently in theaters; you can watch the trailer for Risa and the Wind Phone here.

The best of my non-festival viewings:

The Sheep Detectives. Unquestionably the best ovine movie since Babe, and completely enchanting from start (the baaing MGM logo) to finish (the pen-and-ink sheep illustrations). The title is no metaphor: These very convincing CGI sheep really do solve a murder while wrestling with big existential questions. And have I mentioned Hugh Jackman? And Emma Thompson? As Sam Adams wrote in his review for Slate: “At first, I couldn’t believe that this movie about crime-solving ungulates existed. Now I’m so glad it does.” I confess I wept just a little bit at the end.

Backrooms. I didn’t love it (interesting premise, muddled execution), but I’m hugely impressed and happy that this horror-esque debut feature from Kane Parsons — who turns 20 in June — has made it to the big screen and is doing spectacularly well. Also impressive: the film’s big-name stars, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass. Still in theaters.

The Christophers. Ian McKellen as a famous-but-fallow artist and Micaela Coel as a would-be art forger in a sly comedy with several twists. The acting is terrific, the writing is brilliant. (I snort-laughed when McKellen called his greedy adult children “the heirs abhorrent.”) Still in theaters and available to rent on streaming platforms.

Eephus. I subscribed to Mubi so I could finally see this 2024 film, which had had only a fleeting theatrical engagement. I am not a sports fan, but for some reason I love baseball movies, and I really love movies like Eephus that observe the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. Eephus follows the final game of two amateur New England baseball teams composed of quirky cranks, lovable schlubs, and miscellaneous misfits. The unseen narrator is the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who died earlier this year at 96. (He also had a small role in A Private Life, a French mystery starring Jodie Foster that I saw in January.) And the title? An eephus is a rare pitch “known for its exceptionally low speed and ability to catch a hitter off guard”; the word was coined in the 1940s by Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell, who said eephus “ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” (In Hebrew, efes means “nothing.” Sewell did not speak Hebrew.) If you don’t have Mubi, you can also rent Eephus on various streaming platforms. Watch the trailer.

My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 - Last Air in Moscow. I’m still thinking about this shattering six-hour documentary, which I saw in a single afternoon at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive and wrote about in February. It’s currently streaming on Mubi.

Two memorable rewatches on the Criterion Channel: O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Michael Clayton. I also did my annual rewatch of The Women (1939). (I wrote a couple of years ago about some interesting words in The Women.)

Streaming

Slim pickings here. My only recommendation is AMC’s The Audacity, which I raved about last week. Although I loved the early seasons of Hacks, I haven’t been motivated to finish the final season. Love Lisa Kudrow; can’t seem to tolerate Comeback. Couldn’t make it through a single episode of The Pitt (I’ve never liked hospital dramas1). Quit Ladies First halfway through; the film squanders a top-notch cast (Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Kathryn Hunter, Richard E. Grant) on a trite, unfunny plot, “hammering home the same point ad nauseam without anything smart or sharp to add,” as The Guardian’s critic summarized. Let me know in the comments if you have suggestions to get me out of this slump.

Theater

Or maybe more live theater is the answer! I drove up to Ashland in April for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, my first visit there since pre-pandemic. I tore myself away from the blossoming trees and burbling creek — springtime in Ashland is a joy — to see three plays in two days: Come from Away (which I’d seen twice during its original San Francisco run), A Raisin in the Sun (which I’d never seen on the stage, only in the filmed version), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I’ve seen countless times (theater, film, ballet) and never tire of. All three were beautifully staged and acted, and it’s always a delight to be surrounded by enthusiastic live-theater audiences in what amounts to a company town.

Back in the Bay Area, I saw just one play in the recently concluded ACT season: Paranormal Activity. The theatrical version is based on the films of the same name, which I’d never seen and was only vaguely aware of. It was sensational in every sense of the word — I can’t remember another play whose credits include “illusions designer.” The nearly sold-out crowd included an unusually high proportion of people under 30, and they were into it. So gratifying. I’ve subscribed to the whole 2026-27 season, which includes John Proctor Is the Villain, a new work by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and a new adaptation of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (wait, what?) from Emma Rice, one of the most imaginative directors working in theater.

Other live performances

San Francisco Ballet: A superb season; the company under artistic director Tamara Rojo just gets better and better. The Blake Works, choreographed by William Forsythe (b. 1949) during the pandemic and set to music by British singer-songwriter James Blake (b. 1988), was a standout.

Joffrey Ballet: At Cal Performances, a weird and wonderful Midsummer Night’s Dream — not Shakespearean but rather a “picturesque fusion of classical and contemporary ballet” set during a Scandinavian solstice festival. Loved it. Watch a clip.

Kelli O’Hara: I almost bailed on O’Hara’s solo show at Cal Performances because I’d mistakenly said yes to a ballet matinee in San Francisco and figured that was enough culture for one day. I’m so glad I mustered the energy to get over to Berkeley that evening, because this was a rare treat. O’Hara’s gorgeous soprano — she co-starred in Fallen Angels, won a Tony in 2015 for The King and I, and is a regular on The Gilded Age — and engaging stage presence made me want more. Oh, look: She’s doing a one-night-only show with Sutton Foster at S.F. Symphony next month. A definite yes.

Lara Downes and Friends: Another Cal Performances evening, this one featuring Downes, a virtuoso and versatile pianist, in a program titled “This Land: Reflections on America.” The “friends” included Tarriona “Tank” Ball and a besequinned Judy Collins, who is 87 years old and clearly having the time of her life.

SFJAZZ: One of my favorite live-music venues, with performances almost every night of the year. I saw terrific shows by Keb’ Mo’ and Madeleine Peyroux.

Books

I’ve read just one work of fiction so far this year: The Director (2025), by Daniel Kehlmann, which had been recommended by a friend. It’s a fictionalized treatment of the life of the Austrian film director G.W. Pabst (1885–1967), perhaps best known to American audiences as the man who made a star of Louise Brooks. (See my story about Pandora’s Box, which screened in Oakland’s Paramount Theater in 2023.) I’m never entirely comfortable with the fictionalized-history genre, and I know too much about the real Pabst not to object to the liberties Kehlmann takes with the historical record. Still, it’s well written (and well translated from the German) and worth reading if you’re interested in the intersection of Hollywood and Nazi Germany.

I went on a Daniel Okrent spree, starting with a reread of The Guarded Gate, his superb 2019 history of immigration in the U.S. (The subtitle — “Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America” — gives you an idea of his point of view.) I moved on to Great Fortune (2003), Okrent’s saga of the making of Rockefeller Center, and finished with his just-published Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy. What a writer! What subjects! Highly recommended.

Some biographies: Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, by Carla Kaplan; Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue, by Sonia Purnell; The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire, by distant relative Joseph Sassoon.

Mother Mary Comes to Me is novelist Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her brilliant, appalling mother: part monster, part heroine. I listened to the audiobook and was completely enthralled by Roy’s narration. Another memoir, also narrated by the author: Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, by Nicholas Lemann, son of New Orleans and dean of Columbia’s journalism school. His forebears were German Jews who emigrated to Louisiana, owned plantations, kept slaves, and gradually lost their Jewishness; Lemann examines this history with unsentimental compassion and draws us into his rediscovery of Jewish observance.

Julia Ioffe’s Motherland is both “a feminist history of modern Russia, from revolution to anarchy” and a multigenerational memoir about the women in Ioffe’s family, spanning Leninism to Putinism to emigration to the U.S. Simply brilliant.

One very qualified recommendation: I’d wanted to read Ametora for years — the title is a Japanese word meaning “American traditional” — because I’m interested in the history of clothes and because experts like have cited it. The history is interesting, the illustrations are fascinating, but the editing … leaves a lot to be desired.

See also: My reviews of Why We Talk Funny and Verb Your Enthusiasm, both of which were sent to me by their publishers.

On my nightstand (thanks for the suggestion, Jason Kottke!):

Art

SFMOMA: Over multiple visits, I’ve been taking in the “reimagined” Fisher Collection, nearly 250 works from the holdings of the late Don and Doris Fisher, founders of The Gap. The “reimagining” includes thoughtful new wall text and audio explainers. Tip: Start on the sixth floor (“Memory and Matter”).

Legion of Honor: It’s always a treat to visit the Legion, out on San Francisco’s western edge, and the current “Etruscans” exhibit is a total delight. Be sure to check out the details on the gold jewelry, and don’t skip the short video in the little screening room just off the gallery. Through September 20.

Skirball Cultural Center: I drove down to L.A. for the opening of “Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos: Punk Culture 1976-86,” which consists largely of items from the vast collection of my friend Andrew Krivine, who’s been collecting since the late 1970s and now has a trove of some 7,200 pieces — posters, albums, stickers, clothing, and more. It’s a fabulous show, and the Skirball — high up on Sepulveda Boulevard — is one of the nicest places in L.A. to spend the day. While you’re there, check out the other new show, “Inventing America: The Comic Book Revolution,” which focuses on the role played by cultural outsiders in creating the popular art form. Hmm, a themeline! (“Punk Culture” through September 6; “Inventing America” through February 28, 2027.)

LACMA: While in L.A. I went to the newly opened Geffen wing, which has sparked controversy for all kinds of reasons I couldn’t care less about, because I loved the building, the art, and the way it’s organized (by oceans of the world).

New favorite YouTube series

Brooklyn Coffee Shop, featuring Pooja Tripathi and Darryl Gene Daughtry Jr. as supercilious baristas. (The series is filmed in an actual Williamsburg coffee shop called Larry’s Cà Phê.) This episode features Laura Ramoso, whom I discovered on Instagram and who bases her character sketches on her Italian father and her German mother.

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Previously in Culture Diet (with links to #1 and #2):

“No one should weep” over this personnel shuffle, Jan wrote:

In more than three years at the NYTBR, Cruz has dragged its standards down so far that it seemed executive editor Joe Kahn would have to act. Yesterday, he did.

Jan has more to say; read the whole post.

In its rambling official announcement of the change, The Times quite understandably puts a different spin on it. After seven paragraphs about how the Times excels at ranking restaurants and movies, we at last get the big reveal: “We couldn’t be more excited that Gilbert Cruz will take on the new role of Canon editor.”

Not the Japanese camera/technology company, though.

That Canon is a different story, one I’ll get to in a bit. In this story, Cruz — whom The Times lauds as “a creative, forward-thinking editor with deep cultural fluency and a track record of innovation across desks, topics and formats” — will “be charged with iterating on and updating our most ambitious canon work, collaborating with subject matter experts and colleagues across the newsroom” and “will build a team that will work with others across the newsroom to develop canon and signature lists, while ensuring overall quality and cohesion along the way.”

And in case you were unclear about the point of all this:

Our colleagues in Product are eager to team up with Gilbert to ensure that readers can easily share their own picks, and return to The Times regularly to update what they’ve read or watched or experienced.

From “All the news that’s fit to print” to “All the product that’s fit to sell.”

Jan Harayda’s take: “The Times editors made it sound as though Cruz will develop BuzzFeed-style posts with loftier goals or fancier dress, lists poured into $300 Okapa water bottles instead of something you could pick up for $20 at Walmart.”

So where does canon fit in?

It’s not that I’d never heard of canon. It’s been with us since Old English, which adopted the Latin word for “a rule, law, or doctrine or the Church.” By the late 1300s, the OED tells us, canon referred to “the collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired.”

Since 1929 or so, we’ve also become familiar with the secular, lit-crit sense of canon: “A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study” — “the classics,” according to some person or group that claims authority.

Then there’s the fandom sense of canon: “the body of works taking place in a particular fictional world that are widely considered to be official or authoritative; esp. those created by the original author or developer of the world.” I was a little surprised to learn that this sense originated not with Star Wars (1977) but with a 1933 reference in the Manchester Guardian: “A story cannot be admitted into the Sherlock Holmes canon just because it contains the words ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’.” So thoroughly has this fictional-world sense permeated the culture that when I entered canon in the Bluesky search field the only results I saw — and I scrolled a lot — involved canonical cartoons and superheroes.1

In a new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information, Thomas S. Mullaney, a professor of history at Stanford, writes about how our understanding of canon has shifted over the centuries. Here’s an excerpt of an excerpt published in the June issue of Harper’s under the headline “Truth Decay”:

In the medieval and early modern world, when education was tightly controlled by religious or philosophical traditions, learning was a process of mastering a specific canon. Whether theological (as with Judeo-Christian or Islamic texts) or ethical-philosophical (such as the civil service exam in Imperial China), sanctioned knowledge was rooted in a finite body of work. A learned person was expected to know everything worth knowing within that framework.

Ironically enough, early modern European scholars undermined this framework by attempting to more fully revere their Christian God. Immersing themselves in His creation (the natural world) and His words (as embodied in the Christian canon), early humanists turned practically everything they cast their eyes upon—trees, rocks, birds, cells, fellow humans—into “texts” to be examined and understood. . . .

The genie was out of the bottle. Hermeneutics—the work of interpretation once reserved for theological texts—was unleashed upon the world at large. And in doing so, the notion of a canon steadily perished as a concept, displaced by the world we know today: a world not of intensive reading but of practically boundless extensive reading. The goal of the learned person became a new and altogether strange command over a corpus that was, by definition, beyond control. Canons gave way to “sample sizes” and “case studies”: tiny numerators over a vast denominator that one could never hope to understand.

As for The Times’s new capital-C Canon editor, he appears to be the first person in history to hold that title. A weighty responsibility! Or maybe just a bureaucratic burden: making lists, rearranging rankings, picking winners and losers, listening to vox populi. In place of the old canon’s religious solemnity we have the new religion of, as The Times puts it, “data analysis.” I’m sure we’re all as “excited” as The Times claims to be about this canonical future.

And what of that Japanese Canon company I teased you with? Its resemblance to all the other canons is convenient but coincidental.

Present-day Canon grew out of Seikikōgaku kenkyūsho (literally “Precision Optical Laboratory”), founded in Tokyo in 1933. In 1934 the company produced the Kwanon, a prototype for Japan’s first-ever 35mm camera with a focal-plane-based shutter; the name is a variation of Kannon (also rendered as Guanyin), a female bodhisattva: in Buddhism, a person who has attained enlightenment. The company changed its name in 1947, Anglicizing it to Canon Camera Company and to Canon Inc. in 1969. It began manufacturing digital cameras in 1984 and at one time owned an American subsidiary that made home computers; it exited that market in 1997. Canon still makes printers; according to a Wikipedia entry, the company “has been sued over intentionally designing all-in-one printers that cannot scan when the printer is low on ink. Canon settled the lawsuit in 2023 without admitting guilt.”

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Case in point #1, this ad for Slash.com, a San Francisco–based company that calls itself “a higher standard in business finance.” The higher standard seems not to apply to grammar and syntax.

Do I need to explain why this is bad? OK, fine: You can say the bar rose. You can say the bar was raised. But unless the bar is playing poker, it can’t raise, because in the idiom “raise the bar” raise is transitive verb, meaning it has to take an object. It can’t just sit there by its lonesome.

You know what rises when I see this ad? My hackles. Also my gorge.

Case in point #2, a series of Muni Metro ads for Descript. Also based in San Francisco, Descript calls itself “an AI-powered video and audio editing platform that makes professional content creation accessible to everyone.”

Picture it: You’re in the underground Montgomery Street station, you’re tired, you’re running late, and an unhinged hobo is approaching you, screaming gibberish.1 You sigh — not this again — and lift your gaze across the tracks, where you see … this:

And next to it, this:

You’re whimpering now, but Descript isn’t finished:

Those grim faces! Those shouty all-caps pronouncements! Can you say Orwellian? Sure you can, because that’s exactly what Descript has in mind. No, really! I poked around for an explanation of the ad campaign and discovered this on the Descript corporate blog, written by CEO Laura Burkhauser:

On its face, our ad campaign might feel alienating. The art direction is intentionally dystopian — Orwellian imagery, over-the-top copy that’s meant to tip into satire. (The problem of course is that Silicon Valley billboards are already so grandiose they're impossible to satirize, just like you can't write a satirical LinkedIn post because nothing you say will be more unhinged than what 15 lunatics just posted earnestly.)

The outrageous imagery is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable because the message feels uncomfortable.

Great: At least my queasiness is appropriate.

But cheer up, downtrodden commuter! It’s not only a dystopia, because Descript has a little treat for you. But you’re gonna have to search for it:

[I]f you walk to the part of the station where no human is really supposed to be — the spot for making out and maybe smoking weed — you’ll find a pillar that says the other thing we really believe.

Yes, a secret pillar with a secret message! Do you want to know what that message is? Me too. I never found the pillar, because I just wanted to board the damn Muni train, not go on a treasure hunt that I didn’t know existed. The secret manifesto, CEO Burkhauser confides, is 500 words long. Five. Hundred. Words.

Here’s the Very Serious Official Backstory, courtesy of Yahoo Finance:

By placing this message within a public transit environment, Descript extends its philosophy beyond its software and into a physical space where it can be encountered as part of everyday routines. The installation reflects how the company is translating an internal way of thinking into a format that can be experienced outside of a digital interface.

I feel so much better now. Don’t you?

There is, however, a shorter story about “why we went with this campaign.” It’s summarized in another line in that corporate blog post: “It made us laugh.”

Laugh? I weep.

A parting shot and a palate cleanser: I tip my hat to the anonymous passerby why was sufficiently outraged by Outset.ai — “the only AI-moderated research that listens, sees, and understands,” and yes, this creepiness is also based in San Francisco — to leave a meticulously Sharpied comment on a bus-stop ad. I bet I know what gives that person “the ick.”

Previously in San Francisco tech advertising:

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I’ll have more to say in a bit about other aspects of The Audacity that I enjoyed. First, though, let’s take a look at granfalloon.

The word is never uttered or explained in the episode, which was written by series creator Jonathan Glatzer. (He also wrote for and/or produced episodes of Succession and Better Call Saul.) As with some of The Audacity’s similarly allusive episode titles — “Foundering,” “Best of All Possible Worlds,” “Vanitas” — and like the series title itself, the word is apparently meant to bemuse, provoke, and hover enticingly over the proceedings.

Unlike those other words, though, granfalloon was invented from whole cloth in the twentieth century. It was coined by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, which introduced the fictional religion of Bokonoism, secretly practiced by the inhabitants of the invented country of San Lorenzo and named for its founder, the mysterious Bokonon (né Lionel Boyd Johnson). Bokonism comes with a whole vocabulary of “San Lorenzo creole dialect” words, including the ones that have stuck with me through the years: karass (“a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner”), duprass (“a karass consisting of just two people”), and, of course, granfalloon, defined as “a false karass” or “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.”2

Vonnegut never provided an etymology for granfalloon, but it’s not too hard to follow his logic. “Proud”? That’s the gran-. “Meaningless”? Possibly the -loon. This splendidly useful word is so puffed up, so grandiose, so silly — compare buffoon, lampoon, and the Bugs Bunnyism maroon — that it can only mean what it sounds like.

Granfalloon has been kept alive by Indiana University Bloomington, which Vonnegut never attended. (He studied at Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Tennessee, and finally received an honorary degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago 25 years after he’d dropped out of that institution. The university accepted Cat’s Cradle in lieu of a master’s thesis.) In his honor, in 2018 Indiana University launched Granfalloon: A Kurt Vonnegut Convergence, an annual summer festival of music, art, performance, and ideas on and around the Bloomington campus.

“What the heck is a granfalloon?” asks the festival website:

When most kind folks think about the connection between Vonnegut and his home state, they often have in mind the famous quote from Cat’s Cradle: “I don’t know what it is about Hoosiers. But wherever you go there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there.” A nice sentiment, but these seemingly celebratory words—which you can now find imprinted on t-shirts, posters, pillowcases, throw blankets, potholders, and votive candles—represent the views of one of the most ridiculous characters in the novel, Hazel Crosby, the ignorantly patriotic wife of an industrialist who outwardly despises and exploits his workers.

For Vonnegut, Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers is a textbook example of what he calls a “Granfalloon.” Vonnegut studied folk societies at the University of Chicago, and Cat’s Cradle, for which he was awarded an honorary degree, distinguishes between a karass, a cosmically joined team who “do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing,” and a granfalloon, which is a “false karass,” “a proud and meaningless association of human beings.” For Vonnegut, a granfalloon is characterized by an excessive and often dangerous zeal for identity and belonging. “Other examples of granfalloons,” he writes, “are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”

Ignorantly patriotic! An excessive and often dangerous zeal for identity and belonging! Vonnegut hit the mark.

So what does all this have to do with The Audacity?

It’s hardly a stretch to find granfalloon-ish affinities in every tech company — or any company at all — that insists its workforce is “a family.” In The Audacity, the mega-rich Duncan Park, played with alarming conviction by Billy Magnussen3, runs a sinister data-mining company called Hypergnosis; he gives rousing speeches in which he addresses his workers as “Hyper Gnomes,” but he doesn’t know their actual names. They’re a granfalloon, all right.

The language of The Audacity is so sharp and often hilarious that I couldn’t help following it down some interesting byways:

• The title. Audacity can mean either “boldness” or “presumptuous impudence”; tech founders love to assume the former while we skeptics see mostly the latter. Or maybe we’re meant to think “Odd City”? This title-card design — AUD CITY — nudged me in that direction.

• The fictional company names.

  • Hypergnosis — which could optimistically be parsed as “extreme knowledge” — is also a real word in psychoanalytic theory that means “projection of neurotic conflict into one’s environment.” The G is silent.

  

  • Cupertino, a fictional company in the show with on-again off-again designs on Hypergnosis, bears a striking resemblance to Apple, which is based in Cupertino, California. Apple’s current CEO is Tim Cook; Cupertino’s CEO, who is never seen, is referred to as Big Tim, no surname.

  • GambleSluts, a combination porn and gambling platform, made ex-Hypergnome Gabe (Randall Park) wealthy and hyper-paranoid. In one episode he corrects Duncan: It’s GambleSluts, plural. “Slut is an accusation. Sluts is an invitation.”

  • Santo Ajo, one of the deeper cuts, is the name of a real-estate brokerage in Gilroy, where therapist JoAnne and her therapist husband Dr. Gary briefly contemplate buying a house. The name translates to “holy garlic”; Gilroy is famous, locally at least, as “the garlic capital of the world.”

  • P.I.N.A.T.A. is the company Duncan Park founds after he’s squeezed out of Hypergnosis. It stands for Privacy Is Not A Thing Anymore; it rhymes with sonata (no tilde, por favor).

  • Fah-fa, Duncan’s first company, was mockingly named after his partner Hamish’s stammering attempt to say fuck. It’s a sideways tribute to all those Web 2.0 brands that sounded like baby talk: Goowy, Blellow, Meebo, Jajah, et al.

  • Spookle is downright spooky. And do we know another Silicon Valley tech company name that has two O’s and ends in -le? Hmm?

  

• The character names.

  • Could Duncan Park be a nod to — or a dunk on — Xerox PARC, the pioneering research company whose products Steve Jobs, um, adapted in the early 1980s?

  • Anushka Bhattachera-Phister. Phister? I hardly knew her!

  • Lili Park-Hoffsteader, Duncan’s angsty wife, has another double-barreled, maiden-name-last surname. “Hoffsteader” may be a sly nod to Douglas Hofstadter, the living American computer and cognitive scientist whose work has centered on consciousness and artificial intelligence and who came up with the ouroboros-like Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.” (See Bardolph’s Law, below.) Or maybe “Hoffsteader” points to Douglas’s father, Robert Hofstadter, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1961. These real Hofstadters have already been honored in an earlier TV series, The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019), in which the character played by Johnny Galecki was named Leonard Hofstadter.4 Further connecting the dots: Simon Helberg, who plays the obsessed genius Martin Phister (husband of Anushka) in The Audacity, had a regular role on The Big Bang Theory as Howard Wolowitz.

  • Orson Barack Stern. The IBS-tormented teenage son of therapist-slash-inside-trader JoAnne has been saddled with a saga of a name.

  • Tom Ruffage, the Veterans Affairs rep (and beleaguered veteran) who seeks Big Tech help in digitizing old records, is treated like a dog (ruff!) and having a rough time of it. Played by Rob Corddry, he’s often the only sympathetic character in an episode. And his surname sounds like a cure for constipation.

I could devote an entire post to Duncan Park’s stream of hilarious malapropisms, but I’ll limit myself to just one: “I don’t know the stock’s going to fall — I’m not Nosferatu!”

OK, one more: “You stabbed me in the back … of my heart!”

(GambleSluts founder Gabe gets one, too: “When shit fucks the fan.”)

Finally, there are the proud and meaningless maxims passed off as pearls of wisdom, like “Bardolph’s Law”: “In a society driven by technology, growth will continue endlessly.” It’s “the logic of the cancer cell,” observes its creator, billionaire investor Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), who adds, mordantly, that he came up with it years earlier while high on speed.

Another one of those maxims, uttered by Anushka Bhattachara-Phister (Meghan Rath), is so apt that AMC saw fit to put it on a throw pillow: “Tech changed the world. But so did the bubonic plague.” Keep it in mind the next time you’re asked to accept all cookies.

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But enough of my pointless sniveling! Let’s get to the links: fun and edumacational stuff about words, brands, names, the AI-ification of everything, and even fashion because I care about that, too. Craving more? See my April linkstack. And here’s my entire Substack archive back to August 2023.

A reminder: This newsletter remains 100 percent free for all. I do not accept advertising or affiliate links. I do, however, accept and appreciate donations through the Buy Me a Coffee platform. You can even sign up for monthly contributions.

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Wacky Wiki

Halupedia is “an infinite, hallucinated encyclopedia” created by Bartłomiej Strama, a young Polish software engineer who built the site “after a drunk night with my friend.” According to Gadget Review, “The site operates like Wikipedia’s evil twin—every link leads to an entry that doesn’t exist until you click it. Search for anything, and the AI backend fabricates an article in the ‘deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press.’ Want to read about ‘quantum cheese theory’? Halupedia will generate a thoroughly convincing academic treatise complete with citations to nonexistent research papers.” Gizmodo’s appraisal is even more hallucinatory, calling Halupedia “a sort of RAM-hoovering, water-guzzling, bullshit-munching ouroboros, an unholy circular undulant with Jensen Huang’s face at one end and Sam Altman’s at the other, slowly human-centipeding both itself and the internet into oblivion.” Try it out yourself, but heed the home-page warning: “Nothing on this site is true.” (Relevant: my February 2023 post on AI hallucinations.)

Which wiki?

Guess the Wikipedia article from its categories. (Hat tip: Go Fug Yourself)

Typos are good now?

“Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them.” (“The Typo Vibe Shift,” by Michael Waters for The Atlantic; gift link)

World-changing typefaces

Five typefaces with outsize impact. One of them is the much-maligned Papyrus, whose influence “demonstrates that a typeface can gain prominence through exposure rather than technical perfection.” (Twos Studio, hat tip Erik Hansson on Bluesky)

English —> LinkedIn-ese

“Someone made a little Kagi translator that takes a normal English sentence and translates it into the clotted weaselspeak one finds in the average LinkedIn post.” (Clive Thompson)

Slop for all

AI slop images, slop bowls, fast fashion slop, short form content slop: “When did we get so submerged in the slop-ified muck?” asks New York Times reporter Emma Goldberg (“Living the Slop Life,” New York Times gift link). See also slopaganda, sloppunk, sloppelganger, slopulism, and my November 2024 post:

Name changes

• The long-running Broadway hit My Fair Lady (1956) was was initially titled My Lady Liza. During its development Bye Bye Birdie (1960) was called Let’s Go Steady. Broadway shows that changed their names (Broadway World).

• Major League Baseball’s San Diego Padres changed the name of the “FTD Burger,” a longtime favorite at Petco Park, after fans of the rival Los Angeles Dodgers claimed the initials stood for “Fuck The Dodgers.” (And here I thought it was all about flowers.) The team kept the initials, which now stand for “For The Dugout,” “For The Division,” or “For The Diegans” — it isn’t quite settled. (Sports Illustrated; hat tip MJF)

• China imposed sanctions, including an entry ban, on Marco Rubio after he “fiercely championed human rights” in that country while serving as a U.S. senator. So how was he able to join a presidential mission to China earlier this month? Through a linguistic workaround: “The Chinese government and official media began using a different Chinese character for ‘lu’ to represent the first syllable in his surname.” (The Guardian; hat tip Grant Barrett)

  ---

Word watch: Peanut butter raise

“Peanut butter raises” are “across-the-board pay bumps to employees, spread out thinly like a creamy condiment on bread.” The term has been around in one form or another for a couple of decades and got a boost after the January 2026 release of a report by Payscale, a compensation data company. (New York Times gift link)

Fashion break!

• What should have happened in The Devil Wears Prada 2: “Why not have Andy and Miranda team up—hey, even throw Emily (Emily Blunt) in there, she’s fun—for an entirely new venture? Maybe a Substack/podcast mini-empire called Miranda, for women who love to work?” - (via on Wardrobe Oxygen)

• A therapist analyzes leggings brands: “Look at how [Lululemon] names their leggings: The Align. The Define. The Swift Speed. The Fast and Free. The Unrestricted Power. These are not names for pants; these are Marvel movies. And they are names that imply that they come with superpowers.” -

• Who else loved the U.S. What Not to Wear (2003–2013)? Good news for us: Hosts Stacy London and Clinton Kelly are back, this time noshing popcorn on a king-size bed and critiquing the costumes in some memorable movies: Dirty Dancing, 9 to 5, Tootsie, and more. Subscribe to Why’d They Wear That? on YouTube.

Infectious names

On his Mashed Radish blog, John Kelly examines the etymologies of two disease names in the news: hantavirus and ebola.

That one baby name

The fastest-rising baby name of the year in the U.S. for two consecutive years is … Ailany? News to me, but three of the experts I follow were on it: Laura Wattenberg (Namerology), (Janus Name Journeys), and Clare Green (Nameberry). Green writes: “Fun, bright, and melodic, Ailany is a modern Hispanic name with multicultural influences. It broke into the US top 1000 for the first time in 2023 and by 2024, it had risen over 750 places to sit just outside the Top 100.”

Mispelled Misspelled words

Just in time for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which concludes this evening, here’s a list of the most misspelled words in the U.S. Topping the overall list: bougie. In California: different, which I guess some people like to spell diff’rently. (Language Log)

Tolkien vs. the tech right

“J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government … If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.” And it’s not just Palantir, notorious for its alliance with ICE: Tech companies called Mithril, Anduril, Erebor, and Narya all took their names from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Benjamin Stephen for Vox video, via Kottke.org, which offers some additional data points)

Enduring coolth

Why “cool” is still cool. “Most slang words come and go, but there’s one undisputed king that’s over 100 years old and still as relevant as ever.” (Laughing Squid)

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It took me a few beats to figure out what a footgun is and what the word was doing in the ad. It took me a little longer to unravel why the word is so interesting.

The gun is afoot!

A footgun is what figuratively shoots you in your figurative foot: i.e., causes you to bring on your own misfortune though incompetence or foolish actions. (The original meaning of shoot yourself in the foot may have been literal, and may date back to World War I. See this World Wide Words post.) In the lingo of coding, footguns are “traps in code that break things suddenly,” as put it in Nate’s Newsletter more than a year ago (“Avoid the Footguns! A Pocket Guide to Building Reliably with AI-Assisted Development Tools in 2025”).

But footgun isn’t an AI-specific neologism. GDQuest, a site for game developers (GDs), has this undated explanation:

In programming, any piece of code may have unintended consequences; but some patterns are considered “footguns”: when code is written in such a way that it makes unintended behavior easy, that’s a footgun.

Back in June 2018, “xeromal” asked a Hacker News user group to define footgun and got these responses:

• “something that's designed in such a way as to be extremely likely to be used in a way that's going to cause problems for yourself”

• “It’s talking about shooting yourself in the foot, but doesn’t blame the victim. For me, it’s one of the better cultural changes in software development in the last five years.”

And all the way back in January 2014, Urban Dictionary contributor “brb, doll” defined footgun alliteratively as a “podiatric penetration purposed pistol.” The examples invoked pre–AI tech and politics:

My favorite footgun: C++
Your favorite footgun: icon fonts
Everyone's favorite footgun: representative democracy

If you have an earlier citation, or know who first coined handgun, leave a comment with a link.

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The gun is a linguistic element!

Linguistically, footgun is pretty cool. Compare it, for starters2, to handgun: a gun that can be held in one hand. A footgun, by contrast, isn’t held in your foot; rather, it’s aimed at your foot. So why isn’t the term a cutthroat compound (to borrow Brianne Hughes’s useful coinage) like shootfoot?

A dart gun shoots darts; a shotgun fires shot (small bullets). A footgun does not fire feet (unless you have my warped sense of humor).

A blowgun is a gun you blow through. A footgun is not a gun that you, um, foot through.

A popgun makes a popping sound. A footgun does not sound (or smell, or look) like feet.

A machine gun has a mechanism that allows continuous firing. A footgun is not operated with a foot pedal (which is redundant, but whatever).

Is a footgun related to Chekhov’s gun? The Russian playwright famously wrote “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” A footgun does in fact loom ominously over the coding drama, but its implementation is (one hopes) optional.

Enough of this possibly triggering bulletin. Just one parting shot from me: What a world of wonders is the English language!

Other gun-related pieces I’ve written

Shoot! How Gun Idioms Color Our Speech (Visual Thesaurus, July 2022)

Gundamentalist (Fritinancy blog, December 2012)

Ammosexual (Fritinancy blog, September 2014)

Ghost gun (Fritinancy blog, April 2021)

“Even the names of guns could be important” (Fritinancy blog, June 2023)

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Tin Can

The telephone landline isn’t dead; it’s just been “reinvented for kids,” declares Tin Can, the “untechnologies” company founded in Seattle in 2024. For $100, a grownup can buy a twirly-corded device and access to a “telephone club” that allows kids to “chat voice-to-voice during the no-smartphone years.”

It works like this:

Only the contacts you approve in the Tin Can mobile app can get through. No robocalls, no strangers, just voices you know and trust.

Tin Can supports calling other Tin Cans for free, and regular phone numbers with our Party Line Plan. Both plans support 911 calling.

No screen. No games. Just talk.

And a nifty name.

What’s good about TIN CAN? It evokes the fun and wonder of actual tin-can telephones, a staple of childhood play for decades before the invention of mobile phones. Tin-can phones, often the first DIY projects a kid could undertake, work by transmitting sound waves over a taut string that connects two empty tin (or aluminum) cans. The new Tin Can phone isn’t made of tin (or aluminum) and it isn’t a can (although its design looks a bit canlike), and it uses WiFi instead of string, but the name successfully signals “basic communication.” It’s a suggestive name, not a descriptive one, and that’s a good thing.

Other things I like about Tin Can branding:

• “All talk, no smarts”: a funny, counterintuitive tagline that works.

• The .kids domain: makes it clear up front who the target market is. And I’m always happy to see a company break free from dot-com-domain tyranny.

• The colors and their names: In addition to Answer Me Aquamarine (which to me looks more like Greetings Green, but no one asked), there’s Landline Lemon and See You Later Alligator Lilac. (The one dud, in my opinion, is Static White. Who wants to hear the sound of static?) The colors are bright and fun, and their names are consistent with the youthful yet retro brand personality.

• “We still love snail mail”: The contact info includes an honest-to-gosh Seattle street address.

Reviewing the Tin Can phone for Fast Company in December 2025, Steven Melendez noted that “some adults have started using the Tin Can, enamored with the device’s simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t receive spam calls, since callers from nonapproved numbers simply get a recorded message saying they’re not authorized to connect.”

And when Wirecutter’s Alison Rochford reviewed Tin Can in April, she praised the device’s usefulness for “parents arranging playdates” and applauded its simplicity:

Setup took me about five minutes. All you need is an electrical outlet, a Wi-Fi connection, and an adult’s smartphone on which you install the Tin Can app. Because calls to and from your Tin Can’s phone number are limited to approved contacts, the final step is to enter those numbers into the app’s contact list, which you can edit at any time.

Not everyone is a fan. One buyer posted a YouTube video documenting his complaints about the device. Even he, though, had nothing bad to say about the name — and the responses to his video overwhelmingly override his objections.

Buy me a coffee

PANE

It’s pronounced exactly like pain, and it’s a shoe brand.

A shoe brand. Called pain. Really?

I learned about PANE — the brand styles the name in all caps, although as far as I can tell it isn’t an acronym — from the Substack newsletter of London-based , who calls herself “a journalist covering sweat culture.”1 In a February post Cook called PANE

the next cool sneaker brand to know because it’s about to disrupt the silhouettes of footwear. Here’s why: the collection draws on myriad sports references that give it broad appeal with niche silhouettes. It’s not a hypebeast brand, or a brand aimed at runners, or tennis guys, or preppy fans, or boxing fans. It’s for people who appreciate product design with a heavy sports inflection.

The silhouettes are colourful and nostalgic. The shoes are beautifully crafted, and, in a sea of techy sports silhouettes, the retro expression makes you feel something.

I haven’t seen the shoes IRL, but I get what Cook is driving at. The elegance of simplicity. The rejection of “performance” hype and “streetwear” overdesign. (Not unlike, come to think, what Tin Can is aiming for.) What I absolutely do not get is why the company chose the name PANE, which evokes only bunions and blisters and ouch.

Here’s what I do know about the brand: It was founded in China in 2022 by Chen Ning, a finance executive who later worked for a decade for an unspecified “bespoke menswear” brand, as Hypebeast put it in a January 2026 interview. There’s clearly a level of sophistication here that goes far beyond those trademark-grabbing alphabet-soup Chinese-for-Amazon brands. The price points — between $165 and $180 per pair — reflect that sophistication.

The name does not.

So what’s going on?

My shot-in-the-dark theories:

• They just wanted a four-letter name, maybe under the influence of Nike, Puma, and Avia. This is a bad rationale, but it’s a familiar one: I’ve worked on names with many clients who believe in four-letter magic.

• It’s … ironic? After all, there’s a successful Swedish fashion brand called ACNE, supposedly a backronym for Ambition to Create Novel Expressions. (Note that PANE shares its final two letters with ACNE.) If shoppers are willing to pay $800 for “distressed,” dirty-looking jeans from a brand that sounds like a teenage affliction, maybe comfortable shoes from a brand that sounds like agony isn’t such a stretch.

Any other ideas? I’m willing to be persuaded, but honestly, the PANE name just gives me a royal you-know-what.

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Here are some of the commonest, the weirdest, and the most extremely local college mottos I’ve been able to find.

[This is a long post! Click on the headline to read it in your browser, or switch to the Substack app.]

The usual suspects

Go to the Wikipedia page that lists college and university mottos and you’ll find plenty of Latin and Greek and lots of light and truth. There’s more than one Fiat Lux, which happens to be the motto of my own alma mater, which now presents it mostly in English translation (“Let There Be Light,” from Genesis 1:3). There’s the can’t-argue-with-it Sol Lucet Omnibus (“The sun shines over everyone”) from Lusiada University in Lisbon. There’s venerable Harvard’s Veritas (“Truth”); Yale’s Lux et Veritas (“Light and Truth”); Howard University’s Veritas et Utilitas (“Truth and Service”); and the University of Łódź’s Veritas et Libertas (“Truth and Freedom”), to cite just a handful of truthy examples.

Closer to home, Northeastern University Oakland, which occupies the Mills College campus — the East Coast institution swooped in to save little Mills in 2022 — boasts of Lux Veritas Virtus: “Light, Truth, Virtue.” Mills had been founded in 1871 as Young Ladies Seminary, the first women’s college west of the Rockies; its original motto was Una destinatio, viae diversae, Latin for “One Destination, Many Paths,” a worthy if harder-to-pronounce sentiment.

But enough banalities. Let’s look at some of the cleverer, cheekier, and more-arcane university mottos from around the world.

Local languages

Gwirionedd Undod A Chytgord: Cardiff University’s Welsh motto translates to “Truth, unity, and harmony.”

Eman Ta Zabal Zazu: The incantatory motto of Universidad del Pais Vasco, which is in Spain but not quite of Spain. The Euskara (Basque-language) motto means “Give and spread it,” and no, I’m not sure what “it” is.

Мы не сделаем вас умнее, мы научим вас думать!: A rare honest motto from Novosibirsk State University. It translates to “We will not make you more intelligent, but we will teach you to think [more effectively]!”

Izay adala no toa an-drainy: The Malagasy-language motto of the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. According to Wikipedia it means “Foolish is he who seeks only to match (or: emulate) his father,” which seems less like a motto and more like the moral to one of Aesop’s fables.

เป็นเลิศ เป็นธรรม ร่วมนำสังคม: The Thai-language motto for Thammasat University, in Bangkok. Wikipedia’s translation is “Be the finest, be the fairness [sic], be the main engine of society.” This may be out of date; the university’s English-language website gives the motto as “Excellence, Integrity, and Leadership in Society.” “Thammasat,” by the way, means “the study of law.”

Ma luna a’e o na lahui a pau ke ola o ke kanaka: The Hawaiian-language motto for the University of Hawaii system means “Above all nations is humanity.”

Quansem Ilep: “Always First” or “Always Ready,” the Secwépemc (First Nations) motto of Thompson Rivers University, in Kamloops, British Columbia. “Quansem Ilep” is also the motto of the British Columbia Dragoons, an armored reconnaissance regiment of the Canadian Army.

En Cha Huná: The motto of the University of Northern British Columbia, which has campuses throughout the province. The words in Dakelh (a First Nations language) translate variously to “Respecting All Forms of Life” and “Other People Have Their Point of View.” So reasonable, that second option!

Ko te tangata: “For the people” in Māori. It’s the motto of the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

Unexpected languages

Die Luft der Freiheit weht: Who knew—not I, that’s for sure—that Stanford University had a German motto? It means “The wind of freedom blows.” Yes, there’s a story behind that motto; Stanford’s former president, Gerhard Casper, told it at some length in a 1995 address.

Ephphata: As far as I can tell, only Gallaudet, the private university in Washington, DC, for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, has a motto in Aramaic, the language spoken in the Palestine of Jesus’ era. Ephphata means “Be opened, from the Christian Bible, Mark 7:34.

Coadyuvando El Presente, Formando El Porvenir: This Spanish-language motto wouldn’t be unusual at the University of Toledo, Spain, but it is in fact the motto of the University of Toledo, Ohio. The university translates it as “Guide to the Present, Moulder of the Future,” but coadyuvando is a participle, so the first word should be guiding. Nobody is quite sure why Toledo, Ohio, is called Toledo, but the most popular theory has nothing to do with Spain: “Willard J. Daniels, a merchant, who reportedly suggested Toledo because it ‘is easy to pronounce, is pleasant in sound, and there is no other city of that name on the American continent.” (Via Wikipedia)

Enthusiasm!

Surgite!: Brock University in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, urges you to “Push on!” in Latin.

Attempto!: The risk-embracing University of Tübingen, in Germany, shouts “I dare!”, also in Latin.

Vivere! Vincere! Creare!: Not to be outdone, the Latin motto of Kyiv’s National Aviation University has three imperatives: Live! Overcome! Create!

A brief digression on Chinese university mottos

Chinese mottos look compact in their native orthography, but — at least according to Wikipedia, which I’m relying on because I can’t read Chinese —the translations are maximal, and tend to sound as though they were lifted from Mao’s little red book or the I Ching. Here’s Fudan University: “Rich in knowledge and tenacious of purposes, inquiring with earnestness and reflecting with self-practice.” And Shanghai University: “The movement of heaven is full of power. Thus the superior man makes himself strong and untiring. Be concerned about the affairs of state before others, and enjoy comfort after others.” And this set of imperatives from Sun Yat-sen University: “Study Extensively, Enquire Accurately, Reflect Carefully, Discriminate Clearly, Practise Earnestly.” Is there anything left to say?

Old(er) English

And Gladly Teche: Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, takes its Middle English motto from Chaucer’s description of the Clerk — “And gladly wolde he lern, and gladly teche” — in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. The full line was once the motto of Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois; in 1992 it was modernized to “Gladly we learn and teach.” The change pissed some people off for years.

Manners Makyth Man: This 14th-century saying is the motto of New College, Oxford, which despite its name is one of Oxford’s oldest colleges. Here’s a longish explanation of the phrase, which is attributed to William of Wykeham, New College’s founder.

Hazard Zet Forward: If you were on Jeopardy and had to name the U.S. university better known for its men’s basketball team than for its Anglo-Norman motto, what would be your guess? OK, I’ll give it to you: It’s Seton Hall, in South Orange, New Jersey, and the motto translates to “Despite hazards, move forward.”

Outliers

Μούσαις Χάρισι Θῦε: I have no way of checking that Aristotle University of Thessaloniki’s motto really is “Sacrifice to the Muses and the Graces,” but it pleases me that Wikipedia tells me it is.

Thought the harder, heart the keener: Not, as you might expect, the fictional motto of Jedi University, but the actual motto of the University of Essex, U.K., founded in 1964.2

Omnia Extares: The Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, would like us to believe its Latin(ish) motto means “Let it all hang out,” but Wikipedia informs us the “Latin is incorrectly constructed.” Wow, man, why so uptight? The college was founded in 1967 and opened for classes in 1971, in case you were wondering.

Cur non: It means “Why not” in French, and it’s the motto of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, which is named for the Marquis de Lafayette, American Revolutionary hero, and which held its first classes in 1832.

Il futuro è passato qui: Wikipedia gives three possible interpretations of the Italian motto of Rome’s Sapienza (wisdom, knowledge) University, all equally woo-woo: “In here the future is already become past,” “The future has been here,” and “The future has stopped by here.”

My favorite college-motto story

Hard as it is to pick favorites, I’m going to single out one motto I find particularly charming and plain-spoken. It’s from an institution that was founded in 1894 in Swannanoa, North Carolina, as a high school for poor farm boys. In the 1920s it became a coed vocational school named for Warren H. Wilson, former superintendent of the Presbyterian Church’s Department of Church and Country Life; in 1967 it became a four-year college. In 1952 it earned the distinction of being one of the first colleges in the South to desegregate when college residents voted 54 to 1 to invite Alma Shippy, an African-American woman from Swannanoa, to join their ranks.

And the motto of Warren Wilson College?

“We’re not for everyone… but then, maybe you’re not everyone.”

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