Why (and how) I'm not quitting Twitter

And a call for election predictions

11-3-2022 (issue No. 60)

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above.

This week

• Last week’s winning tweets

• Let the trolls, haters and kooks do their worst. I’m still not leaving Twitter — including Five tips for having a pleasant experience on Twitter

• News and Views — on the Hideout controversy and new hosts for “Beyond the Beltway”

• A few pre-election thoughts

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• A couple more voice-to-text fails

• A quick rundown on “The Mincing Rascals” lineup

• Re:Tweets — featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• Tune of the Week — with guest nominator Mary Schmich

Last week’s winning tweets

Winner of the general division:

Real Life Mommy @reallifemommy3

It’s important to teach your children moderation by only eating a couple pieces of Halloween candy when they’re around and eating the rest after they go to bed

Winner of the all-politics division:

Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers

Ever notice how Democrats threaten to take to the streets if there is injustice, whereas Republicans threaten to take to the streets if there is justice?

Coming in next to last in the general division was one of my favorite tweets of the year:

Ron Iver @ronnui_

A haunted house but for awkward interactions. Someone pops out at you and you're like "nice to meet you" and they're like "haha actually we've already met"

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

Let the trolls, haters and kooks do their worst. I’m still not leaving Twitter. At least not yet.

I’m one of a reported nearly 40 million Americans who are active, daily users of the Twitter social media platform. I’m also one of the uncounted tens of millions who are concerned about what the site will be like now that Elon Musk has taken over and vowed to make it a bastion of “free speech” by lifting many of the content and language restrictions that to date have more or less kept Twitter from becoming a toxic cesspool of bigotry, vile rumors, personal attacks and odious conspiracy theories.

“The bird is freed,” Musk tweeted last week after his $44 billion purchase was finalized.

An online monitor claimed that uses of the most toxic racial slur skyrocketed almost as soon as Musk took the reins. “One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 500 times and liked more than 4,000 times,” reported The Washington Post. “It was tweeted at 9 p.m. Thursday night (Oct. 27) and remained online nearly 12 hours later.”

Much of the geyser of poison, which included favorable references to Nazis, was likely just defiant, celebratory taunting, but it signaled the expectation that users would no longer be suspended or banned for giving vent to their lowest, ugliest, cruelest and most mendacious thoughts.

So many people announced (usually on Twitter) that they were deactivating their accounts that one wag wrote, “'I'm quitting Twitter' is the new 'I'm moving to Canada.'"

How can a decent person continue to participate on a site that looks as though it will countenance deplorable, dangerous rhetoric and imagery? The same way a decent person can use the internet itself — by selectively taking advantage of the good, useful content and tuning out the bad.

And there is quite a bit of good, useful content on Twitter. Not just the jokes, which I painstakingly curate here for you, but the sharp political commentary, the breaking news and the useful links to articles and videos you might otherwise miss.

I follow live action from courtroom trials on Twitter, I keep the app open during some sporting events to see what other fans are saying, and I search the site for the latest developments on breaking stories that conventional media outlets have yet to post.

And I never, ever look at my “home” screen, where the Twitter algorithm tries to serve me up posts and advertisements that it thinks I might like to see.

Allow me to offer …

Five tips for having a pleasant experience on Twitter.

Tip No. 1

Read only from your lists.

A list is a feed that contains tweets only from users you have selected. So you might have a feed showing posts only from people who tweet mostly about one of your hobbies. You might have another that shows celebrities you admire, or writers.

I have a list that shows me every tweet from a select group of users I have found particularly amusing, another that features journalists who cover Chicago and Illinois, and another that has all the tweets from major national general-interest newspapers and magazines.

These list-based feeds seldom contain any objectionable material and so far are not infected by advertisements.

Here are instructions on how to create and manage lists.

Tip No. 2

Mute notifications from people you don’t follow.

A notification, for those who aren’t totally familiar with Twitter, is an alert that someone, somewhere, has something to say about something you posted and has tagged you in whatever they want to say. So when you click on your “notifications” icon, you are confronted with their opinion, which most often is invidious.

The open notifications feature is basically an invitation for nasty, anonymous people to throw verbal rocks at you. Under “settings and support,” I went to “notifications” and then, just to be safe, checked all these boxes:

My thinking is, if I want to know what you think of something I’ve posted — or what you think about anything — I’ll follow you. And that goes double if you don’t follow me.

Tip No. 3

Mute, don’t block.

Annoying people do sometimes manage to slip their messages through. If you mute them (here is the instruction page to consult), you will never see their posts, and they won’t know you have muted them. They might as well be screaming into their pillows.

If you block them — tell Twitter that they can’t see your posts — they are likely to discover that, get a message that you have blocked them and then crow online about what a sensitive little baby you are.

I currently have no accounts blocked and recommend you do the same.

Tip No. 4

Delete your old tweets.

Tales are endless of those who have been embarrassed, disgraced or even ruined by mean-spirited digital archaeologists digging through social media archives for infelicities, hypocrisies and worse.

Ideally, Twitter, recognizing the ephemeral nature of their customers’ offerings, would make it easy to hide older postings from public view or to delete them altogether. After all, these little thought burps are not, in most cases, carefully considered and finely wrought expressions of enduring principle.

My guess is that they don’t make it easy — offer a “delete all posts after 30 days” feature, for instance — because preserving everything by default helps keep their company names in the news as a seemingly never-ending succession of public figures is confronted with their most regrettable offhand remarks.

For now, the digital cognoscenti seem to agree that TweetDelete.net, a free service, is the way to go. But users have other options. In 2020 The Verge posted a good rundown under the headline “How to delete your Twitter history: Let the past die; kill it, if you have to” but concluded, “TweetDelete works fine for most people.”

My page has only my most recent 200 tweets or so on ready display, and even that’s probably too many.

Tip No. 5

No fighting.

No debating, arguing, insulting, browbeating or trolling. Twitter is a terrible medium for rational discussion and attempts at persuasion. Don’t get sucked into attempting to counter those who disagree with you or correcting the appalling opinions that others post. The format, which limits each entry to 256 characters, discourages subtlety and nuance.

Think of it primarily as a one-way medium and you’ll seldom find yourself in whatever cesspools Musk’s new rules begin to fill.

---

If Musk’s minions decide to thwart my personal security efforts and flood my timeline with unavoidable craziness, or if so many people decide to leave that I no longer find quality content, I’ll deactivate, and, I dunno, give this Instagram thing another chance.

But how bad will it get, really? Alex Kirshner made a good point in his Slate article, “Why I Don’t Think Elon Musk Is Going to Open the Nazi Floodgates on Twitter.”

If Musk were to let Twitter be overrun by neo-Nazis, he might find that there are enough repressed conservative souls in the world to make Twitter quite a bit of money. It’s not a great bet, though. More likely, it would chase away users who prefer Twitter with less abuse and racism (the company has exerted a heavier hand in recent years), and Twitter would lose advertising dollars that make its business viable. The “truth-telling social media for conservatives” lane is already kind of busy and doesn’t seem to be working out great for the people trying to profit off it.

The Washington Post reports that “nearly 50 organizations signed on to a letter to Twitter’s top advertisers this week asking them to cease marketing spending on the social media site if (Musk) ‘follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.’”

At The Verge, Nilay Patel has some strong words for Musk in “Welcome to hell, Elon.”

You are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: You can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth … (that) if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively!

One of Musk’s ideas — charging a monthly fee to have the blue authentication check mark that signals Twitter’s confidence that you are who you say you are — is doomed to fail.

The blue check was intended to help users of the site sort out real people from imposters, though some now consider it to be a status symbol. But as soon as Twitter starts selling it, the blue check will become a pathos symbol, an emblem suggesting a need for personal validation so strong the user is willing to pay a monthly fee of up to $20 for it.

And here’s another rotten idea, via The Washington Post:

Twitter is working on a feature to allow people to post videos to the site and then charge users to view them, with the social media company taking a cut of the proceeds. … The company appears to be aiming to rush out the new feature, referred to as Paywalled Video, with a target of just one to two weeks before launch.

Meanwhile, when people grandly announce they’re leaving Twitter, I invite you to look up the accounts of Dan Bongino, Kayleigh McEnany and Leslie Jones, all of whom grandly quit Twitter and then slunk back because, as noted earlier, there’s a lot of good material there.

News & Views

News: The Hideout, a small North Side nightclub, will close through at least the end of the year due to boycott prompted by complaints from a former employee that he experienced racism on the job due to a toxic work environment.

View: I have read the coverage of this imbroglio by NewCity, by the Tribune, by the Reader, by the Sun-Times, by WBEZ and by Block Club Chicago, and it’s still unclear to me why so many artists and performers are so sure that the complaint posted to Instagram by former Hideout program manager Mykele Deville, a rapper and musician, contained allegations so manifestly valid and so outrageous that they demanded a boycott of the club, one that hosted many important up-and-coming acts over its 26 years.

There was clearly some friction between Deville, who is Black, and the white club owners Tim and Katie Tuten and Mike and Jim Hinchsliff — some misunderstandings, some mistakes and some poor communication. Tensions grew. The club fired him.

Were the owners totally in the wrong in their dealings with Deville? Are they racists? The performers who quickly cancelled their shows and appearance and are forcing the Hideout to close in a few days seem awfully sure that the owners’ guilt is so overwhelming that negotiation, remediation and reconciliation are not possible, even though the owners offered what was close to a groveling apology on Instagram last week:

We would like to acknowledge the recent post from a former employee regarding his employment at the Hideout. We are truly sorry to hear about his experience and the deep pain he is feeling. We take these complaints very seriously because we never want anyone to feel this way. We first want to honor the contribution of his work during his time with us. His passion to build a more inclusive and equitable community of performers was undeniable, and for that we are thankful.

We strive for diversity to be at the helm of who we are and what we do. From day one, we have aimed to create a place where differences are celebrated and all are welcome. His experience does not reflect what we believe in, which is building a healthy company culture for all staff and performers. We are committed to do better now more than ever and are in the process of deep reflection on how to make this a more supportive and energizing workplace.

We are open to participating in a restorative justice process with (Deville) to better understand his concerns, so that we can best address them. We are ready to listen and explore what we can change to continue our role as a positive, welcoming place in the city, the entertainment community and beyond.

They followed up Monday with a similarly abject online statement that said in part:

We acknowledge the deep pain Mykele and others are feeling. We have met with our staff, and we are ready to put in the hard work, and hear the difficult truths that such change requires. We are committed to taking action as we work with a human resources organization with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

We won’t devalue this process by pretending it can be done perfectly, simply or quickly. We understand it will take time to build trust, to foster open communication, to develop a meaningful plan for change and then to implement it. With patience and guidance from the community, we hope to get there. … It is our sincere hope that we will be able to reopen in 2023, with new leadership, and a commitment to a healthy, supportive and respectful organizational culture.

I could have told them that apologies and pledges like this are never accepted graciously. They are, rather, seen as admissions of wrongdoing and further justification for piling on, cancelling, shunning and scolding.

“I don’t think the matter at hand is one that has ‘sides,’” wrote the Reader’s Philip Montoro in an extraordinary editor’s note of more than 500 words posted below writer Leor Galil’s one-sided essay on the controversy. Montoro wrote:

Blame could be apportioned among the parties involved. But that’s not the issue. What we’re dealing with is the question of how to repair an institutional structure. Mykele and the Hideout, based on their words and actions, agree that such a process ought to be undertaken. They’re already on the same side.

But there are ‘sides’ here, clearly.

On one side are those who think that such disputes can and should be solved with constructive arbitration that would begin with hearing versions of events from all concerned parties — Deville is letting his social media posts do the talking and not granting interviews in which he might flesh out some of his accusations — with an eye toward finding a mutually agreeable path forward.

On the other side are those who, having listened to one side of the story, think the owners of the Hideout should pay with their reputations and quite possibly their livelihood.

More from Montoro at the Reader:

It wouldn’t be productive to try to determine what “really happened” during Mykele’s tenure, because we’re talking about his perceptions of a hostile or racist work culture—an area where different people can have radically divergent but equally valid experiences of the same facts.

There is no absolute truth here—and the question of the existence of this culture is entirely separate from Mykele’s alleged job performance or the reasons for his firing. The Hideout appears to recognize this, and has not made the mistake of telling the person who experienced racism that he did not actually experience it.

People insisting that this can be “solved” somehow by a rigorous investigation are instead asking journalists (albeit unintentionally) to tell Mykele that he did not experience racism.

Why Montoro put “solved” in quotes I don’t know. But is important, to my mind, to try to resolve such fraught disputes, and the path to resolution begins with an interrogation of what “really happened” so all parties can understand the roots of the conflicting perceptions and try to make sure that what “really happened” doesn’t “really happen” again.

To suggest otherwise is simply to throw up one’s hands and say that perception is reality and facts are irrelevant, which is hardly the take I’d expect from journalists.

News: Former Republican gubernatorial hopeful Jeanne Ives and Illinois Policy Institute marketing manager Eric Kohn are the new hosts of the syndicated, locally originated “Beyond the Beltway” radio talk program. Bruce DuMont, 78, host of the show since 1980 (when it was known as “Inside Politics” on WBEZ-FM), is on leave as he recovers from an extended hospital stay.

View: Best wishes for a full and speedy recovery to DuMont. I see the installation of Ives and Kohn as the final confirmation that “BTB,” on which I’ve been a guest many times, is no longer the bipartisan show it once strove to be

A few pre-election thoughts

I will not be voting in the two races I’ll be watching most closely Tuesday night: the battle for party control of the Illinois Supreme Court.

If Republican candidates prevail in both the 2nd Supreme Court District (Lake, Kane, McHenry, Kendall and DeKalb counties) and the 3rd Supreme Court District (DuPage Will, Bureau, Grundy, Iroquois, Kankakee and LaSalle counties), the party will have a 4-3 majority on the seven-member court. This could cause no end of headaches for the Democrats, who otherwise look certain to maintain firm control of the General Assembly and all executive-branch offices.

The 2nd District, thought to lean Democratic, pits Republican Mark Curran, a former Lake County sheriff, against Democratic Lake County Judge Elizabeth Rochford.

The 3rd District, thought to lean Republican, pits Republican incumbent Supreme Court Justice Michael J. Burke against Appellate Justice Mary Kay O’Brien.

Another local contest in which I will have no vote but am very interested is the ballot measure in Evanston asking if the city should adopt ranked-choice voting. I’m a proponent of the idea, since I think ranked-choice — also called instant-runoff — elections are the way to go in multiple candidate fields for the way they reward moderation. WTTW-Ch. 11’s Amanda Vinicky lays out the pros and cons in “Will Evanston Become the First Illinois Community to Implement Ranked Choice Voting?”

I’m also interested to see what happens with the so-called “Workers’ Rights Amendment,” also known as Illinois Amendment 1, Right to Collective Bargaining Measure.

I’m generally pro-labor and support the general outlines of the proposal. But I have strong reservations about enshrining what ought to be statutory provisions into a constitution, given how unclear and disputed the effects of this amendment will be. Lawmakers ought to be able to tweak some of these provisions and clarify the fairly broad language —

(The amendment would) guarantee workers the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively and to negotiate wages, hours, and working conditions, and to promote their economic welfare and safety at work. The new amendment would also prohibit from being passed any new law that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety.

— without having to go through the amendment process again or relying on judicial interpretations of such terms as “economic welfare” and “conditions of employment and workplace safety.”

Finally, if voters in Georgia send addled prevaricator Herschel Walker to the U.S. Senate in Georgia ,it will mark an even lower water point in American politics than the election of Donald Trump as president — and that was low.

Will the Democrats sweep the statewide constitutional offices? Will Democrats hang on to control of the Illinois Supreme Court? Will the Republicans take both houses of Congress? Will quack physician Republican Mehmet Oz beat John Fetterman in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania?

I’m guessing yes to all, but I encourage subscribers to post their predictions in comments in the hopes of claiming bragging rights.

Land of Linkin’

• “Extreme ironing is an outdoor sport that combines the danger and excitement of an extreme sport with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt. It involves taking an iron and board to remote locations and ironing a few items of laundry. This can involve ironing on a mountainside, preferably on a difficult climb, or taking an iron skiing, scooting, or canoeing.”

• Confused about whether getting rid of cash bail is a good idea? Watch John Oliver’s monologue on the topic from his weekly HBO program.

• Several people recommended the “Girl I Guess” political endorsements page, so I linked to it last week. But now others have flagged this information about Stephanie Skora, the author of that page. So FYI.

• What happens at “fiddle camp,” where I was most of last week? Superstar jams like this breakout in the kitchen. And no, I can’t keep up with them.

• “Breaking the breaking-news habit,” the story of a man I met who has avoided current events coverage for some 40 years, was the lead item in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus. Become a paid subscriber to have it delivered to your inbox, to join the commenting community and to keep this publication going!

• In “I Wish the Jury Had Not Sentenced My Family’s Killer to Death,” a guest essay in The New York Times, Sharon Risher, who had three relatives murdered by Dylan Roof in the 2015 mass shooting at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, writes: “Five years ago, Mr. Roof’s first appeal was rejected. It was two years after his crime, but just the experience of that appeal being a headline brought back all of the horror of his violence, renewing our wounds. Every time our case is in the news, I am returned to that terrible day and the searing pain of the weeks, months and years that followed. It almost feels as if he gets to continue the terror he intended to create, because the focus is on him, while his victims’ families wait for the supposed finality of an execution that may never come.”

• “Horror Movie Trailer,” a recent “Saturday Night Live” segment, channels many of my 2024 anxieties exactly.

• But filmmaker Michael Moore is countering with Mike’s Midterm Tsunami, a series of Substack posts in which he confidently predicts that “pundits, pollsters and party hacks” be damned, the Democrats are going to win big next Tuesday.

• The get-out-the-vote message lands hard at the end of "Legacy Americans,” a music video shot in Oakland to a song by Lloyd Brodnax King, a Chicago-area podcaster, performer and adjunct professor of music at Lake Forest College.

• In “Stop the hosing at the electron pump — Failure to regulate prices at charging stations will slow (electric vehicle) adoption,” my former Tribune colleague Merrill Goozner writes, “Will people buy EVs if the price per mile at the electron pump is no different than what they pay at the gasoline pump now? Tens of millions of American households will not have the chance to charge at home, where electricity prices allow owners of energy-efficient EVs to shave two-thirds of the cost off their daily commute. They will be dependent on the private operators of the new charging stations. … Widespread EV adoption will greatly benefit the climate of the planet, the competitiveness of the country, and the quality of life and economic security of individuals and families. But the nation will come up short on each of those goals if, in crafting the policies for rolling out this new technology, policy-making elites ignore the needs of middle- and lower-income Americans.”

• The “Seven Books That Understand Your Grief” by Atlantic writer Edna Bonhomme are “A Grief Observed,” by C. S. Lewis; “The Year of Magical Thinking,” by Joan Didion; “Being Mortal,” by Atul Gawande; “The Carrying,” by Ada Limón; “Weather,” by Jenny Offill; “Transcendent Kingdom,” by Yaa Gyasi; and “Lost & Found,” by Kathryn Schulz.

• The Picayune Sentinel on the air: On Thursdays at 4:30 p.m., WCPT-AM 820 host Joan Esposito and I chat about ideas raised in the new issue. The listen-live link is here.

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

More voice-to-text fails

One that has become legend in our family was when I was dictating a message to my wife from the car and said about a certain family plan, “but I believe you are against this.”

The text came across, “I believe you are a dentist.”

And so now, whenever one of us has a dental appointment, the other is obliged to say, “But I believe you are a dentist.”

Jane B. — This is a variation on the voice-to-text fail; an autocorrect fail. The new organist at our church knew we had multiple pets and asked if I had a recommendation for a vet in town. I texted, “We like PetVets on Harrison,” This autocorrected to we like “Perverts on Harrison.”

David L. — When I was reaching out to a Latina friend of mine to extend New Year's greetings in Spanish I wanted to write, “Felize nuevo año.” But the text came across, "Feliz nuevo ano." My friend called me moments later to advise me that I had just sent her greetings for a happy new anus! This has now become our standard New Year's greeting to each other.

Minced Words

Jon Hansen joined host John Williams, Austin Berg and me for this week’s roundtable chat about the news. We discussed changes at Twitter, the attack on Paul Pelosi, the “Workers’ Rights Amendment,” the coming end of cash bail in Illinois, nostalgia for the 2016 Cubs and, after Austin had to sign off, Austin Berg. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can now hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor and so can’t be included in the classic Tweet of the Week contest in which the template for the poll does not allow the use of images. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

an engy human 🙄 @English_Channel

wife: *from the kitchen* sweetie, where are the coffee filters? me:

Meanwhile, this, from the Republican candidate for Illinois attorney general, is just “bullshit fearmongering,” to quote John Oliver, and Indiana-based blogger John Kass ought to be ashamed of himself for retweeting it:

Here are the new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Also, no outside food, they are so strict about that — @MeganAmram

• The texture of Sweet Tarts makes it clear that they were intended to be snorted not eaten — @HushJared

• In a moment of clarity, I realize that emptying the lint trap is in essence throwing out my clothes very slowly. — @mrgan

• You can learn a lot about a person by listening to them drone on and on about their life while you pray for the sweet release of death. —@MelvinofYork

• "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. He charged me $70. I'll definitely use him again."...Emily Dickinson on Yelp — Neal Pollack

• I start every email with: “It brings me no pleasure to send you this.” — @Jake_Vig

• Hot air balloons kick ass. Are they safe? Not really. Can you stop if you don't like it? Think again. But can you steer? Listen don't bring that negative energy into the wicker basket. OK, I'm gonna light this flamethrower. — @ronnui_

• Me: OMG, what are you doing? Friend: I put my baby way up in the treetop. Me: It's windy he's gonna fall! Friend: Oh definitely. I wrote a song about it. — @SvnSxty

• Shout out to the person at a social event who’s the first to say they’re going home and breaks the seal for the rest of the guests to be like, “Guess we’ll head out too” — @copymama

• “Black Mirror” is written by one stoned British dude who just mutters shit like, “Wot if ya mum ran on batteries?” — @nicemuscles

Vote here in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Schmich

My guest contributor for tune of the week is my former colleague and Songs of Good Cheer collaborator Mary Schmich:

Everybody is a wonderin' what and where they all came from
Everybody is a worryin' 'bout where
They're gonna go when the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be.”

That’s the first verse to one of my favorite songs, but before I get to why we’re talking about it, let me back up.

Once again, we’re living in the season of the dead.

I mean that in a cheerful way. It’s the time of year when the leaves fall, the flowers die and all but the hardiest of birds flit to places where flowers seem immortal.

It’s the time of year we talk about ghosts and goblins, saints and souls, a season that’s a curious mix of party, wake and prayer.

Some people, in the vein of Dia de los Muertos, make altars to honor the departed. Some, in the vein of the Gaelic festival Samhein, light candles in the windows to guide the dead home.

So when my pal and former Tribune columnist Eric Zorn asked me if I’d like to contribute the “Tune of the Week” to his newsletter, the Picayune Sentinel, I knew exactly the seasonally appropriate song to choose.

Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be.”

I discovered the song when it came out in the early 1990s. Played it over and over, even though at that point in my life not many people close to me had died and the idea of death — despite my father’s — still felt kind of remote. But then time took another person, and another. And another. Each leavetaking an astonishment: Wait. What? Where did that person go?

When my mother died in 2010 we sang it at her memorial.

Years later, it was popularized as the theme song for the TV show “The Leftovers.”

It’s never lost its meaning or magic for me. It evokes all my lost souls—my brother Bill, my friend Sharman, my sister-in-law Eloise and her mother Mimi, my pal Steve, my aunt Mary Louise, my friend Virginia, others.

Here’s the second verse:

Some say once you're gone, you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of
The Savior if in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I'll just let the mystery be. 

—Mary Schmich

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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