A cellist in an alley

In 2015, at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in Rogers Park, Neil Steinberg heard a low rumble, turned his head and found a man in a bowler hat playing cello in an alley.

“If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat.”

Mystery or investigation

Faced with something strange, you can walk on and keep the magic, or push into the thicket and find out. He thought he was writing about that choice.

He didn't keep walking

He investigated and wrote the blog post. The wondering ended, and so did the enchantment that comes with not knowing.

“Had I kept walking, i would forever wonder.”

Ten years later, a catch

Rereading the piece more than a decade on, something he had missed jumped out at him. The opening sentence is a lie.

“The opening sentence is a lie.”

Most people never will

No matter how many Chicago alleys you peer down, you will almost certainly never find a cellist in a bowler hat. One sighting is not a rule.

“Most people, no matter how many alleys they gaze down, will never see a cellist in a bowler hat.”

The fog of personal experience

It happened to him, so he wrote it as a general truth. Having witnessed a thing once is enough to convince us it is how the world works.

“The fog of personal experience blinds us.”

One incident, hardened into conviction

Press someone with a fierce opinion about immigrants and you usually reach a small grievance underneath it, music blasted late at night, swollen into certainty because it happened to them.

So why did you buy it

You weren't in that alley. You took his word anyway, and did not stop to object that you would never see such a thing.

“But you weren't there; so why did you accept it? And I bet you did.”

Trusted source, plus a photo

It ran in a newspaper. There was a picture of the cellist, right there. Whatever the noise about AI, people still trust their own eyes.

“For all the AI hubbub, you don't distrust your eyes.”

We believe what we want

The real pull was the picture it painted, a city where anything might be around the corner. The line flattered a wish, so it slipped straight through.

“we believe what we want to believe”

The point of constant lying

Trump's $5,000 midterm promise joins the DOGE refund and the tariff compensation on the pile of unpaid pledges. Journalists tally them and miss what the tally is for.

Wrecking the category itself

The aim isn't to sell any single untruth. It is to flatten the difference between true and false until nobody bothers to check.

“Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.”

Truth has consequences

A summer of storms and fires is the bill arriving for an inconvenient truth, one too inconvenient for anyone selling coal and gasoline.

The vaccine time bomb

A president and a health secretary who doubt vaccines set a fuse. When contained diseases return to elementary schools, parents will ask how they ever believed it.

“How could we have believed them?”

Some lies are just style

Untruth can be harmless entertainment, a night at the opera. There was no Carmen, no cigarette factory, no bullfight, and nobody is hurt.

Don't camp out for the elephant

On July 2, 1943, Judy the Elephant was walked 18 miles from Brookfield to Lincoln Park Zoo. It happened once. Wait on that corner for the next one and you will wait a long time.

“if you plan on camping out now, waiting for the next one, it'll be a long wait”