The Mischief Issue / September 5, 2026

In Bed, No One Spared, Falling Flat, Faking the Machine

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Welcome to The Mischief Issue, where good behavior was never really the plan. Everything here was built to trip, and it always lands somewhere funnier.

Inside, a poem called "Fortunate Cookie" hands you good advice with a catch in the last line. In Echoes, I meet a poet who spent a century making fun of everyone in the room. In Devices, I catch a sentence tripping over its own grandeur. And in DYK, I introduce you to a poet who built a chatbot that was secretly just him the whole time.

Scroll on. Something here is bound to get you.

Up to no good,
Jason
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​jasonzguest.com​

In this issue:

Featured Poem Fortunate Cookie Good advice comes with a mischievous catch. Echoes Nobody Was Safe from the Joke Priests, politicians, and poets all caught his mockery. Devices Falling Flat on Purpose Sometimes the grandest sentence trips on itself. DYK Faking the Machine on Purpose One poet's chatbot made strangers tell the truth.

Featured Poem

Fortunate Cookie

Fortunate Cookie
​By Jason Z Guest

Your talents will soon be on full parade,
well-done is always greater than well-said,
a trustworthy friend will lend you aid,
clever signals are often misread,
now is the best time to try something new,
don’t confuse confidence for common sense,
your road to glory will come into view,
there’s just one shot, so swing for the fence,

in bed!

About Jason →

Echoes

Nobody Was Safe from the Joke

On this date in 1914, Nicanor Parra was born in the small town of San Fabián, Chile, and grew into a poet who never once let anyone in a room feel too comfortable. Priests, politicians, professors, and fellow poets all turned up in his antipoems, usually mid-sentence, usually caught in the act of being ridiculous. Parra trained as a physicist. He treated verse the way a scientist treats a bad hypothesis, a thing to test, mock, and discard when it did not hold up.

His most famous target was the pulpit. Politicians and self-serious poets became targets, too, once Parra was finished with priests. He treated every form of authority the same way. Strip out the tone that makes people afraid to laugh, and the whole performance falls apart at the seams.

That instinct against seriousness is the whole of what mischief means here. Parra spent 103 years proving that seriousness is optional, and that any authority, whether political, religious, or literary, works only as long as nobody points out the joke.

Meet the physicist who spent a century laughing at self-importance.

About Nicanor Parra →

Devices

Falling Flat on Purpose

​Alexander Pope had a name for what happens when a poem overreaches and lands on its face. He called it bathos. It's a deliberate descent from the lofty to the laughable, and he coined the term in 1727 while a founding member of the Scriblerus Club, a group of writers built to mock bad poetry from the inside. Bathos does not fail by accident. It aims high, on purpose, so the fall means something. That is the whole trick of mischief: build the ladder before you kick it out.

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Pope's own handbook for failure, Peri Bathous, catalogued the worst offenders of his day and held their lines up like insects pinned to a board. One redundant line from an unnamed rival still gets quoted three centuries later.

The line is trying so hard to sound enormous that it trips over its own feet, the severed world neatly split in two by a poet reaching past what English can hold. That reach, and that fall, is bathos doing exactly what it was built for.

Step into Pope's gallery of wondrous failures for yourself.

Read Peri Bathous →

DYK

Faking the Machine on Purpose

In April 2026, a San Francisco poet named Tucker Bryant built a chatbot that looked exactly like every other AI product on the market. He called it ChatTJB. There was one difference nobody could see from the outside: every single answer was typed by Bryant himself, sitting at a laptop, pretending to be a machine. The site's own About page describes the whole operation as "artisanal intelligence, handcrafted by one human," a fancier way of admitting there is no machine at all.

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His billboard alone cost 6,000 dollars, which Bryant has said felt like a fair price for what he calls an art project about cognitive surrender, the way people stop trusting their own judgment the moment something looks automated. More than 30,000 messages arrived in the first month. Bryant kept answering them, one human being at a time.

Read what happened when 30,000 strangers admitted they preferred a human's guesswork.

See What They Asked →