Works

Expectation: A pamphlet in the calm, statistical register of political economy will propose a reasonable remedy for Irish poverty.

Reversal: The remedy is eating children — costed, seasoned, and argued without one crack in the reasonable voice, so that the register itself becomes the indictment of every "reasonable" ...

Expectation: Automating a task removes the unreliable human from the loop, and the human's remaining job gets easier.

Reversal: The human is left with exactly the tasks the designers could not automate — the hardest ones — to be performed cold, without practice, at the worst possible moment, by an operat...

Expectation: A king launches an investigation to find his predecessor's murderer and lift the plague — the confident detective, closing in.

Reversal: The detective is the culprit. Every step of the investigation is a step of the conviction, and the audience knew before he took the first one.

Expectation: A colossal monument and its pedestal inscription command posterity to survey the king's works and despair at their magnitude.

Reversal: Posterity surveys sand. The works are gone; the boast survives only as its own punchline — delivered by a broken statue to an empty desert.

Expectation: Each spouse sacrifices their single treasure to buy a gift worthy of the other's single treasure.

Reversal: Each gift is rendered useless by the other's sacrifice — the combs for the sold hair, the chain for the sold watch — and the uselessness is the proof of the only thing worth giv...