“Take Out the Trash Day” is a term popularized by an early episode of The West Wing (1999-2006) that describes the communications strategy of overwhelming the media by releasing multiple stories at once, usually late on a Friday, to split focus.

It is extremely rare, however, for a politician to take their own career out with the trash: so it was, this past Friday evening, that Toronto came to learn it would need to find a new mayor not five months after electing the current one.

Whether any relevant authority sees fit to apply charges in situations like these is always a separate matter, so we can narrow our interest to questions of succession. Toronto’s municipal succession works as follows: when the mayor’s resignation takes effect (it has yet to, at time of writing), the deputy mayor becomes acting mayor, and council calls for a byelection to occur within 60 days. The rest is up to the people—some of them, anyway: voter turnout in the last election was only 29 percent.

Do read David Remnick’s profile of Salman Rushdie in the New Yorker.

Here’s an amazing line from art critic Jerry Saltz, recent guest of the Pivot podcast: “Art is the most advanced operating system our species has ever created to explore consciousness…” (“Balloon-Gate, The AI Arms Race, and Guest Jerry Saltz,” 7 Feb.)