One of my favorite surrealist works is “La Trahison des images” by René Magritte. It is a painting of a pipe, with some words below: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” or “This is not a pipe.” At first, most people’s reaction to the work is “uhhhh but that is a pipe?” But what the work is asking you to do is think a little bit harder: this isn’t a pipe. It’s a painting of a pipe. That we tend to conflate the image of something with the thing is a bit weird, if you think about it a bit more. Why do we do that, anyway? What is the connection between language, reality, images, and thoughts?

— Steve Klabnik, How to think about Gas Town, 2026