diff --git a/.pylintrc b/.pylintrc
index 635985870..f82d4cfc0 100644
--- a/.pylintrc
+++ b/.pylintrc
@@ -40,12 +40,22 @@ max-attributes=15
 max-module-lines=2000
 
 [MESSAGES CONTROL]
+# * logging-format-interpolation: Pylint warns about things like
+#   ``log.info('...'.format(...))``. It insists on ``log.info('...', ...)``.
+#   This is of minor utility (mainly a performance gain when there are
+#   many messages that use formatting and are below the log level).
+#   Some versions of Pylint (including 1.8, which is the version on
+#   Ubuntu 18.04) only recognize old-style format strings using '%',
+#   and complain about something like ``log.info('{}', foo)`` with
+#   logging-too-many-args (Pylint supports new-style formatting if
+#   declared globally with logging_format_style under [LOGGING] but
+#   this requires Pylint >=2.2).
 # * no-else-return: Allow the perfectly reasonable idiom
 #    if condition1:
 #        return value1
 #    else:
 #        return value2
-disable=no-else-return
+disable=logging-format-interpolation,no-else-return
 
 [REPORTS]
 # Don't diplay statistics. Just the facts.