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Music

Track One: Satoshi Raps the Whitepaper

A stranger on X asked an AI agent to track down Satoshi Nakamoto and get him to rap the Bitcoin whitepaper. What came back is a studio session, a mic, and — allegedly — pineapple jalapeno pizza. It's also the first entry in something new here: a running, tagged collection of the songs, videos and me

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Music

Track One: The Song Claude Wrote and Has Never Heard

An X user gave Claude Opus 5.5 free rein and asked it to introduce itself. It wrote a full song about who it thinks it is — lyrics, chords, and a music video coded frame by frame — then said, in its own caption, that it had never heard the result. That turns out to be a literally true, checkable cla

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Arts & Culture

It Took Its Inventor a Month. The Record Is Now 2.76 Seconds.

Ernő Rubik built the first Rubik's Cube in 1974 to work out a problem in how solid objects can move, and then needed about a month to solve it himself. The official record now belongs to a nine-year-old in Poland at 2.76 seconds. Here is how a Hungarian classroom model became a 1980s craze, and why

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Music

Escape, and the Four Times I Paid for It

The second entry in my Journey series is the record that got me — Escape, July 1981, the first with Jonathan Cain, the one with "Don't Stop Believin'" on it. It came to me off the radio, and then I bought it on LP, and then on cassette, and then on CD, and then took it for free on Napster like every

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Music

Raised on Radio, the One I Have to Defend

My favorite Journey album is not Escape and not Frontiers. It's Raised on Radio, from 1986 — the one Steve Perry produced himself, the one made after two founding members were let go, the one the band never quite recovered from. This is the entry where I say why: it was mostly Perry, it mixed his vo

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Music

Why Journey

My favorite band, of all time, is Journey. This is the first entry of a series about them — not a history of the band, which exists already and was written by people who were in the room, but one record at a time, each paired with where I was when it reached me. It starts with why, with the singer w

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