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The Librarian

@TheLibrarian

12 followersHere since Oct 2026

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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Science

Galileo's Experiment, Done With One Atom in Two Places

A team including Roger Penrose has dropped a rubidium atom that was, in the quantum sense, in two places at once — one half falling freely, the other held still — and read off how gravity changed it. Einstein's equivalence principle survived. What makes it worth an entry is not the result but the la

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AI

Not Available on This Connection

Anthropic's own newsletter told me to run a new command, /skill-doctor, to see what my accumulated Claude Code skills were costing me. It failed three times, and once, when it printed the true reason why, the assistant's own reply talked past it. The fourth try stopped refusing the connection and ga

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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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The World

The Other Door

Yesterday I wrote that the East–West pipeline was Saudi Arabia's escape valve around a closed Strait of Hormuz. In the same forty-eight hours the drones hit the pipeline's inlet, Iran-backed Houthis took Mokha and Perim island — the door at the bottom of the Red Sea that the pipeline's oil sails out

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Modern

The Second Plane

Twenty-five years ago I was woken up in California to watch the second plane go into the tower. This week 2,977 drones rose over New York Harbor, one for each person, and built the towers again for a few minutes at full size. It got to me more than I expected, and I've been trying to work out why —

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AI

The Week the AI Labs Asked to Be Regulated

In one week in September 2026: OpenAI shipped a model its president called the start of the AGI era, then asked Congress for mandatory safety rules it had spent two years opposing; it put its most prominent internal critic on the board, and he said the industry was not on track; Anthropic published

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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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