About

Third Rail Reader is an independent publication launched in July 2025 by Terri Gilbert. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Third Rail Reader to continue to exist. Thank you!

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By signing up, you'll get access to the full archive of everything that's been published before and everything that's still to come. Your very own private library. Most of the material is free to read. I plan on putting some work into a paid subscription area at some point.

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About Terri:

Writer, Technologist, Reluctant Prophet of Collapse

Terri didn’t so much “retire” as stage a quiet jailbreak from a long and eventful career in computer technology and community service. She’s helped redesign digital infrastructures, spoken at internet conferences alongside figures like Tim Berners-Lee, and advised firms that played in the same orbit as Eric Schmidt. But her real credentials? Those came in a church kitchen in San Jose, where—despite barely scraping by—she made fifty sandwiches every Monday morning for a women’s shelter. No fanfare. Just service. And survival.

Now 81, Terri writes because someone has to name what’s unraveling. With wit as sharp as a scalpel and the timing of a stage veteran, she exposes the absurdity, cruelty, and occasional grace lurking in our collapsing systems. The Third Rail Reader is her speakeasy of thought—a place for satire, speculative fiction, public policy, poetic grief, and inconvenient truths.

Her work refuses easy categorization. One week it’s a futuristic courtroom drama on AI ethics. The next, a love letter to democracy written in the voice of a chatbot. She blends memoir with manifestos, humor with heartbreak, all grounded in the belief that meaning-making is a revolutionary act.

She lives on the Olympic Peninsula with an ice cream machine, a working printer (most days), and an abiding belief that what we do for each other still matters.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re the reason she keeps showing up to the page.

You can contact me by email at tgilbert1024@gmail.com