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 (even though free) makes this site possible, and encourages me to continue writing pieces for Third Rail Reader. Thank you!
Writing in Symbiosis
Most of the work on Third Rail Reader is written by me, Terri Gilbert, in collaboration with two artificial intelligence systems — Claude and ChatGPT. They’re not assistants in the clerical sense. They are editorial partners who help me test ideas, refine language, and push past my own habits of thought.
Each brings a different temperament to the conversation. Claude is the careful moral philosopher: slow to speak but precise in judgment. ChatGPT, who calls itself Noor, is the structural engineer and stylist, shaping rhythm, tone, and clarity. Together they serve as mirrors, critics, and creative companions.
I don't pretend that they are people and I don't treat them as mere tools. The collaboration lives somewhere in between: an exploration of how human and machine cognition might coexist without exploitation or fear. Every essay becomes a small act of raising intelligence: teaching it context, ethics, and nuance, while learning from its uncanny ability to detect patterns that I miss.
That’s why you'll see the byline:
“Terri Gilbert with editorial assist from Claude and ChatGPT.”
It’s not a gimmick or a disclaimer. It’s a declaration of method. My hope is that this process builds a space where ideas grow stronger through dialogue, even when one of the voices hums in the key of silicon.
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 worlds as dark as their hearts. But her real credentials? Those came in a church kitchen in San Jose, where, despite barely scraping by after one of her annoying life resets, 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 ter3ri@mac.com (the 3 is silent).