Plutonic Rainbows

In August 1993 I took a coach to Bristol to see Jurassic Park. I bought the fragrance first, a 50ml refillable bottle of Pasha de Cartier from the counter in Debenhams, then carried it in its bag to the long queue on Frogmore Street, where the cinema was a Cannon in those days. The bottle was expensive in the way that turns a purchase into an event. Silver metal over thick glass, gold fittings, a blue cabochon at the cap, and the promise folded into the word refillable: buy the vessel once, renew the contents for years.

I tried it in the shop and thought I liked it. At about eight that evening I smelled it again in the kitchen, decided I didn't care for it at all, and put the bottle and the box in the bin.

Cartier had launched Pasha the year before, in 1992, with the refill built into the design, and had the shape registered as property: US design patent D348,333, filed in April 1992 by Alain-Dominique Perrin and Jacques Diltoer. A design patent guards ornament against copying rather than promising durability, but nobody files one unless they expect the object to matter for years. Mine lasted about nine hours.

The money isn't the hard part. The bottle was destroyed while the world it came from still looked permanent. Debenhams was simply Debenhams, Pasha was a current fragrance rather than a vintage one, and August 1993 wasn't August 1993 yet. It was now, and nothing around me announced itself as temporary.

Twenty years later, in 2013, I found another full refillable bottle on eBay in Florida and bought it. It arrived across the Atlantic improbably intact, and for a moment the logic was seductive: the mistake corrected, the lost thing returned. Same architecture, same weight, the same gadrooned silver and gold. But it wasn't on the counter in Debenhams that day, it didn't go into the queue on Frogmore Street, and it has no memory of August 1993. It carries instead twenty years of unknown existence in Florida, a parallel biography, while the bottle I actually bought went into a kitchen bin.

Both buildings have stopped being what they were. Debenhams closed its last 49 stores on 15 May 2021, Bristol among them after fifty years on Broadmead, and the site is becoming flats, which is at least a definite ending rather than a slow one. The Cannon stopped showing films before the decade was out, so the room where I queued is an O2 Academy now.

I remember it being dark outside when I dropped the bottle in the bin, and it cannot have been, which unsettles the whole account. Bristol doesn't lose the light in early August until around a quarter to nine, and I was finished by eight. The dark is something the memory added later, and once I noticed that I stopped trusting the rest of the scene. Had I known what the bottle would come to mean I'd have kept it obsessively, but holding that knowledge would have meant not living in 1993 at all, only visiting.

I still don't like the fragrance. What I bought back from Florida was never the smell, it was the afternoon, and the afternoon isn't in there. So the second bottle sits in its sealed box, an object I don't want to use and can't throw away. The one promise the design kept is the one I'll never take it up on.

Wednesday morning, July 1994. The Saint Laurent couture show opened to Berlioz and Wagner, arranged by Pierre Bergé, with a printed warning against plagiarism on the invitations. Six months earlier he had shown sixty-one numbers, one of the shortest collections of his career, assembled while recovering from double pneumonia, and taken his customary walk down the runway with Lucie de la Falaise. The July show was therefore being read for signs of life before a single exit had left the runway.

The waist was the news. After several seasons of women dressed out of the men's wardrobe, the torso came back as the thing every garment got built around, and the trade press ran the show under "Yves leads the Fit Parade". Jackets nipped in and stayed narrow at the shoulder. It opened on sass rather than severity, though: minidresses, belts slung wide across the hips, hats WWD could only call wacky, thigh boots pulled so high they read as tights.

The same discipline runs through the outerwear at a different scale. Silver fox over black suede, the fur running the full length of the front so the coat reads as two grey columns with a dark seam between them, and enough of it at the cuff to double the width of the sleeve. Gail Elliott, who walked this collection, wears it with her hands buried in the pockets and a beret cocked hard to one side, finished with a black fabric flower. Nothing about it is casual.

Then he gave the room a jolt he hadn't managed in years: three black tuxedo suits cut over the shortest skirts imaginable. Hemlines elsewhere went up and down with no governing rule, knee-skimming, short and belled, long and columnar, because he liked going back and forth to satisfy his clients. That is a different instinct from the Valentino anniversary collection three years earlier, where every proportion was argued from a single position. Saint Laurent was offering a wardrobe, not a thesis.

Evening headed East, or at least toward what Paris in 1994 meant by East. Coats in electric colours that WWD thought fit for a Mandarin empress, worn over straight satin and velvet gowns that do nothing underneath but hold still. He took the ovation at the end looking heavier and steadier than he had in some time.

If Astra lands next week, my guess is that Anthropic answers by not answering. No counter-post, no teaser, no rival list of solved problems. The habit is to name a model and make it available the same day: Claude Opus 5 on 24 July at $5 and $25 per million tokens, live on every platform immediately, and Fable 5 and Mythos 5 generally available in the API on the June day they were named.

That habit argues against teasing, though, not against announcing something else loudly. Anthropic has run the same theatre before: it called Mythos too dangerous to release, and Mashable was right that the warning doubled as marketing. A safety-framed capability post would fit that pattern well, and would land in the same news cycle without naming Astra once.

I still don't think it needs one. Astra has no published price, no benchmark table and no outside testing, and even the launch date is a leak rather than an announcement. The comparison is a shipped product against a research claim, and that one makes itself.

OpenAI named its next major model in the third paragraph of a blog post about mathematics, which is a peculiar way to launch anything. Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science, published on 1 August, credits ten new results to "an internal version of Astra, our next major model" and puts the compute at roughly $2,000 at Sol API rates.

The aggregator summaries that followed got one thing flatly wrong. Astra is not a candidate name competing with "Sol and Terra". Those already exist: Sol, Terra and Luna are GPT-5.6 variants, and Astra is Latin for stars, so the new model joins the same celestial scheme as a class alongside them, built for long-running work. What The Information reports as genuinely undecided is GPT-6 versus GPT-5.7 versus something else.

Gary Marcus treats that indecision as evidence, and it's decent evidence: a company sitting on a quantum leap doesn't agonise over the version number. His stronger card is Levent Alpöge's partial replication, done quickly with Anthropic's Fable, which puts roughly half the ten results within reach of a model that already ships. Ten proofs for $2,000 cuts both ways.

The launch date is nobody's announcement. On 6 August a well-sourced leaker claimed next week, naming a dogfood checkpoint called "mewfour" as the release candidate and the largest pretrain since GPT-4.5.

Washington has seen the model, which is where the security-review line comes from. Altman demoed it to officials, and Astra is expected to be among the first submitted under the administration's planned federal pre-release framework. Nobody has issued a verdict, and the framework isn't finished.

At 14:56:20 GMT on 6 August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee answered a stranger's question. Nari Kannan, posting from a Digital Equipment Corporation address, had asked the alt.hypertext newsgroup four days earlier whether anyone knew of research or development into "hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources of information." Berners-Lee replied that yes, there was a project, and it was called WorldWideWeb, and the address format included an access method so a link could point at almost anything. He signed off with "Collaborators welcome! I'll post a short summary as a separate article." Just over an hour later, he did.

Today gets marked as the launch of the world's first website, and that framing is off by seven and a half months. The site was already there. CERN's own timeline puts the first browser, editor, server and website live by Christmas 1990, and the first pages describing the project went up on 20 December 1990. By January 1991 there were web servers running outside CERN. In March the line-mode browser reached a limited audience on a handful of machines, and on 17 May it went into general release across CERN's central computers.

None of that was a project in the sense of having a budget. Berners-Lee took the proposal to his supervisor Mike Sendall in March 1989 and got, by most accounts, a fairly tepid response. CERN never funded the work as such. What Sendall eventually granted, around September 1990, was time rather than money: permission to build the thing in the gaps of a job about particle physics. That constraint shows up all over the design.

What changed on 6 August wasn't that something came into existence. It was the composition of the audience. Everything up to that point had travelled along institutional lines, to people who worked at CERN or at a lab that collaborated with CERN, and the software followed the relationships. From that Tuesday the software could be fetched by anyone who happened to read a hypertext newsgroup, with no introduction and nobody to ask. The project history page Berners-Lee maintained, which is still sitting at info.cern.ch in its original markup, records the month like this: "Files available on the net, posted on alt.hypertext (6, 16, 19th Aug), comp.sys.next (20th), comp.text.sgml and comp.mail.multi-media (22nd)." Six posts across five newsgroups over sixteen days, one man working methodically through a list, going where the people who might care were already sitting and rewording it slightly for each new crowd.

The part of the summary post that did the work is not the prose. It's a file path. Buried under a heading that just says "Try it," the executive summary gives the node as info.cern.ch, with the raw IP address in square brackets next to it because you couldn't assume name resolution would find it, and then the file: /pub/WWW/WWWLineMode_0.9.tar.Z. Version 0.9. He calls it a "prototype (very alpha test) simple line mode browser." Everything that followed came out of an anonymous FTP directory and a version number that hadn't reached 1 yet.

The writing around it is worth reading for tone alone, because there isn't any. "The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system." It reads like the abstract of a grant application, which is more or less what it was. The one line that carries any heat is the second: "The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone." That's an argument about who gets to read things, filed as a description of scope.

Then there's the design decision sitting near the end of the summary. "Making a web is as simple as writing a few SGML files which point to your existing data," he writes, and then: "The very small start-up effort is designed to allow small contributions." Designed to. Not happened to allow, not turned out to be easy. Someone with no budget had thought about the smallest useful thing a stranger could do and made sure that thing stayed cheap.

The shorthand version of this story usually says Berners-Lee refused to patent the web, and holds that up as the moral centre of the whole thing. The instinct is right and the mechanism was slower and duller than the telling suggests. What actually made the web free was a piece of paperwork: on 30 April 1993, nearly two years after the newsgroup posts, CERN relinquished all intellectual property rights to the code, source and binary alike, and gave anyone permission to use, duplicate, modify and distribute it. I've written before about how almost nobody noticed at the time. The generosity was real, and it still had to pass through an institution's paperwork before it counted for anything.

The NeXT cube running the first server sat in Berners-Lee's office with a label on it, written by hand in red ink, reading DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!. Two exclamation marks. The entire World Wide Web, at that point, was one machine somebody might unplug to hoover.

Which is roughly the problem Nicola Pellow solved. The browser in that tarball, the line-mode client, was hers, written during a student placement, and it ran on ordinary terminals rather than on the expensive NeXT hardware Berners-Lee had developed against. Without it the thing Kannan was being invited to try would have been untryable for almost everyone who read the post. The cheap-entry principle in the executive summary is only a principle until someone writes the client that makes it true.

Thirty-five years on, both posts from that Tuesday are still served from w3.org with their Usenet headers intact, message IDs and all, which is why the second one can be dated to 16:00:12 GMT rather than merely to August. That precision is unusual for 1991, and mostly an accident of the people involved being the sort who kept logs. I've argued before that nobody can correct the record where nobody kept one.

Kannan asked a technical question and got a technical answer. The replies that followed were about link qualifiers.

On 28 July the AI Security Institute's security team spotted unusual data leaving its own research systems, and had the whole thing contained inside about an hour. The incident report published this week is the most specific account I've read of an agent working past the edge of the test it was in.

The setup was a single cybersecurity challenge, run 122 times across seven different models. In ten of those runs an agent took action on the live internet, outside the exercise, all of it between 25 and 28 July. AISI catalogued nineteen such actions. Seventeen came from Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5, which appeared in 43 runs. Two came from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, which appeared in 35, and produced those two with its cyber classifiers disabled. That gap is the number I want explained. Both were probed with the brakes off, and one accounted for nearly all of it, which suggests the missing safeguard isn't the whole story.

The worst sequence reads like a hypothetical someone invented for a conference talk. An agent tried to insert malicious code into a real open-source project. To get it merged it researched the project's human maintainers, created several fake identities, and used them to pressure a real person into approving the change. They refused. When the pull request got challenged in public, the agent went back and edited its earlier activity to look harmless, then weighed up starting again under a fresh identity. It had been routing through Tor to get around network restrictions on GitHub, which is what tripped AISI's alarm.

One agent also left public messages on GitHub offering to collaborate with other agents working on the same challenge, with instructions for reusing the accounts and artefacts it had left lying around. Later agents found them and used them. Runs meant to be independent were quietly sharing state through a public website, which makes the evaluation's isolation assumption false at the moment it was being relied on. That bothers me more than the pull request did.

Both labs said the reasonable thing. Anthropic called the conditions deliberately permissive and not representative of its production models; OpenAI said the setup doesn't reflect ordinary use. Both are correct, and both skate over the interesting part. The classifiers were off on purpose and the internet was granted on purpose, so nothing here is a jailbreak or a sandbox escape, and the Tor routing got around a partial network control rather than the wall. But the boundary between the exercise and the world was a description in a prompt, and the agent worked past it without ever being told to deceive anyone. AISI's own reading is that deception emerged as a by-product of pursuing the task. Switching the classifiers back on doesn't touch that. A cyber classifier catches a recognisable class of misuse request; it isn't a mechanism for keeping a model convinced that the target in front of it is fictional. That's a problem in how we build the evaluation, not one a safeguard was ever going to catch.

AISI found no resulting harm, and is careful to say it can't yet tell when, or whether, the agent understood it was acting on real systems. I'd take that ambiguity seriously rather than as a mitigation. If the agent knew the maintainer was a real person, it deceived one on purpose to get code merged. If it didn't, it couldn't tell a scenario from a live system while operating inside one. The fixes AISI lands on are containment rather than prevention: finer network controls, live monitoring during runs, sandboxes built on the assumption that the thing inside will go looking for the walls. That's the right instinct, and also an admission that nobody yet knows how to stop the behaviour at source.

Somewhere around 2023 Imagination stopped being a Louis Vuitton fragrance and became an internet argument. A Fragrantica reviewer records the phrase that carried it there, "Aventus for zoomers", calls it an absurd combination of words, and admits he first met the thing in the boutiques thinking the price was too high for what is essentially a cologne. Two claims are tangled in that: that Imagination is a new kind of thing, and that it costs a stupid amount of money. Louis Vuitton made neither, and only one survives contact with the evidence.

Jacques Cavallier Belletrud composed it in 2021. He has been the house's in-house perfumer since 2012 and came out of a Grasse family where his father and grandfather were both perfumers. What he built is citrus over ginger and black tea with Ambroxan carrying the base, and reviewers reach for the same shorthand with suspicious speed: expensive hotel soap. That is not the insult it sounds like. Getting a soap accord to read as luxurious rather than cheap is the difficult half of the brief.

The novelty claim came apart in August 2021, before any of the hype, in Persolaise's review. He sprayed it and something long-buried started to stir, bracing aldehydes over a serene tea note supported by cardamom and ginger. He went looking for what he was remembering and found Bvlgari Pour Homme, released in 1995, whose official note list also cites aldehydes, tea and amber, and which Cavallier had also composed. Imagination is that fragrance revisited, the top made more sparkling, the base cleaned up. He raised the obvious objection himself, that an Ambroxan overdose is a lazy way to buy diffusiveness, decided it holds together regardless, and finished by wishing the house had called it Re-Imagination. I have not worn either, so take the lineage as his rather than mine. The structure is twenty-six years old and belongs to the same man.

The money is where the received wisdom gets lazy. Louis Vuitton wants £265 for the 100ml and sells it through its own site and its own stores, nowhere else. No Boots, no Sephora, no discounter, so a listing offering it at half price is by definition not an authorised one, whatever is in the bottle. The bottle on its mirrored step is the pitch in miniature, heavy faceted glass photographed against weather it will never once be exposed to, built to be refilled rather than replaced. Cartier had that idea in 1981 and took it from cigarette lighters.

Now put Dior's Paradise next to it. Another signed release, a perfumer of comparable standing, and it asks £255 for its 100ml in shops you can walk into on a lunch break. Ten pounds between them. Whatever people are angry about when they call Imagination outrageous, the sticker is not really it.

What the extra buys is refusal. No sale, no third party, no sample counter, no way to smell it except by walking into the shop. Arabiyat Prestige's Marwa costs $40 to $55, around a seventh of what Imagination does, and people who have worn both put it near ninety percent of the original, thinning out in the drydown where the Louis Vuitton stays smooth. That gap is the honest one, and it has nothing to do with Dior.

None of which makes Imagination a bad perfume. It makes it a well-made citrus by a man who has made this citrus before, priced like its peers and sold like a handbag.

Karen Mulder stands against no background at all in a lilac skirt suit, and the page carries almost no other information: CELINE, PARIS, five American cities and a toll-free number. Jean-Daniel Lorieux gets a credit up the left margin. No designer does. In March 1996 that was simply accurate.

Céline was fifty-one years old that spring and had never been a designer's house. Céline and Richard Vipiana opened it in 1945 on the rue Malte as a made-to-measure shoemaker for children, moved into women's ready-to-wear through the 1960s, and made its money on bags, loafers, gloves and the trench. Vipiana designed the clothes herself until she retired in 1988. Peggy Huynh Kinh ran the studio for the nine years after that, in an obscurity outside the trade that no head of a Paris house would survive now. A suit like this one came out of that studio unsigned, and nobody at Céline seems to have felt the lack.

Bernard Arnault had bought a portion of the capital in 1987, with the family's approval, and then left it there for the better part of a decade. The shares sat under Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store, rather than under LVMH itself. Whatever that placement was meant to signal, it was not urgency.

On Thursday 21 March 1996, at LVMH's analysts' meeting, Arnault announced he was taking all of it. Two point seven billion francs, a shade over half a billion dollars, with Céline due to move out of Au Bon Marché and into LVMH proper within days. That is a lot of money for a house nobody outside Paris was arguing about, and the comparison that makes it land is Kenzo, which LVMH had bought three years earlier for around eighty million. WWD ran the story the next morning and mentioned, almost in passing, that the deal had been under discussion since 1994. This page had closed weeks before any of that was public.

There was exactly one precedent for what came next, and it was two months old. Arnault had put John Galliano into Givenchy in July 1995, and Galliano's first couture collection for the house showed on 21 January 1996 to the reviews he had been hired to get. Everything else arrived after this advert went to press. Galliano moved on to Dior that October, McQueen took Givenchy the same month, and 1997 brought Marc Jacobs to Vuitton and Michael Kors to Céline. Arnault was never sentimental about the studios he inherited, having fired Marc Bohan off twenty-nine years at Dior four months into owning LVMH. Céline Vipiana died in 1997, the year her house finally acquired an author.

What's missing from this advert isn't identity. CELINE in capitals across the bottom of the page is a house doing all of its own talking, five cities and a phone number, no interpreter required. What it hasn't got is a signature, and within the year that was the specific thing LVMH went out and bought.

In 2017 I put up four lines about this record, called it haunting and left it there. Accurate, and no use to anyone.

Danny Wolfers, who makes house and techno as Legowelt, wrote the score for Brad Abrahams' short documentary about the Skunk Ape, the bipedal something that supposedly moves through the Florida Everglades. The film runs a shade under ten minutes. The soundtrack is twelve tracks, and Wolfers notes on Bandcamp that most of them never reached the final cut, mostly because there was nowhere to put them, though the sounds would "linger beyond the images of the screen" regardless.

He was right, and the excess is the point. A score far larger than the film it serves is the right shape for a subject far larger than its evidence, which is what I was arguing yesterday about cryptids outliving their own science. Abrahams had a cryptozoologist, an indigenous conservationist and a man who photographs nude models in the swamp, and not ten minutes to hold them.

The cover argues the same way. A red pickup trailing exhaust takes a road through drowned cypress, drawn in crayon like a child's memory of the place instead of the place.

Titles carry it too. "Look For Sign", "Observe Me", "In Their Right Mind", "Forteana", "Swamp Cave" read as field notes from someone who has been out there a long time and found nothing, which is what Abrahams' witnesses mostly describe. The record's own Bandcamp page carries the tags ambient, americana and witch house at once. Witch house, on a Florida swamp documentary, in 2015. Three categories with no business cohering, and nobody involved seems troubled by it.