As of now (2025-11-21 about 12:30pm New York time), all of the above links are available again!

https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11558834128070... (2025-11-21 10:15am New York time) "We are back. Our provider found and repaired a fiber issue last night and traffic has returned. We are sorry for the disruption."

FWIW, right now that's giving me "503 Service Unavailable" "No server is available to handle this request."

The URL here is "web.archive.org/sry", which I suspect is always an error page; the question is what parts of the Internet Archive are currently redirecting to that page at any given moment.

I can confirm that the Internet Archive's whole archived-books collection was throwing errors for me yesterday (2025-11-19), and today, while it's ostensibly back up, certain tranches of material are no longer available. For example, these six issues of the Saturday Evening Post from October–November 1925 are no longer available. (I focus on these because they're the ones in which John Philip Sousa's memoir "Keeping Time" was serialized, so I have their URLs handy. I suspect that there's nothing special about these six and really the entire collection of the Saturday Evening Post is lost.)

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

- https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1925-1...

Also these books which existed as recently as a year ago (detected by following hyperlinks from some of my transcribed works: I'd say no more than 1 in 10 is lost now, but still, it's disturbing that any are lost):

- https://archive.org/details/vidademigueldece00pell

- https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora02boiauoft — this was Volume 2 of "Orlando Innamorato." Meanwhile Volume 1 remains available: https://archive.org/details/lorlandoinnamora01boia

Archived-book searches right now (2025-11-20 about 12:30pm New York time) are failing with "Error details: backend_request search: The search backend encountered an exception (the FTS API request failed, the error reported was: HTTP 502)".

Reports of as-yet-unexplained losses in various areas of the archive:

- (3:48am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442021/why-my-newspaper-scans-were...

- (8:46am Nov 20) https://archive.org/post/2442036/maigret-removed

From TFA:

> But Langan is clearly a smart guy. He probably cleared 140+ on an IQ test. He speaks like a book.[1]

where that last sentence is a link to a local-TV segment

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-788Upky2Y

Langan's only recorded lines in that TV segment are:

> Bonjo! 'Mon, boy! > I think it's about, uh, 20 horses, two llamas, two cows. > This particular paper's on something called a conspansive manifold. > It's a-a theory that studies the relationship between mind and reality. In other words, what's out there in the real world, how does the mind relate to it? > Yes. [/] You don't. [/] It's not that simple. I happen to know there's a heaven, because I know you can use your will to create things. In other words, do you continue to exist after you die? Absolutely. Nothing in this universe is wasted. Nothing ever ceases to exist, not really. The essence always remains preserved. > We, ah, didn't have a lot of money. And the old man was always in need of money, so we had to go with a worklist. > Well, as a matter of fact, I had to fight my way through high school. > There's the foal, and there's Star, his mother. > I mean, why am I not a famous politician, or a, a, a, financier? filthy rich? Ah, some of the business things don't mean that much to me. I'd rather have some meaning in my life, and this is how I get it. [/] In construction, ranch hand, farmhand, cowboy, firefighter — I worked for the forest service about four years. Um, just anything I could get my hands on. > Jeannie was very very taken with the beauty of the place. As a matter of fact she started crying, she was looking at it, and I realized then I couldn't say no. > No, it can't be done. > There's a sort of mind that I call a garbage-trap sort of mind. [/] Usually that kind of mind does not belong to a person who is capable of deep thought. > Sometimes it's hard to find the words when somebody expresses love. When I went to visit my mother, for instance — she's been a little bit ill lately — I had to tell her that I loved her, and she told me that she loved me, and, and then there was a long period of silence, because what can you follow that up with?

That doesn't qualify as "speaking like a book" in my book. I'd be interested to see videos of people who do habitually speak in well-formed sentences; I'm sure such people exist, although (from that one five-minute TV segment) Langan doesn't seem to be one of them.

I was recently asked, "Did people in the past really talk like that?" (i.e. in complex sentences like they do in the dialogue of your average 18th- or 19th-century novel) and I unfoundedly opined that while the answer was probably "no, the literary style is always an exaggeration of the natural speaking style; 21st-century people don't speak exactly like their novels, either," it seemed plausible to me that when all your educated people start their careers studying Latin grammar and rhetoric for several years, they do end up with more unconscious respect for grammatical structure and therefore more of an ability to generate complex yet well-formed sentences on the fly. I'd be interested to see what the experts think.