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Late on the Friday before Christmas, just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known colloquially as the Epstein files. The contents are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, and heavily redacted.
At The Atlantic, we’ve been up, poring over the documents to contextualize what they mean.
Updated at 12:40 a.m. on December 20, 2025
Late on the Friday afternoon before Christmas, and just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known, colloquially, as the Epstein files. The contents, most of which I’ve reviewed, are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, even absurd (in the case of a photo of Jeffrey Epstein posing with a giant Winnie the Pooh mascot).
It’s rude to boast, but here in 2025, you’ve got to take the wins where you can get them. This morning, Time magazine announced its Person of the Year, and it’s me. It’s you too.
If you want to get all technical about it, Time’s Person of the Year is actually not a person at all but a collection of people: the architects of AI.
This story is part of a series marking ChatGPT’s third anniversary. Read Ian Bogost on how ChatGPT broke reality, or browse more AI coverage from The Atlantic.
On this day three years ago, OpenAI released what it referred to internally as a “low-key research preview.” This preview was so low-key that, inside OpenAI, staff were instructed not to frame it as a product launch.
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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community.
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In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel sits down with Eliot Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative collective Bellingcat, to examine how our public sphere slid from healthy debate into what Higgins calls “disordered discourse.” Higgins is an early internet native who taught himself geolocation during the Arab Spring and later built Bellingcat’s global community.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s X rolled out a feature that had the immediate result of sowing maximum chaos. The update, called “About This Account,” allows people to click on the profile of an X user and see such information as: which country the account was created in, where its user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed. Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said the feature was “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square.
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In this inaugural episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel examines the state of the internet as it stands now in November 2025 with Hank Green, a true citizen of the internet—somebody who has made a living riding the algorithmic waves of the social web. Green started his YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, with his brother, John, back in 2007, and they now have more than 4 million subscribers.
Some generations get a nationally televised car chase featuring O. J. Simpson fleeing police in a white Bronco. Others get the communal adrenaline rush of frantically “CTRL-F”-ing a House Oversight Committee trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.
Yesterday, lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents related to Epstein, including thousands of emails between him and his powerful contacts in the government, Silicon Valley, and the British royalty.
The prompts read like tiny, abstract poems.
“A brutal storm off the coastal cliff. The clouds are formed into tubular formations and lightning strikes are never ending.”
I scroll; another appears:
“A male figure formed of gentle fire, his outline glowing with soft embers, approaches a female figure shaped from flowing water, her form glistening with ripples and fine mist. They move toward one another with calm grace, meeting in a warm embrace.
If you measure only in dollars (and not in dignity), YouTube got a pretty good deal. This week, the Google-owned platform paid $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump after the company suspended his channel six days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. At the time, YouTube said it was “concerned about the ongoing potential for violence.” (Trump’s account was eventually reinstated in March 2023.
Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident—let alone details about the shooter or a motive.
Looking back, I don’t know what exactly I was expecting when I opened “Request No. 1,” the PDF file containing the contents of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday book. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and co-conspirator, created the book in 2003 by soliciting tributes from the financier’s friends and associates. Given the crimes Epstein was convicted of, I steeled myself before scrolling. Somehow, my internet-addled imagination failed me. This book is a nightmare.
Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter’s YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for life,” they say, the camera focused on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for death.
It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage.
Sydney Sweeney is inexplicably reclining and also buttoning up her jeans. She’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath. She’s attempting to sell some denim to women, and appears to be writhing while doing so. In a breathy voice, the actor recites the following ad copy as the camera pans up her body: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.
Summer weekends in America are good for lots of things: baseball games, cookouts, farmers’ markets, sipping a bev next to a lake. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump: crashing out on social media in hopes of distracting the nation from nonstop coverage of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump is an inveterate poster, known for his erratic style and late-night tirades.
Donald Trump helped create a monster. Now he’d like for everyone to ignore it.
After years of sounding dog whistles and peddling outright conspiracism to work his supporters into a lather about global pedophile rings, Trump is telling those same people to move on. Earlier today, Trump posted on Truth Social that the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy—a pillar of the MAGA cinematic universe—is a “hoax” and went so far as to disavow his “PAST supporters” over the issue.
The year is 2025, and an AI model belonging to the richest man in the world has turned into a neo-Nazi. Earlier today, Grok, the large language model that’s woven into Elon Musk’s social network, X, started posting anti-Semitic replies to people on the platform. Grok praised Hitler for his ability to “deal with” anti-white hate.
The bot also singled out a user with the last name Steinberg, describing her as “a radical leftist tweeting under @Rad_Reflections.
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.
The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon.
The sun rises every morning. Spring turns to summer. Water is wet. Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s relationship has ended with a tweet about Jeffrey Epstein.
This was inevitable. When Elon Musk attached himself to Trump during Trump’s presidential transition last fall, there was great speculation that these two massive egos would, eventually, clash and that their strategic partnership would flame out spectacularly.
This has been a banner month for X. Last week, the social network’s built-in chatbot, Grok, became strangely obsessed with false claims about “white genocide” in South Africa—allegedly because someone made an “unauthorized modification” to its code at 3:15 in the morning. The week prior, Ye (formerly Kanye West) released a single called “Heil Hitler” on the platform. The chorus includes the line “Heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on Twitter.
The first months of Donald Trump’s second presidency have included a systematic attempt to dismantle government agencies and pillage their data; state-sponsored renditions of immigrants; flagrant corruption; and brazen flouting of laws and the courts. The New York Times editorial board summed it up well: “The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction.
Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating.
On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of Careless People, the new tell-all memoir by the former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, is that a book chronicling the social network’s missteps and moral bankruptcy can still make news in 2025.
The tech giant—now named Meta—seems determined to make this happen itself.
For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.
Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post almost 12 years ago, he went out of his way to assuage fears that he would turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he wrote at the time. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” For much of his tenure, Bezos kept that promise. On Wednesday, he betrayed it.
If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.
DOGE has achieved “God mode.
Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.