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).

Jeffrey Epstein’s victims began the day believing they might finally get something they’d been requesting for years: a direct conversation with the nation’s top law-enforcement official before the Justice Department made public a full trove of long-buried documents and photos.

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When President Donald Trump visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 2018, he reportedly showed little interest in the estate or in the first president. But Trump did have a critique of his predecessor. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” he reportedly said.

Updated with new questions at 5 p.m. on December 19, 2025.
When I visited the Snapple website this week, I was served one of the drink brand’s famous fun facts: that a jiffy is an “actual time measurement equaling 1/100th of a second.” Fun indeed! And arguably even a little bit true!
In 2013 in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance courageously exposed that many of Snapple’s bottle-cap facts were false.

One of the minor annoyances of being an incorrigible pervert is that you risk having your own bookshelf testify against you. Some spines are better turned inward. A pederast might hide away Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which a middle-aged German author ogles a lithe young Polish boy. A hyper-literate rapist should camouflage his copy of A Clockwork Orange with a more consensual dust jacket.