In this special “Galaxy Brain” episode, @cwarzel.bsky.social is joined by @isaacstanleybecker.bsky.social and @adriennelaf.bsky.social to talk about the newly released Epstein files. They share their findings, address the political fallout, and explore what—if anything—can be learned:

Emergency pod about the combing through/making sense of the Epstein Files What’s in them, what’s not, and where we go from here. feat @isaacstanleybecker.bsky.social and @adriennelaf.bsky.social

oh come on!

the people who made the Epstein gmail simulator did it again, but this time with the photos www.jmail.world/photos

Wrote about the Epstein Files. The redactions,the political point scoring, an administration that has long lost the benefit of the doubt, and why this very real conspiracy (with victims who deserve real accountability and transparency) won’t go away

Wrote about the Epstein Files. The redactions,the political point scoring, an administration that has long lost the benefit of the doubt, and why this very real conspiracy (with victims who deserve real accountability and transparency) won’t go away

extremely normal night here in america

The Most ████ Administration Ever

extremely early epstein files takeaway is that these creeps took more gd photos than any people i've ever met

Epstein Files search tool...not great!

welp. www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-...

iykyk

A few weeks ago when CNN partnered w/ Kalshi & the company raised $1 billion & its CEO said the goal was to “financialize everything” I wanted to do a pod that looked at prediction markets & how they fit into our broader culture/politics/economy where it all feels like a casino. This one is v good!

tomorrow's pod is about prediction markets and the extremely bleak vision of the future depicted here

MY 4-YEAR OLD: *calmly, while coloring a picture of the Grinch* If baby grinches die, we can eat them. If they’re clean. That’s ok

im at the combination trump kennedy center

absolutely wild move by @oversightdemocrats.house.gov to allow comments on the dropbox folder with the epstein photos

hell yeah brother we're gonna live FOREVER

what time are the epstein files

always a horrifying feeling when you decide to open up the spam folder and you find an email that VERY much is not spam and in fact holy crap what else has this awful filter removed from my inbox since i last checked 3 months ago gah

one of the best interviews of the year. this line really stands out. "If presenting what I saw, unfiltered, is an attack, then what would you call it had I chosen to edit it and hide things about it, and make them look better than they look?" www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

great anecdote from the nyc school phone ban (which seems to be working!) this person is either going to end up running a fortune 500 company or be in jail or both nymag.com/intelligence...

very grimly ironic that our government run by podcasters sucks at true crime

lot of awful and insane stuff going on. but if you really want to have a brain bleed this holiday season don't lose sight of Stephen Miller's wife doing a video podcast with the FBI director and his gf about their love life

this is what the republican party fall is going to look like. people who think MAGA rubes are going to fall to their knees and repent are fooling themselves, it's going to look like "i'm a conservative, but not a republican, and not a maga republican", this is what it looked like in 2007, too

a truly generational, sustained run for this account

i have been thinking about MTG and her break from Trump and really wonder if there won't be a political opportunity for more maga pols to break and (still shamelessly) use moments like these to position themselves as 'not brainwashed' to a crowd that likes but is getting tired of trump

tried to get into a lot of this in our ep about why everyone's becoming a youtuber now (conveniently on youtube, srry) www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzFg...

My best books of the year list is up on Culture Studies. Yes, it’s paywalled, but yes, Anne Helen Petersen was able to pay me fairly in return. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to put my words in front of a community of readers. www.patreon.com/posts/very-b...

was not expecting the photos of epstein's hot water heater to have such a threatening aura...but here we are

For your weekend perusal: An attempt to explain how Youtube ate podcasts and how everything is television now feat. NPR's Rachel Martin, Bloomberg's @ashleycarman.bsky.social, and @dkthomp.bsky.social

I'm excited about today's podcast, which is a slightly meta thing about how YouTube ate podcasting and how short form video has taken over. Part of wanting to do a video pod is to be an internet crash test dummy of sorts and this ep —which went in a bunch of unexpected directions—feels like that

not to paint with too broad a brush but i feel like this comment on my short little article today says something about how some people see the creative output of humankind

The odds are decent that morsels from your life have been used to train chatbots. Which means that you, too, are Time's person of the year, @cwarzel.bsky.social writes.

big day for me. for *us.*

damn man i didn't realize this is what he meant by "a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you"

*uses index finger to push glasses back up the bridge of nose* if it's trained off of the stolen creative output of humankind then technically, we are *all* the architects of AI...

nice little society we got going here

i have entered a profoundly embarrassing period of my life (even for me) where my top two most listened artists are Goose and Geese

i choose to find it extremely comforting and very personally validating that a major pop star, who might be a touch bored with that career, just wants to blog itscharlibb.substack.com/p/the-death-...

“New Lizza post is up!” I shout from my room. The only reply is my own echo; this house has been empty for thirty-five years.

ah yes, everyone remembers that moment after 9/11 where everyone got cancelled and we started the extremely woke war on terror www.piratewires.com/p/heather-co...

an incredible week for 'real images from the us govt that may have caused an instant brain aneurysm if you showed them to a person in early 2016'

if one were to take this poorly thought out plan very seriously...how would this even work, logistically? how do you turn over your social media history to them? any ideas?

Hegseth talked this up, they gave it a Starship Troopers logo, and used words like 'lethality' but really this is just like Google Gemini work suite for military bureaucracy (which isn't to say it couldn't cause real problems but also lol too)

reasons why the 'weird' critique worked, part 9,457

the people behind him do not seem enthused

did it in four words hemmingway

and this doesn't even mention tiktok!

a very concise and helpful post about Elon's incoherent views on 'free speech' www.techdirt.com/2025/12/09/t...