Archive collections

Epstein on Tape: What the 2,000 videos tell us

Follow up to Epstein Child Sex Trafficking At Least 1,114 Victims Only 138 Victim Interviews Release – See also – CNN Report – video: “Roughly 2,000 videos [redacted] were included among the millions of documents in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice earlier this year. CNN reviewed these videos to better understand what they reveal about Jeffrey Epstein and how he was able to carry out his crimes.”Card Catalog: 5 more collections that put their archives online for everyone  From 2,000 years of medical illustration to vintage software preserved in a browser, these five free digital archives cover an enormous range of human record-keeping.

• Wellcome Collection(wellcomecollection.org) Over 100,000 images spanning 2,000 years of medical history, all free to download under Creative Commons licensing. The earliest item is an Egyptian prescription on papyrus. The collection includes medieval illuminated manuscripts, 16th-century anatomical drawings with hinged paper flaps that reveal the organs underneath, and etchings by Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh.
• National Palace Museum, Taiwan(digitalarchive.npm.gov.…) One of the world’s largest collections of Chinese art and artifacts, spanning 8,000 years from the Neolithic period to the modern era. The museum has digitized 70,000 high-resolution images from its holdings of nearly 700,000 pieces, many of which were evacuated from Beijing’s Forbidden City during China’s civil war in 1948 and never returned.
• Internet Archive MS-DOS Game Library (<a “https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games”>archive.org/details/sof…) Over 6,000 vintage games from the 1980s and 1990s, playable directly in the browser through an in-browser emulator called EM-DOSBOX. The collection exists because of eXoDOS, a long-running fan preservation project that tracked down software written for hardware configurations that no longer exist.
• Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (collection.cooperhewitt…) More than 215,000 design objects spanning 30 centuries, from ancient Roman marble to Pre-Columbian textiles to contemporary 3D-printed furniture. The museum holds the largest collection of wallcoverings in North America, and the entire catalog is searchable online with an open API and downloadable datasets.
• Endangered Archives Programme(eap.bl.uk) Over 16 million digitized images and 35,000 sound recordings from more than 500 projects across 90+ countries, in over 100 languages and scripts. The program funds digitization of archives at risk of destruction or decay, from Timbuktu manuscripts threatened by conflict to palm-leaf texts in Southeast Asia. Originals stay in their countries of origin, with digital copies made freely available online.

Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite

Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch [no paywall]: “Last year I used detailed data on the ideological positions of people who post on social media to show that they over-represent the radical right and left, confirming the polarisation hypothesis. 

Over the past week I have used the same dataset of tens of thousands of responses to questions on policy preferences and sociopolitical beliefs to test whether and how the most widely used AI chatbots shape conversations about politics and society. 

The results strongly support the theory of AI chatbots as depolarising and technocratising. I found that while different AI platforms behave in subtly different ways, all of them nudge people away from the most extreme positions and towards more moderate and expert-aligned stances. 

On average, Grok guides conversations about policy and society towards the centre-right — a rightward push for most people but a moderating nudge towards the centre for those who start out as conservative hardliners. OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini and the Chinese model DeepSeek all exert similarly sized nudges towards a centre-left worldview — a slight leftward nudge for most people but a moderating push away from fringe leftwing positions.

 Importantly, this remains true after accounting for partisan differences in AI platform usage and chatbots’ sycophantic tendencies. Even when the AI bots know a user’s political leanings, conversations with LLMs still direct hardline partisans on both flanks away from extreme beliefs on average…”

Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem

The Atlantic Gift Article: What happens when AI can hack everything? – “For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world. 

This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state secrets, and fry crucial infrastructure. Already, according to the company, this AI model has identified thousands of major cybersecurity vulnerabilities—including exploits in every single major operating system and browser. This level of cyberattack is typically available only to elite, state-sponsored hacking cells in a very small number of countries including China, Russia, and the United States. Now it’s in the hands of a private company. 

On Tuesday, the company officially announced the existence of the model, known as Claude Mythos Preview. For now, the bot will be available only to a consortium of many of the world’s biggest tech companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia. These partners can use Mythos Preview to scan and secure bugs and exploits in their software. Other than that, Anthropic will not immediately release Mythos Preview to the public, having determined that doing so without more robust safeguards would be too dangerous. For years, cybersecurity experts have been warning about the chaos that highly capable hacking bots could usher in. 

As a result of how capable AI models have become at coding, they have also become extremely good at finding vulnerabilities in all manner of software. Even before Mythos Preview, AI companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all reported instances of their AI models being used in sophisticated cyberattacks by both criminal and state-backed groups. 

As Giovanni Vigna, who directs a federal research institute dedicated to AI-orchestrated cyberthreats, told me last fall: You can have a million hackers at your fingertips “with the push of a button It’s not just tech journalists that are worried about the Mythos threat. “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell summoned bank CEOs to an urgent meeting this week to warn about the cybersecurity risks associated with Anthropic’s powerful Mythos AI model.”

How to be a Dissident: Is There a Right Way to Rebel?

The beatings will continue until morale improves...

"Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? 

Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity." 

~ Vaclav Havel 

“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.” 

Is There a Right Way to Rebel?

In “How to Be a Dissident,” Gal Beckerman offers an inspiring tour of famous renegades with lessons for the rabble-rousers of today.

HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT, by Gal Beckerman

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In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., teenagers and children as young as six faced fire hoses, dogs and angry police officers to protest segregation. The campaign, called “Project C” — the “C” stood for “confrontation” — involved rolling marches and sit-ins. On a single day, hundreds of young people were locked up.

“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.” Less than a week later, the jailed kids were released and the city agreed to desegregate its lunch counters.

The so-called Children’s Crusade of 1963 is one of the many stories recounted in “How to Be a Dissident,” an inspiring series of profiles of activists and rabble rousers from Gal Beckerman, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, and whose previous works include a history of radical ideas and a history of Soviet Jews. Beckerman features the Birmingham tale prominently in a chapter titled “Be Reckless,” which also lingers on the example of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who refused to remain in exile after an almost-lethal poisoning in 2020 and died in a Russian prison four years later.

To his credit, Beckerman offers no hard and fast formula for determining when heroic risk-taking veers into irresponsible adventurism or outright self-destruction. Recklessness is both “necessary” and “completely fraught,” he writes.

Superficially, “How to Be a Dissident” takes the form of a guide, with each of the 10 chapters focused on a trait central to the dissident temperament: In addition to being reckless one should “Be Alone,” “Be Pessimistic,” “Be Watchful,” “Be Human” and so on. But the book can also be understood as one man’s reckoning with the existential questions posed by the rising tide of authoritarianism.

There are, of course, classic dissident stories, set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which sadly don’t feel as distant or foreign as they might have only a few years ago. We also meet the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, Jesus Christ and many other luminaries. The subtext is that any one of us might be next: called to rebel when ICE agents snatch our neighbors, when lawmakers hijack our rights or when A.I. companies try to steal our livelihood.

The book’s stories are compellingly rendered, imparting clear and moving lessons or posing interesting moral challenges and ambiguities, especially when coupled with Beckerman’s insightful commentary. Yet some characters and accounts are more prickly or ambiguous than others. In the chapter “Be Funny” I flinched during an aside that compared the comedian Louis C.K.’s public masturbationto the Greek cynic Diogenes, who famously and irreverently lived in a large urn on the streets of ancient Athens and masturbated in the city’s marketplace, without mentioning that C.K.’s actions were abhorrent because he pressured women into watching or listening to him.

It was a reminder that one person’s dissident is another person’s douche bag or demagogue. As Beckerman acknowledges, dissidents are often “exasperating, self-righteous or rude” — or worse. Even Hitler, he says, could have qualified as a dissident before he rose to power. “Dissidence,” he writes, “is not inherently virtuous.”

It would have been interesting to hear Beckerman dig more deeply into this dilemma and its related complexities. Today, the most powerful people in Washington and their influencer supporters present themselves as dissidents perpetually besieged by oppressive forces. They blast the woke mob, rail against the “Jewish oligarchy” allegedly pulling the strings of American foreign policy, smear students who argue that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as terrorist sympathizers and rage against the Deep State, conflating hate speech with fearless speech and lies with suppressed truths and revelations. How can we reliably distinguish real dissidence from its profitable simulation?

As I finished Beckerman’s rousing manual, I couldn’t shake another thought: We need dissidents, yes, but we also desperately need discipline and vision. The book offers some tantalizing accounts of collective rebellion, including the fight for abolition in the United States and the struggle against communism in 1980s Poland that started among trade unionists. But more could have fruitfully been said about the push and pull between dissidents and social movements, or between the commands of private conscience and the outreach and compromises required to make lasting change. Beckerman shows how to sound the moral alarm, which is an important first step. What comes next — the steps required to forge durable coalitions and win specific democratic reforms — is harder and on this front Beckerman is more conflicted.

Which brings us back to King. When he raised his prophetic voice, it was in service of organizing toward clearly defined goals: civil rights, labor rights and an end to racism, poverty and militarism. Over decades, King and countless others built a movement wide and deep enough that it could coerce the powerful into making concessions.

When those courageous young people stood up to the Alabama authorities, their dissent was grounded in solidarity and guided by well-honed strategy. As readers of “How to Be a Dissident” think about the kind of dissidents they might want to be, they would be wise to remember that potent combination.

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HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT | By Gal Beckerman | Crown| 199 pp. | $19, paperback

 Nurture yourself like you would anybody else going through something this hard.

 – Melvina Young

Grief Doesn’t Follow a Script

A death doula reflects on the many ways people process loss — even when tears don’t come.

Marcus sat down beside me at a hookah lounge in Los Angeles and asked something to the effect of: “Ain’t you that guy that helps people die?”

I’m a death doula. I support people throughout the dying process, so I said what I always say when I get this question: “Yeah, but not in the sense of killing them.”

Marcus chuckled, introduced himself, then said, “I know, but do you also help the family after the person died?”

This was the kind of place where friendly approaches happen easily, but Marcus later confessed he knew who I was because I had once helped the mother of someone he knew transition, and that man had taken to calling me the “messenger of death.”

I could tell Marcus needed to talk, and I figured we’d need to take up space at the booth he was sitting in with his girlfriend, instead of the noisy one with friends who’d dragged me out that night. So Marcus and I headed over, and I told him that I do help the families after the death, if they want my help.

He began telling me about the giant who was his father. Keith was a Southern Black man raised on old-school principles, meaning he not only knew everyone in the vicinity by name, but he also asked how their parents were doing when he stopped them to talk.

Keith understood the importance of cooking too much food for dinner. No one went hungry in the sticks of South Carolina where he was from, as long as they knew where he lived and how to get there.

He sat on the porch and yelled to the neighbors, letting them know how nice the tomatoes they were growing looked, and he stood up at every family reunion to let people know his world-class fried whiting was ready to eat and to thank everyone for coming.

Marcus’s account of Keith was filled with stories of endless patience, sage advice, love expressed through food and kisses on the top of their heads no matter how old his children got.

Keith was a pillar, and having experienced him as a father and later in life as a friend, Marcus wanted to know why he hadn’t yet grieved.

As a death doula, I hear this question often. It’s one of the most common concerns people have when they don’t sob or feel like they’re being crushed in a stampede of sadness.

But grief doesn’t follow a set script, and just because someone’s not openly mourning doesn’t mean they aren’t feeling the weight of loss. We often have ideas about how it’s supposed to look because of how we’ve seen others experience it. But, trust me, grief is there — it just shows up in ways we don’t always recognize right away.

And in a quiet corner of this lounge, I asked Marcus something we don’t ask enough: “What does grieving look like?”

Marcus told me he expected the same sadness and anger he felt when, at 12, his best friend died. He wondered what happened to the tears he thought would come at Keith’s funeral and then again randomly while showering. He didn’t get anxious, lose sleep or build a moat around himself — all things he’d done when losing someone he loved deeply.

He felt guilt, but not the kind that normally comes with grief — about things left unsaid and undone. Marcus’s guilt was about its absence. It couldn’t possibly be that everything he wanted to say to his father had been said. To him, that’d never been done in the history of fathers and sons.

Marcus stopped talking and looked down at the hand he’d placed in his girlfriend’s. Then he looked over at me with his eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what he meant. So I shared what I’d learned about grief from other grievers who had asked me to sit with them.

I told him about Alisha — who still hasn’t cried about the death of her favorite aunt (at least since the time I last spoke with her). From her, I learned that grief sometimes looks like gardening. Some mornings, before getting ready for work, Alisha gets her hands dirty in soil, planting new flowers, pulling weeds, and tending to her thyme, cucumbers, collards and strawberries.

Before she died, her aunt called her every morning to pray for her; to make sure she was having breakfast; and to talk about the plants and flowers hanging around her house — the ones she was struggling to keep alive, the ones she named after her favorite TV characters, and the ones that secretly gossiped about the others.

When Alisha got the news of her aunt’s sudden passing, her first thought was “What’s going to happen to Virgil Tibbs, the succulent?” She started a garden the next day, knowing nothing at all about gardening, and she said each new addition was a conversation with the woman who taught her to love the earth.

When Carlton got the call that his best friend died in a motorcycle accident, he did something he’d never done: He went running. He was in dress shoes, having just left work, but it was only a run around the block.

When he walked back in the house, winded and with sharp pains in his calves and ankles, he searched marathons online instead of focusing on with the tragedy, knowing there’d be plenty of time to deal with that later.

After seeing the total distance of a marathon, Carlton looked up local 5Ks and left the house, left his phone on the counter, and bought a pair of running shoes.

Every mile he covered was a mile closer to grappling with the pain he thought he was putting off. He told me he’d get a text about funeral plans or see a “Sorry for your loss” message on social media, and he’d lace up his shoes and run. Each step, he said, brought memories.

After the wake, Carlton ran. After the funeral, Carlton ran farther. And on the day of his first 5K, he crossed the finish line, exhausted, overwhelmed and completely in tears, laughing at how stupid his best friend would say he looked at that moment.

From Carlton I learned that grief also looks like running; it looks like sweating and laughing simultaneously.

Marcus sat there, listening and nodding as he stroked his beard.

“Grieving is more than one thing,” I told him. It’s the sadness, the anger, the tears, the guilt, the anxiety, the complete numbness. But it’s also laughter and singing and buying annuals to plant in your yard, thinking “annuals” means they’ll grow back next spring, too.

And there, in that booth with too many hookah burn marks, Marcus realized the neighborhood potluck he puts together when he goes back to his hometown, the smiling at old-timers while driving through the neighborhood and his efforts to keep things as his father left them — that was grieving, too.

It’s often painted in heavy, dark strokes, but it doesn’t have to be. It is more than just sadness; it’s the way we continue to live, laugh and remember. It’s in the quiet moments when you make your grandmother’s famous pie recipe, even if it’s just for yourself. It’s in the way you play the song that reminds you of your best friend, singing out loud in the car.

Grief is a part of love, and love isn’t just sadness — grief can be full of life.

Excerpted from “Never Can Say Goodbye” by Darnell Lamont Walker and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2026.

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Coping With Grief and Loss

Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. But the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ.

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• Grief Attacks: Sudden surges of anguish can accompany intense mourning. That’s not unusual, experts say, and they can even be helpful.

• What Is Anticipatory Grief?: While immersing yourself in it doesn’t mean that a loss will be less painful, experts say it can help you prepare. Here’s how to navigate these feelings.

• What Experts Say: Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved, but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.

• How to Help: Experiencing a sudden loss can be particularly traumatic. Here are some ways to offer your support to someone grieving.

• Let’s Talk About Death: From end-of-life care to burials and beyond, we answer your questions on mortality.

• How Do You Grieve?: We asked readers for the unconventional ways they remember those they’ve lost. Over 800 replied.