Hey, happy Thursday. Today's edition covers a lot of ground. NPR got the full picture on how Epstein and Maxwell used donations to a prestigious Michigan boarding school to gain access to teenage girls, a story that's as methodical as it is disturbing.

On a lighter but still kinda unsettling note, The Atlantic looked at why companies are now marketing multi-step skincare routines to 9-year-olds, and what that does to kids' sense of self. Then we've got two pieces about the Internet's fragile memory: one on a mysterious YouTube channel that became a confessional for millions of strangers, and one on the creaky, church-housed nonprofit trying to preserve the entire web before it vanishes.

Brett

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell used a prestigious Michigan arts boarding school as a recruitment ground for some of their earliest victims, according to DOJ records and interviews with former administrators. Epstein first attended Interlochen Center for the Arts as a 14-year-old in 1967, and when he re-established ties in the 1990s, officials welcomed him back as a generous alumnus. Over 13 years he donated more than $400,000, including funding for an on-campus lodge he could use two weeks annually. Two women told NPR and federal prosecutors that as teenage students they were approached by the pair, who used a small dog to break the ice, asked probing questions, and dangled scholarship money to build trust. Both described relationships that ended with financial cutoff when they refused requests. Interlochen conducted internal reviews in 2008 and 2019 and found no formal complaints, though paper records from the 1990s had been routinely destroyed. The school has since added front gates, cameras, and 24/7 patrols.

Read here.

The wellness industry millennials built has set its sights on their children. Brands like Evereden, Pipa, Tubby Todd, and Shay Mitchell's Rini are marketing sheet masks, face mists, and multi-step routines to kids as young as 3. Sephora is expanding its Gen Alpha shelf, with brands launching nationally in stores next month. Dermatologists are unmoved: most children need only soap, lotion, and sunscreen. Child psychologists worry the trend erodes "middle childhood," the developmental window before puberty when kids explore identity through imagination rather than self-consciousness. A toddler with a prepackaged sheet mask isn't doing the same cognitive work as one inventing her own version. The brands say they're selling hygiene and sun protection, not beauty correction. The sharpest skepticism comes from a 9-year-old named Charlotte: "If they get chocolate or mud on their face, you could just get a paper towel and wipe it off."

Read here.

In 2012, an anonymous YouTube user named Taia777 uploaded a looping video of pixelated Donkey Kong Country 2 imagery set to a wistful ambient track. For years, almost nobody noticed. Around late 2019, YouTube's algorithm surfaced it to thousands of people who had no business finding it, and something unexpected happened in the comments: strangers started sharing their lives. They called it a "checkpoint," borrowing video game terminology for a safe place to save your progress. The pandemic turned it into a full confessional. A Discord community called the Taia777 Sanctuary now has over 5,000 members. In 2022, Nintendo copyright strikes erased the channel. But a volunteer archivist named Rebane had already captured all 29 videos and their comments, and a community member built a searchable website from her archive. Writer Bijan Stephen traces the whole arc, sitting with what it means that millions of people found genuine emotional refuge in a retro game comment section.

Read here.

You don’t need to be a coder to make AI work for you. Subscribe to Mindstream and get 200+ proven ideas showing how real people are using ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other tools to earn on the side.

From small wins to full-on ventures, this guide helps you turn AI skills into real results, without the overwhelm.

Get Your Free Guide

The Internet Archive occupies a former church in San Francisco, and if you stand in the nave you can hear hundreds of spinning hard drives hum. Writer Bruce Li profiles the infrastructure keeping this digital library alive. As of late 2025, the Wayback Machine has archived over one trillion web pages across 99 petabytes of data. The backbone is the PetaBox, a custom storage server built in-house in the early 2000s because commercial options were too costly. The data centers use no air conditioning; drive heat warms the building through San Francisco's foggy winters instead. The organization runs on a budget that's a rounding error next to Silicon Valley neighbors, while fighting copyright battles that have repeatedly threatened its survival. The proposed long-term solution is decentralized web technology that would spread the archive across thousands of nodes, so no single legal challenge could take it down.

Read here.