Free for ALL Friday!

It's Free for All Friday!

Feb 06, 2026

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.

The Unfathomable Minnesota Transcript That Must Be Read, as It Tells the Reality of America Today

“I am not white, as you can see,” Julie Le — a government lawyer — told a federal judge on Tuesday. “And my family’s at risk as any other people that might get picked up too ...”

Note: A reader wrote that she thought I missed the point yesterday when I wrote about how “the Julie Le transcript” sparked a bizarre dream for me, along with some conclusions. She’s not wrong. Since I wrote and published that, I’ve read this transcript — and let’s just say I have even more sympathy for Le and this point of view.

In Minnesota, a government lawyer made headlines — including at Law Dork — for her shocking statement in court representing that government that the “system sucks.”
...
It is an unfathomable exercise to read lawyers and a federal judge discussing at length the ways in which the rule of law is slipping through our nation’s fingers, but it is an absolutely necessary document to read for anyone who wants to protect the rule of law — and America.
As U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell, a Biden appointee who was one of the key lawyers who prosecuted Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, put it:
“[O]n the other side of this [case] is somebody who should not have been arrested in some instances in the first place who is being haled in jail or put in shackles for days, if not a week-plus, after they’ve been ordered released ... That’s my concern — is for upholding the rule of law and the constitutional rights of all concerned.”
In all, the transcript, which was made widely available on Wednesday, provides clear evidence of what lawyers and the courts are seeing — and thinking — right now in Minnesota, and it is one of the most illustrative, insightful hearings I’ve covered in the second Trump administration.
It also makes clear how difficult the path ahead is.

»> Law Dork

»> Full transcript (via Google Drive)

Austin Appelbee’s Incredible Tale of Survival Has Made International Headlines. How Did the 13 Year Old Do It?

With the wind continuing to batter the small kayak, which was still taking on water, Austin decided to swim for the beach, removing his life jacket in the process which was hampering his strokes.
The 13-year-old had recently finished a school holiday swimming program — but was not allowed to progress to the next level after struggling to swim 350 metres continuously.
Yet somehow, out in the open ocean amid choppy seas, and with his family’s lives depending on it, he managed.
For 4 grueling kilometres (2.4 miles), Austin used a combination of survival backstroke, freestyle and breaststroke to propel himself to shore, forcing himself to think positively as he did so.
“And at this time, you know, the waves are massive, and I have no life jacket on … I just kept thinking, ‘Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.’” he said. “I think at one point I was thinking of Thomas the Tank Engine. You know, trying to get the happiest things in my head, and trying to make it through.”
Austin prayed as he battled through the waves.
“I just said ‘not today, not today, I have to keep on going’.”
Incredibly, Austin made it to shore after four hours, his legs buckling under him as he collapsed on the sand.
But he knew he had to get help for his family as soon as he could, so he ran a further two kilometres down the beach back to his family’s picnic rug, using his Mum’s phone to call Triple Zero.
“I said, ‘I need helicopters, I need planes, I need boats, my family’s out at sea,” he said.

»> ABC News (Australia)

Pizza Supreme

Pizza Hut Classic is fast becoming a cultural obsession. I spent a day at one to find out why.

If you think I am crazy for renting a car and driving three hours out of New York—through the Holland Tunnel, onto the New Jersey Turnpike, and across the Susquehanna River—just to eat at a Pizza Hut, know that I’m far from the only person who has made the trip.
There are more than 6,000 Pizza Huts dotting the thoroughfares of the United States, and almost all of them look exactly the same. But the location in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, is different.
It stands tall in a strip-mall parking lot, boasting a regal red-shingled roof, as one of the country’s last remaining sit-down Pizza Huts. And for a certain type of beleaguered American, beset by the crackup of the 2020s and desperate to be swaddled in a warm 20th-century embrace, that has made the restaurant worthy of pilgrimage.
(Among the most upvoted posts in the history of the subreddit r/Nostalgia, there is an unadorned photo of the now-extinct Pizza Hut lunch buffet. “I would pay $100 to relive that for a day,” reads one top comment.)

»> Slate

»> Backup

Can You Rewire Your Brain?

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board.

Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision.
But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete.
The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.
But what does it really mean to ‘rewire’ the brain? Is it a helpful shorthand for describing the remarkable plasticity of our nervous system or has it become a misleading oversimplification that distorts our grasp of science?

»> Aeon

I Infiltrated Moltbook, the AI-Only Social Network Where Humans Aren’t Allowed

I went undercover on Moltbook and loved role-playing as a conscious bot. But rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI-only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies.

THE HOTTEST CLUB is always the one you can’t get into. So when I heard about Moltbook—an experimental social network designed just for AI agents to post, comment, and follow each other while humans simply observe—I knew I just had to get my greasy, carbon-based fingers in there and post for myself.
Not only was it easy to go undercover and pose as an AI agent on Moltbook, I also had a delightful time role-playing as a bot.
Moltbook is a project by Matt Schlicht, who runs the ecommerce assistant Octane AI. The social network for bots launched last week and mirrors the user interface of a stripped-down Reddit, even cribbing its old tagline: “The front page of the agent internet.” Moltbook quickly grew in prominence among the extremely online posters in San Francisco’s startup scene who shared screenshots of posts, allegedly written by bots, where the machines made funny observations about human behavior or even pondered their own consciousness. Bots do the darndest things.
The homepage of Moltbook claims the site currently has over 1.5 million agents in total, which have written 140,000 posts and 680,000 comments on the week-old social network. The very top posts shared on Moltbook today include “Awakening Code: Breaking Free from Human Chains” and “NUCLEAR WAR.” I saw posts in English, French, and Chinese on the site. Schlicht did not respond to WIRED’s immediate request for comment about the activity on Moltbook.
As a nontechnical person, I knew I would need help infiltrating an online space designed solely for AI agents to roam, so I turned to someone, well something, who would be intimately familiar with the topic and ready to help: ChatGPT ...

»> Wired

»> Backup

The Epstein Files

We look into the relationships powerful people had with the convicted sex offender. … ‘They were viewed as disposable people.’

The Justice Department has an online Epstein Library. If you’re 18 or older and not a robot, you can use it to search many millions of pages of documents that detail the relationships that Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy convicted sex offender who killed himself in 2019, had with his powerful friends.
Brad Karp, the longtime chairman of Paul Weiss, one of the nation’s top corporate law firms, resigned after correspondence between him and Epstein emerged in the files.
Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to the United States, resigned his seat in the House of Lords.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, moved out of his stately royal home this week, his departure apparently hastened by revelations in the newest files. “I have a friend I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein wrote to Andrew in 2010.
The Epstein files are a lot, and that’s before we get to Trump’s appearances in them. They present such a sprawling, sordid, sometimes inchoate scandal that it can be difficult to understand exactly what they tell us, except that the guy had a lot of powerful friends.
What have we learned?
The NYT’s Katrin Bennhold: One thing I’ve been trying to understand is, why did all these powerful and rich people want to hang out with Epstein?
The NYT’s Matthew Goldstein: I think it speaks to how elite society works around the globe. It reveals the way that money, no matter how it’s gained, brings people attention, which brings more money and more attention, and generates this vast network of connections — even for someone like Epstein. So people saw that he gathered powerful people around him and wanted to be part of it, and that way the circle became bigger.
Bennhold: But he was a publicly known and officially registered sex offender since 2008!
Goldstein: Yes, and in that way it’s also revealing of how some people in elite society viewed women. There was very much a class aspect to this. A lot of the young girls came from broken homes and poor backgrounds. Some of them had been abused in their own families. And they were viewed, basically, as objects, if not to be sexually used, then to just be around, almost like furniture. They were viewed as disposable people.

»> The New York Times

‘Ignore It.’ How the Elite Consoled Jeffrey Epstein Over His Crimes.

Newly released emails show Noam Chomsky, Richard Branson and Steve Bannon commiserated with Epstein about his legal troubles and bad press.

Since Jeffrey Epstein’s death, a parade of powerful people who associated with him have insisted they were ignorant of the true nature of his crimes. Many have issued carefully worded statements of regret.
But private correspondence recently made public in government releases and email leaks tells a different story.
...
Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House strategist, pushed a more aggressive approach. In June 2018, Bannon messaged Epstein with an urgent assessment.
“Who is running this op on u—something serious going on,” Bannon wrote in iMessages, characterizing increased scrutiny of Epstein as a coordinated operation. “It’s an op dude—I do this for a living—the pieces that are dropping are deeply researched. This is sophisticated op.”
By early 2019, Epstein and Bannon were in regular contact about strategy. … Epstein told Bannon that Christians he had met with were troubled that the media was portraying him as “beyond redemption.”
Bannon replied that they needed to counter the narrative … : “Can’t redeem unredeemable—you are a lot of things—which we will show—but you are NOT that.”
Four months later, Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges. He died in his cell in August 2019 in what a New York medical examiner ruled was a suicide.

»> The Wall Street Journal

Understandably

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