The Free Press

Alex Jones was using apps like Headspace and Calm to quiet his mind, but he had fallen away from his Catholic faith. Then he read The Brothers Karamazov, and everything changed.

Alex, who went on to recommit himself to Christ and start Hallow, the Catholic prayer app with millions of users worldwide, believes Dostoevsky’s classic is the perfect book to read for Lent.

In this conversation, Alex explains to Shilo how the novel mirrors Christian scripture, explores Dostoevsky’s answer to the problem of evil, and shares why he chose the Silicon Valley start-up model as his unlikely but powerful way to bring millions of people back to daily prayer.

Buried deep within millions of pages of the recently released Epstein files are hundreds of hours of hard-to-obtain footage.

Earlier this month, we published all 14 hours of the footage from Data Set 10, a raft of videos seized from Epstein’s electronic devices. The videos painted the most vivid picture yet of Epstein’s dark world.

Today, we are publishing 12 hours of footage from Data Set 9. This collection traces more than a decade of efforts by law enforcement to investigate Epstein. There are tapes of police searching his mansion, clips from depositions spanning multiple years and cases, and even covert footage of a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting operation to retrieve his infamous “little black book.” The footage shows, on camera, a game of cat and mouse between Epstein and law enforcement that lasted more than a decade. One way to think about it is that Data Set 10 captured Epstein’s world as he saw it, while Data Set 9 captures authorities’ long, uneven effort to dismantle it.

Of all 12 batches of material that were released by the Department of Justice last month, the footage from Data Set 9 was the hardest to obtain. That’s because in addition to the structural obstacles in the agency’s website—such as no master index and no ability to browse or search by file type—Data Set 9 was partially taken down shortly after its release, reportedly following complaints that some files contained unredacted child pornography. As a result, the bulk download link was disabled, which means that even anyone willing to download hundreds of gigabytes of data was no longer able to do so.

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released more than three million pages of material related to Jeffrey Epstein.

But very few of the more than 2,000 video files included in the release have been seen by the public. That’s because they are stored in a way that makes them very hard to find or browse.

The Free Press wanted to make this archive more easily viewable for the public, so viewers can understand this story for themselves.

We previously published hours of footage from Data Set 10: footage seized from Epstein’s electronic devices that offered a glimpse into his private world.

We are now publishing the full 12 hours of footage from Data Set 9, excluding only obvious duplicates and extensive CCTV prison footage, which we will link to in the show notes.

This data set contains hundreds of videos, generated over more than a decade of law enforcement investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

This is the fourth installment of the Epstein Tapes.

Viewer discretion is advised.

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice released more than three million pages of material related to Jeffrey Epstein.

But very few of the more than 2,000 video files included in the release have been seen by the public. That’s because they are stored in a way that makes them very hard to find or browse.

The Free Press wanted to make this archive more easily viewable for the public, so viewers can understand this story for themselves.

We previously published hours of footage from Data Set 10 that was seized from Epstein’s electronic devices and offered a glimpse into his private world.

We are now publishing the full 12 hours of footage from Data Set 9, excluding only obvious duplicates and extensive CCTV prison footage, which we will link to in the show notes.

This data set contains hundreds of videos, generated over more than a decade of law enforcement investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

This is the third installment of the Epstein Tapes.

Viewer discretion is advised.

“A scenario, not a prediction,” was the disclaimer on the viral memo that made the stock market plummet as it opened this week. The 7,000-word essay from analysis firm Citrini Research, titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, envisioned a world in which the rapid adoption of AI leads to mass white-collar layoffs, collapsing consumer spending, the destruction of demand, rising unemployment, and ultimately, economic devastation. The authors—James van Geelen, founder of Citrini Research, and AI entrepreneur Alap Shah—called it “a negative feedback loop with no natural brake.” Think of it as Dante’s 10th circle of hell, one where humanity has ceased to matter, and every soul is forced to watch endless feeds of our own irrelevance.

By the time U.S. stock markets opened on Monday, the essay, which everyone has taken to calling the “Citrini memo,” had rocketed around the internet, climbing to what is now 10 million views on X. And despite the “scenario, not a prediction” caveat, the market started sliding, a loss of some $700 billion in value, almost all of it in the first hour of trading. The Dow index lost 1.7 percent of its value for the day, but the drop was much bigger for a few companies like Mastercard, DoorDash, and the investment giant Blackstone, which seemed to have nothing in common with each other aside from all being mentioned in the Citrini memo.

If you’re like me, you spent all Sunday evening watching clips of the United States men’s hockey team clinching, then receiving, then celebrating their Olympic gold medals—the Miracle on Ice redux, 46 years after the original. When the game was won, helmets and gloves flew off, and the American players smashed into each other in wild celebration. The Canadians sank, just like the Russians did in 1980, heads hitting the railing over their team’s bench. Even those of us who only watch the Super Bowl halftime show pumped a celebratory fist.

“I’m so proud to be American today,” said Jack Hughes, the front-toothless, bloodied, and charming player who won the game with a golden goal, dedicating the triumph to his country. Before they even took a team picture on the ice, sweaty and draped in American flags, two players grabbed the young children of Johnny Gaudreau from the stands. Gaudreau would have competed Sunday had he not been killed, along with his brother, by a drunk driver two summers ago. The hockey cap to the Winter Olympic Games had it all: blood, tears, trophies, remembrance, grit, brotherhood, jubilation, love of country, love of team, handsome men, cute babies. You couldn’t have scripted it any better.

And then things got a little weird.

There is an unfounded assumption of political significance in a lot of the commentary around the annual State of the Union address. Journalists ask each other if the president’s speech will move voters, or persuade the public to back his agenda. And there is some evidence that this annual civic ritual used to have that kind of effect long ago. But it hasn’t moved the public one way or another in at least a generation.

What the State of the Union now offers instead is a window into the thinking of the president and his team. And what was evident through that window in Tuesday night’s speech was an exhaustion of ambition and the absence of a clear agenda for the remainder of Donald Trump’s presidency.

For most recent presidents, the State of the Union address has functioned as a catalyst for clarifying priorities. The speech serves as an annual deadline for proposals from advisers and cabinet agencies, and an opportunity for culling and filtering ideas to arrive at a discrete set of administrative actions and legislative aims to put before the country. These would then also form the outline of the president’s budget proposal to Congress, which is due each February.

The Trump administration clearly doesn’t work that way. It has no organized policy process, and no intention of meeting the annual budget deadline. Especially this second time around, the administration is largely an extension of the president’s whims and predilections.

But that makes presidential rhetoric all the more important as a window into the administration’s inner life and direction. Hearing the chief executive talk for nearly two hours should give us a useful sense of what is on his mind.

Readers of a certain generation will remember Loose Change—a shoddily produced 2005 documentary that cost $2,000 to make and declared that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. It was a viral sensation—one of the earliest on the internet—but didn’t make much; its creator gave it away for free online.

Tucker Carlson’s five-part YouTube series, The 9/11 Files, shares much in common with that movie.

It hawks the same sort of conspiracies: “Why did some reporters announce attacks before they happened? How did foreign governments know more than U.S. intelligence? And who profited from airline stock trades right before the attacks? We uncover the strange facts, hidden intelligence, and unanswered questions that demand a new investigation into 9/11,” reads the fourth episode’s synopsis.

And it, too, has garnered an enormous audience, with the series drawing nearly 14.4 million views in just five months.

But unlike Loose Change, Carlson has found a way to capitalize on his conspiracies. A 60-second host read on The Tucker Carlson Show is listed at $45,000, with a minimum commitment of $450,000, according to the website for Red Seat Ventures, which manages Carlson’s business. The cost for every 1,000 ad impressions, or CPM, is $36, and there’s a guaranteed 1.25 million impressions.

It’s hard to explain to younger people what a force Jesse Jackson, who died last Tuesday at 84, once was in American politics. He rose to national prominence as part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s entourage, and was present at King’s assassination. For days after that 1968 killing, young Jackson sported the turtleneck he wore that night, stained with King’s blood. For years, Jackson associates and political enemies, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, accused Jackson of intentionally smearing the slain civil rights leader’s blood on his garment, in a self-anointing as King’s successor. Jackson repeatedly denied the charge.

He ran for the presidency twice in the 1980s, and established himself as a Democratic Party power broker in the 1990s and early 2000s. But his most durable legacy is as an avatar of racial identity politics, which, with brilliant cunning, he brought from the streets to corporate boardrooms and university administrations. We are still dealing with this illiberal cancer today, which has broken containment on the left, and has now been embraced by young white activists of the right.

Much has been said in the days since his death about Jackson’s role in the post-King civil rights movement, particularly his trailblazing campaigns for the White House. Though one is reluctant to speak ill of the dead so soon after their passing, the Chicago operator’s corrupt racializing of American politics, for the profit of himself and his allies, must not go unnoticed. There is a straight line from the kind of lucrative racial activism Jackson pioneered to the same profiteering practiced at a far grander scale by the founders of Black Lives Matter.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan looks at the preparation of Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

By the election of 1800, the political parties that the Founding Fathers had hoped never to see had become impossible to ignore. Republicans (confusingly, the forerunner of the Democratic Party) accused Federalists of a conspiracy to transform the presidency into a monarchy, curtail freedom of speech, and menace immigrants. Federalists accused Republicans of seeking to render America lawless, defenseless, godless, and financially creditless.

Until recently, it was hard for historians trying to relay this history to explain how such apocalyptic-sounding accusations ever went mainstream. Now, anyone scrolling through social media has a decent sense. The timelier question is, how did our forebears move on after the experience? Two hundred twenty-five years ago this week, the winner of the presidential election, Republican Thomas Jefferson, went in search of words that could “restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.” That was how he described his goal with his first inaugural address, and it remains among the finest expressions of American values ever composed.