You’ve Got Jmail

The release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein last month felt less like a disclosure and more like an information avalanche. The Department of Justice simply dumped millions of pages and thousands of videos without organization, explanation, or context. “The sheer amount of material” can feel “as indigestible as a spoonful of sawdust,” Jem Bartholomew recently wrote for CJR. And that may be the point: this is a form of disclosure that overwhelms more than it elucidates.

Enter Jmail, a brilliant Web project that lets you scroll through Epstein’s emails as if you’re in his Gmail inbox. Luke Igel, an AI programmer and the CEO of Kino AI, came up with the idea in November, when the House Oversight Committee released the first tranche of Epstein data. To make the project a reality, he recruited his friend and “tech jester” Riley Walz (I know “tech jester” doesn’t sound like a real thing; here is a New York Times story about Walz that explains the concept). They built the entire site in a single five-hour session. Walz unveiled it in an X post, writing, “We cloned Gmail, except you’re logged in as Epstein and can see his emails.” Igel feels this format allows readers to experience the shock of the emails in their original context: “We’re making this scandal hyperlegible,” he told me. “It was made legible through these documents, but hyperlegible to me implies that anyone who has ever used a phone can now very deeply dive into this very intricate scandal.”