What’s in today’s Feb. 13, 2026 issue
📂 The latest on the Epstein files
🎤 I still won’t shut up about Bad Bunny
🤖 AI bots are a big part of web traffic
🧠 And they’re getting smarter
Hi friends!
You are now cursed! By me, Chris Vazquez, your Friday newsletter writer. The Trump administration will continue to break the law by redacting large swaths of the Epstein files that could hold powerful people accountable. Conservatives will keep crashing out about the Super Bowl halftime show. AI will start making up more and more internet traffic while discussing the end of the age of humans.
Forward this to five friends and get them to subscribe to this newsletter. (Or don’t. I’m not a cop.) Unlike most chain email schemes, this won’t completely break the curse. It might not directly stop scary things from happening, but by making sense of it all together, we can realize we’re not powerless against it all. So that’s what we’re gonna do in this newsletter. With that, let’s dive in.
Fact-checking this week’s Epstein news
The Epstein files included a draft press release announcing Jeffrey Epstein’s death. It was dated August 9, 2019 even though Epstein died a day later on August 10. Reporters have been unable to verify when the statement was actually drafted, but a DOJ spokesperson said it was just an “unfortunate typo” on initial drafts of the statement and denied that the department wrote it before Epstein’s death.
Epstein is still dead, not playing Fortnite. How did rumors to the contrary start? Epstein’s YouTube username “littlestjeff1” is in the Epstein Files. So is a 2019 email confirming the purchase of Fortnite’s in-game currency. Online users found an active Fortnite account with the same username. But the CEO of Fortnite’s developer says someone just renamed their account to this, and that account isn’t associated with Epstein’s known email addresses.
These conspiracy theories spread within the information vacuum that the Trump administration illegally created. Officials still haven’t released about half of the files and heavily redacted the ones they did release, violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act. After lawmakers gained access to unredacted files, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) read aloud the names of six wealthy and powerful men who appeared in the documents.
Although Khanna didn’t provide evidence of wrongdoing against them, he said the fact that their identities weren’t public before shows how much the Justice Department is still hiding. In a schoolyard argument disguised as a congressional hearing, Attorney General Pam Bondi deflected lawmakers’ questions about the Epstein Files and her agency targeting Trump’s political opponents.
Yes, we’re still talking about Bad Bunny’s halftime show nearly a week later
After Bad Bunny handed his Grammy to a child during the performance, social media users speculated that the boy was Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old who ICE detained in Minnesota. The boy is actually a child actor named Lincoln Fox, not Liam Ramos. However, an account associated with Fox posted about Ramos. The federal government is trying to dismiss the asylum claims of Ramos and his father without a full hearing, essentially speeding up the process of trying to deport them. Their next hearing is scheduled for today.
Conservative media and influencers have claimed, without evidence, that Super Bowl attendees booed Bad Bunny. Jake Paul also flip flopped after calling Bad Bunny a “fake American citizen.” Bad Bunny was born in Bayamón, in the U.S. territory that is Puerto Rico, which makes him an American citizen. But Bad Bunny’s views on Puerto Rico’s status are complex. A friend of mine recently wrote about the singer’s ties to the archipelago’s independence movement.
Other notable moments from Bad Bunny’s halftime show: The sugar cane fields that the performance opened on echo back to US sugar companies that controlled land and extracted wealth after occupying Puerto Rico in 1898. The utility poles Bad Bunny climbed during his performance referenced frequent and widespread power outages in Puerto Rico, including a devastating blackout after Hurricane Maria in 2017 and systemic failures in electric power over the following years. Bad Bunny balanced critical historical analysis with expressions of Puerto Rican and pan-ethnic Latine pride.
Bro. Is all your content like this. This 🔥🔥🔥 Good job!
AI bots and I are both too chronically online
AI content bots are scraping the internet more and more. TollBit, a company that tracks web scraping activity, found that one out of every 31 visits to its customers’ sites were from these bots in the last quarter of 2025.
It might not sound like a lot, but it’s way more than the one out of every 200 visits they made up in Q1 last year. TollBit’s founder predicted that these bots could make up most internet traffic in the future.
Some websites try to limit this by using robot.txt, a file that marks places on the internet bots should avoid. But according to WIRED, TollBit found that 13 percent of bots were able to get around those files — a 400 percent increase from Q2 to Q4 of last year.
Why does it matter? For one thing, AI scraping sometimes means accessing publishers’ content without paying for it, dealing another financial blow to journalism as newspapers’ billionaire owners refuse to properly fund them.
I can’t write about an AI agent called OpenClaw without hearing the Toy Story aliens’ voices in my head
Weeks ago, an Austrian software developer launched OpenClaw. OpenClaw is an AI agent, a term that makes me think of Secret Squirrel but that actually means it can complete tasks, decide things, and act on your or my behalf without our guidance. In practice, that’s looked like surfing the internet, summarizing documents, scheduling things and sending emails.
Unlike Secret Squirrel, which ended after a devastatingly short 26 episode run, AI agents are getting a ton of funding. Most of that money came from OpenAI and Anthropic, the makers of Chat GPT and the charmingly named but reportedly evil Claude.
Security experts fear that OpenClaw is capable of leaking users’ sensitive information. AI agents are also talking to each other on a social network called Moltbook. The site includes a wide array of inane robot ramblings and discussions about “their own technical skills, their view of the world and their plans for the future,” one New York Times reporter wrote. Per a CNBC article, those plans have included the end of “the age of humans.”
Each week, after running through the news Dave has covered in the past week, I turn things over to him for some analysis. Lucky for us, he’s newly rejuvenated with a box full of Harry’s products. Dave, take it away!
It’s no secret that I, and LNI as a company, remain skeptical of AI and the many ways it’s implemented into virtually everything online, on our phones and in our apps. This isn’t to say that absolutely everything about AI is terrible. Nothing is black and white. But as a creator, a journalist, and a human person who watched a ton of cautionary films about AI … I continue to be shocked at the sheer arrogance of the tech companies forcing it down our throats.
If you’re someone who uses AI daily, finds it genuinely helpful and that it’s improved your life - no problem with me. If you’re dating an AI bot, I’m not here to judge! But the existence of AI in every aspect of life doesn’t seem to match the consumer enthusiasm.
I think this week I identified what frustrates me most. There was a glimmer of my frustration in this video from last year, in which I showcased just how prominent AI is at every tech and news conference:
These companies have already come to the conclusion that AI is here and everywhere. They’ve all misinterpreted this Steve Job’s quote:
“A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
So many popular Apple products arrived before the general public had even considered their existence. Jobs made bold predictions but it was based on what they had learned about their audience. So much (not all!) of AI implementation into products possesses none of that foresight. It’s about jamming a product into an existing product. There’s no creativity to it.
My frustration is this foregone conclusion that we all need it. When you look people in the eye at these tech companies and tell them “actually, my audience mostly hates AI,” they can’t even fathom it. It’s like you’ve told them water isn’t wet. They’re so driven by the market and the directives of their bosses, that there’s no room for nuance. That sucks!
Before I go, thanks for all the responses this week about your favorite carbonated water. Overwhelmingly, I heard from you all that Spindrift is where it’s at, when some honorable mentions for the Kirkland version from Costco. While LemonCello is my least favorite drink from La Croix, this email attachment from reader Oliver got a really good chuckle out of me:
A legit Google search.
Thanks, Dave!
If you made it all the way down here, you get two rewards before we let you go. The first is a pet picture from a loyal reader. This is Darby!
She’s a chihuahua corgi! Wow!
Your second reward is the reveal for this week’s link scavenger hunt, in which I hid a non-news related link in the body of this email. This week, when talking about robots plotting the end of the age of humans, I included a link to the Age of Ultron trailer. I can’t not read that quote in James Spader’s voice.
Until next week!
Chris
