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OpenAI said it will eventually launch a text-only adult mode for ChatGPT, the Wall Street Journal reports, despite what are strong misgivings from the company’s own advisers.

In adult mode, ChatGPT users will be able to have text chats with adult themes, the Journal said, citing an OpenAI spokesperson. But the chatbot will not be able to generate erotic audio, images, or videos. The OpenAI spokesperson told the Journal the company considers these chats “smut rather than pornography.”

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot launched in November 2022 by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research and deployment company led by CEO Sam Altman. Since its release, ChatGPT has banned erotica, though in recent years, OpenAI has begun to consider ways to permit certain erotic and NSFW (not suitable for work) content. 

A representative for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)  

Adult mode was delayed

OpenAI said earlier this month that it was delaying the feature to focus on higher-priority items, including “gains in intelligence, personality improvements, personalization, and making the experience more proactive.” The company said it wanted to take the necessary time to get adult mode “right.”

Initially, the company was going to release adult mode by late March.

Ryan Beiermeister, an executive in charge of product policy who voiced opposition to the rollout of the adult mode feature, was fired in January, the Wall Street Journal reported in February. 

Following a leave of absence, Beiermeister was ousted, with the company claiming it was due to sexual discrimination against a male colleague. In early 2025, Beiermeister had started a peer-mentorship program for women at the company. OpenAI denied that the executive’s dismissal was related to her outspoken concerns over the erotica feature, and Beiermeister said the discrimination allegation was “absolutely false,” the report said.

Unnamed employees told the Journal that Beiermeister was worried that OpenAI lacked strong guardrails against child-exploitation content and that teens could too easily access adult-mode chats.

Last October, Altman posted on X that the company would be “allowing more user freedom for adults,” saying the company would be protecting minors from harmful material but also “treating adult users like adults” and allowing “erotica” on ChatGPT. 

Altman said the company had made strides toward prioritizing children’s safety in the wake of a lawsuit over a teen’s suicide. Last September, OpenAI added parental controls that let parents set times when their children can’t use ChatGPT. Parents can also disable image generation and voice mode.

Company representatives faced strong pushback from a panel of advisers at a January meeting, according to the Wall Street Journal report. The company had created the advisory council to “help define what healthy interactions with AI should look like for all ages.” The advisers included experts in psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

At the January meeting, advisers warned that children would find ways to get around age restrictions and access the chats. The advisers also said it was likely that some users would become emotionally dependent on adult mode.

One adviser said that OpenAI risked adult mode creating a “sexy suicide coach,” referencing some ChatGPT users who have taken their own lives.

Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal report said OpenAI is trying to tighten up its age-prediction technology, which tries to guess a user’s age by the “general topics you talk about or the times of day you use ChatGPT.” The Journal report cited sources as saying that the system was misclassifying minors as adults about 12% of the time — resulting in millions of minors being able to create adult-themed chats.

OpenAI also wants to make sure that adult mode doesn’t enable users to delve into topics such as child sexual abuse or nonconsensual sexual behavior, the report said.

By launching the new feature, OpenAI will be entering a realm that has become a major topic in the fast-expanding world of AI — sexual material generated by chatbots. Elon Musk’s Grok allegedly has generated millions of nonconsensual sexual images, and Meta’s AI is being investigated for having sensual chats with children.

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Advisers warned OpenAI it risked creating a “sexy suicide coach” by allowing a text-only adult mode on ChatGPT. SOPA Images/Getty Images

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At the start of the 2008 financial crisis, I was at a hedge fund. By its end, I was at the U.S. Treasury. At both, I worked with people only a few years out of college. The drama of 2008 was all they knew about financial markets. “Remember what’s happening,” I told them. “You’ll never see anything like this again.”

Now I’m not so sure. Maybe they’ll see worse.

We have returned to a period of risk, one rife with the sort of pressures that have led to major financial crises. This time, the risks are spread across industries, markets, and nations: artificial intelligence, the roughly $2 trillion private credit industry, stock markets, Taiwan, and now Iran. These risks are analyzed one by one, news article by news article. We understand them in isolation. Yet they are different entry points into the same underlying structure — a complex and tightly coupled system where the specific source of stress matters less than how quickly that stress can spread.

Signs of systemic strain are emerging.

Let’s start with private credit, which is already showing worrisome signs. Over the past two decades, the retreat of traditional banks after the financial crisis has left many companies increasingly reliant on borrowing from institutional investors. But these loans rarely exchange hands, leaving investors uncertain about what these instruments are really worth or how easily they could be sold if conditions deteriorate.

Now clouding the picture is the fact that many of the borrowers underpinning the lending industry are software and technology companies — the kinds of businesses whose services could be replaced by A.I.

That vulnerability is starting to worry investors. Already uneasy about the way higher interest rates are raising borrowing costs, some have begun withdrawing their money from the private credit funds of well-known companies like Blue Owl, BlackRock, and Blackstone. Shares in Blue Owl have fallen sharply. And because the market has no organized exchange and information is inaccessible, investor withdrawals can trigger the kind of wholesale run that, in the past, turned financial stresses into full-blown crises.

Simultaneously, the A.I. boom is driving extraordinary investment into a small group of dominant technology companies, inflating their valuations to the point that 10 stocks now account for more than a third of the S&P 500’s value. That level of concentration is unprecedented — and dangerous, because it means a shock to any one of these companies can ripple across the entire market rather than be absorbed by it.

What appear to be separate developments — a new kind of lending market and technological dislocation on one hand, stock market exuberance on the other — are in fact the same network of money and expectations, approached from different directions.

Of course, private credit isn’t only financing those companies vulnerable to A.I. It is also a critical source of financing for the infrastructure that drives A.I. — the data centers and semiconductor chips. This infrastructure is largely being built by the handful of companies like Google and Microsoft that dominate our stock market. In this tightly connected system, the weakening of private credit strains the A.I. investments of the tech Goliaths, which in turn threatens the stock portfolios, the retirements, and the pensions of tens of millions of people.

In addition, the A.I. boom is placing new strains on the physical infrastructure it depends on. It drives enormous electricity consumption and has a ravenous appetite for advanced semiconductors. These carry geopolitical weight.

Take Iran. An energy shock from the conflict that raises the cost of power or constrains its supply directly affects data centers and A.I. production, raising costs for the A.I. Goliaths, which then transfer those pressures to our private credit and stock markets.

Then there’s Taiwan. If China were to invade or blockade it, America’s access to semiconductors would be severely limited. That would immediately slow deployment of A.I., weakening the companies driving the A.I. boom, with the inevitable knock-on effects.

Our current financial system fails not because any one thing goes wrong. It fails because different shocks propagate through the same structure and in ways that are hard to anticipate. When something eventually goes wrong, it spreads faster than it can be contained.

It is critical that our policymakers realize that private credit is not just a parallel risk sitting alongside the A.I. boom. A.I.’s data centers, chips, and infrastructure have been built largely on private loans. Investors in those loans cannot easily sell their positions. So if there is any quake in the system and they find they need to raise cash, they will do what investors do when they can’t sell what they want to sell: They sell what they can. And what they can sell easily are the large, publicly traded technology stocks that dominate the major indexes.

This is not the first time we have built a system like this. The crisis of 2008 is often remembered as a story of homeowners gorging on excessive debt, a housing bubble fueled by speculation, and millions of mortgages going bad. But the housing bubble itself was not the reason the crunch became so destructive. The accelerant that pushed the crisis to such depths was the financial system that had been constructed around the housing market. Novel and complex financial instruments obscured the risk, intertwined balance sheets across the financial system, and eliminated the buffers that once absorbed shocks. When the housing market tanked, these instruments nearly took our entire financial system down with it.

This time, the danger isn’t financial engineering. It’s that our financial system has attached itself to the vulnerabilities of our physical world — power grids, water, land, supply chains — and created hazards that markets have no framework to analyze. Our models for detecting risk look at prices, volatility, and correlations. They have no instruments for reading a grid failure, a drought, or a severed supply chain. By the time warning signs show up in market data, the damage will already have been done.

The physical risks of Iran, Taiwan, and the A.I. boom are supplanting the types of financial risks that preceded 2008. I’d take financial risk any day. Financial risk moves just prices. Physical risk moves the world.

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Liana Finck

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“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus. — Turkish proverb,”

 

Hmmmmm…History is repeating itself yet again!

 

Isaiah 59:14

New Living Translation

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You might find these videos enlightening!

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A. R. Bernard: one of many

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In a world first, China has approved a brain implant for commercial use in people with spinal cord injuries.

The device is a type of brain-computer interface (BCI) and is made by the Shanghai-based company Neuracle Medical Technology, a potential rival of Elon Musk’s BCI start-up Neuralink. Brain implants have been used as part of clinical trials for decades, but this is the first time such a device has been approved for broad use in patients.

BCIs, sometimes known as brain-machine interfaces, are devices that record brain activity. Invasive BCIs like Neuracle’s are surgically implanted in or on the brain. There, they record electrical signals from neurons. Software then “decodes” these signals, which can then be used to control a computer cursor or a prosthetic limb, for example.

Neuracle’s BCI consists of a coin-sized wireless implant that sits on the surface of the brain’s outer membrane and controls a robotic glove. It is specifically designed for people with spinal cord injuries, but is only approved for people who still have some upper arm function. BCIs, in general, are typically being developed for use by people with paralysis or other disabilities. Neuralink’s Musk has talked about one day making them available to people with no health problems, but that application is farther off.

One of the first (and still one of the leading) BCIs was created in the early 2000s by a research consortium called BrainGate. The device enables study participants with paralysis—including from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or locked-in syndrome, which involves paralysis of everything but the muscles that control eye movement and an inability to speak caused by a stroke or injury—to control a computer mouse and type on a virtual keyboard. Since then, other research groups have developed devices capable of similar feats.

In the U.S., Musk’s Neuralink has come the closest to commercializing this technology, but questions about the device’s safety remain. In 202,2 the Food and Drug Administration initially rejected a bid for Neuralink to test its technology in a clinical trial. A trial was eventually approved the following year, and then 30-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who was paralyzed below the neck, became the first user to have a Neuralink implant. As of January 2026, the company said it had 21 participants enrolled in its trial.

Other American start-ups, such as Synchron and Paradromics, are developing their own BCIs and are also running ongoing trials.

But while there is compelling evidence from these clinical tests, the devices are still considered experimental. Installing brain implants requires brain surgery, after all, which is highly invasive and carries a risk of infection and complications. And the implants can sometimes move or cause scar tissue buildup over time that degrades their signals. No BCI devices have been approved for commercial use in the U.S.

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Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library/Getty Images

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The best family finance advice

Be open about money.

“It’s super important for partners to be honest with each other and share everything about their finances. A lot of couples have one personality who is more financially aware and one who is happy to let the other person take care of everything. But that can get dangerous when there is a death, disability, or divorce. The person who didn’t do much financially may not even know what they own or where their assets are. I handle most of the investment decisions in my marriage, while my husband handles the bills, but we do an ‘audit’ once a year, where we review everything and make sure we both can log in to all our accounts. So, neither of us is living blindly, and we know how to do something the other does, if we need to.”

Don’t keep your children’s inheritance a secret.

“You shouldn’t be a lottery to your kids. It’s good for your children or heirs to know what money they’re going to get from you. One of the worst things you can do to a young or middle-aged adult is to have them wonder what they’re going to receive, because then they can’t do their own financial planning.”

Give with a warm hand (part one).

“With people living close to 100 years these days, it might not be the best practice to wait until death to leave an inheritance to your kids, who may be in their seventies and retired at that point. Maybe the best thing you could do for your children and grandchildren is to give some of that money to the parents when that baby’s first born. Then the parents have more resources to either get good day care or go to part-time work themselves to be able to invest more in these little ones when they really need it.”

Explain your financial choices.

“Growing up, we didn’t talk about money in our household. If there was enough money, our parents didn’t talk about it. If there wasn’t, they would fuss and argue. With my own children, who are 11 and 15, I do the opposite; we talk about money in age-appropriate ways so they understand how and why we choose to spend our money. We almost never go out to eat, for example, so we can spend our money on travel and education, which are our priorities.”

Give with a warm hand (part two).

“There’s always this kind of fantasy that you’re going to leave equity in your home to your children, but it is often worth a lot less than you think it is because it hasn’t been maintained, it’s filled with your crap. Your kids would likely rather have had the cash earlier or the financial foresight into how to manage that cash than any kind of surprise lump sum.

So consider inter vivos transfers, which means gifting assets while you’re alive. Work with an adviser to find out how much you can give them now during your lifetime, while also making sure that you have enough for yourself. The other reason your children will like that, besides being able to plan more rationally, is that they’ll know you’ll be OK.”

Talk to your kids about money.

“My dad was very open about money. He felt the best thing you can do is teach your kids about money so that they understand it is a tool. He wanted us to learn how to earn, save, and share money, but also to know how to enjoy spending. He explained life insurance to me as a 10-year-old (in an age-appropriate way.) He taught me to not spend money in the dark, so to not waste money on things like fees or fines. But more importantly, he would tell me: ‘Just because you avoid the conversation, doesn’t mean you’re avoiding the problem.’ I’ve tried to carry on that approach with my own children. I did taxes with them, had them fill out their federal student aid applications next to me as teenagers. We talk about Roth contributions, what sneakers they’re buying.”

Let your kids know pertinent details about your finances.

“We know that most financial predation happens within families, so you can imagine a mother or father not wanting to discuss anything about their finances with their children. But if those are the same people you’re planning to leave money to, then you should want to do it in an orderly way. So tell them where important documents are, what your plan is, but don’t hand over the account number. It’s probably best if you don’t ever hand over finances to a family member, but pay a professional to do it. Most children don’t have the financial education to do so and don’t want the added stress.”

Consider a college’s ROI.

“People have started revolting against college for a lot of good reasons. A four-year degree, it turns out, is not what all people need in order to do really well in their careers. And many would be financially better off not going to a four-year college and avoiding taking on life-changing levels of debt.

Families and students really need to be thoughtful about what kind of education is needed and what kind of debt you’ll accumulate getting a degree. For some jobs, like engineers, lawyers or doctors, it is likely still worth the investment. But for many other jobs, it could not be. And it can be really hard to pay back some of those loans when you’re on a social worker’s or teacher’s wages.”

Don’t pick a college based on reputation alone.

“This idea that you have to go to the best college you get into is not great advice anymore. I think students and parents have to look at college as a value proposition. My younger cousin got accepted into Harvard University, but she took a full ride offer from the University of Delaware instead. Then she was able to use the money her mother had saved in a 529 account as a down payment on a fixer-upper home.”

The best advice for young people

Don’t make things too complicated.

“Don’t worry about money so much, and keep things simple: Stay out of debt. Do what’s right instead of what’s easy. Always put people first before money.”

Start small, but start now.

“Saving small amounts, as early as possible, compounds in wonderful ways. It’s not about the amount; it’s that you actually do it. When I graduated from Princeton in 1991, every single person was asked to give $19.91 to the university. They were teaching us to be givers. It’s a brilliant concept, and I wish everyone would do that with their 401(k) plan. Start with even small amounts and, over a lifetime, that can get very big, very fast.”

Understand the true secret to wealth.

“When we are young, we really don’t understand the power of compounding. Warren Buffett, at 95, has seen his entire net worth double over the last seven or eight years. That’s really astonishing when you think about it. And compounding doesn’t just work with money. It works with habits, with health, with networking, with collaboration. It’s not just about your portfolio.”

Take the slow road.

“There is a narrative right now that young people are completely screwed and that in order for them to catch up, they need to take speculative bets, like getting into prediction markets. True, life costs more now than 20 or 30 years ago. But if you consistently save and invest, you will get where you need to be financially—maybe a little bit slower than your predecessors 30 years ago, but you can still live a pretty comfortable life. The prediction market is essentially just gambling. It’s possible to have a nice life without having to take on that kind of risk.”

Save early and often

“Open a savings account early, and make savings a habit, even if the amounts saved are tiny. My father opened a savings account for me when I was little and doubled any money I placed in it. My mother said, ‘Spend money, but don’t waste it.’ I did the same for my two daughters.”

Save early and often

“Open a savings account early, and make savings a habit, even if the amounts saved are tiny. My father opened a savings account for me when I was little and doubled any money I placed in it. My mother said, ‘Spend money, but don’t waste it.’ I did the same for my two daughters.”

Put money in stocks ASAP.

“I should have started investing in stocks much earlier than I did. Even when I became a financial planner, at first I was only paying my bills and investing very little. I’m 64 now, so if I had started investing in the stock market sooner, I could have been the Mexican Warren Buffett.

Don’t wait to save until you make more money.

“Your financial goals don’t have to wait until you’re out of debt or make more money. You can start to act on them as soon as you earn that first paycheck, even if you have student loans or credit card debt. You may not be able to go full speed at the moment, but you can begin to plant seeds and educate yourself. Your financial goals matter because you matter, and the best time to start working toward them is today.”

Live it up a little.

“Have more fun. Yes, focus on your savings and investment rate, but there are certain things you can only do in your twenties. Do them now!”

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

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Hmmmm … War is evil!

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Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.

On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.

They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.

As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.

The Israeli police and military, in a joint statement Sunday morning, said that border police officers and soldiers, while on a mission in Tammun to arrest suspected terrorists, had “sensed danger” after a vehicle “accelerated towards” them and “responded by shooting.” They said the circumstances of the episode were being investigated.

The two accounts could not have been more contradictory. But one fact was undisputed: Mr. Bani Odeh, 37, his wife, Othman, and Muhammad were all shot and killed.

The Israeli-occupied West Bank is under siege as it has not been in years, with extremist Israeli settlers terrorizing Palestinian villagers on hillsides and in valleys where they live near one another. The body count is rapidly piling up: Seven Palestinians have been killed so far this year, all but one of those since the war with Iran began on Feb. 28.

The Israeli military, which is the governing authority in the West Bank, has condemned settler violence and insists that it is working to prevent it. The Israeli police, who are responsible for investigating crime committed by Israelis in the West Bank, say they act against any violence, but have largely failed in bringing violent settlers to justice.

But Tammun is deep inside the territory governed and policed by the Palestinian Authority, far from the friction with settlers. And Mr. Bani Odeh believed that, even if he encountered Israeli soldiers, he had little to fear, according to his father, Khaled Sayl Bani Odeh, 65. He knew he posed no threat, and believed that if stopped, he could talk his way out of any trouble — in fluent Hebrew — thanks to his experience working inside Israel.

On Saturday, Ali Bani Odeh was reluctant to take the boys on an outing, his father said. He was tired and wanted to rest. But the boys were restless, and he gave in.

Muhammad, the youngest, usually stayed with his grandparents because he was hyperactive, according to the elder Khaled Bani Odeh. “I was trying to tell him not to go,” he said at the family’s wake on Sunday afternoon. “But his grandmother said, ‘It’s not far, let him go.’”

Little Muhammad asked his grandfather to fix his hair and give him some of his cologne. “I did, and he set off,” Mr. Bani Odeh said.

Later Saturday night, as the grandfather was watching soccer on television, he said, his wife prodded him to call their son and check on them.

“I said, ‘They’re in a car with the children — there’s nothing that can happen to them,’” he recalled ruefully, as dozens of men streamed into the cavernous social hall where he sat, paying their respects.

Palestinian security officials said they had been briefed by their Israeli counterparts only after the fact, and told that the Israeli police and military mission in Tammun was to arrest two youths: one suspected of making explosive devices, the other of using social media to incite violence against Israelis.

Israeli officials mentioned only people suspected of making explosive devices.

Liron Rubin, a spokesman for the border police, said that the officers and soldiers had signaled for the vehicle to stop using flashlights and laser pointers, but that it kept coming toward them.

“They’re a very professional force,” said Dean Elsdunne, another police spokesman. “If they felt their life was at risk when they’re operating there against terrorists in a very dangerous place, it’s for them to say.”

They declined to discuss other details of the case, citing the investigation underway.

Khaled and Mustafa, the surviving boys, spoke later outside the women’s wake for the family at a home uphill from the social hall. Mustafa wore a bandage across his nose, where he said he had been hit by shrapnel from a bullet.

He described trying to pull 5-year-old Muhammad toward him, to help him, but said that his brother was already dead.

Khaled, a sixth-grader, did most of the talking.

“When the shooting stopped, I opened the door and started yelling, ‘Please help me,’” he said. He said the soldiers told him to shut up, and that one pulled him out of the car by his hair. He said he had been thrown to the ground and stepped on, questioned aggressively about whether anyone else had been in the car, and beaten on the head and legs.

An Arabic-speaking soldier spoke to him kindly, calling him “Habibi,” but then kicked him repeatedly, Khaled said.

When Khaled told the soldiers that he and his brother needed a bathroom, he said, the soldiers pointed them in the direction of a Palestinian ambulance that had been waiting about 100 meters away. As they walked that way, he said, a soldier opened the door of his family’s car. Inside, he said, he saw his dead parents.

Khaled’s grandfather said he had seen his slain family members’ bodies at the hospital. His daughter-in-law had been shot multiple times in her head and chest. Young Muhammad was shot several times in the face.

His 11-year-old namesake, visibly numb, said he had found part of his little brother’s body on his shoes.

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Palestinians mourning the deaths of four members of the Odeh family in Tammun, West Bank, on Sunday. Credit…Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press

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https://www.nytimes.com

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Hmmmm…give yourself a gold star if you can follow this one!

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Many people shudder at the thought of Friday the 13th. Myths, legends and horror films have turned it into an omen of bad luck.

History has also had plenty of bad Friday the 13ths. On Friday, September 13, 1940, Nazi forces bombed Buckingham Palace in London. On Friday, January 13, 2012, the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rocky outcropping and capsized, resulting in a total evacuation and 32 deaths. And on Friday, September 13, 1996, Tupac Shakur succumbed to his gunshot wounds from six days prior.

But the 13th day of a month that happens to fall on a Friday is just a day. Superstitions about it can be dispelled with mathematics. Using number theory, you can easily demonstrate that there isn’t a single year without this ominous date. In fact, the 13th day of a month falls on a Friday more often than on any other day of the week.

Adventures in Number Theory and Calendars

To keep things simple, let’s first focus on years with 365 days. We can begin by calculating which sequentially counted day of the year the 13th of a month will fall on, using the number of days in each month as a guide. So January 13 is the 13th

day of the year, February 13 is the 44th day, March 13 is the 72nd day, and so on. Here’s a table summarizing what this approach reveals.

During a year with 365 days, January 13 falls on the 13th day of the year. February 13 falls on the 44th day of the year; March 13 falls on the 72nd day; April 13 falls on the 103rd day; May 13 falls on the 133rd day; June 13 falls on the 164th day; July 13 falls on the 194th day; August 13 falls on the 225thday; September 13 falls on the 256thday; October 13 falls on the 286th day; November 13 falls on the 317th day; and December 13 falls on the 347th day

A week is a repeating pattern of seven days. That means, for example, that the first, eighth, 15th, 22nd, and so on always fall on the same day of the week. Therefore, it’s possible to determine which 13th days of a month fall on a given day of the week. To do this, simply divide the number of days in the year that have already passed on the date you’re investigating by 7. The remainder will tell you which day of the first week of the year that date matches.

This might sound complicated, but it’s actually quite simple: when you divide the 13th day of the year by 7, for example, you get 1 with a remainder of 6. This means that the 13th day of the year falls on the same day of the week as the sixth day of the year. You can repeat this process for the 13th day of each month, which result in the following.

During a year with 365 days, January 13 and October 13 will fall on the same day of the week as the sixth day of the year. February 13, March 13, and November 13 will fall on the same day of the week as the second day of the year. April 13 and July 13 will fall on the same day of the week as the fifth day of the year. May 13 will fall on the same day of the week as the seventh day of the year, recorded in the chart as the zeroth day of the year. June 13 will fall on the same day as the third day of the year. August 13 will fall on the same day of the week as the first day of the year. September 13 and December 13 will fall on the same day of the week as the fourth day of the year.

Each day of the week, labeled 0 to 6, appears at least once in the list. (And for those skipping the math and skimming the tables, the 0thday of the year is actually the 7th day.) This means that in a year with 365 days, each day of the week will be the 13th of a month at least once (days 0, 1, and 3 each appear only once). Days of the week can also be the 13th of a month twice (days 4, 5, and 6). And there is one day of the week that will be the 13th of a month three times (day 2).

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Liudmila Chernetska/Getty Images

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The wealthy bankers, political leaders, and prominent academics who visited Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island traveled by private jet and spent afternoons scuba diving or riding jet skis.

The girls and young women that Epstein shuttled to the island had a drastically different experience: confiscated passports, extensive sexual abuse, and conditions so dire that at least one said she tried to escape by swimming away.

For nearly two decades, Little St. James, Epstein’s roughly 70-acre island, was the perfect tool for him to both cultivate powerful friends and abuse young women and girls. It offered Epstein both a glamorous setting to attract famous figures and the seclusion he needed to prey on his victims.

Now, a trove of millions of pages of documents released by the Department of Justice creates the clearest picture yet of Epstein’s tropical crime scene, a mysterious locale that’s at the center of a sex trafficking scandal still roiling global politics today.

A CNN review of thousands of emails, photos, videos, and documents from the DOJ files adds critical new details to how Epstein transformed the island into his personal fiefdom – and highlights warning signs of the terrible abuse perpetrated there that some staffers and victims say was happening in plain sight.

The testimony outlined in the DOJ documents calls into question claims by some influential visitors to Epstein’s island who have denied knowing about the financier’s sex trafficking – and shows several of those guests boasting of sexual exploits or engaging in crude conversations with the convicted sex offender.

“The activities were so obvious and bold that anyone spending any significant time at one of Epstein’s residences would have clearly been aware of what was going on,” one victim stated in a court document.

Those warning signs include photographs of naked young girls on his walls, airport workers who reported Epstein had traveled with girls who appeared underage, and an interior decorator who said he’d been asked to design one of the island’s bedrooms with pink furnishings and bunk beds.

Some staffers and victims have also called out specific Epstein guests, the documents show, such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki, who both spent a day on the island in 2007, according to a victim’s statement. “They observed that we did not speak and that we remained mute,” the victim, whose name is not included in the public document, wrote in the statement. “They witnessed the trauma on our faces and in our eyes. Sergey and Anne witnessed our souls and bodies riddled with fear. They said nothing. They did nothing.”

Brin and Wojcicki did not respond to requests for comment.

In the wake of Epstein’s death in a federal jail cell in 2019, his estate sold Little St. James and the neighboring island of Great St. James, which Epstein also owned, for about $60 million, at least some of which has gone to paying settlement costs related to his abuse.

But questions about the island and its place in Epstein’s sprawling financial empire have only grown in the years since his death.

Little St. James became “the hub” of Epstein’s sex trafficking because it was the ideal place to “isolate his victims,” said Thomas Volscho, a City University of New York professor who has studied Epstein’s crimes.

“You’re in paradise,” he said, “but you’re in hell at the same time.”

From tropical paradise to human trafficking hub

When Epstein bought his island for about $8 million in 1998, he was a financier with a spotless criminal record, a growing network of prominent friends, and a home base in one of Manhattan’s largest private residences. In a Wall Street Journal real estate listing at the time, the island’s previous owner, venture capitalist Arch Cummin, described life on Little St. James: “You can hop off a plane and never see anybody again.”

The windswept island is more than a mile away from St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, and only accessible by helicopter or boat. Over the course of 20 years, maps and documents illustrate how Epstein transformed the somewhat desolate Little St. James into what appeared on the surface to be a luxurious vacation destination complete with a theater, library, stand-alone gym, tiki hut, and staff residences.

Satellite images from 2002 show just a handful of buildings, with the main house and a few cabanas and outlying structures on the island’s northern tip. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Epstein significantly expanded the living spaces, adding a larger pool, new cabanas, a massive sundial, and a bizarre temple-like structure overlooking the island’s southwest coast.

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