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The Atlantic ·For the curious

The Curse of Too Much Evidence

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Published 2026-06-20 08:00:00-04:00

What happens when a search for answers gets buried under the evidence itself?

0:00 / 19:37 · Narrator Gacrux

Context

Long before internet sleuths began combing through celebrity court dockets or leaked emails, a few dedicated citizens spent years memorizing the 18,000-page Warren Commission Report on the JFK assassination. In an essay published on 20 June 2026, Kaitlyn Tiffany looks at these early researchers to understand a very modern habit: falling down the information rabbit hole. The piece asks a sharp question about what happens when people finally get the transparency they demand. When citizens dig through endless raw data, are they actually looking for the truth, or just getting addicted to the thrill of the search?

Show notes

An account of Sylvia Meagher, a 1960s bureaucrat who spent years indexing the 26-volume Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination. Drawing on Meagher's papers and the author's own archival research, it traces the origins of a modern American habit: sifting through massive government document dumps to find hidden facts. From the JFK files to recent celebrity court dockets, amateur public-record investigation has grown from an eccentric hobby into a standard cultural response.

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