These news cycles make it tough to keep up. Things are happening so fast and there are so many people involved that you might feel like you’ve walked in midway through a movie.

A good example of this is the Epstein birthday book. There are several well-known names there, like Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, but there are also a bunch of public figures you might not have heard of, like Les Wexner and Leon Black. If you’re interested in this topic it might feel a little daunting to try to get background on all these characters. Should you do lots of Google searches? Dig through Wikipedia?

I’ve made a number of tools to make the task of finding information on public figures easier, and I’m going to talk about them in a three-part article. We’re going to start by talking about MiniGladys, which uses two secret weapons from Wikipedia to make your public figure search easier.

The first secret weapon is Wikipedia itself. Part of what MiniGladys does is find you related concepts across Wikipedia so you explore your chosen topic from a number of different angles. The second secret weapon is Wikipedia’s page views, or what I call fossilized attention. If you analyze the page views of a Wikipedia page, you can determine dates of unusual public interest in the page via spikes in page views. Public interest usually signals some kind of news story or event around the topic. Once you have the dates, you can create date-bounded Google News search targeting that date.

So instead of doing large general Google News searches on your topic, you’re doing focused searches around specific dates. This kind of searching in my experience is faster, more targeted, and often produces very rich results!

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. MiniGladys is a collection of four research tools to use Wikipedia data. For this article I’ll use the example of Leon Black, who appears in the Epstein birthday book but is not on the public stage as much as someone like Alan Deshowitz. In the time it takes to click a few times and read a few news stories, you can get background on Leon Black, major news stories linked to him, and topics related to him that you might not know about. Best of all, MiniGladys is free, free of ads, and uses the GDPR-compliant analytics service Simple Analytics.

Getting Started With MiniGladys

Using MiniGladys starts with looking up your topic on Wikipedia. Start typing in the left form and it’ll offer several autocompleted options as you go. We’ll choose Leon Black.

Once you’ve chosen that, content from the Wikipedia page will load. There’s usually an image here but apparently not for Mr. Black. You’ll note at the top of the page that there’s space to show official links and social links; unusually Mr. Black has none.

Scroll down to read through the Wikipedia article for a general overview. Once you’ve got that, click on the Gossip Machine tab.

Gossip Machine

All you have to do is click on a time span. MiniGladys will analyze the Wikipedia page views in that period and surface the days with unusually-high page views. Because different time spans analyze different sets of dates, the dates considered unusually-high can differ slightly across different spans. Since we want to get a bunch of background at once, we’ll click on the Last 5 Years button. MiniGladys will analyze the last five years’ worth of views for Leon Black’s Wikipedia page, and give us a set of potentially newsworthy dates. They will initially list with the highest spikes first, but you also have the option to sort by oldest or newest.

MiniGladys provides a few statistics about the page views at the top of the results, so I can tell you that over the time period the Leon Black Wikipedia page had an average 883 views a day. The top date result, for January 26, 2021, had over 30,000 views and a very high z-score of 20.01. The “Google News search for this date” link will take you to a Google News search for your Wikipedia page topic on that specific day. Let’s take a look at January 26, 2021, shall we?

Oh my.

So the biggest spike of views for Leon Black’s Wikipedia page in the last five years is when he resigned from the Apollo hedge funds because of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Well, that drops us right in the middle, doesn’t it?

Do you see how handy that one-day search is? It will generally focus on one event or topic. The results are rich with information, and they’re not overwhelming (only 24 in this case.) You’re only searching one day — that’s a very limited search space! But you’re using those Wikipedia page views, that fossilized attention, to show you what dates to search. And that use of previous public interest is directing you to useful results.

Let’s do the second date on the list, the more recent July 25, 2025.

These results cover the rumors about Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book that happened over the summer prior to the release of the actual book. Again, the coverage here is unique in topic from the first set of results but similar in that they’re limited in number (21) and focused on one particular topic.

MiniGladys also has a way to find topics related to your page of interest that doesn’t use Wikipedia page views. Skip the Custom RSS tab for the moment (we’ll get to it later) and click on the Related Topics tab.

Related Topics

This tab will help you find other Wikipedia pages which mention your page of interest. You can set a minimum number of mentions to find as very famous people will generate lots of related topics. The default is 3 so we’ll leave it on that for Leon Black, as he is not very much on the public stage.

The related topics with the most mentions are Apollo Global Management (where Mr. Black used to serve as CEO) and Jeffrey Epstein, so I scrolled down a little to the unexpected “Bust of a Woman,” which is a 1931 sculpture by Pablo Picasso. Each of these mentions have a link to a Google and Google News search for your chosen topic and the related topic. Let’s see what this one’s about via the Google News search.

As you can see from the screenshot, Leon Black is connected to this sculpture via a legal battle which ended with him as owner of the artwork. Because this was apparently an ongoing issue, it might not have caused a view spike high enough to discover this topic via Gossip Machine. On the other hand, as an ongoing issue it led to several Wikipedia page mentions, which made this related topic discoverable via the Related Topics tab.

Do you see how Wikipedia page view data and related topic information give you an additional edge to build useful, targeted search spaces? It’s very easy to evaluate the last five years’ worth of Wikipedia views data for a page, grab a sandwich, and just go through a list of dates in a timeline, bam-bam-bam, giving you an overview of a public figure’s history without have to dig through a lot of results and sort them out.

Custom RSS

There’s one more tab here I haven’t mentioned, the Custom RSS tab. This tab presents about a dozen keyword-based RSS feed sources and lets you generate them by just clicking a checkbox. If you want to follow Leon Black news going forward, this is an easy way to do it.

From MiniGladys to MegaGladys

MiniGladys is actually the second “Gladys” search tool I made (the name comes from the Gladys Kravitz character on the old Bewitched TV series.) The first tool I made was called MegaGladys. It’s much more in-depth and has tools for exploring the relationships between people and groups of people, as well as a couple of specialty search tools. In the next article, we’ll look at how to use MegaGladys to find connections within the Epstein birthday book names.